A thought on conscious suffering

Simone Weil:

The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering.

The false: escape from terror or dread by means of a substitute sacrifice (i.e., if I sacrifice a sheep on the altar – or read about a Baghdadi child losing his arm to a mine in the newspaper, or even make a lot of busy-ness in my life – I can reassure myself that it is not I, not I who is suffering or dying. I am alive).

The true: making oneself a sacrifice (i.e., submit and bear the suffering consciously).

Ereshkigal meets Inanna at the gate

So you’ve come to my door, brazen sister. Do you imagine that you can simply join the funeral procession, pour a dramatic torrent of tears, and reassure me with your empty words that you still love me? You are surprised at my bitterness, my cynical smile? You have made your trivial promises, and I will hold you to each one this time. There is no way back through the gates you have opened so thoughtlessly. I shall strip you bare and hang you from a hook. I will watch your flesh rot into a green carcass. I will call each and every insect in the kingdom to come feast on your corpse. I shall rejoice at the moving swarm of maggots over your whitening skeleton. You want love, sister? This is mine.

Rosarium Philosophorum, Station 8

This body lies grief-stricken in its tomb, waiting. The answer lies not in anything to be figured out, but rather in the listening. It waits in the sunbeams streaming through half-open doors, in the soft undulations of tall grasses, in the flapping of fresh laundry hung out to dry in the bright morning. Also, in the forlorn loneliness of the abandoned road, cracked and overgrown with weeds.

This body waits, spreads out Gideon’s fleece on the dusty floor. Everything depends on looking closely, mindful of all that passes through the gates of consciousness. And then it appears: the gathering wind sweeps up the innumerable prayers and vigils and wakes into a revelation, and Gideon’s dew appears.

Longing

What is this longing I could not mute, not even with wine and revelry? This morning it transformed into an erotic plea, like a melancholy drunk seeking solace in the arms of a prostitute. I want to dive into your flesh and know that you are equally grief-stricken and thereby capable of true understanding. And yet is this not about something deeper than the body keening for its fleeting ecstasies? Is this desire not about the always reaching, the always pleading eternal now, the coupling of gold and silver, the joining of sun and moon?

***

Bonsai

One morning beginning to notice
which thoughts pull the spirit out of the body, which return it.
How quietly the abandoned body keens,
like a bonsai maple surrounded by her dropped leaves.
Rain or objects call the forgotten back:
the droplets' placid girth and weight; the dresser's lack of ambition.
How strange it is that longing, too, becomes a small green bud,
thickening the vacant branch-length in early March.

~Jane Hirshfield

The lives

I don’t want to go home. Out here under the endless skies and uninhabited prairies, chains of lonely mountains, I can find my place of rest. I can settle into my remote life without anyone looking on with scorn or accusation, and my secret life can be an open book – you just need to pause and pay close attention. Secrets are in the details. Take one of the four directions, west. West is where I have always wanted to go – west towards the setting of the sun. In the dream I keep edging closer to the coast, until I settle into a cabin perched on top of a sea cliff. There is a monastery down the road, and I take care of the village orphans. One is always blind so that she can never see me, and another is always lame so that he can never go far. The monks appreciate my cooking but are preoccupied with conversations they have with God. At night, I walk the dirt path along the crashing waves, breathing the rhythm of the world and repeating, I am safe, I am safe, I am safe, here at the end of the world.

Sometimes my lover comes to my door and we spend the evening by the soft light of the oil lamp, reminiscing about our lost lives. He tells me how he wound up with a brace on his leg, and I tell him why I never had children of my own. Later, we undress and explore the wounds on our bodies. They slowly warm up to become radiant stars.

The conflict

Come be my mother, my lover, my friend. In this our secret world, we do not have to follow the rules, nor contend with disappointment. Here I can feed my endless longing, my insatiable hunger to consummate the boundless bonds with you.

Do not ask my true name. In this our secret world, I cannot bear its resonance, nor the piercing gaze of your eyes. Here it is required that if you ever search for my image, it must only be in a reflection. The moment you look at me directly, I will fall away like Eurydice, inconsolable and alone among the shadows.

The Doomsday Vault

They are building a doomsday vault in the Arctic. Meter-thick walls of reinforced concrete, two airlocks, high security blast-proof doors will protect the seeds from natural disasters. Or nuclear war.

