the beast

"THERE was once a witch who desired to know everything. But the wiser a witch is, the harder she knocks her head against the wall when she comes to it. Her name was Watho, and she had a wolf in her mind. She cared for nothing in itself -- only for knowing it." - George MacDonald, The Day Boy and the Night Girl

I used to have a recurring nightmare. In every variation of it, I am being chased by a vicious yet strangely intelligent wild animal. In the last version of it that I remember having - which was many years ago - I was in my grandmother's house. It had originally belonged to my mother's mother, and is now the home of my sister.

In the dream, I was being pursued through the house by what was essentially an enormous werewolf. He was a supernaturally large human/lupus hybrid with powerfully muscled broad shoulders and the body, strength and nature of a wolf; but he stood on two legs and possessed the height and intellect of a man. As I ran for my life up the attic stairs, I felt the hot, moist exhalation of his breath through bared teeth on the nape of my neck. He held nothing back as he stayed on my heels, and at the extremity of my ability I was just barely ahead of him. He roared in fury his intent to kill me. But more disturbingly I could sense his thoughts, as I felt that he could read mine. We almost seemed to share one mind. And I sensed no pause, no relenting, in his irrational, single-minded intent to devour me.

I took the top of the stairs a hairs breadth out of his reach, and as he bellowed with hatred and rage at me I managed to fling the last door closed in his face, enclosing myself in a small upper bathroom with no other exit.

Barricaded inside and with no other way out, I turned to watch the door shudder and rattle, almost leaving it's frame as he hurled his body heedlessly against it, refusing to accept that it could come between him and his prey. I was struck by how unlikely it was that the thin, antique wooden door should be able to withstand such a supernatural onslaught. But it was built, indirectly at least, by the loving hands of my grandmother, eventually coming to us through our mother. And for the moment, it seemed to be just enough to stand between me and my enemy.

The seed beneath the snow

Kafka had this word written over his desk: "Warten" (wait).

“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”

-Ben Okri

Such words and sentiments have become my hope and comfort over the last few years of my life. The confidence that there is indeed some guiding force that is not indifferent to our dreams; that the inarticulate hopes we find embedded in our hearts are not put there as a cruel joke or a meaningless taunt. I remember, both as a child and as a young man, conceiving of the kind of person I wanted to be, and what the life I would wish to live might look like. I recall with anguish the person I have been at times, and the bewildering turns taken along the way. I sometimes now see glimpses of the person I will end up becoming, and it is not so very far off from what I had hoped.

I read recently about the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. A maze has many possible outcomes, some of which are dead-ends. In a labyrinth, no matter how convoluted and complex the path, the walker always ends up at the appointed destination.
It is not that I would choose the way things went, or the route that I have come. But it is heartening to see the beginnings of a kind of over-arching order and meaning to life. One that has asserted itself despite both my resistance to, and my attempts at assisting it. Whatever my life may be in the end, it is comforting that it is not something I could not recognize as my own.

Of course I am not sure exactly what Kafka meant by "Wait". I suspect though it is something akin to my own long resisted lesson that sometimes, the real work of making art is inward; still, invisible, and maddeningly inactive. That sitting and looking - seeing until I understand - is the essence of art, more so than the drawing or cutting or shaping or writing. The hardest part of a good drawing, for me, is the discipline to look at a subject more than I look at my line; to wait, to see the truth of it, before I record it with a mark. Perhaps good art, like all living things, requires a gestation period after conception. A time when the seed must lie buried in the ground.

I wonder if our lives are like that too. That we are the art of some higher being, one who waits patiently to see us unfold organically, rather than calling us into existence fully formed. That we are the planting of a patient gardener, who does not forget what the seed he has buried looks like.

up into the silence the green

up into the silence the green
silence with a white earth in it

you will(kiss me)go

out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it

down into your memory and
a memory and memory

i)kiss me,(will go

-e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings

silence

.is
a
looking

bird:the

turn
ing;edge,of

life

(inquiry before snow

-e.e. cummings

Churchianity

"Men never do evil so thoroughly and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. " - Blaise Pascal
The only consistently harsh words Jesus had were for the religious conservatives of his day. It was they, the strict, pious and brutal - who believed in the inspiration and authority of the scriptures - who had him crucified.

I am persuaded that it is not political liberals who are the enemies of the spirit of christ. It is those on the right, social conservatives who claim his name while misrepresenting his character; who believe they do him a service when they exert political power in order to control their neighbor's small vices; who are certain they can and should create a society that enforces their selective understanding of the morality of the bible.

They assert that we are a "christian nation". But is that not precisely the U(dys)topian spirit that motivated the architects of Babel?

Genesis 11:4 "...Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches (attains) to the heavens..."

George MacDonald

"...Yet I saw the raven, felt the ground under my feet, and heard a sound as of wind in the lowly plants around me! "How did I get here?" I said--apparently aloud, for the question was immediately answered. "You came through the door," replied an odd, rather harsh voice. I looked behind, then all about me, but saw no human shape... The same instant I knew it was the raven that had spoken, for he stood looking up at me with an air of waiting. The sun was not shining, yet the bird seemed to cast a shadow, and the shadow seemed part of himself. "

George MacDonald, from Lilith

the only thing left

"Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness."

