Night lines

Take up and read:
tolle, lege --

Toll and ledger
of a ragged life --

Listen. The birds are in
the pear trees --

Mottled birds
that fly like stones --

& The stone of the word
Flutters too --

Paraphrase of Donne's "Hymn to Christ" - from age 19

If I set forth upon the waters in any ragged ship,
I will take it for the voice-laden image of your ark;
Whatever draining ocean may pull me into its mouth,
I will hear in its rush the living letters from which your flowing blood appears;
Though you choose to drape your countenance in angry billows,
My knowledge will remain set on your eyes alive behind that dark veil,
Which, though they roll and rove like the waves, will never drown me from spite.

I set this isle, my lifeworld, on your altar
With all my lovers and beloveds and friends;
When I have spilled the watery expanse of our poured-out lives between us all,
Establish your own salty gulf between yourself and my transgression.
For just as tree-sap ebbs in thick streams toward the buried tubers
To seek refuge from a dying world, I now in the winter of my life also go under
That I may dwell in the everlasting root of your love.

Neither you yourself nor the worship of you will constrain
The free passions of a spirit in symphonic concord,
But you do jealously desire to have that one’s love for yourself;
And as you are zealous for my love, my God, so now I overflow with zeal for yours.
You do not love, if you will not liberate my spirit from its wandering loves;
For the person who gives freedom takes it.
My soul exclaims, Oh! You do not love me if you sigh not for my other loves.

Place then the signet of your love on the divorce papers
That set me apart from all on whom the trickles of my weak affection fell;
Wed all my old loves who have dissipated with my young years,
Take unto yourself my worthless lovers, those named notoriety, intellect, and ambition.
In dim sanctuaries it is most true to pray:
To see you alone, my God, I pass out of vision and lose my eyes.
And to depart from the tempests of time, I choose for my spirit an eternal dark night.

Druskin, for the pause

There is a certain kind of incompatibility, especially in value judgments, when someone says, for example: “How intelligent is the design of the human body,” substantiating this only by examples of those organs in those cases when they function normally. But if one recalls that all people get sick and die—for the most part, not from being sated with life, like the Biblical patriarchs, but accidentally, or from illnesses, or simply get sated with life before their time—or that there are many unintelligent organs, one might as well say that the human organism is designed unintelligently. These two propositions cannot be called equivalent, simply because they express nothing at all beyond the human need to utter general judgments, i.e. a simple desire to talk, a preference for talking rather than keeping silent. This kind of behavior is typical of the insane. Therefore we are all precisely insane. But, having uttered this, I, too, speak like an insane person. My insanity in this case consists in uttering a general judgment without having sufficient grounds for it. I was coming from empirical, and moreover, rational grounds. I discussed rationally illnesses, premature satiation with life, and premature death. But how do I know that they’re premature, that illness has no purpose, when in my experience it has been granted me to see its purpose and the madness of the wise who deemed that is has no such purpose? For a human being is not a body, not an organism but God’s image and likeness. When my arguments cross their proper boundary, I become a madman. I pick up distinct inklings, although they are mere inklings, of a supra-rational, irrational rationality, of the existence of Providence, but I reduce the life of a person to merely the life of a human organism, and supplant absolute rationality with my own limited, irrational rationality. -- Yakov Druskin

Dear Simone

DEAR SIMONE.

When I think of gravity I think of you

sinking into your sickbed, Simone.

Dying was the force you understood best,

though you might have stayed

for some unravelling to show:

frays in the thread of purity

you assumed to stitch the world.

A SNOW

A SNOW.

A clean mounded snow’s call to labor

meets most often will

breaking the skin of the drift.

Sure of traction,

movement follows, walking,

wheels. Beside such needful arcs

lesser needs appear: desire

(fickle wound that nothing seals)

and rest, a stingy kind of pause

that lets the snow lie,

ponders what splendour

a melting world makes.

See a sudden lake of light

welling in the ground, or ice-gems

dripping the spoils of givenness

and oh, how quick they drop away,

work’s whisper, willful mind --

beauty is the deftest knife.

