*
The world? Are the atheist and the Christian both correct about it? "One world, after all"? The bend, the shape of it is the same bend and the same shape for both people -- if it is different the difference still bends the same way and ends up with the same shape -- so both believer and non- somehow manage to live there and be right about where they live. But is that true?
Imagine God as a fire. Then imagine there being both a closeness and a distance from that fire. The place might even be chosen. Chosen by you. Chosen for you. Or just chosen without more ado. The world in its peculiar bend and shape. A shape that either someone shaped intentionally to look as if randomly shaped (and that random look is correct) or else that something shaped randomly in such as way that the shape seems intentional (and in fact it is). And the place is cohabited by people who believe in the shape and people who do not or cannot believe in it, that is, as a shape. As shaped. The world, the "case", about which one is somehow correct.
And the disbeliever and the believer are often, in effect, a single person.
So you are close to the fire -- a believer -- or distant from it -- and as if condemned not to believe. The same world. Only the placement changes.
The same events, the same kind of events, happen close and happen far: death, as one example. But the meaning differs. Burning with intention? Not so? A different event, burning or not burning with intention. But the same world. The burning at least is for real.
It seems that the atheist's beloved Darwinism (clung to like a faith) is indeed true but just distantly true, a sort of abandoned truth most true to that category of truth tellers that is identified or self-identified as the abandoned. To them it's not just true but truer than true, this bloodsport of being is like a dye that saturates all truth and makes it true. The ancient emperors believed in it too in the deepest way. This is the truth that bites and sucks its believers but of course that doesn't make it anything but true in the place where it is true -- in the remoteness from God's fire.
But when you try to understand even this Darwinian truth, and God's place (even posited as remote) within this truth, you find yourself moving closer to the fire, God's fire, and it is as though you have no choice. The fire burns with love for you, with your own love. Even for you. The moment you approach it, that other truth is no longer true and indeed somehow never was. That is, the fact thaat it never was true somehow becomes true (though wasn't before) but this movement of truth is all in you, not in the truth itself, and certainly not in the world.
So that what ends up mattering is not what truth you have reasoned out or into with so much labor. What matters is where you are. Close to the fire? Far away from the fire? Not very sure?
Are you burning yet?
Think of not what you think but where. God will burn all our reasonings.
*
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Monday, November 28, 2005
Crackle
*
Because made. The world, the whole thing. Not just there. "There" is a word excavated and occupied. Occupied by. Billion dollar prepositional phrase, quest of lifetime: "by". By whom? To know the whom all the way. Lifetime task. Lift a rock, never find nothing. Because made. What would nothing be? A counter for computations?
Finish the "by". Digging your heart for treasure.
Even nothing has something inside.
No that's not right. Not something. Someone.
The difference between "thing" and "one"? Finish the "by", would you please. Tried and tried. Even the being at a loss, even that is movement forward. A quest, no?
Every second a package to be unwrapped. In fear. Might explode. Crackling paper. Fear.
It kneads you. No stopping. When stopping stops it goes on. A dryness folded into the water. All right.
Made. Made by. Finish the by.
She herself was the package.
Afraid to open. Easier, just clutch it and hold on. Suspension, abeyance. All that sad vocabulary of not yet.
Cowardice is understandable. But that is not what I wanted to understand.
Syntax, that would sustain your thinking but not change it. Not the virtual particle flitting that you like to be. Not committing, never committing.
No one was ready really.
The freedom of not being anyone, that was what people wanted. People themselves wished not to be occupied. Instead of excavating. The occupation was not you but another. It might require something.
To pregnancy, they brought a scalpel. The horror of being someone, having a history. A syntax.
Better to just fly?
The students walked over not upon the campus. The sidewalk. There were sad nymphs leaning half in half out of the trees. The students didn't see them. Poetry now nothing but Poundian flotsam. Frags of self delight. Rap in a workshop. Fun to write, painful to read.
Well, God spoke in days and weeks, not just individual words. You had to wait. Even the moment of true waiting, that too you had to wait for.
*
Because made. The whole thing. Not just there, really.
