it is the self becoming word, the word becoming world

The poet Conrad Aiken’s (1889-1973) father shot Conrad’s mother, and then he shot himself. Both dead, a murder/suicide, as young Conrad, age 11, discovered, afterward writing of it:

[A]fter the desultory early morning quarrel, came the half stifled scream, and then the sound of his father’s voice counting three, and the two loud pistol-shots; and he had tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever. 

(-Aiken, C. (1952). Ushant: An essay. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce.) (cf. Cosmos Mariner)

Who is experiencing what? And what the relationship between what we call dream and what we call reality? Is the butterfly being dreamt? Or the world?

Are we the active or passive agents in the dreaming?

I'm curious, because I want to know whether I am dreaming this chaotic world, or, am I being dreamt by it?

V 

The locust tree spills sequins of pale gold

in spiral nebulae, borne on the Invisible

earthward and deathward, but in change to find

the cycles to new birth, new life. Li Po

allowed his autumn thoughts like these to flow,

and, from the Gorge, sends word of Chouang's dream.

Did Chouang dream he was a butterfly?

Or did the butterfly dream Chouang? If so,

why then all things can change, and change again,

the sea to brook, the brook to sea, and we

from man to butterfly; and back to man.

This 'I,' this moving ‘I,' this focal ‘I,'

which changes, when it dreams the butterfly,

into the thing it dreams of; liquid eye

in which the thing takes shape, but from within

as well as from without: this liquid ‘I':

how many guises, and disguises, this

nimblest of actors takes, how many names

puts on and off, the costumes worn but once,

the player queen, the lover, or the dunce,

hero or poet, father or friend,

suiting the eloquence to the moment's end;

childlike, or bestial; the language of the kiss

sensual or simple; and the gestures, too,

as slight as that with which an empire falls,

or a great love's abjured; these feignings, sleights,

savants, or saints, or fly-by-nights,

the novice in her cell, or wearing tights

on the high wire above a hell of lights:

what's true in these, or false? which is the ‘I'

of 'I's'? Is it the master of the cadence, who

transforms all things to a hoop of flame, where through

tigers of meaning leap? And are these true,

the language never old and never new,

such as the world wears on its wedding day,

the something borrowed with something chicory blue?

In every part we play, we play ourselves;

even the secret doubt to which we come

beneath the changing shapes of self and thing,

yes, even this, at last, if we should call

and dare to name it, we would find

the only voice that answers is our own.

We are once more defrauded by the mind.

Defrauded? No. It is the alchemy by which we grow.

It is the self becoming word, the word

becoming world. And with each part we play

we add to cosmic Sum and cosmic sum.

Who knows but one day we shall find,

hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot,

the square root of the eccentric absolute,

and the concentric absolute to come.  

 (—from poem,  A Letter From Li Po, by Conrad Aiken) 

 "In every part we play, we play ourselves," says Mr. Aiken.

If so, then, who am I now? 

What dream is this, this going forward, this change from this to this, arriving at a change of scene, on a road that feels familiar, a trail I feel I've walked, perhaps someone I think I knew turning to say something I can't completely make out?

but from within

as well as from without: this liquid ‘I':

how many guises, and disguises, this

nimblest of actors takes,

Am I dreaming this life?  Or, am I not? 

It might be so, however unfathomably so. Nor does that make it any less real.

I look at you. What do I see?

You look at me. What do you see?

This dream is a mirror. Look into it.

More than that -- step into it. 

Where seeming two converge as one, remaining distinct so as to permit the dream to wander on its way into itself, emerging through and through the thin place where everything is felt and nothing known.

And so . . . we practice . . . living . . . here.

body and mind — where have they gone

                   “The poet is the priest of the invisiblle.”  (Wallace Stevens)

There’s nothing special

About zen — for heaven’s sake, 

Just open your eyes

What comes in is going out

What goes out is the cosmos

a man to emulate with thoughtful attention

 Jimmy Carter enters hospice at home today.

Good for him!

A good man and decent. A president and a former president one could respect and honor.

For you, Mr. President, a good death with much love surrounding!

