*
And so the yoga instructor held a class on Christmas day and the atmosphere was very strange. A special day, yes, but in what way exactly? Everything shut down and everyone withdrawn into a familial warmth, except for those without family. For them, all strange.
Was there joy? Merely strangeness?
The teacher went through a sun salutation but there was no sun anywhere. Then she stretched what would not stretch.
Do not force the muscle, treat it like a gentle beast -- it resists when you push hard but there is always a way to coax.
But first of course you must coax the thing that coaxes -- that is the will, the coaxer. It too resists prodding but responds to persuasion. An exasperating donkey of an organ. You must not push past without respect.
Bend the knee and, if you can, lift the foot. Lift it rather high and hold it in your arms, rock back and forth. Hold it with both hands.
Hold it like a baby. You are like a mother, holding this thing, this self, in loving arms, and rocking it with infinite tenderness. Not the self but something closer than the self. Try to love what you have.
So the day rocked within an enormous tenderness that no one quite understood. And you were its child.
*
Monday, December 26, 2005
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Kenosis
*
She walked into the path, the Place, and found herself empty, even deliberately emptied herself. It was called for. It was necessary. "Depression", whatever that was, had to be a valley one walked through and finally left behind. So the emptiness was like an exhalation, making space for the joy that one would soon inhale. It took a kind of courage.
As for "Depression" (whatever that really was!) did you medicate it? Of course you medicated it, if you had to, if the alternative was a collapse into death. But there would always remain the concern that this painful kneading you walked into was not something to deflect but something to walk through -- that medication might be an evasion of a truth that needed instead to be faced.
There was an odd truth inside the atrocious pun of your "equal" relationship with God: "I need God -- and God kneads me".
*
She walked into the path, the Place, and found herself empty, even deliberately emptied herself. It was called for. It was necessary. "Depression", whatever that was, had to be a valley one walked through and finally left behind. So the emptiness was like an exhalation, making space for the joy that one would soon inhale. It took a kind of courage.
As for "Depression" (whatever that really was!) did you medicate it? Of course you medicated it, if you had to, if the alternative was a collapse into death. But there would always remain the concern that this painful kneading you walked into was not something to deflect but something to walk through -- that medication might be an evasion of a truth that needed instead to be faced.
There was an odd truth inside the atrocious pun of your "equal" relationship with God: "I need God -- and God kneads me".
*
Friday, December 23, 2005
Lord Kelvin's casino
*
Life is like a casino (I say -- pretending to be some big expert on this -- never having gambled in my entire life -- but understanding it the way an obedient priest understands sex). The kids in the casino are playing a losing game, because the percentages are set at 51% for "the house", so if you play long enough, there is no uncertainty to this: you will lose. But all the players think they are exceptions somehow and maybe manage to be, for awhile.
But if you continue to play you are going to lose. What you most like about your body, or your mind, or your circumstances, that is what you are certain to lose -- the better it is the bigger the loss.
And when the casino closes for the night, all the takings are gathered -- where?
What is this "house" that always wins? Not God, nothing to do with God. Whoever runs the house, that person too is also playing, and also guaranteed to lose. So the game makes no sense and something else entirely has to be operating.
You could create an indirect proof for the existence of miracles by proving how exhausted, empty and non-existent is the alternative world, the one where people play against the "house" and lose.
The "house" is where people go who are turning away from God. So of course one loses there!
*
In Lord Kelvin's Casino, everybody play the laws of thermodynamics and everybody loses. The players lose, the house loses, the owners lose, even people who are just looking on, they also lose. So don't play that game. Maybe you walk through a space where those laws reign but you don't have to live there -- living by definition takes place where there is the possibility of life -- in a casino there is none. Life is elsewhere, in a garden of faith, where abundance somehow knows how to bloom itself even out of destitution. And there, everybody wins.