*
Because made. The world, the whole thing. Not just there. "There" is a word excavated and occupied. Occupied by. Billion dollar prepositional phrase, quest of lifetime: "by". By whom? To know the whom all the way. Lifetime task. Lift a rock, never find nothing. Because made. What would nothing be? A counter for computations?
Finish the "by". Digging your heart for treasure.
Even nothing has something inside.
No that's not right. Not something. Someone.
The difference between "thing" and "one"? Finish the "by", would you please. Tried and tried. Even the being at a loss, even that is movement forward. A quest, no?
Every second a package to be unwrapped. In fear. Might explode. Crackling paper. Fear.
It kneads you. No stopping. When stopping stops it goes on. A dryness folded into the water. All right.
Made. Made by. Finish the by.
She herself was the package.
Afraid to open. Easier, just clutch it and hold on. Suspension, abeyance. All that sad vocabulary of not yet.
Cowardice is understandable. But that is not what I wanted to understand.
Syntax, that would sustain your thinking but not change it. Not the virtual particle flitting that you like to be. Not committing, never committing.
No one was ready really.
The freedom of not being anyone, that was what people wanted. People themselves wished not to be occupied. Instead of excavating. The occupation was not you but another. It might require something.
To pregnancy, they brought a scalpel. The horror of being someone, having a history. A syntax.
Better to just fly?
The students walked over not upon the campus. The sidewalk. There were sad nymphs leaning half in half out of the trees. The students didn't see them. Poetry now nothing but Poundian flotsam. Frags of self delight. Rap in a workshop. Fun to write, painful to read.
Well, God spoke in days and weeks, not just individual words. You had to wait. Even the moment of true waiting, that too you had to wait for.
*
Because made. The whole thing. Not just there, really.
*
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Conversion
*
One Sunday she walked into a church. She opened the door and the building swallowed her. Then she returned the next Sunday to the dark eaves and the glass pictures. She "was never seen again". She died to the bulk of her friends. She walked the labyrinth and got her feet tangled in the thread of a turn, was never able to extricate herself, she unravelled as she moved. Converted. Converted. Unable simply to leave. Stuck listening to an organ whose reverberations never died. Exchanged the peace with strangers. Felt that peace.
*
Recited the creed. Didn't blink, didn't clutch, didn't clear her throat. Didn't hold back. Took the miracles in stride. In stride. Darling, there they are. Deal with them. Believe. She didn't fan herself with old syllogisms. Didn't play the game of being too adult to commit herself. Didn't fetishize the game of disobey. Actually didn't play the age old games. Walked the rolling green of the great lawn. Labyrinths of larches. If not the garden she grew up in, at least a snapshot.
Sang when asked to sing. Got down on those sharp knees. Didn't play the role of confessing, no. Confessed. Actually did it. Refused to look around and judge. Managed not to project her own weakness into the crowd. Loved her enemies, admitted she had them. Handed her hatred to God without pretending not to have any. Skipped the step of hating God. Helped an old lady to the altar. Took bread and resolutely chewed. Did not bother to cover her mouth.
*
Church is a building you enter but don't leave. If you leave, you didn't enter, because entering is the act of not leaving. Its walls smear your skin like honey or chocolate. They leave a mark, a permanent mark. You are there. You can't rub it off you nor you off it. You are there and are never not there, not anymore. You walk in. You don't walk out. Church.
This is not real estate but God's fleshy hand squeezing.
*
The heavy, hard, perhaps mean-spirited people walking to the altar. They are desperate to change. The desperation is real and the change is what is hoped for. This is church, you are in church. Forever. Have a good day!
*
One Sunday she walked into a church. She opened the door and the building swallowed her. Then she returned the next Sunday to the dark eaves and the glass pictures. She "was never seen again". She died to the bulk of her friends. She walked the labyrinth and got her feet tangled in the thread of a turn, was never able to extricate herself, she unravelled as she moved. Converted. Converted. Unable simply to leave. Stuck listening to an organ whose reverberations never died. Exchanged the peace with strangers. Felt that peace.
*
Recited the creed. Didn't blink, didn't clutch, didn't clear her throat. Didn't hold back. Took the miracles in stride. In stride. Darling, there they are. Deal with them. Believe. She didn't fan herself with old syllogisms. Didn't play the game of being too adult to commit herself. Didn't fetishize the game of disobey. Actually didn't play the age old games. Walked the rolling green of the great lawn. Labyrinths of larches. If not the garden she grew up in, at least a snapshot.
