One way. One of many. To remind oneself. To give oneself again a mind that may have sufficient courage and desire to step out again into pure blue space. The sky of pure optical illusion. Is to think about God as if he were a friend who has given us a call the night before and said he would be popping in to visit us today. Think of this. The God of the universe popping in today. To visit with us. The creator of. Well. Everything. A friend. Who has with him, he has said, a gift. A gift he’d like to give us today. And so.
And so what we naturally do is look for him. Watch out for him. Looking into the eyes of each person we encounter. Listen to the words of each person we come across. Look into the events as they unfold throughout the day. Looking for signs of him. Wondering what his gift today may be.
And the exercise. This discipline sometimes. It feels so. So. Hokey. So silly. So much like an exercise someone’s pastor made up. So much like a pure exercise of the imagination. Like a purely made up thing. A story we make up to place ourselves inside.
I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’m driving myself crazy with this God stuff. This God activity. Sometimes I think I’m building castles in the air. Or silly stories in the air. In pure blue air.
But then he shows up. He. I say he. Well, convention. Love shows up. Swelling like a flame. A bright, yellow-red-orange burning. Peace shows up. The entire white moon lying gently on the water. And everything. The world. The world and everything in it. The mountains. The seas. The deserts. The grasslands. The croplands. The cities. The cemetaries. The restaurants. The factories. The stores. The houses. The office buildings. The apartment buildings. The roadways. The rivers. The lakes. The people. The many, many people. Not least of all you. And me. Everything. Is changed.
Changed all through. And for a moment. For a time that only seems like the shortest possible breath of time. That is brief and at the same time extensive. Extensible. Elastic, if you will. And for this infinite moment God is with us. God is in us and around us and all through us. And we have disappeared. Into this. Into them. Into him.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Saturday, November 11, 2006
This Depends Completely
The trick is to keep this always before us. Always present to our minds. This depends completely upon our paying attention. Depends upon the recreation of the view we had on our mountain. On the reliving, if you will, of that sudden insight. That sudden apprehension. That sudden freight train of the cosmos annihilating us there.
Everything depends upon this. Upon our paying attention. Upon our reminding ourselves. Almost as if we need to give ourselves this new mind. This new way of seeing things. Of experiencing things.
We keep trying to see the cosmos in the old way. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me why, because I have no idea. Habit maybe. The comfort of habit. Hey it’s not always all that comfortable to feel unimportant. To feel overwhelmed by a tsunami sea. It’s not all that much fun for one’s little self-involved life to be drowned and submerged in the general flood of his presence. In the overwhelming sense of his dominion. His power. His actuality.
But I don’t know. There’s this everydayness that keeps creeping in. Keeps creeping like a dog after its vomit. This sameness. This every day is like every other day. This sense that we are all just moving through this like a bunch of zombies underwater. Everything is slow and vague. Everything is very quiet. Or if it’s loud, still it’s far away. It may hurt the ears, but it does so from a long way off. Even if it’s someone shouting and his mouth a few inches from your face and his spittle wetting your face. Or if you are in a car accident, it seems like it’s happening to someone else. Someone you knew a long time ago but now. Well. Now. You are only distantly acquainted. Your knowledge of this other person is only very sketchy now. As if you haven’t kept up. Haven’t really had a conversation that entailed more than thirty words in decades.
What is this, I’m wondering. What is this tendency to forget. To forget one of the most extraordinary moments of your life. To forget the meaning that was in that moment. The understanding. The direct experience of God. The excitement of this. The exhilaration of this. As if he had reached out of the cosmos. Reached his hand straight out of the nth dimension and pulled you into the nth dimension through the invisible doorway. Through a doorway he keeps up there. Up on the tops of mountains but also elsewhere. Also in any number of places. In one’s bedroom, for example. In one’s bed.
But I undress. I mean. I digress. What I mean is that these moments kind of dry up, in a way. Kind of dry up like a river in a dry season in a dry land. Dry up and leave only a vague impression that a river was once here. That a river once flowed through here. That leave some evidence that a river once passed this way, but no residue. No moisture whatsoever.
And so recollecting the experience is like trying to invoke a river by remembering it. By longing for it. By opening one’s heart far enough that it aches for the river that is no longer here. That has disappeared into the dust. Into the dust of our everyday lives.
And so these experiences. These ecstatic experiences. Depend on something in us, is what I’m getting. Depend upon some door opening in us and staying open. Opening at least long enough for God to wheel the nth dimension doorway from wherever it is right now over to our vicinity. Over to our neck of the woods.
And what may happen is that we step out of the doorway that habitually separates us off from the possibility of the world, the possibility of the cosmos. We open the door that we have closed in ourselves that keeps us from the danger of our actual lives. From the lives we were meant to live. And we step through that doorway that is in us and enter into naked space. Into the place of naked possibility. Into the place where anything may happen. Who knows what may happen here, where we are no longer protected. We have no idea and are therefore not very anxious to do this. Quite reluctant to do this. We do this so infrequently, we can forget how. We do forget how. But occasionally we do it. We find ourselves opening the door because there is this ache for something out there, but we aren’t exactly clear what it is. We’ve forgotten what it is. It’s risky to step out into pure blue space. We don’t have any idea what will happen. Will we fall. Will we rise. Will a rocket powered freight train run us down. We have no idea, but we do it anyway, from time to time. Looking. Searching. Adventuring out of our sleepy lives. Our predictable lives. Our lives full of cotton wadding and slow motion. And sometimes when we do this we find another doorway. God’s doorway into his nth dimension. The place where he lives.
And then he steps out of his house. He finds us here dangling in space. Dangling in air, outside the deep upholstery of our lives. The deep pile carpeting of our lives. The dark paneled nothing of our lives. And he grabs us. Just absconds with us. And that is maybe what we mean. What we may think we mean when we say that we. That God. That something extraordinary has happened involving God.
Everything depends upon this. Upon our paying attention. Upon our reminding ourselves. Almost as if we need to give ourselves this new mind. This new way of seeing things. Of experiencing things.
We keep trying to see the cosmos in the old way. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me why, because I have no idea. Habit maybe. The comfort of habit. Hey it’s not always all that comfortable to feel unimportant. To feel overwhelmed by a tsunami sea. It’s not all that much fun for one’s little self-involved life to be drowned and submerged in the general flood of his presence. In the overwhelming sense of his dominion. His power. His actuality.
But I don’t know. There’s this everydayness that keeps creeping in. Keeps creeping like a dog after its vomit. This sameness. This every day is like every other day. This sense that we are all just moving through this like a bunch of zombies underwater. Everything is slow and vague. Everything is very quiet. Or if it’s loud, still it’s far away. It may hurt the ears, but it does so from a long way off. Even if it’s someone shouting and his mouth a few inches from your face and his spittle wetting your face. Or if you are in a car accident, it seems like it’s happening to someone else. Someone you knew a long time ago but now. Well. Now. You are only distantly acquainted. Your knowledge of this other person is only very sketchy now. As if you haven’t kept up. Haven’t really had a conversation that entailed more than thirty words in decades.
What is this, I’m wondering. What is this tendency to forget. To forget one of the most extraordinary moments of your life. To forget the meaning that was in that moment. The understanding. The direct experience of God. The excitement of this. The exhilaration of this. As if he had reached out of the cosmos. Reached his hand straight out of the nth dimension and pulled you into the nth dimension through the invisible doorway. Through a doorway he keeps up there. Up on the tops of mountains but also elsewhere. Also in any number of places. In one’s bedroom, for example. In one’s bed.
But I undress. I mean. I digress. What I mean is that these moments kind of dry up, in a way. Kind of dry up like a river in a dry season in a dry land. Dry up and leave only a vague impression that a river was once here. That a river once flowed through here. That leave some evidence that a river once passed this way, but no residue. No moisture whatsoever.
And so recollecting the experience is like trying to invoke a river by remembering it. By longing for it. By opening one’s heart far enough that it aches for the river that is no longer here. That has disappeared into the dust. Into the dust of our everyday lives.