*
Life is like a casino (I say -- pretending to be some big expert on this -- never having gambled in my entire life -- but understanding it the way an obedient priest understands sex). The kids in the casino are playing a losing game, because the percentages are set at 51% for "the house", so if you play long enough, there is no uncertainty to this: you will lose. But all the players think they are exceptions somehow and maybe manage to be, for awhile.
But if you continue to play you are going to lose. What you most like about your body, or your mind, or your circumstances, that is what you are certain to lose -- the better it is the bigger the loss.
And when the casino closes for the night, all the takings are gathered -- where?
What is this "house" that always wins? Not God, nothing to do with God. Whoever runs the house, that person too is also playing, and also guaranteed to lose. So the game makes no sense and something else entirely has to be operating.
You could create an indirect proof for the existence of miracles by proving how exhausted, empty and non-existent is the alternative world, the one where people play against the "house" and lose.
The "house" is where people go who are turning away from God. So of course one loses there!
*
In Lord Kelvin's Casino, everybody play the laws of thermodynamics and everybody loses. The players lose, the house loses, the owners lose, even people who are just looking on, they also lose. So don't play that game. Maybe you walk through a space where those laws reign but you don't have to live there -- living by definition takes place where there is the possibility of life -- in a casino there is none. Life is elsewhere, in a garden of faith, where abundance somehow knows how to bloom itself even out of destitution. And there, everybody wins.
*
Through death?
*
Christianity is in essence to move through death into life. Well, I've got the death part down. I have memorized death. I know this immersion. Death is clear. What I need to learn is that next movement. This is hard.
Death has got me down. But if you stop there everything before it also dies. Move on, it is imperative to move on.
*
Christianity is in essence to move through death into life. Well, I've got the death part down. I have memorized death. I know this immersion. Death is clear. What I need to learn is that next movement. This is hard.
Death has got me down. But if you stop there everything before it also dies. Move on, it is imperative to move on.
*
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Dear Christian, imagine...
*
Dear Christian, imagine what it would be like to really *be* a Christian. You yourself are not yet a Christian, though you believe you are....
*
Dear Christian, imagine what it would be like to really *be* a Christian. You yourself are not yet a Christian, though you believe you are....
*
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Chapter 6: Conduct imagined as a person
*
There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.
Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.
His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.
For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.
Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.
You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.
*
There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.
Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.
His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.
For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.
Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.
You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.
*
Monday, December 05, 2005
Like rain like drought
*
Grace like rain, it falls like rain. But is sometimes disguised as drought. Very very effectively disguised. Very very oh so dry now.
*
Still must be grace, even so. Only this drymouth feels like reading Oswald Chambers every morning, leaves you feeling hopeless by comparison to real Christians (where are they now?), you seem to be an F-student in sanctification. Hopeless? Or is that emotion merely a ladder to the floor above, which is itself hope and not just hope but grounded hope? And suddenly your mouth floods with words.
But she cared about what it really was, not how it felt.
*
Grace like rain, it falls like rain. But is sometimes disguised as drought. Very very effectively disguised. Very very oh so dry now.
*
Still must be grace, even so. Only this drymouth feels like reading Oswald Chambers every morning, leaves you feeling hopeless by comparison to real Christians (where are they now?), you seem to be an F-student in sanctification. Hopeless? Or is that emotion merely a ladder to the floor above, which is itself hope and not just hope but grounded hope? And suddenly your mouth floods with words.
But she cared about what it really was, not how it felt.
*
Sunday, December 04, 2005
The holy drought
*
Have you ever shucked off all caution and stood outside in the drought, as that girl did, and let it fall down, fall on top of you? To stand in the drought, feel it fall down, let it cover you and soak you till your clothes are heavy and your shoes make an unhappy squishing sound. In the drought, penetrated by the drought, feeling it fall and accepting it as a gift.
As one of the things God has given. A dryness that is not dry at all.
