In the waiting room

It waits for you to drop the curtain of thinking and words. It waits for you to fall from your heights. It waits for your dreams.

Doomsday Plan, Redux: or, Playing at God, again

The Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) plans to reintroduce lost technology, art history, crops, livestock and even humans back to Earth after a global catastrophe (such as nuclear war, asteroid impact or resource depletion).

(in the beginning was the Word)

Download the Encyclopedia Terrestra 3.1 to Earth

Check

Crack open the Doomsday Vault and throw some seeds around

Check

Clone a few million animal and plant species from the DNA bank

Check

Set Adam and Eve down in this new paradise and

Go

Go forth and multiply

Not only the Passion but the Creation itself is a renunciation and sacrifice on the part of God… God already voids himself of his divinity by the Creation. He takes the form of a slave, submits to necessity, abases himself. His love maintains in existence, in a free and autonomous existence, beings other than himself, beings other than the good…

~Simone Weil

The neighbor is pruning his shrubs; another is blowing leaves off his lawn. A plane flies overhead. The garbage truck backs up the cul-de-sac with the insistent beep-beep-beep warning. So much ado in this tiny corner of the universe. So much busy-ness, all of it imbued with self-importance, while the stars travel their immutable course across the sky, across millennia. I want to see the stars. I want to stand in the middle of a great expanse, left to its own meditation, with only the wind running great strokes across the wild grasses.

The Lord of Black Moods and gray eyes is here again. I know from past experience that I am going to have to host him in my house for some time. When the whim strikes him, he shows up and makes an all the greater nuisance of himself if I ask him to leave. I am an unwilling hostess, still, and pretend each morning that he is not here, only to be surprised when he emerges from his nightly slumber.

In the dream, I see the man clearly steal over the wall, into my garden. He doesn’t know I am watching, and I want to scare him off. I want to yell, YOU! but realize my lips are frozen. I take another breath just to sound a scream, but nothing comes out. I gulp air in panic and try and try again. My chest heaves and aches as I manage a mere whisper with enormous effort: thief.

I watch him take razor blades and cut himself with them, laughing, saying, it’s nothing, it’s only a bit of fun. When I changed the pillowcases this morning, I saw small specks of blood, as if (as Jessie once said) his brain was crying. Except she had the organ wrong.

And I provided the razor blades. I, my mother, his best friend – everyone who loves him most.

"I was a hidden treasure, and I wished to be known; hence I created the world."

~hadith

He who learns must suffer... Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart; and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

~Aeschylus

***

I custom-ordered four black t-shirts. One of them has the following haiku printed on the back:

The world? Moonlit
drops shaken
from the crane's bill

That one has proven more subversive than a Communist slogan. I get many puzzled stares. On occasion, a braver soul asks what it means. What is the meaning of this pronouncement.

The day still ahead, and my body already a stubborn ox laying down in the field, refusing to budge. There is only so much whipping the beast of burden can take.

Grace - a tendency of the matter of the human body which impels thought towards the Good.

Rupture. Change of state. Successive ruptures make all disequilibria an image of equilibrium; all changes an image of the motionless; time an image of eternity.

(After Simone)

Sometimes it is an insult to be stuck in this body. For a person who feels good in his body, physical reality may be a field of dreams, but for a wretch who suffers its painful limitations, it is a cross.

There is truly no need to develop sophisticated torture techniques. Mother Nature provided the best one of all: insomnia. Try that for two weeks. I’m ready to confess to crimes I didn’t commit as barter for one sweet, long, delicious night of nine hours of unconscious, uninterrupted bliss.

I have some other serious objections to the unintelligent design of the human body. More to come.

She dreamed of being a ballerina. The Nazis shot her through the knees. Three times. She loved her father with incestuous passion. Even after he left the family for a mistress. On the eve of the war.

She raised two daughters. Often badly. No suitor ever made the cut. Not even when she was sixty.

On her deathbed, she asked for milk and rice. Three times a day. Her voice, faltering and tiny, like a two-year-old’s, trailed off mid-sentence. On the last day, a white pigeon flew through the open window and perched itself on top of the ancient wardrobe. It could not be scared off, not even with wild waves of the broom. It flew off at dawn, shortly after she did.

There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that men who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the world, like inert matter.

~ Simone Weil

Lesson

We all drew the crown across both sides – precisely in the middle of the notebook where the staples showed. Sister Agnes admonished me to draw more thorns – surely Christ’s executioners were not so kind?

Now: for every act of kindness, or generosity, or helpfulness without hope of reward, you may draw a flower on the tip of each thorn. Each flower will blunt the sharpness of the thorn’s pointed end.

Too much light

I want her to sew curtains for the upstairs rooms. The light is a deluge of blinding whiteness.

Mom, look at me. Can you see my face?

She takes a long, thoughtful look and agrees that behind the light, my face has fallen into a featureless shadow. The curtains must be just dark enough to adjust the light. The attentive gaze needs a measure of darkness.

If you would have the Kernel, you must break the husk

~Meister Eckhart

Animus

We step out into the darkness, the torrential rain draping the night with a stealthy sheen, like a black snake on the move. I stop by the curb, waiting for you to emerge, always late, always fumbling with intuitions of having forgotten something. A passing car splashes my trousers with muddy water all the way up to my hip. I’m pissed. I take one look at you – your uncut hair flying in the wet wind, one pant cuff inside the worn sock – and I think, how different you might have turned out if you’d had different parents. Down the street, a cop is writing a ticket and I realize, shit, it’s my car. He’s just finished when I get to it. I plead, please, is there anything we can do to forget the ticket. He grins and says, well, yes, in fact there is, and slides his arm around my hip in a muscular grip.

After Bion

In the beginning was the Truth. In its abject aloneness It was to ripple Its essence through existential resistance (the human being) (condensation. shattering of the vessels. evil). In the eddy of the perturbation, It was to be discovered anew (by the human being. the form) from its adventurous exploratory wave-front-echo. This eddy is called experience. The echo is the transformation of Truth as It is experienced by the beholder.

You lean out and touch the hard leather. There is a metallic button embedded in the surface, and you finger it slowly and deliberately, startled at the change in texture. You gaze into the dark hue and intuit it is like the sky. The moment of insight is without conception, because you don’t yet have a word for BLUE.

Time does us violence... Were I condemned to death, I should not be executed if, in the interval, time stood still... Time's violence rends the soul: by the rent eternity enters.
~Simone Weil

Were time to stand still, I would not have to endure the shock of separation, the unraveling of bonds.

The blossoms are coming in too early. It is still the dead of winter, and the tiny buds are foolhardy to take this risk. One cold snap, and the delicate white petals fall to the frostbitten grass.

And then I bump up against a hard, black surface, as impenetrable as a cut diamond. It glows dimly with a hundred thousand tiny points of light.

She is back in desert country. It is dry and the hills are copper-colored. She missed it, and now she starts walking through the scant brush. She feels a distinct and piercing pain in the toe and fears that she might have been bitten. Lifting her foot gently off the ground, she confirms it: a snake has buried its fangs in the flesh.

Dwelling in the great abode, an enormous cathedral of the purest ocean-blue water held in place by a dazzling matrix of arches made of diamond slabs. Only a hum like the inside of a seashell, only one opening in the far end, a gap in the whirring folds of blue.

She is back in her childhood home – a tiny, first-floor apartment in the trash-strewn projects. It is bare, with a mattress leaning against the wall of the living room. She walks over to the window. It looks out onto a small grassy patch where a large peacock is strolling and picking at the ground. Its tail is magnificently long but folded. She tries to call her mother over to the window and show her the peacock, but her mother does not believe her.