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. 

Aphorisms: Last Summer

To be a saint is a supreme selfishness. Saintliness: An obsession for others to acknowledge one's own metaphysical intuitions, indeed one's own desires, as best. Sainthood: The state of having achieved recognition for one's selfish obsession. 

Dark Mark II

"True religion should be able to respond to the dark melodies, the faulty and hideous sounds that echo from the heart of men." -- Endo

A Bit of Humor... From My Old Mind

This is the sort of sentimental muddle that makes me wonder where the intellectualism hides within this "ministry" -- does peppering some classical/patristic catch-words over a Dostoevsky anecdote make for thinking? I don't see how that's supposed to work. Intuition is not thinking, feeling is not thinking, repetitions of truth-assertions are certainly not thinking (not to mention that this post-writer gravely misreads Dostoevsky). Perhaps that's why they call this section a "slice of infinity" -- although for me it remains a slice of unclarity. 

Interjection (also old)

It's strange: it seems that every day great icebergs of hatred and guilt and even sadness float down like soft white flags & disappear. Even a week or two ago, I could not imagine that my heart would be warmed, that I would believe God and want to know His mind, and -- most of all -- that I would count such events as a clear & true response rather than a vile phase. Still, my heart is not quiet. My body shakes me in impossible ways that I do not understand. My mind seems to be evaporating. And yet, I feel in a queer (in the archaic sense) way that some vector of grace has met me where I am (despite all the rumbling) and that at the last I will be carried home. But life, X, life! I want that also.

[In that old prayer]I am sure I did not know what I asked -- if this illness is a "wringing," then it is not what I wanted! But I feel like a silly giddy child, even in the worst suffering I've known (though so far it is little), because the great sheets of ice and stone and solitude are coming down. I do not feel alone! 

Perhaps you will wince when reading this as I do while writing it -- confession rubs close. Plus a dual movement of confusion, both cognitive/compositional and inward-constitutional, scrapes into my hoped-for meaning. This has helped me, though, even as speaking this way is a wallowing and a wound. 

A Dark Mark

For contrast. Perdóneme. 

THAT OLD BALM.

That old balm -- 
Quiet --

No longer soothes
A thing. 

To the rended mind
Space seems better

Than singing -- 
But chaos is aloe

For a baseless wound. 
Thumping

On the bathtub
In the sky --

Such absurdities 
Keep time. 

Turbatio

I have just been speaking to X about my symptoms, fears, and feelings related to whatever neurodegenerative disease I may have -- it is so frustrating for me NOT to be able to speak and think with the fluency that I once did. My cognitive ability seems to be slipping away so fast. Just now as I type I'm mixing up letters, and I can see that what I'm writing does not have the structure or flow that it should -- see, I'm writing symptoms in when what I mean to say oughtn't to be tainted with such trivial details. What I mean to say should start with the topic, and then describe according to that rather than go off on bunny trails (I never would have used a cliche before, and here I cannot think of the words to say what I mean with nuance and texture.) So: I've just been telling X that if I have to go through this disease (new neuro)/ these diseases (neuro+nephro) I want it to have some meaning. But how can I have meaning, make meaning, offer meaning to the world, when I cannot think, speak, or write clearly (which would be my usual meaning-making mechanism), when I have no hand eye coordination or proper vision, when my proprioceptive field and interactive abilities have degenerated so? If I cannot balance, I cannot dance; if I cannot see, I cannot paint or draw; if I cannot process, I cannot understand conversations or make music or cook -- how can I go to school, do for others, know and be known, love and be loved? I feel like I am in a cage, like the cage is closing fast. Perhaps I will not degenerate so fast as I have been; perhaps some of my function will be preserved. But then there is the very good chance that I will come to death soon (for which I feel God MAY have been preparing me for some time). "For me to live is Christ, for me to die is gain." But if I say, "I will not remember Him Or speak anymore in His name," Then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire Shut up in my bones; And I am weary of holding it in, And I cannot endure it.

GOD will make meaning for me; I cannot machinate to make my life meaningful; He brings salvation with His own hand. 

The paradox: Christ went to death obediently, not opening His mouth (and so I should follow His example so much as He gives me grace to do... I do not want to die, but I do want to be obedient. Not because I want something, not because I want healing or an afterlife in a movement of greed,  but because I want Him... for His own sake.