And so these experiences. These ecstatic experiences. Depend on something in us, is what I’m getting. Depend upon some door opening in us and staying open. Opening at least long enough for God to wheel the nth dimension doorway from wherever it is right now over to our vicinity. Over to our neck of the woods.
And what may happen is that we step out of the doorway that habitually separates us off from the possibility of the world, the possibility of the cosmos. We open the door that we have closed in ourselves that keeps us from the danger of our actual lives. From the lives we were meant to live. And we step through that doorway that is in us and enter into naked space. Into the place of naked possibility. Into the place where anything may happen. Who knows what may happen here, where we are no longer protected. We have no idea and are therefore not very anxious to do this. Quite reluctant to do this. We do this so infrequently, we can forget how. We do forget how. But occasionally we do it. We find ourselves opening the door because there is this ache for something out there, but we aren’t exactly clear what it is. We’ve forgotten what it is. It’s risky to step out into pure blue space. We don’t have any idea what will happen. Will we fall. Will we rise. Will a rocket powered freight train run us down. We have no idea, but we do it anyway, from time to time. Looking. Searching. Adventuring out of our sleepy lives. Our predictable lives. Our lives full of cotton wadding and slow motion. And sometimes when we do this we find another doorway. God’s doorway into his nth dimension. The place where he lives.
And then he steps out of his house. He finds us here dangling in space. Dangling in air, outside the deep upholstery of our lives. The deep pile carpeting of our lives. The dark paneled nothing of our lives. And he grabs us. Just absconds with us. And that is maybe what we mean. What we may think we mean when we say that we. That God. That something extraordinary has happened involving God.
More Of This
And then what happens is that you want more of this. Don’t you. More and more of this. Oh. You become a this connoisseur. You become a this aficionado. A this devotee. A this gourmet. A this habitué. A this addict. Don’t you. You structure your life around this. You become this obsessed. Monomaniacal about this. Single minded in your search for more and more of this.
You keep thinking about that mountaintop. That life-defining mountaintop. And everything arranges itself around this. As you live your life now, you imagine your comings and goings in the context of this. You imagine your comings and goings taking place in the valley, along the banks of the river of clear ideas, in which is reflected the mountain you have climbed. In which the mountain that took you there is imaged. Is imagined. The mountain that took you to this. To the thisness of this. To your penetration deep into the thisness of this.
And now you are lost. You are lost to all your friends and family. You are lost to your neighbors and your coworkers. You are lost to your psychiatrist, your proctologist, and your lover. All of these fall away from view. All of these are somewhere in the trees below. They are a part of this, but no longer significant players. No longer principals on the main stage of your life. This occupies the main stage now. This is the protagonist, if there is one anymore. But this protagonist does not so much act as be. This is, and by being provides all the drama, all the action, all the meaning and interest one could hope for.
And the odd thing is. The truly weird thing is. Your coworkers in the vineyard of life, your family and friends, and so forth think you have changed somehow. They don’t know exactly how. But something is different. And better, they tell you. Something has shifted in there, and it seems for the better. They seem. Oh. They feel more. I don’t know. Appreciated, maybe. Loved, maybe. Encouraged, maybe. But from your perspective, they’ve diminished in importance. Oh, don’t get me wrong. You love them. You like them. More than you did before. You respect them. You cherish them. You honor them. More than you did before. But they are less important also. Just as you are less important. Just as you are lost in this, they are also lost in this. Wanderers, merely, in the context of this. In the presence of this. In a world that you have suddenly discovered to have this in it and all through it and around it and under it and over it.
This is everywhere you look. Because you retain that experience. That perspective. That mountaintop prospect that gave you insight into the thisness of things. The thisness of the world. Of the universe. Of the cosmos. The thisness that provides an explanation. Constitutes a context. A frame, if you will. For everything. A frame that is so large. That includes within its scope so much. So much that is perplexing and terrible and lovely and mad and ugly and beautiful and imperfect and asymmetrical and various and empty and deadly and cruel and tender and affirming and courageous that you find yourself a little weepy. You find yourself a little teary-eyed. A little moist around the window shades. You find yourself crying some when you hadn’t so much before. You wonder what this is. What this is about. And then it suddenly occurs to you that this is this. That this is in the nature of things, but you hadn’t realized it until now. That everything all put together like this is. Well. Overwhelming. When you consider the whole kit and caboodle like this. All simultaneous. All happening at once in the thisness of the world. In the thisness of history. In the thisness of all of us and all our acts and all our thoughts. In the thisness of natural history and artificial history. In the thisness of language, both spoken and unspoken. In the thisness of the cosmos, with all of the dizzying numbers and events and possibilities out there in here. In the thisness of here and now. And you are joyful and sad at once. But mostly you are joyful and grateful to be here in all this. To partake of all this. To be one very small player in the context of this. And so your eyes leak a little more than they used to. But this is okay, because of this. Your eyes leak a little more than they used to because you are beginning to get this. You are beginning to allow this to penetrate. You are allowing the thisness of things into your heart and mind and soul and spirit. You are allowing the thisness of the not you to penetrate the thisness of you. And to overwhelm you. To surround you and suspend you and buoy you up like a sea. Like the sea into which all good things flow. Like the sea into which the earth melts under the epochal rain. The rivering down rain. Like the sea from which the earth emerges, steaming and black and hot.
You’re teary-eyed, and you’re no longer ashamed. You no longer try to hide this activity. This expression of the wonder and the love that has now overwhelmed you like a sea. Like a tsunami sea. You abandon yourself to the great broad cosmic sea of this. You abandon yourself to the cosmos of this. You fling yourself on this new understanding of things. That will not go away. That will not diminish. That will not be refuted. That will not be discounted. That will not be modified. That will not be marginalized. That will not be forgotten. Because this. This is everywhere now. It is everywhere you look or listen or smell or taste or touch. When you silence your inner activity. Your self-made words and sounds and tastes and shapes and colors and textures and futures and pasts and smells and. When you slow and pay attention as you did on the mountaintop. When you allow the thisness of this to be everything now.
You keep thinking about that mountaintop. That life-defining mountaintop. And everything arranges itself around this. As you live your life now, you imagine your comings and goings in the context of this. You imagine your comings and goings taking place in the valley, along the banks of the river of clear ideas, in which is reflected the mountain you have climbed. In which the mountain that took you there is imaged. Is imagined. The mountain that took you to this. To the thisness of this. To your penetration deep into the thisness of this.
And now you are lost. You are lost to all your friends and family. You are lost to your neighbors and your coworkers. You are lost to your psychiatrist, your proctologist, and your lover. All of these fall away from view. All of these are somewhere in the trees below. They are a part of this, but no longer significant players. No longer principals on the main stage of your life. This occupies the main stage now. This is the protagonist, if there is one anymore. But this protagonist does not so much act as be. This is, and by being provides all the drama, all the action, all the meaning and interest one could hope for.
And the odd thing is. The truly weird thing is. Your coworkers in the vineyard of life, your family and friends, and so forth think you have changed somehow. They don’t know exactly how. But something is different. And better, they tell you. Something has shifted in there, and it seems for the better. They seem. Oh. They feel more. I don’t know. Appreciated, maybe. Loved, maybe. Encouraged, maybe. But from your perspective, they’ve diminished in importance. Oh, don’t get me wrong. You love them. You like them. More than you did before. You respect them. You cherish them. You honor them. More than you did before. But they are less important also. Just as you are less important. Just as you are lost in this, they are also lost in this. Wanderers, merely, in the context of this. In the presence of this. In a world that you have suddenly discovered to have this in it and all through it and around it and under it and over it.
