Imitation and Kierkegaard

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Kierkegaard talks of true faith as "imitation" of our "prototype" Christ. But (1st but) imitation is impossible because the distance is too great! But (2nd but) recognizing this distance leads one to "grace". But (3rd but) "grace" then becomes a device for the human to go on living as before that same empty life and relying on "grace" like a crutch. But (4th but) all of this is what the human does only as facing forward and willing her redemption. But (5th but) that is not how it works, dear Mr K.

Grace is not in front of one to be willed but behind one and between the shoulder blades. It pushes the blades and so you move tentatively toward the God who is everywhere. But (6th but) doesn't the will get in the way of this? Or can you will to be pushed ever so gently by that push?

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Behind

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Oddly enough, your goal is not in front of you but behind you.

Behind. Under.

Like a hand.

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The dog in God's hand

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At the crossing, a little dog
a little dog
has 4 legs now,
has 4 legs now

looks at the girl and turns
looks back at the girl
walks to the girl
sits by the girl
wags his tail at the girl

runs away from the girl
laughing on 4 legs -- has 4 legs!
splashes in existence
swimming in the ivy like a dog swimming in the ivy.

God's hand
God's hand
my surface is God's hand

God pets the dog
God throws a bone.
God's throw. God's bone.

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Conversion

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At transitional points, at breaks -- where the skin turns into fingernail: that is where conversion occurs.

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Chapter 15: Green trees

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Una walked with the crown of her head as touching heaven, her spine straight as a thrust spear. The core lay upward and became squeezed. Her heart seemed to pierce the clouds. The book of the shoulder blades closed, tight shut. The granite dormitories stood skewed on either side, as if unable to resist the pressure of God's thumb. There was a crack down the front of the world's rational complacency and coherence, an opening of mathematical wrongness -- there for students to ponder, to fall through or ignore. It lay quietly across her forehead too. The world -- considered by itself -- did not add up. But as a kneaded paste of what was to come, it made a different kind of sense or was about to -- always on the verge, just like a human.

There was a man in the garden. Who was that man? He did his work and didn't look at her.

She was certain she knew him. She couldn't remember how. He was very attractive to her. Not knowing what to do with it, she took the attraction and shelved it like a book on some back shelf (behind the shoulder blades?), leaving it there to be latent and ready. Then she looked back and found the attraction unshelved, in front of her, bursting her heart. It had nothing to do with sex. As she stepped forward the man no longer stood in front of her, was no longer visible. But he was still there.

All around her were the green and succulent trees. As still as her own heart.

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Poem & Digression: On loving the enemy

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You must know what's at stake to understand
what cursing curses and who is
the enemy one must forgive but first
there has to be an enemy -- one must
live where these stakes continue to exist --
where men are wrenched in pieces and their blood
accumulates and starts to flood
all judgment. You cannot stay wrapped
in affluence like cotton. Never boast
you have no enemy or you are lost!
Faith must be founded in reality,
this little piece of it that juts out from
the wider providence you cannot know,
except as bone that breaks the way you go.

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The shadow of God's hand

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As she walked the mud spread and covered her -- it was a mask. One that expressed and revealed, not concealed, or one that spread its palm over untruth to conceal that and reveal the other.

God the potter spun the sharp wheel and shaped a pot or a girl. Una rolled down the hill exhilarated, hung in her cocoon of devotion. The creed was a bodily space that the body moved through. Her flesh solidified over time and flaked off. She was new.

The greatest miracle was the Crucifixion, not the Resurrection. For given an "entity" that is God, who can be surprised about its being born again from oblivion, which is merely standard behavior for a god. But that God, being who he is, would have bent forward to hollow out his own eternity and allow it to be submerged in death? Not that a given man would live forever but that God, our God, would dare to experience the other thing.

He must be crazy about us, Una said.

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So why didn't everyone walk down her pleasant campus path, the garden walk of faith? Oh because the access was so much pain. The path was pain. So all because of pain. Or rather the fear of pain -- which is actually a form of pain.

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The intelligent design

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If there were a God, "how would we know?" the scientist asked. (American Scientist, Jan-Feb 2006, p, 4).

The answer might be that If I *didn't* know, then I *wouldn't* know. There is no way I "would" know unless I "did" know. In pretending the slate is bare the writer is starting from a fictional position and so will never come to the one awkward fact. It is more than pre-supposed. I would say that my "knowledge" of God was hard-wired in my being -- certainly deeper than a postulate. Whatever in me knows would come from this, or this would be what knew, or what did the knowing. You can't exactly dispute about a wiring nor can you, the wire, redo the wire. Nor prove, nor disprove. This is deeper territory than the flat hall of debate, unless you imagine a debate that you ride inside like a wild train and come out as a being changed and disclosed, maybe killed. That would not be very scientific.

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The landscape

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Had the landscape then been evil? She could not see it that way. Even the bugs being eaten were not in themselves suffering evil. Death was not an evil, it was something that occurred. Death gave life its shape.