With U’-we-hno, our thanks and gratitude

with no punctuation

 We are — poems — breathed

by someone — else — here we are —

words exhaled — shaped — shown

some unappealing, some confirming

 The woman is saying that infinity is before anything. From which is consciousness. Followed by code.

These words from my younger study -- infinity and eternity -- no beginning and no ending, no time --  and then here we are.

It's 51o in Camden in the middle of February. Bald Mountain across road just sits there, a zen practitioner with no particular agenda other than (as friend and I spoke about yesterday) presence, openness, attentiveness, and acceptance.

As it happens, all attempts to practice fall away and mere practice occurs.

Any sitting is zen sitting. Any walking is kinhin. Any sound is chant. Any question arising is koan study. Any doubting uncertainty is don't-know mind. Any passing truck is letting go by what cannot be grasped. Any FedEx package hanging at gate is deliverance going forward.

I meditate on the phrase, 'Before anything was, I am.' Or is it, 'Before anything was I, Am.'

Every piece of bread is my body. Every glass of water, my blood.

Every newspaper article is scripture -- some unappealing, some confirming.

Every nap is death.

Every alarm wakeup, resurrection.

This room is church, temple, mosque, zendo, synagogue, and holy ground.

The snoring dog is the snoring dog.

I get up. I fall down. I get up. I fall down.

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

    (Roethke) 

And all is . . .

Well

we don't now and never did lie to each other

Spare us your verse. We’ve a world to dominate. This won't hurt much. Then you’ll sleep. Forever, like love. See how we live without it.  

International forensic experts delivered a report to justice officials in Chile today regarding the death of the South American country's famous poet Pablo Neruda — some 50 years ago. A nephew of Neruda tells NPR that scientists found high levels of poison in the poet's remains.

Scientists from Canada, Denmark and Chile examined bone and tooth samples from Neruda's exhumed body. Neruda died in 1973, just days after the U.S.-backed coup that deposed his friend President Salvador Allende. 

 

Rodolfo Reyes — a nephew of the Nobel Prize winning poet who has seen the report — says scientists found high levels of the bacterium that can cause botulism poisoning. He says that proves what he has said for 50 years — that his uncle was injected with the poison at a hospital immediately after the coup. 

  

Scientists from Canada's McMaster University say they couldn't conclude if the bacterium killed Neruda, but did note political prisoners in Chile were poisoned with the same toxin in the 1980s

(npr, 15feb23 )

 Neruda knew the rules, the stakes, the broken lines fallen off typewriter onto floor next to grey slipper turned on its side.

Viva Chile! Viva los Estados Unidos! 

Nixon’s junta amigo Pinochet didn’t like such a poet and compañero of Allende, poems about dogs, love, or fine wine.

Neruda knew what poets know. 

Saludos y agradecimiento por tus palabras!

A Dog Has Died 

by Pablo Neruda

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.
So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

it's hard to follow

"The absurd", Camus*

said true, "is sin without God."

Much absurdity

passes as thoughts, words, of our

bleak minds strange hearts without love 

...   ...   ...

 * from The Myth of Sisyphus:

"I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone. I am told again that here the intelligence must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of the reason, I do not therefore negate it, recognizing its relative powers. I merely want to remain in this middle path where the intelligence can remain clear. If that is its pride, I see no sufficient reason for giving it up. Nothing more profound, for example, than Kierkegaard's view according to which despair is not a fact but a state: the very state of sin. For sin is what alienates from God. The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the conscious man, does not lead to God. Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement: the absurd is sin without God."

of course we are only passing through

 Are you a student 

of zen? Go easy, look hard —

See clearly, move through

what’s that popping in that mitt

 Pitchers and catchers

Report to Florida and

Arizona … Thump!

call no man father, no woman mother — all are children, all are orphans

 The teacher is not

Important, the teaching is —

Taught by each passing

perplexing progeny

 Blame the parents of

Republican congressfolk

And senate beggars

They weren’t loved Anouilh, no

Trust in anything not cash

…   ….  …

I am played in private theaters, so I write for the bourgeoisie. One has to rely on the people who pay for their places; the people who support the theater are bourgeois. But this public has changed: They have such a terror of not being in touch, of missing out on a fashionable event that they no longer exist as a decisive force. I think the public has lost its head. They now say that a play can't be that good if they can understand it. My plays are not hermetic enough. It's rather Molièresque, don't you think?