This is everywhere you look. Because you retain that experience. That perspective. That mountaintop prospect that gave you insight into the thisness of things. The thisness of the world. Of the universe. Of the cosmos. The thisness that provides an explanation. Constitutes a context. A frame, if you will. For everything. A frame that is so large. That includes within its scope so much. So much that is perplexing and terrible and lovely and mad and ugly and beautiful and imperfect and asymmetrical and various and empty and deadly and cruel and tender and affirming and courageous that you find yourself a little weepy. You find yourself a little teary-eyed. A little moist around the window shades. You find yourself crying some when you hadn’t so much before. You wonder what this is. What this is about. And then it suddenly occurs to you that this is this. That this is in the nature of things, but you hadn’t realized it until now. That everything all put together like this is. Well. Overwhelming. When you consider the whole kit and caboodle like this. All simultaneous. All happening at once in the thisness of the world. In the thisness of history. In the thisness of all of us and all our acts and all our thoughts. In the thisness of natural history and artificial history. In the thisness of language, both spoken and unspoken. In the thisness of the cosmos, with all of the dizzying numbers and events and possibilities out there in here. In the thisness of here and now. And you are joyful and sad at once. But mostly you are joyful and grateful to be here in all this. To partake of all this. To be one very small player in the context of this. And so your eyes leak a little more than they used to. But this is okay, because of this. Your eyes leak a little more than they used to because you are beginning to get this. You are beginning to allow this to penetrate. You are allowing the thisness of things into your heart and mind and soul and spirit. You are allowing the thisness of the not you to penetrate the thisness of you. And to overwhelm you. To surround you and suspend you and buoy you up like a sea. Like the sea into which all good things flow. Like the sea into which the earth melts under the epochal rain. The rivering down rain. Like the sea from which the earth emerges, steaming and black and hot.
You’re teary-eyed, and you’re no longer ashamed. You no longer try to hide this activity. This expression of the wonder and the love that has now overwhelmed you like a sea. Like a tsunami sea. You abandon yourself to the great broad cosmic sea of this. You abandon yourself to the cosmos of this. You fling yourself on this new understanding of things. That will not go away. That will not diminish. That will not be refuted. That will not be discounted. That will not be modified. That will not be marginalized. That will not be forgotten. Because this. This is everywhere now. It is everywhere you look or listen or smell or taste or touch. When you silence your inner activity. Your self-made words and sounds and tastes and shapes and colors and textures and futures and pasts and smells and. When you slow and pay attention as you did on the mountaintop. When you allow the thisness of this to be everything now.
On The Ecstasy
On the ecstasy I’ve been talking about this whole time. On that sore subject. On that preciously sore subject. At the risk of turning into a. Oh. I don’t know. A professional God person myself. Or sounding like one, which is about the same thing. At the risk of turning into Bore Snorington, QED, PDQ, DVD, and XYZ, if I haven’t already. Let me pontificate a bit about ecstasy. Let me expostulate a bit and say this about that. Let me spout some about the mystical shmysical aspect of the whole deal. About where it comes from and where it goes. About how it works. About who gets to have it and who doesn’t. About what this has to do with God. With experiencing God, for Pity’s sake. Which is after all what we’re all about. What Alfie’s all about. Et cetera.
Ecstasy. And I’m not speaking about the powder. The white stuff. I’m talking about the form of all feel good drugs. I’m talking about the heavenly form itself. The experience next to which all these others are mere shadows. Mere ersatz experiences. Mere Disneyfied experiences. Mere Namby Pamby Land type of stuff. Mere Holy Land Amusement Park entertainment type of stuff.
Ecstasy. Bore right straight down into the heart of beauty. The heart of love. And what comes out is a gusher. A heads up straight-shooting gusher. A fountaining artesian streaming on up and rivering down of something that is living water itself. That is the heavenly form of water itself.
What happens I think is that the Honored Guest. Our Honored Guest. Goes out dowsing. Goes out divining. Around the house. Around the property. And he finds his divining rod bending, bending. Until it points well straight on down. And then he strikes the ground of the cosmos with a thunderbolt or some less poetic device such as a celestial well drilling rig that splits the rock and frees the living water to jet upwards, showering everything all around with a rain of living water forced up at great pressure from the living ground of the cosmos.
Or think of it this way. It’s like climbing a mountain. You need to climb one if you haven’t. Really, you should. Like climbing a mountain. Oh. It’s painful. You breathe hard. Your knees are like somebody’s practicing voodoo on them. Full of needles. Weak. Rubbery. Sweat and curse. Perspire and groan, I should say. Feel like. Whew. Will this never end. Perhaps I’ll die. Perhaps long before I get there, I’ll just lie down here in the dirt and on the stones. And breathe my last. And then I’ll shrivel up into a kind of. Oh, I don’t know. A mummified version of myself. Over the days and months and years. A husk. Like those bugs that somehow climb out of their skins and leave their skins behind lying there in the dirt and grass and weeds. Split open skins that are remarkably delicate and translucent to the point of transparency. That are remarkably intact, each detail preserved. More or less. How intricate you think. How complex and fine and almost. Well. Beautiful is God’s creation, even this bug here. This former bug. This former living breathing entity that is now. That is now. A kind of house that has been vacated. A kind of former life that has been abandoned for what comes next. For the next new thing. Whatever that may be.
But even with these thoughts, you keep on climbing. See. You keep on going because. Well. You aren’t there yet are you. So you keep on putting one foot in front of the other in the dust. In the buggy dust over which the trees and the flowers and the ferns lean like doting aunts. Like doting aunts, for Pity’s sake. Like relations who aren’t talking in any sort of intelligible language. Any sort of language that might easily be decoded into the English language, for example. Who are communicating in a kind of green language, if you will. A kind of ferny and treey and flowery language that if translated would have to be translated into poetry. Possibly blank verse that in texture and sensibility and tone and pitch and angle and gesture and drift might be. Who knows. Shakespearean perhaps. Modern but nevertheless Shakespearean as well. That civil and wild and quirky and funny and arcane and private and public and historical and contemporary and trivial and puzzling and serious and clever. That kind of thing. But then as you’re thinking these things and climbing all the while, you’re thinking. Oh my. What in the heck am I thinking, anyways. This is crazy, isn’t it. This is a little loony, isn’t it. I mean. The language of the trees indeed. The language of the ferns and flowers, indeed. What kind of thinking is this anyways. What kind of mind do I have here anyways. And meanwhile the ferns and flowers and trees are speaking their language all the same and you are passing them. Some of them. Inching your way lugubriously up the face of the mountain. Dragging yourself out of the valley of beauty and death. Dragging yourself like some sort of wounded beast out of the valley of the river of clear ideas. Of deceptively clear ideas in which the fish are all apparent and the rocks are there quite clearly on the bottom of the crystalline river. The clear-eyed glassy river that reflects the trees and the ferns and the flowers very prettily there on its surface. Its deceptive and illusory surface.
And it feels. Oh, I don’t know. It feels like you really will any moment drop over. Just flop over in the dust. But you don’t because you’re still not there yet. Occasionally you turn around and look down into the slowly descending valley with its windy river there. Its cursive and recursive river there making its inexorable but tentative and curling way down the steady slope of the valley. The dialectical river there making its glassy way down through the fern and tree and flower strewn valley to who knows where below. But you don’t stand and rest and look too long because you feel it pulling you, don’t you. You feel the river pulling you down toward it. And it feels like if you stand here for very long looking, you’ll fall headfirst off the side of the mountain. Or worse yet dive. And so you turn and resume the climbing. The beetling small-limbed small-minded activity you are engaged in. It’s just the climbing now. It’s pure climbing now. Pure difficulty and sweat. No cussing now because. Well. It takes too much breath to cuss. It takes too much out of you to cuss. And you need to save as much as you can for what you are doing. For this silly climb you are engaged in.