Sang when asked to sing. Got down on those sharp knees. Didn't play the role of confessing, no. Confessed. Actually did it. Refused to look around and judge. Managed not to project her own weakness into the crowd. Loved her enemies, admitted she had them. Handed her hatred to God without pretending not to have any. Skipped the step of hating God. Helped an old lady to the altar. Took bread and resolutely chewed. Did not bother to cover her mouth.
*
Church is a building you enter but don't leave. If you leave, you didn't enter, because entering is the act of not leaving. Its walls smear your skin like honey or chocolate. They leave a mark, a permanent mark. You are there. You can't rub it off you nor you off it. You are there and are never not there, not anymore. You walk in. You don't walk out. Church.
This is not real estate but God's fleshy hand squeezing.
*
The heavy, hard, perhaps mean-spirited people walking to the altar. They are desperate to change. The desperation is real and the change is what is hoped for. This is church, you are in church. Forever. Have a good day!
*
Saturday, November 19, 2005
How poetry killed
*
When she sat under a tree God took the tree and threw it at her. The leaves became spears, the trunk made a passageway. Ants and spiders thrashed within pockets. Her meditation pierced so that she could not move. One's body wallowed in a Shelleyan blood. What is good pain? Might this be good pain? Pain from God -- not from a man -- would be good pain, bountiful pain, a throbbing that you lick in your subjection to what is real. A pleasure thrown forward from this Place, which is the throw.
So if words spoken in this Place should kill you, might that not be good? Would they not still be good words? The good not in the words but behind the words. Godly words.
It must be the case that poetry "can kill a man", as a certain person said. Poor "corazon" now sits chained and afraid, biting the air around it. The girl could barely clear her head to study, she could barely breathe.
If this was absence, what in the world could presence be?
*
When she sat under a tree God took the tree and threw it at her. The leaves became spears, the trunk made a passageway. Ants and spiders thrashed within pockets. Her meditation pierced so that she could not move. One's body wallowed in a Shelleyan blood. What is good pain? Might this be good pain? Pain from God -- not from a man -- would be good pain, bountiful pain, a throbbing that you lick in your subjection to what is real. A pleasure thrown forward from this Place, which is the throw.
So if words spoken in this Place should kill you, might that not be good? Would they not still be good words? The good not in the words but behind the words. Godly words.
It must be the case that poetry "can kill a man", as a certain person said. Poor "corazon" now sits chained and afraid, biting the air around it. The girl could barely clear her head to study, she could barely breathe.
If this was absence, what in the world could presence be?
*
Friday, November 18, 2005
The veil
*
The logicians merely killed time, discussing the gray and dirty veil that dangled over reality but not saying the one necessary thing, that it *was* a veil, that it hid the subject matter they wanted to discuss. And the veil examined closely was their own words.
When she stopped discussing with them she went and sat in the Place -- movable, withdrawn -- that harbored the text from the past. The past always knew more. Scripture there did not enter the logical game and did not even refuse to play. The Scripture and the Place were two overlapping circles.
In that Place the experience of reading was to let God hook words onto His bow and shoot them straight through a given sentence, no longer veiled. Words were vertical not horizontal, and they would enter the heart with great pain, a flourishing of bloody feathers that was not a discussion. Reading them turned into living and not mere talking.
It was so difficult to speak of what one lay inside.
*
The logicians merely killed time, discussing the gray and dirty veil that dangled over reality but not saying the one necessary thing, that it *was* a veil, that it hid the subject matter they wanted to discuss. And the veil examined closely was their own words.
When she stopped discussing with them she went and sat in the Place -- movable, withdrawn -- that harbored the text from the past. The past always knew more. Scripture there did not enter the logical game and did not even refuse to play. The Scripture and the Place were two overlapping circles.
In that Place the experience of reading was to let God hook words onto His bow and shoot them straight through a given sentence, no longer veiled. Words were vertical not horizontal, and they would enter the heart with great pain, a flourishing of bloody feathers that was not a discussion. Reading them turned into living and not mere talking.