— Jean Anouilh^{[23] .(Wikipedia.)}

republican firearm school curriculum

                     (waka on difficult pedagogy)

 Going to school mom

Love you dear, remember hide

When the shooting starts

Learn math, your number will come

Learn history, it repeats

skills we didn’t know we needed

 Learn how to be sad

and uncertain, it will help

maintain sanity

if possible, laugh them out of the way off to the side

 Ri

Di

Cu

Le

It’s a way to sideline

Foolish and dangerous

Id

Ea

S

The Achilles heel of

Heels and deceivers 

Is

Ri

Di

Cu

Le

somebody probably cares

 Let them play, he said

When pass interference called —

Season (thanks be) ends

the seeking of god

 We think we look for

 God, when, in fact, it is God

who is, seeking, us 

nothing but dust and nonsense

The lead quote:

So, following the saintly fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only- begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from the beginning about him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ himself instructed us, and as the creed of the fathers handed it down to us. 

(—The Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (a.d. 451) in God after Metaphysics A Theological Aesthetic, by  John Panteleimon Manoussakis, 2007)

Followed by:

It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious Maker of the world has visited His world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man who made the World. That such a higher personality exists behind all things had always been implied by the best thinkers as well as by all the beautiful legends. But nothing of this sort has ever been implied by any of them . . . The most that any religious prophet had said was that he was the true servant of such a being. The most that any visionary had ever said was that men might catch glimpses of the glory of that spiritual being; much more often of lesser spiritual beings. The most that any primitive myth had ever suggested was that the Creator was present at the Creation. But that the Creator was present at scenes a little subsequent to the supper-parties of Horace, and talked with tax collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire, and that this fact continued to be firmly asserted by the whole of that great civilization for more than a thousand years—that is something utterly unlike anything else in nature. It is the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word . . . it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion. 

(—G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Ibid) 

 There is always the question, here applied to The Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon’s statement, whether the words…

 “ the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from the beginning about him”

…are, indeed, true.

For a moment, if I imagine they are true, does/did a single individual exist from/through whom what we experience as this apparent cosmos comes into existence, is sustained by, and moves through a spiritual/energetic holism toward an, as yet, unknown and undetected teleology signatured for all creatures and all elements encircled by this creative physics/theological explanation?

In Chesterton’s assertion, “the one great startling statement that man has made since he spoke his first articulate word” — namely, “the creator present at scenes talking with tax collectors and government officials in the detailed daily life of the Roman Empire” — is, indeed, unusual. The creator entering creation and attempting to steer it toward a happy conclusion.

The Jesus phenomenon has intrigued thought and activity for some two thousand years. 

Could the story, the speculation, the antagonisms, and heuristic possibilities actually be so intimate to our narrative DNA as to ultimately and unexplainably be true and accurate? 

If we push a little further, do we suspect that this narrative is one auto-generated by an organism grown in sophistication and knowledge to such an extent that the activity of unfolding consciousness begins to encircle the possibility that everything that is is the expression of everything as it is becoming manifest in the visible experience of that which visualizes from the inside out?

How do we see such a story? How incarnate and embody such curious explanation of the origin and contemporary expression of this creation/existential reality?

In a Dark Time

                 BY THEODORE ROETHKE

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,   

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   

And in broad day the midnight come again!   

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

(Poem by Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time" from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.  Copyright © 1963)

The circumstances.

The correspondences.

The natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Is “One” and “God” and “mind” all of a piece?

And, are we, in the interim, and, at best, dust and nonsense?

Maybe, joyfully so?

(naibu), 内部, (within)

Prison resident

At Friday conversation

“Then, what is your goal”?