Oh this monumentally silly climb, you’re thinking. Where did I get the idea that this would be fun in any way. Oh. This is. This is a lot like work, isn’t it. Is what you’re thinking. As you huff and puff. This is a lot like dying, really. A lot like The Death of Ivan Illych, for example. You feel like screaming and howling like he did as he died, but. As I say. That would take too much energy. Energy you don’t have. Energy you’ll need to complete this climb. And so you do not scream like a banshee. You do not howl like a monkey. You do not groan like the Jews in the Holocaust or the Christians under Nero or the Muslims under the Crusaders’ swords, because. Because everything is going into putting one foot in front of the other in the dust here on the face of the mountain. Every bit of your strength is going into this climb now. The trees and the ferns and the flowers are a kind of far off blur. The trail itself is way down there, mingling with your shoes. Way down there beneath you. And your legs are long. Too long really. And so heavy. So absurdly heavy and long and awkward and difficult to make do what they’re designed to do. Stupid, these legs. Gross and ungainly and fat and heavy. Why do people even have legs, you’re wondering. What good are they, when all is said and done. They just carry you back and forth and up and down. But where does one actually get to. What actually gets accomplished by all this traveling. By all this gadding about.
Isn’t everything the same, really. Isn’t the world all one. Aren’t all humans. Well. Just humans. Oh there are differences. Slight perturbations to a basic design. Slight variations. Matter shaped a bit differently here and there. But it’s all just dust, isn’t it. All just cosmic dust. Formed. Dispersed. Reformed. Dispersed. Fluxion. Flexion. Plate techtonics. Volcanism. Quantum mechanics. The carbon cycle. Electrons and holes. Clocks and watches. Trains and light. Particles and waves. The butterfly’s wings. Mechanical properties. Physical properties. Gravity, for example. Stuff moving and forming and falling apart and reforming again. And moving and moving and moving. Circling and sphering. Elipsoiding and spiraling. And what’s the point. I mean what’s all this movement for, anyways. What am I climbing this mountain for, anyways. Just for the halibut, I’m wondering. I mean. I mean, you’re wondering. I should have said you’re wondering. Just for the halibut. Just because. And then you look down at the trail, and you look back down the trail. And it’s all snaky and rivery all down the face of the mountain, disappearing into the trees. All wormy and snaky and rivery curves and recurves this way and that.
And then you turn around. And you keep on slogging up the river of dust and rock and stone. And then. Quite abruptly. You’re here. A few steps more, and you obtain the crest. You are on the crest. Or a crest. Because on most mountains, there are several crests. And you look out. You take on the long prospect. The great long volume of sky and earth that is sensible from here. And it seems. Well, you’re not sure. Somewhat insensible as well. Paradoxical, one might say. Far and near. Small and large. And its. It comes at you like a freight train. Like a rocket-driven dream freight train in the night. Suddenly you are annihilated. Suddenly you don’t exist. Suddenly this. Out in front of you and all around you. This is all that exists. You have suddenly disappeared in this. This. This that is not you. This that includes you but is also not you. And suddenly you become this.
You have stepped deftly out of your delicate skin and into this. Whatever this is. And you do not know what this is. Oh. It is sky and earth and trees and ferns and flowers and a river of water and a river of dust and rock and stone and birds of various kinds soaring and the sun and other people gathered up here to take this in. But it’s not these things as well. Together these things from this perspective are not these things. They have become this. And you have become this. And you have no idea what this is, except that it is exhilarating and frightening and it gives you goose bumps. Except that it is beautiful and terrifying and humbling and exalting. And gratifying and worthy and admirable and full of grace. And your responses. Your complex and incomprehensible responses are infused, everywhere, with this odd feeling also. This feeling that you have had in other very different contexts. And this is the feeling that you are in love. That you are loved and that you are in love and that everything has changed and will never be the same. And that this is it. This is where you will live somehow. If not in a physical home of lumber and sheetrock and glass. Then in memory. In your being. From now on. Every day of your life. And you will be in this, and this will be in you. And this is all you know now. About anything. Ever. Really. This and only this. Whatever this is.
Ecstasy. And I’m not speaking about the powder. The white stuff. I’m talking about the form of all feel good drugs. I’m talking about the heavenly form itself. The experience next to which all these others are mere shadows. Mere ersatz experiences. Mere Disneyfied experiences. Mere Namby Pamby Land type of stuff. Mere Holy Land Amusement Park entertainment type of stuff.
Ecstasy. Bore right straight down into the heart of beauty. The heart of love. And what comes out is a gusher. A heads up straight-shooting gusher. A fountaining artesian streaming on up and rivering down of something that is living water itself. That is the heavenly form of water itself.
What happens I think is that the Honored Guest. Our Honored Guest. Goes out dowsing. Goes out divining. Around the house. Around the property. And he finds his divining rod bending, bending. Until it points well straight on down. And then he strikes the ground of the cosmos with a thunderbolt or some less poetic device such as a celestial well drilling rig that splits the rock and frees the living water to jet upwards, showering everything all around with a rain of living water forced up at great pressure from the living ground of the cosmos.
Or think of it this way. It’s like climbing a mountain. You need to climb one if you haven’t. Really, you should. Like climbing a mountain. Oh. It’s painful. You breathe hard. Your knees are like somebody’s practicing voodoo on them. Full of needles. Weak. Rubbery. Sweat and curse. Perspire and groan, I should say. Feel like. Whew. Will this never end. Perhaps I’ll die. Perhaps long before I get there, I’ll just lie down here in the dirt and on the stones. And breathe my last. And then I’ll shrivel up into a kind of. Oh, I don’t know. A mummified version of myself. Over the days and months and years. A husk. Like those bugs that somehow climb out of their skins and leave their skins behind lying there in the dirt and grass and weeds. Split open skins that are remarkably delicate and translucent to the point of transparency. That are remarkably intact, each detail preserved. More or less. How intricate you think. How complex and fine and almost. Well. Beautiful is God’s creation, even this bug here. This former bug. This former living breathing entity that is now. That is now. A kind of house that has been vacated. A kind of former life that has been abandoned for what comes next. For the next new thing. Whatever that may be.
But even with these thoughts, you keep on climbing. See. You keep on going because. Well. You aren’t there yet are you. So you keep on putting one foot in front of the other in the dust. In the buggy dust over which the trees and the flowers and the ferns lean like doting aunts. Like doting aunts, for Pity’s sake. Like relations who aren’t talking in any sort of intelligible language. Any sort of language that might easily be decoded into the English language, for example. Who are communicating in a kind of green language, if you will. A kind of ferny and treey and flowery language that if translated would have to be translated into poetry. Possibly blank verse that in texture and sensibility and tone and pitch and angle and gesture and drift might be. Who knows. Shakespearean perhaps. Modern but nevertheless Shakespearean as well. That civil and wild and quirky and funny and arcane and private and public and historical and contemporary and trivial and puzzling and serious and clever. That kind of thing. But then as you’re thinking these things and climbing all the while, you’re thinking. Oh my. What in the heck am I thinking, anyways. This is crazy, isn’t it. This is a little loony, isn’t it. I mean. The language of the trees indeed. The language of the ferns and flowers, indeed. What kind of thinking is this anyways. What kind of mind do I have here anyways. And meanwhile the ferns and flowers and trees are speaking their language all the same and you are passing them. Some of them. Inching your way lugubriously up the face of the mountain. Dragging yourself out of the valley of beauty and death. Dragging yourself like some sort of wounded beast out of the valley of the river of clear ideas. Of deceptively clear ideas in which the fish are all apparent and the rocks are there quite clearly on the bottom of the crystalline river. The clear-eyed glassy river that reflects the trees and the ferns and the flowers very prettily there on its surface. Its deceptive and illusory surface.
And it feels. Oh, I don’t know. It feels like you really will any moment drop over. Just flop over in the dust. But you don’t because you’re still not there yet. Occasionally you turn around and look down into the slowly descending valley with its windy river there. Its cursive and recursive river there making its inexorable but tentative and curling way down the steady slope of the valley. The dialectical river there making its glassy way down through the fern and tree and flower strewn valley to who knows where below. But you don’t stand and rest and look too long because you feel it pulling you, don’t you. You feel the river pulling you down toward it. And it feels like if you stand here for very long looking, you’ll fall headfirst off the side of the mountain. Or worse yet dive. And so you turn and resume the climbing. The beetling small-limbed small-minded activity you are engaged in. It’s just the climbing now. It’s pure climbing now. Pure difficulty and sweat. No cussing now because. Well. It takes too much breath to cuss. It takes too much out of you to cuss. And you need to save as much as you can for what you are doing. For this silly climb you are engaged in.