(35, 000 warheads still aiming at each other.
Immediate environment:
blast
thermal pulse
neutrons
x- and gamma rays
radiation
electromagnetic pulse
ionization of the upper atmosphere.
Blast effect:
ground shock
water shock
blueout
tens of millions of degrees
centigrade
cratering
dust
radioactive fallout)

Or in a thousand years the reinforced walls crack on the melting permafrost and the winds carry the spoils out into an uninhabited world.

Upon meeting Mary Jo, 93 years old

She sits wrapped in soft folds of pink, a woolen shawl falling off one shoulder. A flash of white lace grazes her knees as she crosses and uncrosses her legs. She is radiant in the golden glow of the lamps encircling the room, and even the tea and cookies startle with their uncommon taste.

We embark on a journey.

It took us thirteen billion years to get here, you and me, looking at each other on this very evening. (A leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of stars)

She ponders whether it might not have been interesting to have been a scientist after all had she had her life to live over. A cosmologist? A geneticist? DNA – that’s one of the things we are given, as we are given our birthplace, our epoch, our parents. Then there are the things we choose – and not just the big decisions, but the untold afterthoughts that turn out to have had the impress of God’s finger weaving the red thread on the tapestry of life. This thread is ending, but she is not sad.

It doesn’t matter. The point is that I won’t be here to regret that fact. (Before birth, after death – they are exactly the same in this way: there will be no memory and there will be no desire)

She cannot read her books anymore, but that hardly matters. Like very old friends, they have revealed themselves beyond words. Now she knows that the spirit dwells in the human voice, in the music of the storytelling, in the pause between thoughts. She had made a pact with herself long ago.

I will never turn away from any thought or memory. (The arrogance and the meanness, the inflicted injuries, must all be companions to love)

To love every moment with consummate awareness: that is to live in eternity. Carefully now: trace the delicate imprint of fossilized bones in the soft limestone with your finger. That is Osteolepis panderi, meeting its own fingertip across four hundred million years in an instant.

The evening draws to a close and I stagger out into the night. The fog has lifted, and thousands of city lights drape over the hillsides and valleys below. Each one is a beacon on this tiny dust mote trailing along the outer fringes of a minor galaxy, hurtling into the inscrutable unknown.

Kuchisake-onna

Listen, there is nothing to it, the truth about love is simple. She was a lady at court – beautiful, smart, cultured. She did not want a circumscribed life. But love was greedy and would rather sacrifice than share. So one tragic night he cut her face from ear to ear.

He was here again, my new, shy lover-to-be. There were chaste caresses, his warm breath on my neck, the palm of his hand in the small of my back… And as usual, we ran through the city desperate with desire, looking for our secret hideaway, only to find strangers everywhere – under the bridge, in the alleys, in the hallways of dark apartment buildings after midnight. Even the closets and bathrooms teemed with revelers absorbed in their bacchanalia, oblivious to our need, our lonely, melancholy hunger to touch our wounds in the ink-black night. How I wanted him to ask: tell me something that will make me love you. And how I wanted to tell him about that evening ten years ago when I sat alone with my emptied heart; how I dialed the familiar number, but the voice on the other end was not. I’m entertaining, he said, not without triumph, as a woman’s voice laughed in the background.

So you see, it’s rather simple. It was months before my lacerations healed enough for me to eat solid food, and now I can only come out in secret. I suppose my lover can never trace the wound – not only because it’s so ancient, but also because neither one of us wants to risk dying.

From the annals of earthweek

The ice is breaking up, and a large chunk carrying the mother bear with her two cubs has floated far out to sea. Everywhere they look, only a vast expanse of sparkling blue. Sometimes they hear the distant rumble of helicopters. She knows she might still make it to shore if she starts swimming now, but the cubs are too young – she knows this too.

Two days later a fishing boat captain reports a sighting, the three figures huddled together, motionless, still floating into the shimmering abyss.