From Boonetime

The mountain has a chill on it today. Somehow it is more 'right' for my soul just now, and more inviting, even than reams of sunshine. I ran awhile today, at the Greenway, ran into the misty air -- the droplets of which flung onto my face and rested there like healing hands. I am growing into this menage of hills. The feeling of it starts in my feet and spreads to my limbs, pouring up into them like fresh water courses through root & branch. I am in Boone. There is nowhere else for me, through this full changing of the seasons. Yes, I am home here. Several years ago, I can remember believing that wherever one found oneself was home (or should be), no matter if one experienced even rapid, drastic relocations. Perhaps one facet of this axiom I still believe in: the ground where you are is the ground where you are. There is no other ground. A tautology, yes, but even my body knows this to be so. For while there is ground and ground on this planet (and all grounds, por eso, are possible), as you are a being delimited by -- and extended within -- a single body, its singular place at any given time is your only ground for experience. For me to say now, I wish I was in Greensboro, or Russia, or New York, is for me to yearn for some magic, some astral projection, to ferry my soul away towards grounds that my body cannot just now know. That longing is to enact, to effect, a dualism -- the desire for projection creates it, just as attentiveness to the plants and stones, the rhythms and images of life here on the mountain, and so forth, creates and propagates a unity that is at once whole and plenary. So then it seems -- and this is to shift rather abruptly towards another focus -- that there is a benefit in physical investment in place, in sensitive observation, and in building a habitus suited to the geographical, social, and psychological landscape of any given location. Perhaps it is true that living in (supposed) readiness for moving on and always on is an unproductive chaos. It could be that such living-on-the-surface-of-the-tumult disallows one from climbing into the chaotic sinkhole and finding meaning, from drawing out from the swirling arche some form and structure, routine and repetition, that will provide a more accessible surface for the infinite details of a particular place to spread themselves, and sprout, and live. 

1 Year 9 Days Ago

1. Such a beautiful time, when everything is possible again -- though I am nearly solitary. It pleases me to imagine that I have swapped beauty for beauty, such that the physical charms I've lost through the hard use of age have exchanged themselves somewhere in the aether for older, simpler allures, such as curiosity, spatial awareness, and the contemplative air. How I miss some people, though, B especially, and V, and even the awkward loves who I prized for some attribute or aura. Gone, they are gone. Will there again come into my life spangled streams of light like them? like D, and M, and the gentle nervous inflections of underloves like H? & what of the long impassioned talks, everything at once and each thing the hinge of all value? Then the doors of imagination and love swung open for me (though here I sentimentalize, as always). These small daily tasks, this learning of the basic elements of scientific work and artistic evaluation are difficult for me to attend with the most extreme focus, as Simone says one ought to do, & as I likewise believe. There is such a glory behind them, a rushing of light into which they are all swept as soon as I think outside the present problem, and even that presence itself is a flickering of unspeakable fire, and the flames twist together into such a torrent that I am overwhelmed at every blink or breath. & Now my past sits behind me in the flesh, though aetherially it slips into the pack of silverish pasts like a new set of fins into a school of gleaming fish. How I want to write, and how I love it, so much that I want to make my home forever in the library, or a monastery, and pore over manuscripts, mine writing & others' written, and let the glory of god and the infinitudes of little lightnings its echoes in each fall over me. How can I think of terror when there is such light? And what is that light but utter terror that, as Rilke says, "coolly disdains to destroy us"? And, to quote myself, "how can fire speak to inner terror?" or a spark of fire to the darkness? I see my mind dividing, shading everything into blackness and light, void and immanent presence, and I think, this is the only glory, the ultimate joy of which all other joys only participate like shades of color in varying intensity. Yet this, by all accounts, is mad. I am afraid of myself and of the inner reverberations that I hear when I go there, that overwhelm my whole sight & sense inside so I am rendered dumb and stationary and useless and utterly in bliss. This is the constant state of my "soul" when I stop to breathe, when I slough all the tasks & wanting away. The vapid inscrutable blackness of self (of Weil's gravity), and the rapid inscrutable abundant light that lies veiled behind all plastics & faces & trees. & oh the glory of this madness. How can I bring it down into, as Jarrell says, "the dailiness of life," and live it with grace and attention and as much precision as unsteady humans can muster, with openness, a reconciliatory hand, and peaceful feet? What is there other than the gift, the immanent gift, hand over hand, hand to mouth, in the mouth already, the taste, the golden swallow, the fire in the belly, the satiation, the want fulfilled as soon as it's "wanted," oh, what is there but this? "What a world, and such a world, that we should die," but feel that there is only light, to the point of distraction -- always in danger of illumination, of the swallowing up of either gravity or grace, to borrow terms, but ever more immanent is the light and the light and the light. Nulla dies sine linea, but why write when there are lines of light coursing & creasing & cavorting until we draw up silly, nearly in grief at our joy? And how not to write, when the mercy of god -- the bouncing of this light -- constrains us? I thrash, and cannot sleep, and am one molecule of glory abuzz with grace. O maker of light and setter-into-motion of me and of all things, o sustainer of & at every moment, constrain me to praise you, and teach me to live in the material world, rather than in the spectre of a light that eludes my speaking of it, but is ever present in my simple repentance & accompanying love.