Oh this monumentally silly climb, you’re thinking. Where did I get the idea that this would be fun in any way. Oh. This is. This is a lot like work, isn’t it. Is what you’re thinking. As you huff and puff. This is a lot like dying, really. A lot like The Death of Ivan Illych, for example. You feel like screaming and howling like he did as he died, but. As I say. That would take too much energy. Energy you don’t have. Energy you’ll need to complete this climb. And so you do not scream like a banshee. You do not howl like a monkey. You do not groan like the Jews in the Holocaust or the Christians under Nero or the Muslims under the Crusaders’ swords, because. Because everything is going into putting one foot in front of the other in the dust here on the face of the mountain. Every bit of your strength is going into this climb now. The trees and the ferns and the flowers are a kind of far off blur. The trail itself is way down there, mingling with your shoes. Way down there beneath you. And your legs are long. Too long really. And so heavy. So absurdly heavy and long and awkward and difficult to make do what they’re designed to do. Stupid, these legs. Gross and ungainly and fat and heavy. Why do people even have legs, you’re wondering. What good are they, when all is said and done. They just carry you back and forth and up and down. But where does one actually get to. What actually gets accomplished by all this traveling. By all this gadding about.
Isn’t everything the same, really. Isn’t the world all one. Aren’t all humans. Well. Just humans. Oh there are differences. Slight perturbations to a basic design. Slight variations. Matter shaped a bit differently here and there. But it’s all just dust, isn’t it. All just cosmic dust. Formed. Dispersed. Reformed. Dispersed. Fluxion. Flexion. Plate techtonics. Volcanism. Quantum mechanics. The carbon cycle. Electrons and holes. Clocks and watches. Trains and light. Particles and waves. The butterfly’s wings. Mechanical properties. Physical properties. Gravity, for example. Stuff moving and forming and falling apart and reforming again. And moving and moving and moving. Circling and sphering. Elipsoiding and spiraling. And what’s the point. I mean what’s all this movement for, anyways. What am I climbing this mountain for, anyways. Just for the halibut, I’m wondering. I mean. I mean, you’re wondering. I should have said you’re wondering. Just for the halibut. Just because. And then you look down at the trail, and you look back down the trail. And it’s all snaky and rivery all down the face of the mountain, disappearing into the trees. All wormy and snaky and rivery curves and recurves this way and that.
And then you turn around. And you keep on slogging up the river of dust and rock and stone. And then. Quite abruptly. You’re here. A few steps more, and you obtain the crest. You are on the crest. Or a crest. Because on most mountains, there are several crests. And you look out. You take on the long prospect. The great long volume of sky and earth that is sensible from here. And it seems. Well, you’re not sure. Somewhat insensible as well. Paradoxical, one might say. Far and near. Small and large. And its. It comes at you like a freight train. Like a rocket-driven dream freight train in the night. Suddenly you are annihilated. Suddenly you don’t exist. Suddenly this. Out in front of you and all around you. This is all that exists. You have suddenly disappeared in this. This. This that is not you. This that includes you but is also not you. And suddenly you become this.
You have stepped deftly out of your delicate skin and into this. Whatever this is. And you do not know what this is. Oh. It is sky and earth and trees and ferns and flowers and a river of water and a river of dust and rock and stone and birds of various kinds soaring and the sun and other people gathered up here to take this in. But it’s not these things as well. Together these things from this perspective are not these things. They have become this. And you have become this. And you have no idea what this is, except that it is exhilarating and frightening and it gives you goose bumps. Except that it is beautiful and terrifying and humbling and exalting. And gratifying and worthy and admirable and full of grace. And your responses. Your complex and incomprehensible responses are infused, everywhere, with this odd feeling also. This feeling that you have had in other very different contexts. And this is the feeling that you are in love. That you are loved and that you are in love and that everything has changed and will never be the same. And that this is it. This is where you will live somehow. If not in a physical home of lumber and sheetrock and glass. Then in memory. In your being. From now on. Every day of your life. And you will be in this, and this will be in you. And this is all you know now. About anything. Ever. Really. This and only this. Whatever this is.
Or They Sermonize
Or some of the professional God people sermonize about experiencing God in such a way that they make God sound like. Oh. Ho-hum. Well, that’s fine for you, but leave me out of this please. This sounds. Oh. You know. Like something I can live without. Like something professionals. Professional God people. Are paid to talk about, and so they do.
And this is what gets me about a lot of them. A lot of what I read. There’s this. There’s all this talk. Talk talk talk and more talk. Oh, you know. Instructions. Like they’re instructing you on the assembly of a very complicated backyard gym. A backyard gym that’s come in maybe one thousand and one pieces. There are drawings. Many drawings. Showing what attaches to what. Pictures of the tools you’ll need. For example, you’ll need a wooden mallet, a tack hammer, a claw hammer, a maul, a pair of needle nose tweezers, a pair of needle nose pliers, four crescent wrenches, three different types of screw drivers, a hack saw, a chain saw, a backhoe, a wheelbarrow, four hundred pounds of dry cement, four hundred pounds of gravel, three trouble lights, one B-1 bomber, three one hundred foot extension cords, one hundred and seventy-five feet of half inch nylon rope, a spade, one super computer, a shovel, a trowel, a miter box, a table saw, and a partridge in a pear tree.
And sometimes I want to stand up in the middle of the sermon or in the middle of the book and just walk away. I mean. Jesus. This sounds. Oh. Like maybe the guy was on his way to the beach with his towel and umbrella and summer reading and everything, sun tan lotion, et cetera, and then ended up somehow negotiating a merger between a hemorrhoid ointment manufacturer and an actuarial firm. And the merger talks broke down. And then started again. Broke down. Started again. Broke down. Started again. And it takes three years to get the deal done. And then they finally come out with the first hemorrhoid insurance product on the planet to great yawning and heavy eyelids. A company that will get you coming and going. Either way. They don’t care.
Sometimes I feel like the professional God people are turning God into a career, for Pete’s sake. Or a cow. A milk cow. Or a whole herd of milk cows. Don’t you. I mean. Maybe what we should do is cycle people through these jobs and back out into the private sector. Maybe we ought to get them back out into the real world where the rest of us live so that they can get a life, so to say. I mean they seem to want to make God sound so hard and arcane and philosophically complicated. So outside normal human experience that. Well. You just get tired, straining to figure out what in Sam Hill they’re talking about. You get weary slogging through the gumbo. I swear, sometimes I think what’s going on here is that the professional God people are in cahoots with the gumbo makers. And what happens is they get kickbacks for all the gumbo they pour around their churches and seminaries and cloisters and conference centers and publishing companies. If they fill up all these places with gumbo and keep them filled, they get all-expense paid trips to Tonga or Tahiti or somewhere like that where they all cavort for a month a year and call it a religious retreat.
I know. I know. I’m not being exactly kind to the professional God people. I should treat them with a little more Christian charity. But I read this stuff they publish, like a good little Christian. I read it and read it. I listen to the sermons. I listen to them all sermonizing. And I wonder what in the heck they think they’re doing. Whether they might have made a wrong turn in college and gotten lost in a Monty Python movie.
Or. Who knows. Maybe I’m the one who took a wrong turn in college and got lost in a Monty Python movie. Maybe I live in a bizzaro world where God walks down the street like he owns the place, pops up everywhere I look like some sort of Woody Woodpecker, and everybody else must live in the regular world where you have to stress and strain, must turn yourself into an intellectual troglodyte, must live underground for years and years in the dark, before he gives you a peek. And then it’s a very quick peek before he retreats into the planet’s molten metal core, where of course you cannot follow.
Sometimes it feels like one of those one hand clapping games. You know. Where you close your eyes and the other person stands on the other side of the room, and the other person either, A, does nothing, or, 2, claps with one hand, softly. And you’re supposed to guess which one.