(threw marker completed pass)

“To love what is (now) here” — (Yes)

when conscious spirit is all enfolding

 What an absurd thought

That there is nothing outside —

All is here, within

receding, receding

 Moon rising (not there)

Radical interior

Right here within sky

rolling up timeline

lies hang out

somewhere at 

the edges

truth resides

somewhere in

the middle

where

do we

find ourselves

if you lose something, it is, gone

 Do you think it is

Meaningless, this everyday

Life — No, no, I don’t —

I do not, no, I do not

(Stumbling to say something else)

on bed, with dog, drips melting snow from roof

 Someone speaks of pre-birth knowledge and after-life awareness on YouTube.

I walk upstairs. I find I am not interested in these experiences, neither do I have an opinion or a preference about them. 

I wonder what my lack of interest connotes. An indifference to pre- or post-existence?

These matters are of passing interest,

I do not live with an eye to securing some afterlife advantage. Nor do I fear some afterlife disadvantage.

I enjoy looking around my room. So too looking out windows. As also walking with dog up incline to Hosmer Brook (our meetingbrook) and beyond — looking at trees, broken branches, iced stones, animal tracks in snow.

This life is enough.

These sights, sounds, questions, and conversations.

This.

Without that.

What, then, does it mean to be spiritual?

To breathe through this experience.

If that is where God is, then ok, attention to God.

As such, God is the awareness of this life, this experience, this moment.

Nothing else.

I send donation to St. Jude’s Hospital for Children. 

It’s a small response.

As I am, a small response.

sadness of the false

 I look forward to 

Truth becoming important

In congress — don’t you?

buying soap and birdseed

Furnace blows warm air

floor vents  — February — one

day slowly passes

the final choice that is not finished

 Mutation, chaotic bifurcation,

Leaps

New time-space orientation

Keep eyes open

We are not done with delving

Into the hidden unknown

It snowed last night

New white fall covering soot

You will become free

When irruptive time

Folding space

Nears everything

Copresently inhabiting

Everything everywhere

You like the idea, don’t you,

Becoming all that is arising

A footprint in snow

Chivers and peanut butter 

Toasted English Muffin

Cream in hot coffee

I choose

To love you

As you are

As I am

obligation fulfilled

 Good job, Mr. President.

Sorry some of the kids overstayed their bedtime and were cranky.

little nubs of erasure on zen page

 helping auditor 

with numbers -- nothing adds up,

you can count me out

one minus one is nothing to talk about

 when younger I thought

I had to prove myself -- now

there's no-one grading

no distraction in silent mind

 When in silence, no

sound is other than itself --

just listen to it

with plenty and many without.

 It's a matter of perspective, isn't it?

Call on Jesus to crush a point of view you do not espouse as a right-wing conservative, and you're a good Christian.

Call on Jesus to help change the minds of the rich and powerful toward the weak and needy, and you're a left-wing revolutionary.

Verse of the day 

Did I not weep for those whose day was hard? Was not my soul grieved for the poor? But when I looked for good, evil came, and when I waited for light, darkness came. 

- Job 30:25-26

Voice of the day 

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.   

 - Dom Helder Camara  

 

 Prayer of the day 

Thank you for the life and work of Dom Helder Camara; may we dismantle the systems of greed that leave some with plenty and many without.  

 

(Sojourners) 

It is absurd, isn't it -- the variance of perception, the desperateness of potentially refitting a good agent of beneficial assistance into an armed vigilante? 

 

And the way we raise up despicable characters -- pathetic poseurs and former elected criminals -- into paragons of projectionist protectionist menace and pseudo-messianic profligate Ponzi carnival barkers. 

 

We used to think shame accompanied the unmasking of those who would swindle and deceive. Now bare-faced pride at successful deception and untouchable immunity from prosecution -- sneers from lips and mocking eyes -- staring out from adulated images posted by cackling admirers. 

 

The likes of Dom Helder Camara are few and muted. Any words issued from behind sexual scandals and impotent perches of diminished power sound faint and foolish in the public square. 

 

Where are the prophets? 

 

Where the models of authentic resistance? 

 

Where, in Jesus' name, are the Christ-imbued presence-filled real-deals? The individuals and the communities who do not fear showing up, facing and saying what needs to be done and said?

