The problem was not the grief – the great misdeed was to try to flee from the grief. Only a sacrifice can mend the heart. So here it is, fierce lord. Strip me to my skeleton. Take my bones and grind them to a fine powder. Let nothing remain save the heartbroken love which I hardly noticed anyway when I lived here, in my rusty armor. Take it to the mountain. Let it quicken the heart which died of cold, a heart worthier than mine.
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“She was walking down the middle of the boulevard dressed twentieth century smart; she was walking up and down the median of the boulevard lined with black granite monoliths, then suddenly yanked off her lush black wig in a sweep of her hand. Her raccoon hair fell out in a radiant splash of dapples and she spoke (and I saw, I SAW the words streaming forth from her mouth and filling space with the vermilion of the Golden Gate): Did you know that I could sing? Did you know that? And she laughed a healthy, happy laugh, and I awoke cradled in the folds of the valley which was filled with the inanimate world.”
Simone Weil:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
