Chapter 400?

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Kierkegaard somewhere said that you cannot confront another person's ilusion head-on. You need to come from behind. What does this mean? The insight will not come out of the violence of a debate -- your respondent then just digs in and fights. You need a new arena that changes all the terms.

One is convinced by one's own experience, not someone else's. And the Spirit pushes inward from between the shoulder blades, not from outward into the eyebrows.

*

Una moved through the edge of the campus with her God behind her. He flowed into her movements as she allowed him to. Just insofar. Now God was not the thesis of an argument she had. He was not a point to be made. He was not a historical artifact to be sustained or recovered or polished or put away. Not just discussed per se, not possible. He was not a set of rules, relevant or otherwise. He was not an "experience". He was not an event in her spiritual autobiography. What he was she had to keep from blocking, she had to let him come into her perception -- into the act of her perception -- fostering it, sustaining it, keeping it from its own abject death and oblivion -- so that she might somehow be able to see the way he saw. One momentary flicker would be enough to nibble on for years and years.

She looked behind but the gardener could no longer be seen. Strongly felt but not located. Ahead of her the ruined chapel, left in decay. Crumbs and condom wrappers, graffiti on the helpless softening walls. A depression one simply needed to walk through. An ugliness that ate itself up. In the windows spiders rolled and unrolled like little yoyos.

The dorms at dawn were all in a tilted condition. They leaned like loose teeth. The light they were made of seemed a wavering substance, a flashlight in a jiggling hand. The buildings were only half plugged in -- were one to pull the plug, if you reached and pulled it, what happened to the contents, their existence? If the physical plant were turned off, what happened to the life inside? Would its being turn off too? Was it cradled elsewhere? How solidly grounded was this thing, existence? In what exactly was it grounded? Where did it come from, what was its source?

So much transience littering the soul. She felt the power behind her at an impossible angle, she felt the Lord move her forward, she rested in this immense capability. She yielded to his grandeur: Gelassenheit. Then the inexpressible joy. She walked and was walked.

Her breathing breathed her and left her breathless. "You are my refuge". Do not abandon me.

By the stairwell of the dorm, 2 students she knew slightly were lounging in their old chairs dangling coffee cups. One of them stood up to get more coffee.

Una stood next to the urn but the other didn't even look at her. Didn't see her. When she put her hand on the shoulder the woman shuddered and didn't move. They were not present to each other but rather haunted by each other.

I am invisible, Una thought.

*

Then each of the women backed away from the other as though what she'd touched had been a burning stove.

*

Photons are selfish little things whose dearest wish is to eat each other up, in the Physics that seals the land of God's abandonment. Their nature was to be overenergized and deadly. Through the sweep of them -- the concatenated physical hypotheses that popped inside the dorm staircase and made it occur -- Una moved carefully, the mud on her feet burning and cracking. Over her head the building was a construct as fragile as an untended row of trees. Sycamores say that no one loved enough to groom. She expected it to wink out of existence at any moment. She reached the floor of her own room and paused to catch her breath and pray, since even though the building felt unreal, her own prayer might still be grounded and hence a point of reference, and if so, one much needed. It would be the only surviving link between herself and this space. She opened the door and instantly her roommate rose up from her bed screaming and pointing.

You're dead! she screamed. What are you doing here? You are dead!

You have been certified already!

*