She walked through it steadily, not pretending it wasn't there, but not seeing it as ultimate either. Drought has a fruit of its own, drought has (I hope it has) a purpose, a measure that measures a kind of abundance, also a direction, a slant, a way of cleaning you off as it moves through. So say it, thank you for this dryness, thank you for the emptiness and the hunger and even for this dull feeling inside me that doesn't want to thank you at all, that feels a bit like dying, even thinks it is already dead, there is even a submerged and sullen thankfulness hidden inside that, waiting to be savored.
And the drought came on coming down. Month after month after month. The path to the garden covered with dust.
*
Have you ever shucked off all caution and stood outside in the drought, as that girl did, and let it fall down, fall on top of you? To stand in the drought, feel it fall down, let it cover you and soak you till your clothes are heavy and your shoes make an unhappy squishing sound. In the drought, penetrated by the drought, feeling it fall and accepting it as a gift.
As one of the things God has given. A dryness that is not dry at all.
She walked through it steadily, not pretending it wasn't there, but not seeing it as ultimate either. Drought has a fruit of its own, drought has (I hope it has) a purpose, a measure that measures a kind of abundance, also a direction, a slant, a way of cleaning you off as it moves through. So say it, thank you for this dryness, thank you for the emptiness and the hunger and even for this dull feeling inside me that doesn't want to thank you at all, that feels a bit like dying, even thinks it is already dead, there is even a submerged and sullen thankfulness hidden inside that, waiting to be savored.
And the drought came on coming down. Month after month after month. The path to the garden covered with dust.
*
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
God's fire
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
Monday, October 31, 2005
The place of being - Chap 3: Depression
*
One m0rning the girl woke up and the Place was gone. It couldn't really have been gone but the feel of it was gone. The world persisted and classes occurred, even classes in poetry, but the subject matter, or again the feel of the subject, had fled. The thing talked about was not to be known. And she walked the wooded area adjacent to the campus and felt herself bereaved again. Something had been taken away, although it still was there.
Her life continued, her grades were good, her friends thought of her as happy. Her professor saw great promise in her as he followed her with his eyes.
On the path to the creek, the elite girls stood and complained. This place has grown common, they said. People have invaded this place who don't *understand* it. It isn't the way it was before. Nothing is as before.
What has poetry stooped to become? A bunch of nobodies taking the mike for their own and reciting their hip-hop *jingles*.
Mere therapy. Poetry has lost its outward motive.
We were seeking grace and clarity. A world whose lines were pure. Comprehension circulating lucidly in motes of light.
The rich girls complained with a sing-song lilt, making the poetry of regret with their mouths. But no one wanted to hear it. They were the evicted nymphs of the Place. Their soft membranes were tearing in this new harsh air. Poetry is weak, poetry is dying. It cannot survive the bustle of the world.
The girl stood beneath the bleak buckeyes and wondered whether the feel would ever return, the feel that expressed the world. God's beautiful world with its soft colors and torn hornsounds, its flute-thin outlines shivering like thistle fluff, the undersurface of a world not meant to be simply used but to be -- what? What exactly was this world for? What was the mission of this place that was more than a place, this haunted domain with its surrounding echo, its abiding sense of purpose, its providential push? Reality rhymed and rhymed. There was someone intending and someone hearing -- someone objective but not human -- someone standing in the place waiting for her, this was the deity she was unable to engage. The Place of Poetry was like a place of assignation, she had had an appointment there with God and had missed the appointment, now nothing to do but wait and wait. What else could be the purpose of this *place* with her in its middle?
*
One m0rning the girl woke up and the Place was gone. It couldn't really have been gone but the feel of it was gone. The world persisted and classes occurred, even classes in poetry, but the subject matter, or again the feel of the subject, had fled. The thing talked about was not to be known. And she walked the wooded area adjacent to the campus and felt herself bereaved again. Something had been taken away, although it still was there.
Her life continued, her grades were good, her friends thought of her as happy. Her professor saw great promise in her as he followed her with his eyes.
On the path to the creek, the elite girls stood and complained. This place has grown common, they said. People have invaded this place who don't *understand* it. It isn't the way it was before. Nothing is as before.