(Wait, you, right there!)

 I see you. 

Are you. are you, the one we are waiting for? 

The one who, by showing up, is to come forth, speak forth, be forthright?

Go ahead — 

Be now!

Speak now!

Embody what is the now made manifest!

the reason for all things is revealed in the incarnation

 The first lecture of The Franciscan Intellectual Tradition by William Short is about Christ at the center as the center.

The 13th century. That’s where I go.

Sent, coming from another. But from where?

The wisdom of God. The love of God. Incarnate.

But a crucified love.

At origin.

Of all, creation.

That’s what we get. That’s what we got.

What to make of it?

The primacy. The alpha.

The end. The omega.

This is known only to God.

This

Is known

Only

To God.

(I wonder if the thermos on kitchen counter has any coffee from yesterday.)

odd, to be lost, with no direction home

 In prison this morning we spoke about Quality.

Is quality the arising of the veridical?

The nascent appearance of truthing energy? 

Hidden spirit embodying and concretizing?

The emergence into appearance of that which is urging itself from within to that which is obviously itself within/without?  

Robert Creeley writes:

            drive, he sd, for  /  christ’s sake, look  /  out where yr going.                       

              (from “I Know a Man”)

I have no idea where I am going.

Nor do I think I am going anywhere.

We look out. We look in. We look out. We look in.

Search me, God, and know my heart;

    test me and know my anxious thoughts.

 

See if there is any offensive way in me,

    and lead me in the way everlasting. 

(Psalm 139:23-24, New International Version)

I cannot fathom who I am, or where I am, how I am, or why I am.

And so, the words of Jeremiah:

Why are you like a man taken by surprise, like a warrior powerless to save? You are among us, O LORD, and we bear your name; do not forsake us!          (Jeremiah 14:9)

In our midst.

Your name we bear.

Do not desert us.

We wander the desert of that which is not us, mirages to left and right, winds of opinion and doubt sweeping away evidence of who we've been, where we've been, wondering which step to take, in what direction, with what energy remaining.

One step, after another, step.

look out where yr going

 Who am I?

Don’t-know!

Who are you?

Don’t-know!

What is this?

Don’t-know!

Don’t-know?

Don’t-know?

Give me a break!

Oh . . .

I am broken

Everything is broken 

Pick up the pieces

With kindness and compassion

I am of a piece

You are of a piece

So?

And?

We might

As well

Read 

Creeley:

          I Know a Man 

               BY ROBERT CREELEY

As I sd to my   

friend, because I am   

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his   

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for   

christ’s sake, look   

out where yr going. 

(Poem by Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man” from Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, © 1991)

becoming a stethoscope

 Choose your mythology.

Which story attracts your attention?

Which telling moves you to ask questions that move you from certainty to journey through unknowns?

Who is your "God"?

"God" -- meaning that which introduces meaning and fidelity into your life. That which inspires a sense of exploration or purpose to be born, cultivated, and enacted.

I’m not so interested in which or whether there is any religion’s God operative in your thinking. If you have a savior or redeemer, whether you say one or three or a hundred thousand gods are in your pantheon.

I want to know what you make of the fleeting passing instants and instances of apparent manifestation wherein the 5% (five percent) of anyone’s life are up and online for us, now or in the past, those miniscule windows into shared reality that are immediately thrown into the process of translation and interpretation by our personal psychological existential administration?

Of course there arises the question as to whether we ever really know another, or, just the 5% evanescent cohabiting transient neutrino-like indecipherable hermeneutical guesses we make in our jotting notebooks we call fact, fiction or mythic encounter.

We don’t know another person. We only have our approximate “readings” of them.

Nor is there any “God” out there or in here. What is out there is what is out there. What is in here is what is in here. 

The Jewish sages were right when they said: “Don’t name the unnameable. You can’t see the unseeable.”

Names and visages, categories and images, beliefs and manifestations — are all the playthings of  logbooks, file cabinets, computer documents, and exam booklets.

What we don’t see, cannot hear, nor actually touch is the veridical life of anyone other, or even our so-called selves.

Did Jesus exist?

Ha!

Do you exist?

Do I?

As an elder Jew I knew would often say — “Don’t ask!” 

Maybe he meant — “Let your questions be your breath.”

Be stethoscopes to one another!

currency has nothing to do with wealth, only presence

 Ah, 3°

Warmth returns

Furnace fixed again

Wood stove serving well

May all beings

Come to dwell

In their true home!

we were younger then

 “Reading poetry, she said, should be an emotional experience.” (From obituary for Linda Pastan 1932-2023, nytimes, 3feb23)

After her reading in Philadelphia in 1979, during which I’d sat in unemotional attention throughout, she was overheard saying to her husband, “There was one man I couldn’t reach.”

It wasn’t true. 

I wrote about the reading back in Germantown, “Her face was a better poem.”

Thank you, Linda, for the lines you shared!

ember-ace me my sweet ember-traceable stove

 (Yawn) still minus nineteen

Load wood stove at 4:26am

Strong winds, quiet house

be safe

 Negative nineteen (-19°)

With wind, takes breath away

outside barn

Moonlight on snow

in navigable weather

I take Eliot to prison this morning.

It will be a very cold next 24 hours.

He might not warm us, but he’ll give us pause. 

II

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable

Prayer of the one Annunciation.  It seems, as one becomes older,

That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.
For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

(—from poem The Four Quartets 3, The Dry Salvages,, by TS Eliot, 1941)

The day, this formation of rocks, 

we navigate, 

this unrelenting ocean of time, 

the feel of it. 

come in, sit, what’s on your mind

 Slippery, the Court

Superficial, the House

Slow, the Senate

Senescent, the Executive

Is it a crisis

Is it a gunfight

Is it follow the money

Is it deflect, distract, debase

All of it stinks

Methinks

we have to know what the injury is

When heroes are suspect.

When bad and good dance together and twirl so fast it is not easy to see their true shape.

Concerning Jean Vanier and L'Arche. 

 JENNA: Honestly, Mitchell, I'm very pissed right now at Vanier, and…

MITCHELL: ..it's hard not to be! 

JENNA: Yeah, it's weird being pissed off at a dead person. But L’Arche had a beautiful founding story. He, he heard a call, right? That's what he always said: “I heard a call once, I saw this plight,” and now as the report says, we've learned, there was no call. There was no call. He saw the pain and he saw an opportunity. To use that as a screen.

So I'm just grappling with what it means that something can have such bad soil at the start and then still produce somehow this really important fruit, because I do still believe in the work that L’Arche does in the world.

So Mitchell, it's been a lot to process and thanks, thanks for being one of the people I process with it. I know you've got a lot of stuff you gotta get back to. 

MITCHELL: Yeah. Thanks Jenna. Um, I really do appreciate the time to talk through this with you, to hear your process both as a person and a journalist, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the episode.

[musical interlude] 

JENNA, narrating: Last week in the first episode, I said this show is gonna try to answer a key question: What do we do when spiritual leaders we once trusted turn out to be spiritually and sexually abusive? Given what we learned today, that question feels bigger. The stakes feel larger. Vanier wasn't just abusive. He founded L’Arche first and foremost as a cover for his abuse. 

I'm gonna go finish reading that 900 page report and then I'm gonna work on the next episode of the podcast. And in that episode we're gonna talk to Tina Bovermann and other members of L’Arche, and we're gonna talk about how we tell our founding stories. 

I'll leave you with one last thing: As I sit with this report, my mind keeps drifting to a conversation I had a month ago with Carolyn Whitney Brown. You'll hear more from her in coming episodes. Carolyn used to live at a L’Arche and she also has written multiple books related to L’Arche and Vanier. When I told her that this podcast was gonna try to focus on healing, she said something poignant: “Before we can start healing,” she explained, “we have to know what the injury is.” 

This 868-page report does a lot to diagnose the injury. And today, the wound feels pretty fresh.

