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.

She joined the exodus. First the train, then a bus, commandeered with breathless speed by a driver crazed with fear. Midway through the journey, they stopped at a makeshift encampment and she realized she had forgotten to take the thick sleeping bag she had laid out right before the journey. She walked about restless and cold, trying to find a comfortable spot in the abandoned shell of a semi full of spilled broccoli heads. In the morning she set back for the sleeping bag but stopped in a clearing of tall pines, arrested by the tranquil beauty. A man who lived there said:

“Why meet the end of the world there when you can do it here?”

At once she decided to stay in the valley of the pines and meet the inevitable, unstoppable current of fate without fear. She kissed the young man, shyly at first, then ever more eagerly as the erotic plea of life tightened around their disintegrating bodies.

.......

The act of being alive inflicts violence on other forms of life. This is an inescapable fact. Thus existential guilt is a natural outcome being a self-aware creature (i.e., I kill/consume in order to perpetuate my creatureliness).

Guilt and its resultant suffering and horror at one’s actions are therefore not neurotic!

Why should this guilt not extend to violent thoughts about others?

Simone Weil:

Necessity-an image by which the mind can conceive of the indifference, the impartiality of God.

Necessity is God's veil.

The absence of God is the most marvellous testimony of perfect love, and that is why pure necessity, necessity which is manifestly different from good, is so beautiful.

***

Example: a contemplation of the flower. Its unfolding is inexorable and absolutely necessary. It will grow in the queen's garden and in the trash-strewn lot by the freeway overpass. It does not prefer or take notice whether it is admired or scorned.

In antiquity there were sacred orders of humans who had the awe-full, wonderful, terrifying privilege of keeping the cosmos in order. To think that there were people who knew, absolutely and finally in their very hearts, that their ceremonies kept the sun rising each morning. How differently might we feel about our own lives if we held such a tremendous responsibility? But no more. No one now believes such things, save lunatics. I once read about a man who spent two years motionless in bed in a psychiatric ward. After two “catatonic” years he suddenly rose, walked over to the table where the staff were eating their customary lunch, and began a casual conversation while he helped himself to some food – all in a manner as if nothing had happened. Astonished, one of the therapists asked him what brought on the sudden recovery. The man answered that he had been attempting to count to a million – the salvation of the world depended on this – but had been interrupted in the early days of his stay at the hospital by the staff’s initially forceful interventions. He would then lose his count and have to start over.

Attachment

Each spring the calla lilies outside my kitchen window unfold their white spiral cones – of their own sweet desire, since I have not planted them, nor enriched their soil for over six years. Each spring I watch their thick radiance persist through the early summer. Awed and astonished, I feel an ever more insistent attachment to this fearless erotic display of power. Then, inexorably, the heartbreak sets in as the petals wilt slowly but relentlessly away, until I stand, abandoned and grief-stricken, in the naked absence.

Awe, exiled and fiercely vengeful, is joining other banished spirits, gathering force and fury and ravaging our world. All are perishing by the hand of awe banished to the underworld.

The phenomena of life may be likened unto a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, the glistening dew, or lighting flash; and thus they ought to be contemplated.

~The Immutable Sutra