What has poetry stooped to become? A bunch of nobodies taking the mike for their own and reciting their hip-hop *jingles*.
Mere therapy. Poetry has lost its outward motive.
We were seeking grace and clarity. A world whose lines were pure. Comprehension circulating lucidly in motes of light.
The rich girls complained with a sing-song lilt, making the poetry of regret with their mouths. But no one wanted to hear it. They were the evicted nymphs of the Place. Their soft membranes were tearing in this new harsh air. Poetry is weak, poetry is dying. It cannot survive the bustle of the world.
The girl stood beneath the bleak buckeyes and wondered whether the feel would ever return, the feel that expressed the world. God's beautiful world with its soft colors and torn hornsounds, its flute-thin outlines shivering like thistle fluff, the undersurface of a world not meant to be simply used but to be -- what? What exactly was this world for? What was the mission of this place that was more than a place, this haunted domain with its surrounding echo, its abiding sense of purpose, its providential push? Reality rhymed and rhymed. There was someone intending and someone hearing -- someone objective but not human -- someone standing in the place waiting for her, this was the deity she was unable to engage. The Place of Poetry was like a place of assignation, she had had an appointment there with God and had missed the appointment, now nothing to do but wait and wait. What else could be the purpose of this *place* with her in its middle?
*
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Forgiveness as being: The shop of bones
*
Bread is a clothing that coats the bone. "Give us... our daily bread."
*
But bone is a clothing too. (What exactly does it clothe?)
*
The Place of Poetry was a clothing store where the bones went to put on their clothes. But the bones themselves were a clothing that was put on and someday taken off. What did the bones clothe?
What they clothed, that was what you saw milling around the shop (or desperately queueing in a Russian breadline), hovering if it had the power to hover. Hovering and waiting for bone. This inner "thing", this "what they clothed" was something desperate for a metaphor, something that cried out to be clothed in metaphor, so that it could actually *be*.
Because being, too, that was something external that a creature put on.
*
Bread is a clothing that coats the bone. "Give us... our daily bread."
*
But bone is a clothing too. (What exactly does it clothe?)
*
The Place of Poetry was a clothing store where the bones went to put on their clothes. But the bones themselves were a clothing that was put on and someday taken off. What did the bones clothe?
What they clothed, that was what you saw milling around the shop (or desperately queueing in a Russian breadline), hovering if it had the power to hover. Hovering and waiting for bone. This inner "thing", this "what they clothed" was something desperate for a metaphor, something that cried out to be clothed in metaphor, so that it could actually *be*.
Because being, too, that was something external that a creature put on.
*
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Forgiveness: Parable of the Coat
*
When I wear my little coat -- the one of which I've spoken dear -- I feel lighter by ever so much. Lighter by the weight of the coat. when I wear my coat my own self-hatred becomes a non-issue. Not that it disappears darling. Not that it completely disappears but it is perhaps folded and put aside. Let us put a parenthesis around that -- let us just bracket that one and leave it undealt with for awhile! That is what I do with those particular concerns. It is as though the coat becomes a mask over my sorrow, only here darling the mask is truer, more authentically worn, so to speak, than what it covers, and so I no longer know really what it covers. I am in the dark because the mask is not a disguise. My relief from the self-hatred is actually truer than the self-hatred. The form is true, the formlessness it covers is, not exactly untrue, of course, but a lesser truth, a true less true, a sad half-truth that would lead (if it existed) into the evasions and lies of a typical inauthentic person being authentic. And thus cannot really be true. How can something that moves inevitably into lies itself be true? I'll have none of that.
Well leave that thought floating without a registry, let it die. In this case, my coat covers my shabbiness with the truth of my forgiveness, that is, my simultaneously being forgiven and forgiving. I think I can love that if I can't love myself.
So I wear my little coat and feel okay going into strange rooms, mingling with stranger, and that is someting new, I can tell you. There is a buffer now between myself and whatever is strange, including myself, the strangest of all. So now how I feel in that room is as underfined as ever but the feelings that buffer me and that I wear can be predicted. So they form a protection.