And this has been going on for. Oh. Millennia. Millennia. Not just centuries. Millennia.
Pity the poor trees, then Man. Is what I’ve got to say on the subject. Pity the poor trees that have been slaughtered to support all this sermonizing. Support all these intricate instructions and descriptions and explanations. And then. Man. Pity all the poor Christians who have been convinced they ought to listen to all this elaborate brouhaha. All this droning. All this medicine for insomniacs. All this idea making. All these febrile infelicitous fleeting fluctuations recorded on the unfortunate reprocessed bodies of fallen forests all over this fair earth. All over this God-fashioned, God-breathed, God-teeming place.
And this is what gets me about a lot of them. A lot of what I read. There’s this. There’s all this talk. Talk talk talk and more talk. Oh, you know. Instructions. Like they’re instructing you on the assembly of a very complicated backyard gym. A backyard gym that’s come in maybe one thousand and one pieces. There are drawings. Many drawings. Showing what attaches to what. Pictures of the tools you’ll need. For example, you’ll need a wooden mallet, a tack hammer, a claw hammer, a maul, a pair of needle nose tweezers, a pair of needle nose pliers, four crescent wrenches, three different types of screw drivers, a hack saw, a chain saw, a backhoe, a wheelbarrow, four hundred pounds of dry cement, four hundred pounds of gravel, three trouble lights, one B-1 bomber, three one hundred foot extension cords, one hundred and seventy-five feet of half inch nylon rope, a spade, one super computer, a shovel, a trowel, a miter box, a table saw, and a partridge in a pear tree.
And sometimes I want to stand up in the middle of the sermon or in the middle of the book and just walk away. I mean. Jesus. This sounds. Oh. Like maybe the guy was on his way to the beach with his towel and umbrella and summer reading and everything, sun tan lotion, et cetera, and then ended up somehow negotiating a merger between a hemorrhoid ointment manufacturer and an actuarial firm. And the merger talks broke down. And then started again. Broke down. Started again. Broke down. Started again. And it takes three years to get the deal done. And then they finally come out with the first hemorrhoid insurance product on the planet to great yawning and heavy eyelids. A company that will get you coming and going. Either way. They don’t care.
Sometimes I feel like the professional God people are turning God into a career, for Pete’s sake. Or a cow. A milk cow. Or a whole herd of milk cows. Don’t you. I mean. Maybe what we should do is cycle people through these jobs and back out into the private sector. Maybe we ought to get them back out into the real world where the rest of us live so that they can get a life, so to say. I mean they seem to want to make God sound so hard and arcane and philosophically complicated. So outside normal human experience that. Well. You just get tired, straining to figure out what in Sam Hill they’re talking about. You get weary slogging through the gumbo. I swear, sometimes I think what’s going on here is that the professional God people are in cahoots with the gumbo makers. And what happens is they get kickbacks for all the gumbo they pour around their churches and seminaries and cloisters and conference centers and publishing companies. If they fill up all these places with gumbo and keep them filled, they get all-expense paid trips to Tonga or Tahiti or somewhere like that where they all cavort for a month a year and call it a religious retreat.
I know. I know. I’m not being exactly kind to the professional God people. I should treat them with a little more Christian charity. But I read this stuff they publish, like a good little Christian. I read it and read it. I listen to the sermons. I listen to them all sermonizing. And I wonder what in the heck they think they’re doing. Whether they might have made a wrong turn in college and gotten lost in a Monty Python movie.
Or. Who knows. Maybe I’m the one who took a wrong turn in college and got lost in a Monty Python movie. Maybe I live in a bizzaro world where God walks down the street like he owns the place, pops up everywhere I look like some sort of Woody Woodpecker, and everybody else must live in the regular world where you have to stress and strain, must turn yourself into an intellectual troglodyte, must live underground for years and years in the dark, before he gives you a peek. And then it’s a very quick peek before he retreats into the planet’s molten metal core, where of course you cannot follow.
Sometimes it feels like one of those one hand clapping games. You know. Where you close your eyes and the other person stands on the other side of the room, and the other person either, A, does nothing, or, 2, claps with one hand, softly. And you’re supposed to guess which one.
And this has been going on for. Oh. Millennia. Millennia. Not just centuries. Millennia.
Pity the poor trees, then Man. Is what I’ve got to say on the subject. Pity the poor trees that have been slaughtered to support all this sermonizing. Support all these intricate instructions and descriptions and explanations. And then. Man. Pity all the poor Christians who have been convinced they ought to listen to all this elaborate brouhaha. All this droning. All this medicine for insomniacs. All this idea making. All these febrile infelicitous fleeting fluctuations recorded on the unfortunate reprocessed bodies of fallen forests all over this fair earth. All over this God-fashioned, God-breathed, God-teeming place.
Yes But
Yes but, you want to say. Or yes but, you are saying. What in the Sam Hill do you mean by mystical shmystical anyway. What does the term mean in your flakey flakery lexicon. In your doughy bakery of nonsensical terminological infinitude.
And I’d have to say, Ahhhh. Well. It has to do with God.
And you might say, Well, what do you mean it has to do with God.
And I’d have to say, I has everything to do with God.
And then you might sputter, turn red in the face, that kind of thing. We don’t know one another, and perhaps you in particular wouldn’t do this. But there are people who would.
And I’d have to say, calm. Calm. Everything will be okay. Everything will be alright. All will be well. All manner of thing everywhere will be well.
More sputtering, perhaps. Only this time rather than let’s say a tea kettle type of sputtering, it’s rather more a volcanic sputtering.
And then I’d say, It’s really a matter of detection. Of sensing. Of making him out of the fog.
What, you’re wondering. Making him out of the fog. That’s not mystical shmystical. That’s just plain prayer or worship or whatever. That’s just living. That’s just breathing. That’s just normal.
And I’m saying, Yes! Yes! That’s exactly what it is. Think of another human, for example. Think of how that goes. Think of how that other human is real and everything. How that person requires a response, and it’s only the crazy people or the extremely rude people who don’t respond. Don’t recognize the existence. And think of how there’s your basic detection. And then there’s your basic friendly. Oh, you know. Chit-chat. Then there’s your basic, oh. I kind of like this. I had no idea. I kind of like. How charming. How. Oh. I don’t know. And then there’s this sort of falling feeling. You know, how when you are around someone. Someone let’s say who might some day have been your intended. Or will be your intended, but this is in the past now. Or was. If you remember back to those days. Or someone like an infant. Like your infant child who’s just plain. Who you just can’t get over how. How you are finding yourself crying over for Pity’s sake, or. I don’t know. Just wanting to hold onto in the evening. Who you’re looking for an excuse to just. You know. Be around.
Or in the physical act of love with your beloved. How you seem to disappear. You simply and overwhelmingly disappear into something that’s. Well. That seems way more than a little contraction of some type and that’s it. That seems at a minimum oceanic or maybe cosmic. That seems to swallow you and you become it, whatever it is. A part of the great beyond, if you know what I mean. Indistinct. Undifferentiated. Submerged in the great bright darkness. Or the great dark brightness. That’s all around. The great roaring light that is so bright, there’s dark in it also. Or you develop a friendship let’s say. A friendship for life. FFL, my daughter calls it. Where what happens is that you’re thinking the same things at the same time. Reading one another’s minds, you’ve got the other so deep into you. Deep into your mind, soul, spirit, heart. Let’s say.
So there’s this variety. This great wide variety of relationships. These aspects to one relationship. A relationship that will run the gamut, so to say. That will modulate from day to day. In which at some points you might just be saying, Hello. And at other points you might. I don’t know. Be jumping into the sack together. Or at other points be making stew together. Or discussing the finances. Or a book. Or whatever. But there is this variability. This phased quality. Today, this is where we are. Or there. Or whatever. And it isn’t all the time banging one’s head against the wall or in the most extreme sort of ecstasy or reading the paper. It can be one thing and then another and then another. But certainly there is some of the ecstasy thing thrown in because without it. Well. It wouldn’t be the full tilt boogie life, and of course that’s what God offers. He offers the full tilt boogie life with the kitchen sink and wild times thrown in as well as the not so fun times. The overshoes and the galoshes and the take out the garbage, Dear, type of times. The flooded basement and the fiery crash. The hospital bed with the tubes and the pain. The cemetery with the raw dirt and the cold wind straight from hell. The absolute down in the muck terrible times when you are having trouble getting warm enough it’s so cold. Having trouble getting light enough it’s so dark.