Where then did evil come from, since it was so swarmingly there? Was the devil -- who was not a real entity on his own but more like a virus that could seize a distracted will and simulate existence -- so was his whole existence nothing but your own loss of focus?

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Suppose that suffering were something external that the will encountered as an object. Its final meaning might be what the will made of it. It might be like a weight whose lifting made you stronger. That was what it was as an object, not a subject. Why didn't it stay that way?

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Through some terrible metamorphosis, no, it was a literal invasion and a passing through the membrance, suffering became subject instead of object, it became you. The person suffering the pain became the pain. all sentience about anything became pain's mentation, a damned entity to be sure. There was evil. There was damage. You might say that when this happened, even the devil now had hands and feet of his own to flex. But how did it happen?

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Was it about focus? Did it happen because a human, knowing it had a goal, took its eyes off the goal?

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Was it about the periphery being allowed to seep in and take control?

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Was it when the creature, already full, felt its own fangs being sunk into food that it didn't even want? Then food rose into consciousness and began its ugly sobbing. And the sobbing was waste and about waste. Something now gone off track.

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The mud

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What was the mud? The mud was penance. The mud was made of penance, soul-building pain.

Her body was softer than a worm's, more vulnerable. She fell through this putty-like water and felt it reshape her. That was yieldedness. It was terrifying. An ana-baptism!

The process: you yielded to God (a yielding like death), you felt God knead you, and you then resurfaced into the world but it was now a different world. The world you left was a godless one, the world you re-entered was God's world. Here you were in no way alone.

And the filth made no difference.

And it didn't matter now how frail and damageable your own being was. You no longer brooded on that. God was in control.

And in that thought you submerged and were kneaded once again.

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Chapter 13: The invertebrate

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So Una gave herself to God to be kneaded -- a worm within the mud. The walls of the body were just about nothing -- they were liquid or putty. They were ready -- to be shaped into anything.

She fell off an invisible cliff without any purchase at all. The risk of death -- well, it was more than a risk. Was this nothing but the force of gravity? Was God really there?

As for gravity, that too was no more than a shape that God shaped.

All of the elements dissassembled and gave themselves to God.

I hate a world where all the creatures eat each other, she cried. But the cry, that was eaten too.

And the falling continued to fall. She felt her being continue to pull into pieces, softish ones. A poor shell-less invertebrate, what could it do but expose its own weakness in utter hope?

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Food

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Darwinian pit, abandoned by God but perhaps not by his son. They say that Jesus recognized that food had become the subject (subject not object) within our wicked hearts and that blood was tickling our souls with lust -- a forbidden engorging -- and so he came, broke into our vile fratty games and put his own breast in the path of the fang -- "I am the bread of life" -- so that through his own and voluntary breaking-open, food could be clean once again.

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Feeding

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A terrible truth about Darwin's land. When the ants there fed on a scorpion, and ingested her alive, it was not her stinger, her poison or her carapace that they relished, it was her resistance, that was what they fed on and what tasted so good to them.

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Chapter 11: Una's encounter

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They said that every encounter with God ran the risk of death. That was why so many even who called themselves religious shunned that encounter.

Are you orthodox? Are you orthodox? How can you be alone in the mud?

To most it seemed better to live in echoes of the encounter and to retell the old stories that concerned it, simply as stories. Good things to share with our children, they said. History, art, politics, anything but truth.

When a story ended it was like a curtain coming down on a play. Everyone stood up and went home. But an encounter was different from a story.

The people had curled themselves into a ball and hung immersed in the stream that burst the mud. A tadpole sewed through and pierced their sphere, and a demon looked down from a leaf overhead. Behind another leaf Una now hid. She was frightened of this world. Oh Darwinism is the land of God's abandonment. Now there was a membrane separating Una's realm from that land -- one quick movement would make it tear.

So she was smart enough to be afraid.

The creatures in the sphere made a village, a community. We are one, we are close. But some of them were tied and hung upside down. Others slithered along the bloodshot surface. They would nip each other and chew slowly. Sometimes a carapace would suddenly implode. Love was predation in Darwin's land. There was a pair of people each of whom was busy eating the other's haunch. They reached their extensors into each other's belly, pulling out pieces of meat.

It's all just natural, someone said, a budding ethicist, or a demon probably. It's just the way things are. Nothing beyond this. Accept it.

On the bank a group of peasants in yellow pajamas engaged in a tug of war but the thing being tugged was themselves and the flesh would be pulled back and forth until you couldn't recognize it. One of them grabbed her wrist to pull her into the healthful game.

She was now terrified enough to risk the encounter with God. The risk of instant death, that was why more people didn't do this. The kneading of your heart in God's hand, the potting that might kill you.

Conduct, sullen and inexpressive boy, held her other hand as if to encourage her -- or to keep her from running away.