It was so difficult to speak of what one lay inside.
*
Monday, November 14, 2005
Chapter 5: A room without windows
*
Imagine a room without windows, a room without doors. How did you get in, how will you get out? That's not the pont. You are imagining. Imagination flows through walls, goes everywhere, especially impossible places. So imagine you're there. Locked within those walls. Nothing but walls.
It is a place without a feel. It is a place without poetry. It is a place in which to focus. A box, an empty box? No, so far from empty. Even a vacuum swirls with virtual particles. There is quite a lot here.
Here you do not leave the world but focus on the world without interruption. It is a box of bliss.
What is here? Existence is here. Existence fills the room to overflowing. It kneads you without ceasing. "It"? Can anything that moves you so merely be "it"?
There is a place where greed and anxiety are, if not extinguished, not quite that, at least put away in a drawer. Put away for now. The drawer is closed -- so closed that it essentially disappears. It is a room without furniture and you sit inside its blue. The air is blue. Birdsong sweeps the air a little bit. A sense of birdsong without birds. Perhaps the swish of passing cars. They seem to erase themselves.
The blue is not placed there, the blue is not appliqué. It seems to emanate from what is there. Existence cannot be put in a drawer, existence always comes to swell and increase. The folds of this place's garment are blue. Now the blue takes on a deeper blue. The pine needles pierce it slightly.
The room is rare and wonderful. And it *has* no walls!
*
Imagine a room without windows, a room without doors. How did you get in, how will you get out? That's not the pont. You are imagining. Imagination flows through walls, goes everywhere, especially impossible places. So imagine you're there. Locked within those walls. Nothing but walls.
It is a place without a feel. It is a place without poetry. It is a place in which to focus. A box, an empty box? No, so far from empty. Even a vacuum swirls with virtual particles. There is quite a lot here.
Here you do not leave the world but focus on the world without interruption. It is a box of bliss.
What is here? Existence is here. Existence fills the room to overflowing. It kneads you without ceasing. "It"? Can anything that moves you so merely be "it"?
There is a place where greed and anxiety are, if not extinguished, not quite that, at least put away in a drawer. Put away for now. The drawer is closed -- so closed that it essentially disappears. It is a room without furniture and you sit inside its blue. The air is blue. Birdsong sweeps the air a little bit. A sense of birdsong without birds. Perhaps the swish of passing cars. They seem to erase themselves.
The blue is not placed there, the blue is not appliqué. It seems to emanate from what is there. Existence cannot be put in a drawer, existence always comes to swell and increase. The folds of this place's garment are blue. Now the blue takes on a deeper blue. The pine needles pierce it slightly.
The room is rare and wonderful. And it *has* no walls!
*
Saturday, November 05, 2005
The place of being - Chap 4: The damped feel
*
The forest was God's ear, God's mouth and God's garment. "Take your hand from the folds of your garment" (Ps 75.11, NIV?). In other words, make actual what you have implied. Speak to me!
The feel was damped and distant. She could not feel the Place but only be there. But to a person with the longing that kneaded her now, even the feel of no feel became a powerful force, poignant and full of emotion. Silence took the mask off what sound had only played at. It was as though her longing were the object of what she longed for, looping back into her, refracted. And destitution -- the soul's dark night, poetic, dangerous, ever so alluring -- offered an odd kind of solace, an unexpected rest. Sadness was a pleasure (if it could ever be such a thing) that came into her very much subdued and very much delayed. And even her walking through it waited for it.
*
The forest was God's ear, God's mouth and God's garment. "Take your hand from the folds of your garment" (Ps 75.11, NIV?). In other words, make actual what you have implied. Speak to me!
The feel was damped and distant. She could not feel the Place but only be there. But to a person with the longing that kneaded her now, even the feel of no feel became a powerful force, poignant and full of emotion. Silence took the mask off what sound had only played at. It was as though her longing were the object of what she longed for, looping back into her, refracted. And destitution -- the soul's dark night, poetic, dangerous, ever so alluring -- offered an odd kind of solace, an unexpected rest. Sadness was a pleasure (if it could ever be such a thing) that came into her very much subdued and very much delayed. And even her walking through it waited for it.
*
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