-Antoine de Sainte Exupery

1937-2007

I begin with the quote by J.M. Ledgard, from his novel entitled Giraffe :

"Only occasionally, when the light strikes their enclosure in a certain way, as an equinoctial sun struck an Icelandic volcano in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and revealed to explorers an opening to the core of the planet, will the pupils of the giraffes dilate in some contrary fashion, betraying in a clinically observable way, even to a hemodynamicist, a memory of something more than the walls that contain them."

When I think of my mom, I find myself at a loss for words that are adequate enough to express not only what she meant to me, but what she was. The quote above picks up a little bit on this, in describing a glimpse of the interior life of the creatures in question as being larger than the walls that surround them. In many ways, I believe all human beings are like this. That our souls are actually bigger than the bodies they inhabit, or the parameters of our lives while on this planet. In my mother's case, I am certain of it.

Though a talented and promising artist and teacher as a young woman, she turned her back on all those possibilities because she believed that being a mother to her children was the most important thing she could do with her life, and she wanted to devote herself fully and without distraction to that purpose. Just before she died, she had signed up for a watercolor class, though she never had the opportunity to attend it.
She was intelligent, morally sensitive, and terribly witty, with a black humor that I loved, and that my brother and sister and I all share. We used to laugh often at the absurdities of life, and found great humor in our own or our family member's eccentricities.
As a child, I remember some of the later civil rights issues playing out on television. I clearly remember my mother's concerned scowl as we saw the injustices that were taking place, and I listened earnestly as she shaped my own sense of morality, carefully admonishing me that I must treat all people with respect and kindness, and as equals, regardless of the color of their skin.
As a young person who never quite fit into the social structure made available to me in public schools, I had a mother who valiantly carved out a space in this world where it was o.k. to be who I was. She affirmed me, and made certain that I knew that if I found no perfect niche for myself in society, then it was society that there was something wrong with.
I have a portrait I did of her, but I have chosen not to display it here because she didn't like it. It was drawn from a photograph of her that was taken in her early twenties. She was sitting in the back seat of a car, and it was likely taken by my father. She does look somewhat angry or at least annoyed in the picture. But I liked it because when I saw it, I knew instantly that I was seeing a woman who existed before me, who had a life apart from mine. I wanted to capture and acknowledge, and in so doing honor, this person whom I knew as a mother but who was much more than that, really. She was a woman, who had a boyfriend, and a temper, and dreams and aspirations that she eventually chose to set aside for the sake of three children.
When I looked at her in the hospital, after her heart had stopped beating and she had left us, I couldn't stop. I felt as if I was trying to engrave her features on my soul, because I would never see them again in this world. But as I looked, I kept seeing more. I kept seeing, and still see, all the things that weren't visible. I saw an artist, and a writer, and a professor of English literature. I saw that she had loved, and been romanced, and that she had been a young woman with hopes and dreams of her own that had nothing to do with me.

I saw a soul that had gladly set all those things aside for my sake.

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The following is the closing passage from a book that my mother used to read to us as children.  It is from the story Miss Suzy, by Miriam Young, about a squirrel who loses her beloved home in an old oak tree, only to have it fully restored to her in the end.  

"That night, when she went to bed, she was very tired.  But she looked through the branches and she could see a million stars.  The wind blew gently and rocked the tree like a cradle.  It was very peaceful, and Miss Suzy was very happy once more."

Winter

"The French have a nice feeling for simplicity. They merely wear sweaters indoors and sometimes hats as well. They believe in light, yes, but only as the heavens provide it."

"December the third. A day that promises nothing, that passes quickly. In the afternoon, a light snow, a snow so faint and small bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold."

- James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

This is the time of year that I ache for winter. Utterly weary of the heat and the blaring, harsh light of summer, I long for pearl-grey overcast skies of spun glass and the damp, moist air that seems to hover just at the point of precipitation.

No longer living in the mountains, I miss the sense that I am somehow connected to the natural world and it's cycles. Our whole society, as affluent and supposedly geared toward the fulfillment of the individual as it seems on the surface, is really a voracious, indifferent machine. A machine that expects us to wake the same time each 24 hour period, regardless of the position of the earth in relation to the sun. That demands we produce a set, predictable percentage of the G.N.P. per said 24 hour period regardless of the season. The educational system provides daycare so that two parents can work, and churns out new cogs for the machine. Young cogs that are not the same shape as all the others are inefficient, pressured to conform, and when they don't are hated and disdained as worthless.

Sometimes I look at the sky, and the rocks, and I am thankful. At peace, knowing that they were here long before our idiotic culture, and that they will still be here when it is gone. The falling snow, a missive from the primeval wildness; whispering, murmuring, that it will return one day.

Roses

One of the many unusual experiences I have had. I don't mind at all if others believe them to be figments of my imagination, or hallucinations, or lies. I share them merely so that others who know me will understand me.

He said, "The things in your mind - the thoughts and fears and anguish and self-judgment that torment you - are like a crown of thorns. I wore one so that you would not have to."