That’s just about the silliest sort of a thing, you might say. That’s one of the most irritating things I’ve ever heard, you certainly could say.
And I wouldn’t blame you, I’d say in return. I wouldn’t blame you at all. You’d be well within your rights to have that attitude. You’d be well within the bounds of reasonableness to say something like that, is what I’d have to say. Because of the long tradition of people who are. Well. Who have been emphasizing the conduct aspects. The mind your Ps and Qs aspects. Which is what most of the professional God people are into. What most of them want to talk about. This and perhaps the Bible. Certain aspects of the Bible. And the certain of your. Whatdayacallem. Certain of your mystics. Who are into the wild living aspects of the whole deal. Well. Let’s face it. Living with God can be wild. Can be off the charts wild. But what neither of them talk about. What both leave to the poets and fiction writers and the artists and playwrights and so forth to talk about. Is the other. Is the normal times. The tender or the just peaceful or the mildly happy or the oh. There you are. Hey, come over here. Shoot, it’s great to have you around. Type of times. Or the. Oh, thank God you are here. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Type of times. Or the. Hello. Welcome. Come right in. Please. Thank you for stopping in. Type of times. Or the. You can come out now. You can come out here into the living room. I’m done being angry and spiteful. Type of times.
And I’d have to say, Ahhhh. Well. It has to do with God.
And you might say, Well, what do you mean it has to do with God.
And I’d have to say, I has everything to do with God.
And then you might sputter, turn red in the face, that kind of thing. We don’t know one another, and perhaps you in particular wouldn’t do this. But there are people who would.
And I’d have to say, calm. Calm. Everything will be okay. Everything will be alright. All will be well. All manner of thing everywhere will be well.
More sputtering, perhaps. Only this time rather than let’s say a tea kettle type of sputtering, it’s rather more a volcanic sputtering.
And then I’d say, It’s really a matter of detection. Of sensing. Of making him out of the fog.
What, you’re wondering. Making him out of the fog. That’s not mystical shmystical. That’s just plain prayer or worship or whatever. That’s just living. That’s just breathing. That’s just normal.
And I’m saying, Yes! Yes! That’s exactly what it is. Think of another human, for example. Think of how that goes. Think of how that other human is real and everything. How that person requires a response, and it’s only the crazy people or the extremely rude people who don’t respond. Don’t recognize the existence. And think of how there’s your basic detection. And then there’s your basic friendly. Oh, you know. Chit-chat. Then there’s your basic, oh. I kind of like this. I had no idea. I kind of like. How charming. How. Oh. I don’t know. And then there’s this sort of falling feeling. You know, how when you are around someone. Someone let’s say who might some day have been your intended. Or will be your intended, but this is in the past now. Or was. If you remember back to those days. Or someone like an infant. Like your infant child who’s just plain. Who you just can’t get over how. How you are finding yourself crying over for Pity’s sake, or. I don’t know. Just wanting to hold onto in the evening. Who you’re looking for an excuse to just. You know. Be around.
Or in the physical act of love with your beloved. How you seem to disappear. You simply and overwhelmingly disappear into something that’s. Well. That seems way more than a little contraction of some type and that’s it. That seems at a minimum oceanic or maybe cosmic. That seems to swallow you and you become it, whatever it is. A part of the great beyond, if you know what I mean. Indistinct. Undifferentiated. Submerged in the great bright darkness. Or the great dark brightness. That’s all around. The great roaring light that is so bright, there’s dark in it also. Or you develop a friendship let’s say. A friendship for life. FFL, my daughter calls it. Where what happens is that you’re thinking the same things at the same time. Reading one another’s minds, you’ve got the other so deep into you. Deep into your mind, soul, spirit, heart. Let’s say.
So there’s this variety. This great wide variety of relationships. These aspects to one relationship. A relationship that will run the gamut, so to say. That will modulate from day to day. In which at some points you might just be saying, Hello. And at other points you might. I don’t know. Be jumping into the sack together. Or at other points be making stew together. Or discussing the finances. Or a book. Or whatever. But there is this variability. This phased quality. Today, this is where we are. Or there. Or whatever. And it isn’t all the time banging one’s head against the wall or in the most extreme sort of ecstasy or reading the paper. It can be one thing and then another and then another. But certainly there is some of the ecstasy thing thrown in because without it. Well. It wouldn’t be the full tilt boogie life, and of course that’s what God offers. He offers the full tilt boogie life with the kitchen sink and wild times thrown in as well as the not so fun times. The overshoes and the galoshes and the take out the garbage, Dear, type of times. The flooded basement and the fiery crash. The hospital bed with the tubes and the pain. The cemetery with the raw dirt and the cold wind straight from hell. The absolute down in the muck terrible times when you are having trouble getting warm enough it’s so cold. Having trouble getting light enough it’s so dark.
That’s just about the silliest sort of a thing, you might say. That’s one of the most irritating things I’ve ever heard, you certainly could say.
And I wouldn’t blame you, I’d say in return. I wouldn’t blame you at all. You’d be well within your rights to have that attitude. You’d be well within the bounds of reasonableness to say something like that, is what I’d have to say. Because of the long tradition of people who are. Well. Who have been emphasizing the conduct aspects. The mind your Ps and Qs aspects. Which is what most of the professional God people are into. What most of them want to talk about. This and perhaps the Bible. Certain aspects of the Bible. And the certain of your. Whatdayacallem. Certain of your mystics. Who are into the wild living aspects of the whole deal. Well. Let’s face it. Living with God can be wild. Can be off the charts wild. But what neither of them talk about. What both leave to the poets and fiction writers and the artists and playwrights and so forth to talk about. Is the other. Is the normal times. The tender or the just peaceful or the mildly happy or the oh. There you are. Hey, come over here. Shoot, it’s great to have you around. Type of times. Or the. Oh, thank God you are here. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Type of times. Or the. Hello. Welcome. Come right in. Please. Thank you for stopping in. Type of times. Or the. You can come out now. You can come out here into the living room. I’m done being angry and spiteful. Type of times.
And Then There's The Christlikeness Thing
But wait a minute. Wait just a minute, though. One impression I’d like to correct. One idea I’d like to straighten out right now before you get the wrong idea here. Get the wrong cockamamie idea here. And that has to do with this Christlikeness thing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but if so. Well. It’s worth mentioning again. The idea here isn’t to become like Christ. The idea here isn’t to imitate Christ so that we can become like him. Because frankly. Honestly. This is what we call around these parts pissing into the wind. It’s what we call around these parts pushing on a rope. It’s what we call around these parts here an idea that’s pretty as a pig.
I mean. What we would be talking about is trying to be like God. Trying to be infinite and omnipotent and omnipresent and perfect and pure glory and pure beauty and pure truth and pure love. Just like God. Well. I don’t know about you. But I’m thinking there’s just the one God. Just the one tripartite God. Not likely that through sheer will power I’m going to get into that ballpark. Through sheer wanting I’m going to get into that league. Through sheer diligence and assiduous prayer I’m likely wedge myself in there somewhere and morph God into a quadrate or a quadripartite type of God. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Bill. No. Nooooo.
Not likely. Not a. Not a. It’s just not in the cards at all. So what I’m saying is something else. Something altogether different, as I recall someone from Monty Python saying somewhere. What we’re looking for is a chance to spend time in God’s presence is all. A chance to pull back the beads or the blinds or the shades or the veil and to enter through a doorway of his construction and enter the room in which he spends time. I’m not saying all his time, because I think there are probably many rooms in which he spends time. And the room into which he allows me entrance is likely different from other rooms in which he lives.