(Update: It's Worse Than We Thought, by  Jenna Barnett

cf.  JEAN VANIER BEGAN L’ARCHE TO COVER ABUSIVE ‘MYSTICAL-SEXUAL’ PRACTICES, FINDS REPORT, BY MITCHELL ATENCIO, in Sojourners)

All abuse is local.

We have to make our way through broken glass, not denying what the unbroken once resembled, yet affirming the journey needing to be now taken. 

when wonder withers

Winter

Wizens

Wait a

While

cancel and accept no offers

 I give up

No news is 

good news

Wake me

when tide

turns

let your prayer go into space

 Ten degrees outside

Squeaky snow underfoot — may

All find warm shelter

grave-like spatial fixity

It's not the same thing. (Nothing is the same thing.) 

This week in isolation, cloistered (if you will).

Stolen away.

Taken by dint of withdrawing seclusion.

Religious men and women have been inspired to seek lives of solitude since ancient times, moved by the belief that spiritual fulfilment can be found in the rejection of society’s expectations and encumbrances. The desert fathers and mothers, the earliest known Christian solitaries, were inspirational role models for the professional contemplatives of the Middle Ages. They withdrew from the world for the same fundamental reason as their medieval counterparts did: that they might better come to know themselves and, through that self-knowledge, generate a more intimate connection with God. 

In England, during the Middle Ages, the desire to experience religious solitude was commonly mediated through physical enclosure and could manifest as coenobitic withdrawal, which is community-based, as eremitic seclusion, or (certainly in the earlier Middle Ages, at least) as an individualised combination of the two. Medieval eremites, that is, hermits and anchorites, experienced the harshest forms of solitude known to medieval society. 

The term anchorite comes from the Greek άναχωρητής (anachoretes), itself derived from the verb άναχωρειν (anachorein, ‘to withdraw’).[2] Anchorites then, were men and women who sought to withdraw from the world as much as was practicable, often (although not always) to a small, four-walled cell adjoining a religious building. Sometimes referred to as the medieval world’s living dead, many spiritual thinkers have written for them and about them, inspired in part by the deeply dramatic notion of grave-like spatial fixity upon which the vocation is founded.

(--in, Solitude and Sociability, [1] The World of the Medieval Anchorite, by Mari Hughes-Edwards)

And what do I find?

Nothing to speak of. Nothing-

Other, just these words.

one at a time, broken open

Watching Congress on 

C-Span and House TV -- It 

might not be pretty

 but it is democracy --

In dooryard, birds feed on seeds

of what we are made

Fear is the response to danger or threat.

Why the words saying “the Lord has pity on those who fear him”?

Why fear the Lord?

Is it the Lord’s confusion at why such is so that evokes pity and consternation?

The Lord is compassion and love,

slow to anger and rich in mercy.

His wrath will come to an end;

he will not be angry for ever.

He does not treat us according to our sins

nor repay us according to our faults.

For as the heavens are high above the earth

so strong is his love for those who fear him.

As far as the east is from the west

so far does he remove our sins.

As a father has compassion on his sons,

the Lord has pity on those who fear him;

for he knows of what we are made,

he remembers that we are dust.

As for man, his days are like grass;

he flowers like the flower of the field;

the wind blows and he is gone

and his place never sees him again.

 

(—II, psalm 103, 1feb. Office of Readingsj 

Consternation is my God. 

Bestürzung, dismay.

A doorway to unknowing.

In prison once, reflecting on some words in the gospel, I pointed out that Jesus was dismayed, perhaps confused, something was shared, he didn’t know with whom, so he asked who touched his clothes, that power went out from him, someone had touched him in a crowd, he didn’t know who. 

A man in his prison pod, in a wheelchair, summoned me to inform me that Jesus was never dismayed, or confused, that I was wrong.

Maybe.

That’s the thing about exploring something. The dialogue. The disagreement. The perspective.

If I were ever to say the words “My God” it would be a transliterative version of “and then he became distressed and dismayed”.

For me, I suspect, there is no knowing god.

Those words, “no knowing god” — are an inchoate start to the incarnate realization that there is only this, and I am only passing through this and this and this is , . . (fill in the next words for yourself).

I am bereft of predicate.