Christ was oppressed and afflicted; he did not open his mouth. He went to his death without acting as I would -- speeding to get everything said before he died, trying to make everyone understand the meaning of what He was doing. But we know because of what he said before and what someone else (the prophet) has told us what his death means -- that he bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, and made the way of salvation open to us all. Following Christ, then, it is not necessary for me to "open my mouth" in the way that I would -- to, as do the poets, obsessively work to leave the creative residue of themselves in the world for all time. All the creative residue I need to leave is Christ's work in me. "He did not open his mouth," and yet the prophet says "But if I say, "I will not remember Him Or speak anymore in His name," Then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire Shut up in my bones; And I am weary of holding it in, And I cannot endure it"; so, if I am to speak, I speak Him. If I am to make or to do or to act or to interact then it will be all as unto him. For like the prophet, I am weary of holding it in. Like Psalm 34 says, 

 I will bless the Lord at all times;

His praise shall continually be in my mouth.2 My soul will make its boast in the Lord;
The humble will hear it and rejoice.3 O magnify the Lord with me,
And let us exalt His name together.

An Old Reflection and Prayer

It frightens me to think, after all the importance I have placed on thinking, that the possible yield of thought vis-a-vis knowledge is in fact very little. Just now I have been reading from Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” (a small selection, I must admit) and, rather than experiencing the sensations of wonder and deadly weight that used to accompany my readings in philosophy, I felt like the would-be victim of an elaborate but shoddy dupe -- yet one who perceived the act of fraud and willed to reject it. For it seemed to me that the classifications of being and not-being, ground as groundless or truly grounded or un-ground did indeed carry the flash and ring of that old thrill until I saw their boundary-lines as crooked & ill-conceived as a child’s surreptitious drawings on her bedroom wall. Oh yes, philosophers become inflamed with the capabilities of their own minds when they discover within themselves a special ability to conjure the surrounding world into blueprint form, into sets of oppositional and classificatory statements that perform world-ing, that is, the imagined creation or revelation of the universe’s properties that constitutes the proper field of philosophical inquiry. And yet, from their inflammation what comes but delirium? It seems to me now that the approach of the natural scientist, of the manual laborer, of the schoolchild, yes, even of the unlearned but wise elder could combine to form a saner approach to philosophy than that of wild drawings/draftings and grand blathering (and there my writing gets shoddy -- but I am just learning, just starting on my way). For what is generalization, spiritualization, systematization, and long proclaiming in contrast with the reverent (though sometimes dogged) quietness of the observer, the worker, the learner, the gentle-speaker? It seems to me that philosophy is slow work that requires one’s continual attention to the particularities of one’s life in equal measure to speculation, the balance of one’s critical practice in terms of demanding the most exacting level of specificity from all (including one’s own) thought in tandem with the subjection of all one’s critical stringency to former and better thinkers than oneself, and (especially!) one’s willingness to reject over-general & ungenerous ideas no matter where they come from. And do not all of these requirements remind one of the quiet patience that young students must practice in order to learn simple arithmetic? Philosophy is no higher an activity than that (although, in some sense, I want to say that such a kind of learning is the highest activity). Jesus says, “let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” and Kierkegaard speaks of the spiritual person (in this case it would be the thinking person) as a “learner,” which is a very plain word for one in-the-process-of-coming-to-possess something -- an inheritance, so to speak, or a “ground” (yes, as in Heidegger), a promised land in which to remain. “O Lord, You have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.” And it is this that the learner comes to his learning to possess, comes to her continual work of rising-and-going-forth to receive -- the Bread of Life, the living bread, that is, God Himself in Christ. And so learning at once combines the lowest and the highest, the contained and the uncontained, the conceivable and inconceivable -- and so makes the learner (whose posture is always the humble bow -- as to read or work -- and silence) the collision point for a kind of gaining that is at once earning and gift. What one takes to learning is what one gathers in work (which by itself forms a worthless pile) and the illumination by which one sees that-which-one-has-gathered in its fullness and motion is always a given thing. But somehow there has to be a separation from seeing the world in its everyday instrumentality and bringing things from that world into the working/learning table, that is, a division rests at the very incipience of a learner’s learning that cannot be surmounted -- if there is no break then there is no reflection -- one must pluck the leaf from the high tree before one can observe it closely. And then, through a process in which no other property can be named but that of givenness (that is, the process is itself purely a gift) the thing-that-one-learns returns to its place in the living world and works as more itself than before -- and this is how the matter stands to one who has understood something at firsthand. & Gradually one retains something more of that faculty of holistic vision which accompanies learning-how-to-look, as in the first learning-proceedings, as before -- so that more and more the separation recedes, the view of division turns over quicker, until one’s vision comes to operate with a knack for tandem vision, where known and knowing are nearly one. And then, at the learner’s death, the “through a mirror dimly” of the learner’s living learning-work gives way to complete and simultaneous clarity, where, as in Eliot, “the fire and the rose are one” -- the knowing is “face to face,” for “when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away.” So this is the philosophy that I want to know, that of the quiet learner, a philosophy that is both more and less than the love of wisdom -- instead, a learning-work that is the love of love overflowing the creative avenues. Being-and-not-being, then? the ground? metaphysical speculation? -- yes and no -- yes as our ownmost pittance, as that which we, having seen, bring to the Light asking to see -- and no as our ownmost pittance that we bring to the cross for “Christ who is our Light” to burn away. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”  “For me to live is Christ” (that is, the Light) “and to die is gain” (that is, the gain of true sight that is the highest reward of the learner and has nothing to do with sharpness or exactitude and exactly everything to do with truth -- into the character of which I intend to enquire in this year’s learning-work, in this year’s learning-to-see.) &, “Lord, You have been our dwelling-place throughout all generations” & “the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places, yea, I have a good inheritance” -- which means to me that the “ground” of Being in which we all of us dwell is nothing other than God Himself, who has given us nothing less than Himself as our inheritance, as that giver who invariably says “Receive your sight; your faith has healed you.” And how can we have faith without that gift of grace that comes to us after the separation (and here is the non-being, the nothing, the void, the non-being-coiled-at-the-heart of our erstwhile world-that-passes-away-like-a-puff-of-smoke) -- and if I were to pray, which I dare not because I am still an inveterate sinner who’s not taken time to learn how, I would ask God that I might begin walking along this path-to-sight, begin the learning-work that will take me a life (and why my fingers burn as if I’m committing a great sin by typing all this I don’t know -- perhaps it’s because I see all this but am unwilling to yield to all this: I want greatness and renown and no limitations, and because I want to rub my foot in the eyes of all those people who have hurt or superseded me -- yes, I am rotten rottenness, and even as I confess my spoilage I relish it, and revel in it, even delighting in the masterful ways in which I turn all the layers of my discontent, of my smug irony in quietness, into fullish dancing designs, and even now as I congratulate myself for speaking all of this as others do not have the stomach to do I feel the gnawing in my heart of holding onto something spoiled that sickens me but that I yet love (how apt was Tolkien’s ring!) Lord, I am afraid to pray for You to wring it out of me, but wring me anyway. (& What is knowledge then? it is the certain work of love, love living, love unseparated, love allowing itself to be regarded.)

2 Corinthians 2:14

1599 Geneva Bible (GNV)

14 Now thanks be unto God, which always maketh us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the[a]savor of his knowledge by us in every place.

"My present trial seems to me a somewhat painful one, and I have the humiliation of knowing how badly I bore it at first. I now want to accept and to carry this little cross joyfully, to carry it silently, with a smile in my heart and on my lips, in union with the Cross of Christ. My God, blessed be Thou; accept from me each day the embarrassment, inconvenience, and pain this misery causes me. May it become a prayer and an act of reparation." (Elizabeth Leseur, My Spirit Rejoices)

***

These words carry to my ear a scandal: joyfully, silently, reparation.

Humiliation. 

I'm writing to you from a trial of my own, from a multifactorial illness with few facets of accompanying joy. My notes here are for the restless, for persons who like me spend their hours scrapping for tiny graces -- a conversation, the smell of cooking garlic, a normal blood test, a birdsong or distraction or moment without pain.

I have nothing to offer you but my dark places.

What does it mean "to accept and to carry this little cross joyfully," Elizabeth Leseur? We do not all share the mystic's inclination, her habitude of immediacy with God.

For myself, I have almost no faith. I am bitter from my suffering. At twenty-four, I face a life of chronic illness and a rehabilitation from recent traumas which seems so un-beginnable. Failure and solitude have been my long friends these ten years, with only scattered lights of activity or love.

Here I am, humiliated, seeking a hermitage where my silence can turn to speech, where my wracked body can find reparation, where dark places become holy (though they remain dark) & where I might find joy.

If you read this blog along, you will find poems and paintings and philosophizings along with rank & heartless groans. Here, too: stories of brightness and trouble and more.

May it (all) become a prayer.

          --- Noel