On the Divine Image

Question: How can human beings be in the image of God when they are so wretched and so ugly?

Reply: We are raw stuff, like a piece of wood, and God is carving us all the time. He is constantly perfecting the image that can only be a reflection of Himself, since there is nothing other than God. But we have to fully consent to be so shaped.

Oct 12, 4:47 PM (Ordinary Time)

The monks were discussing The Matrix over dinner in hushed but excited voices. Yes, the movie. And it was the elder monk who was filling in the younger ones. The others kept asking for a clarification of the basic premise, i.e., who is actually “real” while in the Matrix. This vexed several of them and they wanted examples. The elder monk delivered an earnest explanation about body plugs and lifetimes spent in sleep.

Only if you were born into the Matrix and then liberated from it could you go between the two worlds.

Insomnia: robber of clarity, attention, precision. Hence a robber of the apprehension of beauty, since the good, the true, and the beautiful can only be discerned through a disciplined and sustained concentration. This being the case, I am puzzling about why the world’s contemplative traditions prescribe so much sleeplessness. There are orders of the Benedictines whose first services begin at 3:30 AM. The monks at Abhayagiri stay up all night long once a month. When I try it, the world is simply a weary blur. I don’t much care for the beauty and the divine order because the order of the mechanism of my body and my senses is in disarray.

Today started with despair that the uprootedness had gone so deep that I might never be touched by beauty again.

Look: the sun has spread its wings
over the earth to dispel the darkness.

Like a great tree, with its roots in heaven,
and its branches reaching down to the earth.

~Judah Al-Harizi

I told her I was afraid of visions of banquets, lusty fatty steak fantasies, mounds of bread smothered with creamy butter assaulting my imagination and hijacking my attention away from the beauty of the world.

She said she fasted for ten days once. On the third day she could not stop seeing herself chasing a rabbit, pouncing on it, ripping it open with her bare hands. The delights of raw rabbit flesh pursued her relentlessly for days, then waned as the body submitted to the fact of its provisional existence, here on Earth.

Just as I had fallen – oh again! – into forgetting, the languid light of October streaked against the row of windows, hard and penetrating. And the soul said yes, this is why you’re here. This moment, this instant of bursting radiance.

Uprootedness, part 3

Uprootedness, part 2

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul

~Simone Weil
....................................

Fear loves noise because it stops the fear from being heard

~Carl Jung

Uprootedness

Here the dead move with the tectonic shifts of the fault. Like an insomniac moments before falling into sleep, the earth wakes in small jerks for centuries, swallowing up memories.

Below the hill, an incessant hum of the freeway, of Harleys barking up Mission Street. A broken CD lies by the foot of a smashed gravestone, apparently the lone celebrant in some time.

……………………………

Big cities are holocausts of humanity

~Emile Zola

God is ever a geometer

~Plato

I'm there (a sort of here, a pretend-here, don't buy into the elaborate act) but not here, not with you, not with this burning thunderbolt taut plastic fishline nerve pinched by rock-hard back knot burrowing into the length of my left shoulder blade. And not after a sleepless night, certainly. Is this the only way I know how to say goodbye?

(Not to you, specifically)

On wakefulness

Questioner: Your work is altogether imbued with a moral
preoccupation. Curiously, after a period of liberation in which it has been rejected, science and, notably, biological discourses have led men to pose ethical questions. What is your view about this evolution?

Emmanuel Levinas: Morality has, in effect, a bad reputation.
One confuses it with moralism. What is essential in the ethical is often lost in the moralism which has been reduced to an ensemble of particular obligations.

Questioner: What is the ethical?

Emmanuel Levinas: It is the recognition of holiness . . . [T]he
fundamental trait of being is the preoccupation that
each being has with [its own] being. The concern for
the other breaches concern for the self. This is what I
call holiness. Our humanity consists in being able to
recognize the priority of the other, as if one could not think without already being concerned for the other.

~Emmanuel Levinas,
On the Usefulness of Insomnia

Again he tries to persuade me that it is all his fault, and he hands me some photos as evidence. They are of Job suffering his cataclysmic afflictions, except this man is not asking why me. He already has an answer, which he devised long ago, when he went to church with his mother and the preacher struck him on the forehead:

"Abandon the abomination that is your life and let Christ heal you!"

But the disease could not be healed by belief; for he could believe that his was a life of abomination. Yet he could not un-make it. It festered like a terminal illness since the day he was born, and those pictures of the 50-year-old skeleton with boils and exploded belly button were simply the abomination come to incarnate itself in the body.

Awoke this morning to a symphony of raindrops tapping on my windowpane.

***

The human soul is exiled in time and space, which rob it of its unity; all the methods of purification are simply techniques for freeing it from the effects of time, so that it may come to feel almost at home in its place of exile….

~Simone Weil (of course)

Here we are again: dream, 9/18/07

And again I am trying to find a place of rest in a ruined world. The countryside is safe but there is no bed in the tiny shack out in the middle of the pasture. Sleep is an impossibility without shelter, so I start out for the city.

The streets are deserted and the air is filled with a fine mist, an ominous white rain.

(White Light/Black Rain reversed)

I am panicked about the radiation. I must get out of the deadly haze. I see a large warehouse and I run inside. It, too, is deserted, and in the corner there is a small wooden loft with a bed.

(Viviane's loft. Every once in a while she would wake up there, paralyzed from the jumbled half-dream, panicked about the demons dancing around her bed, just out of sight but there, she just knew it)

But the side of the warehouse near the loft is all glass, and the pane by the bed is broken, its center smashed in as if someone had thrown a brick through it. I gaze over to the next pane, and that too is broken. So is every single window pane down the length of the entire glass wall.

(A succession of instant-moments, of gravity, of necessity, of force. The container is transparent and broken. Fragile, the vessels shattered from the force)

Notes, 9/17/07

He said this time it's good news because now we know what it is, it is cancer, and it's good because now they know what to do about it. A cancer cell has traveled... maybe two cancer cells, maybe more. Do I have children, he asks, choosing to forget that he already knows the answer, that he has asked this question many times. Abby had a miscarriage and she was upset that I wasn't more upset, he adds.

He asks me again for water - this is definitely becoming a ritual with us, and I always bring him a bottle and pour it in a little glass. He is becoming thirstier with each visit.

You will find near the abode of the dead, on the left, a spring.
Near it there rises a cypress tree, all white.

He drinks very little of it. I wonder if he enjoys my fussing over him, my coming over, the act of pouring it for him. This time he touched my hand as he took the glass from me.

Do not go near that spring, do not approach it.
You will find another spring which flows from the lake of Memory,
Cold, gushing water. There are sentinels before it.

You are in fine form, slender and well-built, he says, maybe 130 lbs. I thought, 130 lbs is way off, I weigh much less than this, but 130 lbs is formidable, matter become life, strong and vigorous. I am confused , so I say, I am not sure whether this is envy or admiration.

Tell them: 'I am the child of Earth and the starry Heaven,
But Heaven is my origin. You yourselves know that.

I said, it is hard to welcome new life when the old one hadn't been properly mourned. Or to mourn one that hadn't even started. Perhaps the miscarried are wise never to enter the threshold.

I am consumed and dying with thirst.. O give me quickly
The cold water which springs from the lake of Memory.'

I see what you're getting at, he said bitterly. He gazed in no particular direction as he tucked this particular remembrance out of sight. What he always wanted, what he still wants, is more life.

And they will allow you to drink from the divine source,
And then you will reign among all the heroes.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was silence.

~Simone Weil

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.