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Surveying the landscape

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As she walked the devil hovered and became *there*. The Place of Poetry was one of his special lairs -- he loved to break in and tear it down. The tears of humans were a precious food. Were he but the bodily trappings of a disordered will, so be it. He revelled in a destitute existence, unlike any modern Christian. So the devil perched, between the bladder and the bowels, holding on tightly and flapping his horrible wings. Inside the body deeply.

A beetle crawled across his face in the mud, with a chemical sting at its nether opening, and the sting was slipping and sliding like a hose filled with poison. The devil grabbed the bug and wedged it into the mud, embedding the sting. Then he contentedly ate the front half still alive. Una walked through the slush without even looking back, actually she was praying her head off, and the devil not only got left behind but was miniaturized, diminished to a mote.

God lay ahead

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In the sludge

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I want to be good, she said, don't know how. The others reduce me, the others, my equals. Gravitational force of human stuckness, the sludge of dailiness. That sludge of dailiness itself grows daily. I pull away and then seem alone -- want to pull away but not be alone. Conduct -- the man she loved -- pulled away from her. His nature. Standing on the cliff above the gully, not a cliff, just a discontinuity. Because life is ringed by death and death is ringed by God -- and you want to move through it.

Don't hang on me, the man said. Don't be one of those girls you see at convenience stores, leaning on their man pathetically. Little Tammy, sweet Diane. The guy smokes her like a cigarette. She looks like someone who's given herself away -- entregada -- to nothing but a human! Treating a human as godlike -- godlike powers. But he too is distorted and weak. That guy is no god.

Your conduct has to be your own.

But here at college, the girls were having sex with the boys and didn't even want to. Didn't even want what they seemed to want. Didn't even know what they want. Sluggish like those not dead not alive. Sluggish being. Pull out pull away. And not be alone there. You are not alone.

If you are not alone, who are you with? God be with me even in this mud.

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She tripped and fell...

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into the water, yes, but he was there with her, the intentional one whose remoteness was a form of love.

She reached for the mud of the stream-edge and seemed to close her fingers upon a grub, too soft for a human hand.

She remembered the day she'd fasted to the point of exhaustion and fallen praying onto the vision of a grub. Some creature so thin it not only didn't have a shell but didn't have any protection at all. So that even touching it seemed to hurt it. And permanently. How could things so weak be thrust into the world, things born to die, how could God allow their life as nothing but carnage? Yes but inwardly this vulnerable image had been Jesus himself, the one who had opted to be without defenses, though the most powerful being in the world, gaping with softness, inexplicable. Sheer threads of hurting hanging down. Now remembering this image, she grabbed onto the poor creature and squeezed it with a practiced selfishness.

... was pulled back onto the shore. Where all the dead bugs lay. The losers in the battles, resting and decomposing.

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Chapter 8: The fear

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In the wheeling fields of storage and memory behind the campus, there was a complete forest at play. At prayer, at play. Free space between. All of it a form of memory. Of past and present and future. More comprehensive than mere time.

This was the domain of the One whom it was perilous to describe and at the same time imperative to try to try to try to understand. And then speak His name. Did God walk the earth or was the entire earth like a single footstep of God? To walk in wonder the playspace or prayerspace and then let its wind blow you through.

You don't know where it came from. You don't know where it's going. It fills your consciousness and rises.

There were large segments of protected space with trees pushing through it. All of it to be read only -- now listen, be quiet, ponder what you move through.

She wondered if a word could listen and not just pontificate. If a sentence could be filled with openness and questioning instead of this pressing demand to expound and to "know".

Then the wind reached and lifted her for a second, "bodily", over the threshhold of the muddy path that fenced off the cliff and led to the rushing water overhead, no: it was down below. A rushing sound that came from every direction.

What a magnificent fear this was!

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The breath

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So she let the breath breathe her.

Her own role small. The breath initiated. From where? To where?

Where are you? Who are you?

Twigs that shifted, dry brush breathing. As if sinking after exercise. Wind like a billowing towel. Can you talk? If you can talk, you are still within range. So go further? She sank down into recovery, let go. The thoughts between the thoughts were almost within grasp.

In the forest Una reached forward her hand and then a hand grasped her hand. Who are you?

Fear a great teacher. One's eyes wide like a horse's. Looking back, there are dorm windows, golden, swollen, people inside. Many miles away. Existent, remote.

But out here, the between that surrounded things was like a leaven. The place was growing.

The breathing was not hers.

What did she bring back? Not information, nothing but wonder.

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The wood of New Year

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New Year's Day. She stepped into the woods behind the dorm. No one there, no color beside wet black and softest white. Black of trees and thorns, very heavy the way it dipped. Moisture within and without.

Be with me there.

Between each thought the same substance as between each twig. Between the branches of the trees there stretched a "there" that was not space but something deeper and perhaps more frightening: the possibility of space. The fact of a space, the opening that as if condescendingly allowed space to be there.

The poetry of the place was the place itself. No, the place was a decal and beneath it what the mere shell of the colors covered.

Be with me there.

In the New Year and at any other time.

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