Atomic redux

It happened again last night. The sound of artillery shells, gunfire, a plume of smoke. Just as I stood on the hilltop overlooking this menacing mess and saying, this is only a scuffle, a trifle of a misunderstanding, all shall be well, the cloud of dust rose to a roar and coalesced into a colossal mushroom, an umbrella of soil and debris sprouting an ever longer stalk, sucking the world into its nuclear vortex, rising towards the sky. And I, standing frozen on that hilltop, saying fuck, fuck, fuck, they’ve finally done it, it’s really happening, it’s real, they did it. The bunker crazies were right all along, and I haven’t got a bunker, there’s only this house in the distance, its skeleton crackling with radiation. Don’t go inside, that’s what they said in Pripyat, don’t go. But here I am, standing on that hilltop, some people down below climbing, breaking their fingers clawing at the rocks, digging themselves a den. The roads are gone, and now I’m scrambling over shards and rubble, a doll (or is it a child?) that’s missing a leg and an eye, and at last I am inside the deadly house with its ruined rooms and walls gaping open, overlooking that hill on which I stood just a moment ago. A sheep’s carcass lies in the living room, and a man is tearing at the fatal flesh. I run upstairs and slap the dusty shutters shut. Some of the slats are missing, and through the openings, hazy sunbeams are pouring over the wreckage.

Plate tectonics: or, finding a home

They call it a theory but it’s no theory, I assure you. One day – one millennium, a million years – Laurasia cracked like an eggshell. Ocean waters rushed into the new channel, so narrow at first you could walk across it. The two landmasses remained locked in a hug for what seemed like eternity, and pterosaurs continued to migrate across the fault, as was their custom since the beginning. But over time, the chasm widened until the abyss was so enormous that many would die during the grueling, weeks-long flight. Finally, they had to choose: homecoming was to be settled on one shore or the other. Those that tried to straddle both worlds perished in the deep blue sea.

A death in the family

It happened much like in the dream when I was seven. A train stops at a deserted station. It is gray and drizzly, a fog rolls between the train cars, the rail lines are slick and shiny from the rain. I’ve hung the dark blanket I had as a baby in the train window because I don’t want to see out into the menacing stares of the guards. But in a flash I realize my cousin has not yet boarded and the train is now moving, rolling faster, very fast now, and he is running alongside my train car, he is waving madly, he is trying to climb through the window over which I’ve hung the dark blanket I had as a baby. I lean out of the window (the way my aunt with the raven black hair liked to lean out over three stories of falling) to catch him, but it is too late: he is under the train, on the slick and shiny rail lines, gone.

The inner core

A secret, a secret place, a secret dwelling place… Out of sight of curious, envious eyes, of scrutiny, of malevolent stares of the opportunists and exploiters, of the totalitarianism of normality, of compassion... Unmolested by the pressures of conformity, it does not have to compromise its Byzantine compositions, nor sacrifice the rare and delicate flowers that have sprung from its soil. In this place I can take my turn ever so slowly decapitating the child killer, or tearing the Nazi interrogator’s fingernails out with a pair of pliers. In this place, I can watch the disk of the Milky Way galaxy rise over another horizon, a world taking its first life breath just as ours is dying.

A protracted illness, the will of forgetting

There exist exactly three photographs of my grandfather. One was taken when he was eighty, the other two are of an indistinct, young man’s figure in a crowd. I suppose he deemed it safe to come out into life just as his was about to end. I am told he insisted that his first wife spent three years in a hospital, where she died in 1944. I am told he said she lay there for three years, dying slowly of some illness – an illness that left her paralyzed from the neck down, staring into the ceiling, a head on a stick, a mind locked into the frozen skeleton.

Hiding

Look, my grandfather’s hideaway. He hid with relatives, friends, friends of friends… Five years from safe houses to basements with hidden trapdoors, finally hunkering down in some forest den he’d dug with his own hands, gathering the mushrooms, picking the blueberries, hunting rabbits and squirrels.

It didn’t matter about the war ending. He would always hide, always stay on the run, stopping just long enough to stand in the doorway to say, just stopped by to say hello, I think there’s a surprise for you if you look in my pocket… The pocket of the long, gray coat he always wore, always, always, and always standing, always in the doorway on his way out before he’d ever stepped in. And the pocket always held a chocolate-covered plum which I loved most of all. How many times did I see him in my life, an eternity of shattered lifetimes? Maybe five, including the afternoon I stepped into his apartment for a moment, a tiny den with black drapes hung over every window, the bacon curing above the bathtub for the coming winter, the murdered ghosts, their eyes glazed with terror and longing—how do you get to be alive?

Now his daughter (my aunt with the raven black hair which I loved to plait) will not touch chicken if she’d seen the carcass – goose bump skin slipping over the fat and muscles, neck flaps opening in to a rib cage filled with wrapped organs… She whimpers something about cruelty and takes a double dose of Valium that evening. She’s tried killing herself twice now – how is it that she is still alive, she wonders.