The coat will neither harm nor be harmed. So if I can just wear it my dear, I will be okay. And I do intend to do that.
So I wear it as often and awkwardly as possible and I am quite happy to sweat inside it, as long as it is there.
It is you might say my creator's coat; and even when I put it on, even then, he himself did not previously take it off.
So who is really wearing it, I don't know. Nor do I exactly care. In my current dissheveled state, I only care that the coat is there, I don't care who owns it. What a waste of time such a question would be! I don't care who puts it on as long as I'm wearing it. I don't care if the wearing is mine to brag about. Wear it and shut up, I tell myself. Stretch it where it goes. And I am sure there are people wearing it right now who don't even know that it exists, and covers them, and they also don't realize whose it is.
*
When I wear my little coat -- the one of which I've spoken dear -- I feel lighter by ever so much. Lighter by the weight of the coat. when I wear my coat my own self-hatred becomes a non-issue. Not that it disappears darling. Not that it completely disappears but it is perhaps folded and put aside. Let us put a parenthesis around that -- let us just bracket that one and leave it undealt with for awhile! That is what I do with those particular concerns. It is as though the coat becomes a mask over my sorrow, only here darling the mask is truer, more authentically worn, so to speak, than what it covers, and so I no longer know really what it covers. I am in the dark because the mask is not a disguise. My relief from the self-hatred is actually truer than the self-hatred. The form is true, the formlessness it covers is, not exactly untrue, of course, but a lesser truth, a true less true, a sad half-truth that would lead (if it existed) into the evasions and lies of a typical inauthentic person being authentic. And thus cannot really be true. How can something that moves inevitably into lies itself be true? I'll have none of that.
Well leave that thought floating without a registry, let it die. In this case, my coat covers my shabbiness with the truth of my forgiveness, that is, my simultaneously being forgiven and forgiving. I think I can love that if I can't love myself.
So I wear my little coat and feel okay going into strange rooms, mingling with stranger, and that is someting new, I can tell you. There is a buffer now between myself and whatever is strange, including myself, the strangest of all. So now how I feel in that room is as underfined as ever but the feelings that buffer me and that I wear can be predicted. So they form a protection.
The coat will neither harm nor be harmed. So if I can just wear it my dear, I will be okay. And I do intend to do that.
So I wear it as often and awkwardly as possible and I am quite happy to sweat inside it, as long as it is there.
It is you might say my creator's coat; and even when I put it on, even then, he himself did not previously take it off.
So who is really wearing it, I don't know. Nor do I exactly care. In my current dissheveled state, I only care that the coat is there, I don't care who owns it. What a waste of time such a question would be! I don't care who puts it on as long as I'm wearing it. I don't care if the wearing is mine to brag about. Wear it and shut up, I tell myself. Stretch it where it goes. And I am sure there are people wearing it right now who don't even know that it exists, and covers them, and they also don't realize whose it is.
*
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Poem of Forgiveness
*
Forgiveness is like the yellow suddenness
inside green leaves, not placed on top
but inside, welling out from the core
of that distant tree, a substance not
an attribute, not hanging like some ornament,
more truly what the live tree hangs upon,
available yet hidden, a primary
color so easily blended in the soot
of my own evaluations: "that tree
is blocking the sun from me".
I wish I could hold what it contains, I would like
this brightness to cover me, no not cover me
but issue from me -- so that I might be
forgiven, as the leaves are, effortlessly.
*
Forgiveness is like the yellow suddenness
inside green leaves, not placed on top
but inside, welling out from the core
of that distant tree, a substance not
an attribute, not hanging like some ornament,
more truly what the live tree hangs upon,
available yet hidden, a primary
color so easily blended in the soot
of my own evaluations: "that tree
is blocking the sun from me".
I wish I could hold what it contains, I would like
this brightness to cover me, no not cover me
but issue from me -- so that I might be
forgiven, as the leaves are, effortlessly.
*
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