But I don’t know. See. I just don’t know. I’m piecing this together from an incomplete set of puzzle pieces. I’ve got about one corner piece and a few edge pieces and a whole bunch of middle pieces, and as I’m working with these I’m getting the sense that there are a whole lot more missing than are here. Maybe. Oh. About a hundred to one. About a hundred puzzle pieces missing for the one that I’ve got here in front of me. So the picture I’m constructing is. Well. A bit incomplete. A bit short on specifics. On the particulars. A bit pathetically full of holes. Is what I’m thinking. And I apologize for that. I’m sorry for that because I really would like to understand this. I really would like to comprehend how this all goes together. I really would like to put the big picture together here. But. Well. God has given us what he’s given, is what I’m thinking. If he wanted the big picture to be clearer in its details, in its edges and its middle, he would have been. He would be. Clearer. He would have given us all the puzzle pieces to work with here.
So when I talk about making a congenial home for the Honored Guest. Letting the Honored Guest have free access to all the places. All the rooms and gardens and alleyways and streets and abandoned lots and garbage dumps on our properties. I’m not trying to say that you will be perfected. That you will be made perfect by the Honored Guest. No. Nooooo. Nothing could be further from the bright hot light of the truth. Will not. At least on this particular earth and at least in these particular four space-time dimensions. Will not be made perfect. God is perfect. We. Well we. Are the imperfect adopted brothers and sisters of Christ. And we are thoroughly pleased to be allowed entrance periodically into one or two rooms in the Father’s house.
And this. This other idea of. Well. That we will never reach perfection here but that we can gradually. With great patience and faithfulness and perseverance and hard work and denial and love for God. Approach perfection. Well, as I say. This also is a load of. Oh. I don’t want to return to my pig metaphor. And I apologize for even the hint of this metaphor. But the problem is that we’re number one or number two here in Iowa. I keep forgetting which one it is. One or the other. In terms of pig production. In terms of pork production. And so. Well. It’s a natural metaphor for someone like me in a state like this. In a state that is always talking about the difficulty of balancing ecology with economics. If you know what I mean.
I mean. What I’ve seen in my clearly limited. Clearly mitigated. Clearly imperfect. And I’m sure somewhat distorted. But nevertheless instructive experience. Is that human beings are. Well. Human. They remain human. No matter how much time they spend with God. No matter how much they do out of love for God. Out of the autonomic. That reflex love action that is built in by God. No matter how built in the love response. No matter how much latitude they give their Honored Guest. How much liberty. Authority. There still is this human business.
There’s still this. Well. It’s a little like trying to turn a pig into. Oh. An ear of corn. I mean. With modern plastic surgery techniques. With modern surgical methods. To the untrained observer. To the casual observer. There may be a slight resemblance after years of surgeries. After many many operations that I’m too squeamish to get into. And the poor pig. He. After all that. He remains. He is. Whatever wishful thinking we may engage in. We may wish to employ. He remains. Unfortunately. Recalcitrant. Uncornish, finally. Unmaizelike. If you get my drift.
But oh. Let’s not go the other way either. Let’s not say. Well then. Well then. It doesn’t matter what I do. If perfection or the approach to perfection isn’t possible. Well then. I’ll simply wallow. I’ll simply defecate all over the place and wallow in it.
No. It does not follow. I’m sorry. There is no reason anymore for wallowing. There is no more excuse. We have Christ after all. He does hose us down. Every day. Every new day. Without fail. He comes out of the house, pulling on his overalls. Gadding about in the yellow, orange, and red level light like some nature boy. Some farm boy completely thrilled with nature. And he hoses all of us down. Every single one. And we are pink and brown and black and yellow and clean. We are doused with the warm clean water ultimately from heaven itself. And bathed in the pure level light that God has created for us. And our pleasure.
But this is no excuse to wallow, is what I’m saying. No. When Christ comes bounding out of the house in the morning, pulling on his overalls, what I’m saying is that it would be nice to be. Well. Not all that dirty. Not all that filthy rotten dirty. It would be nice to have just a little mud here and there. A little dust here and there, and that’s about it. The less, the better. Because. Well. It’s always a shame to disappoint him. A person feels better, the less one does of this. The less, the mess. So to say. Because this. This cleanliness in one’s personal habits. This tidiness in one’s person. I don’t know. There’s something aesthetic in it. Isn’t there. A symmetrical just-so sense to it. A sense that one is doing pretty well with what one has. Some way.
I mean. What we would be talking about is trying to be like God. Trying to be infinite and omnipotent and omnipresent and perfect and pure glory and pure beauty and pure truth and pure love. Just like God. Well. I don’t know about you. But I’m thinking there’s just the one God. Just the one tripartite God. Not likely that through sheer will power I’m going to get into that ballpark. Through sheer wanting I’m going to get into that league. Through sheer diligence and assiduous prayer I’m likely wedge myself in there somewhere and morph God into a quadrate or a quadripartite type of God. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Bill. No. Nooooo.
Not likely. Not a. Not a. It’s just not in the cards at all. So what I’m saying is something else. Something altogether different, as I recall someone from Monty Python saying somewhere. What we’re looking for is a chance to spend time in God’s presence is all. A chance to pull back the beads or the blinds or the shades or the veil and to enter through a doorway of his construction and enter the room in which he spends time. I’m not saying all his time, because I think there are probably many rooms in which he spends time. And the room into which he allows me entrance is likely different from other rooms in which he lives.
But I don’t know. See. I just don’t know. I’m piecing this together from an incomplete set of puzzle pieces. I’ve got about one corner piece and a few edge pieces and a whole bunch of middle pieces, and as I’m working with these I’m getting the sense that there are a whole lot more missing than are here. Maybe. Oh. About a hundred to one. About a hundred puzzle pieces missing for the one that I’ve got here in front of me. So the picture I’m constructing is. Well. A bit incomplete. A bit short on specifics. On the particulars. A bit pathetically full of holes. Is what I’m thinking. And I apologize for that. I’m sorry for that because I really would like to understand this. I really would like to comprehend how this all goes together. I really would like to put the big picture together here. But. Well. God has given us what he’s given, is what I’m thinking. If he wanted the big picture to be clearer in its details, in its edges and its middle, he would have been. He would be. Clearer. He would have given us all the puzzle pieces to work with here.
So when I talk about making a congenial home for the Honored Guest. Letting the Honored Guest have free access to all the places. All the rooms and gardens and alleyways and streets and abandoned lots and garbage dumps on our properties. I’m not trying to say that you will be perfected. That you will be made perfect by the Honored Guest. No. Nooooo. Nothing could be further from the bright hot light of the truth. Will not. At least on this particular earth and at least in these particular four space-time dimensions. Will not be made perfect. God is perfect. We. Well we. Are the imperfect adopted brothers and sisters of Christ. And we are thoroughly pleased to be allowed entrance periodically into one or two rooms in the Father’s house.
And this. This other idea of. Well. That we will never reach perfection here but that we can gradually. With great patience and faithfulness and perseverance and hard work and denial and love for God. Approach perfection. Well, as I say. This also is a load of. Oh. I don’t want to return to my pig metaphor. And I apologize for even the hint of this metaphor. But the problem is that we’re number one or number two here in Iowa. I keep forgetting which one it is. One or the other. In terms of pig production. In terms of pork production. And so. Well. It’s a natural metaphor for someone like me in a state like this. In a state that is always talking about the difficulty of balancing ecology with economics. If you know what I mean.
I mean. What I’ve seen in my clearly limited. Clearly mitigated. Clearly imperfect. And I’m sure somewhat distorted. But nevertheless instructive experience. Is that human beings are. Well. Human. They remain human. No matter how much time they spend with God. No matter how much they do out of love for God. Out of the autonomic. That reflex love action that is built in by God. No matter how built in the love response. No matter how much latitude they give their Honored Guest. How much liberty. