Sometimes there are weeks that feel exactly like this - all knotted and barbed. I've got a barbed knot inside me right now, nicking and tearing my flesh. And yet life makes use of them.

Dream 2/28/08

I was gathering up my things from the floor when something pricked my finger. It was a hypodermic needle. Oh fuck, I said and squeezed the tiny puncture wound hard. A fat, ruby-red droplet formed, which I inexplicably licked, then thought better of it and found a gauze pad soaked in hydrogen peroxide. Who knows who used that needle? Maybe I'll die soon. I packed the rest of my belongings into the car and set out into a lonely road. Its edges were covered in drifts of sand. I looked up at the sky and gasped. I MUST take a picture of this, I said to the driver. She stopped while I rummaged through the floor of the car to find my camera. It was buried under piles of books and clothes.

What's so important about it? she asked

The beam! The beam of darkness! I answered.

The world is not only crucifixion, it is also beauty. Or more precisely, the world's crucifixion is beautiful. This beauty reveals itself in the patterns and harmonies of nature, which the ancient Pythagoreans found so miraculous. The harmony of natural laws is what prompted them to speak of God as a geometer.

And I am full of smoldering rage. Last night I dreamed of two boys picking on me in church. I had put on a white dress, delicate, with pearls sown into the creases. It covered my everyday ordinary clothes. The boys were vicious, they scratched me, called me names. I was furious - I grabbed one by the shirt and told him he ought to be ashamed of himself. He stroked his crotch in response. I spat in his eye. The parents took him away to my relief, but then I noticed the priest was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, unbuttoned to the navel. A heavy crucifix hung around his neck on a thick gold chain, like a gangbangers's accessory. I went home to a beautiful room, polished wood floors, one bed too many, which, I concluded, needed to be removed to make ample space for a perfect life. My parents were just behind the wall.

I lie down on the hard cool tiles. It is sunset. The breeze sways the white curtains in the windows, which have no glass.

Bear cubs incubate while the mother is in hibernation. They emerge into the world of the den and her vast folded softness, to grope and squeeze and touch noses and suckle. All the while the steel gray sky and savage winter storms press in upon them.

......................................................................

He is dying - metastases in his thigh, his lungs, his brain perhaps - not having made it quite to eighty. He knew it when he dreamed about the strap breaking as he tried to play the saxophone. Now I am dreaming of a young man, still dying, but with a head full of hair and a sparkle in his eyes, grabbing me mid-waist and whirling us into a dance.

Every January the same tumble: colors drain, a fog settles between my senses and the objects they try to discern. And I can't help but contemplate that I was born in January when this collapse occurs. I don't feel like a spirit eager to lap up the stuff of things incarnate. All the love (carnal, of course), the greed, the hate, the passion even seem like such an overwhelming effort. Such a distraction from the sweet inner silence.

There is nothing like a bout of insomnia lasting three consecutive nights or so to strip the psyche of faith. Or perhaps what I call faith is illusion, and it is the illusory projections of future joy, happiness and satisfaction that are purified. All well and good. I need to discover whether I can experience beauty in the midst of this zombie-like drift among very-present shadows. If beauty can be discerned, then perhaps the other stuff is an illusion and good riddance.

Poetry: passing through words into silence, into the nameless. Mathematics: passing through forms into the formless.

~ Simone W

It's been one of those weeks... of longing. For the fragrance of creosote after a hot monsoon shower. For the spartan pines, solitary and enduring atop a mesa. For the silence of a desert night nested under a thousand stars.

Keeping up with civilization seems like the least of worthy tasks. Particularly as it (the civilization) is in the midst of a mad dash of consumerist self-destruction. Truth is forgotten. I think it has gone off to the silent, waiting place.

Prophecy: a blue star appears above the lake

Now the vines are growing around the pearls. The vine leaves are gold and they glow from the impact of the sun streaming through white clouds. I pick a leaf and eat it. It is hot, it burns as I chew it, it burns as it travels down my throat and into my body. When it reaches my eyes, the path before me begins to glow with a golden hue. The vine forest drops away and a vast lake of gold appears.

(Should I have eaten a pearl? The opportunity is now gone. Did I just piss away my most important task?)

***


Language sinks its roots into this world but transforms its juices and reactions into signs and symbols. Language is the consequence (or the cause) of our exile from the universe, signifying the distance between things and ourselves. If our exile were to come to an end, language would come to an end.

~ Octavio Paz

When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned

but found no repose in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad despair - in the shadow

She sees leaves dancing in the wind, sudden swirling gusts gathering in whirlpools. She becomes afraid.

"It's a ghost," she says, and refuses to step outside, into the waiting grasp of the phantom.

Her mother takes a glance through the door, sighs with impatience.

"There's no ghost there. It's just the wind," she says. To herself: "Where does the child get these ideas!"

"No ghost?" The girl echoes. She is confused between the evidence of her intellect and her mother's authority. She steps gingerly out, unsure as yet which to believe.

The bees are dying. The world without bees is a world without beauty. Without color. No fruits. No vegetables. No flowers. No flowers!

Do I want to live in a world delivered to weeds?

We are robbing ourselves of this beauty. The bees are the latest link in a chain of human sin - the sin of the refusal of beauty. Refusal of beauty: exactly as if we were tossing God's gift to us into the garbage bin, because we don't deem it useful. Useful as we define it, of course, which is usually some gratification of our self-centered pleasure.

One of Weil's definitions of sin:

consolation: an escape from the real by means of illusory substitutions which deny the harshness and aloneness of creation

Like the time I said yes to M, making of him a substitute divine spouse, an all-wise husband-prophet who would never abandon me. And who would rescue me from my guilt. Most especially from that.

Meanwhile, my buried envy of the eight-year-old crying silently because Jesus was perfect but she would never be able to rescue him from his father's plan - my envy said:

Forget that childish world. Get on with it. Grow up. Have some children of your own. Then you'll see that Jesus should have yielded to the temptation.

Our encounters with phenomena, of which ideas (psychological or otherwise) are metaxus, or intermediaries, to the divine (Bion's "O"). Experience is the bridge to O, the Mystery of Being. Properly understood, it is the way O unfolds through us. The Work ought to remind people, first and foremost, that they exist, that they have an experience, and that this experience emerges, continually and tirelessly, in search of realization.

This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

The essence of created things is to be intermediaries.

~Simone W