I was sitting in a meadow, in a field of flowers. There was in my heart the sense of joyful expectation that I feel when one of the handful of very special friends in my life are coming to visit, and I am anticipating their imminent arrival. As I sat in this expansive meadow bordered by limitless forests, I gathered flowers to make a gift for the one coming to see me. It struck me that I was still an artist even in this place and time, as if it were something inherently woven into my being, for ages to come. I was weaving the flowers I gathered into a small wreath. As I worked, my heart trembled with a sort of fragile thankfulness.

The next thing I knew, he was there, sitting with me in the meadow. Smiling, as happy to see me as I was him. My heart brimming with an intimate, wordless gratefulness, I leaned over to solemnly kiss his temples at each place where the thorns had left a faint mark. As I kissed, at each place my lips touched, a rose appeared. The wreath I had been weaving, a wreath of kisses for his brow.

Abyss

"This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance. We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses." -Blaise Pascal

At the behest of a friend (to whom I am forever grateful), I saw donnie darko for the first time this weekend. It had me near tears, for so many reasons. Not least of which is that it reminded me of how I have felt at times in my life. Tormented by questions about god that opened beneath me like abysses. Feeling as if my inner life was more real than what I and everyone else saw outwardly. Suspecting my understanding of truth to be entwined with mental illness, but not knowing exactly how to disentangle them.

I remember watching the closing credits of rocky and bullwinkle as a child, as the lightening flashed and the ground split open beneath them, and knowing that is not only what I feared, but what I felt like inside.

I often say that there are few things in life that I am certain about. I suppose, if asked to articulate what they are, I might say it this way: That something loved me enough to throw itself under my feet. That something was big enough to fill the infinite abyss.

blue

I woke this morning, for some reason thinking of one of the earliest dreams I can remember. From the age of my sister at the time, I think I must have been between four and six years old. We were at my grandmother's house for a holiday, and I was wakened by my mother for breakfast. I walked into the kitchen - the family gathered around the table - to announce to all assembled what a wonderful dream I had been having.

"There were all these little blue girls", I said enthusiastically, "waiting in line to get in bed with me." 

I recall this pronouncement causing the breakfast conversation among the adults to grow suddenly and strangely quiet. "They were so nice, and so pretty", I continued, undeterred, "and they all glowed blue." 

In my dream, they were indeed translucent, and glowing with a pale blue light (my favorite color at the time) from deep within. They were all my age, and dressed alike. In fact they all looked exactly the same, a long line of identical blue girls receding into the sleepy darkness.  But though physically alike, inwardly each was unique, with an individual beauty and soul and identity. All were sweet and gentle, and each eagerly and patiently waited her turn to get into bed with me. It seemed there was an allotted time for each, during which her eagerness would slowly change to deep contentment as we lay smiling face to face. We would then say affectionate good-byes, and she would surrender her place to the next, completely satisfied and grateful for her time with me. I remember a soft tender word of gentle intimacy with the last one, that the others could not hear.

No one at the table seemed to fully understand how great this dream obviously was. I remember my father concentrating intently on his bacon and eggs. My mother and grandmother carrying on in wide-eyed but stony silence as if they had suddenly lost the ability to hear.
Nevertheless, after eating I quickly rose to earnestly declare my intention to go back to bed, in the hope of continuing this obviously wonderful dream.

Esmerine

"Esmerine’s Aurora is the sound of nations grinding to a halt as the dust settles from the final explosion of the final piece of nuclear ordnance. It is the sound of the meek waiting timidly in stripped shells of burning cars for the intrusions of cockroaches to abate. It is the sound of a loved one passing away, the sound of a marriage disintegrating; it is the sound of unrequited love. It is the sound of losing one’s sight; the sound of morphine overdoses and pethidine dreams. Yet, despite the sadness, there is an underlying beauty at work so immense that one cannot help but be drawn in and enveloped."

http://www.esmerine.com/reviews_aurora.html

a glimpse inside the core

"Only occasionally, when the light strikes their enclosure in a certain way, as an equinoctial sun struck an Icelandic volcano in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and revealed to explorers an opening to the core of the planet, will the pupils of the giraffes dilate in some contrary fashion, betraying in a clinically observable way, even to a hemodynamicist, a memory of something more than the walls that contain them."

J.M. Ledgard, from Giraffe

Rilke

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I would perish in the embrace of his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure and are awed because it so serenely disdains to annihilate us. Each single angel is terrifying."

-Rilke

Wonder

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of all true art and true science." -Einstein

Mystery, and the sense of wonder when confronted with it, has always been the thing that arrested and held my gaze. Like Moses, compelled to turn aside at the sight of the burning bush. It was only when he had paused to contemplate it that he heard god speaking to him.  Mystery has become the heart of my theology, the living, breathing, elastic thing at it's center. The one thing, the only thing, that is capable of filling and spanning the gap between mind and heart, reason and faith. A creed whose holiest words, "I don't understand...", are uttered in hushed, awed, humbled tones.

I am persuaded that it is not so much the correct answer, but the trusting question that god calls faith.

"Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not."  -The Book of Job, 42:3

"A comprehended god is no god." -Madeleine L'Engle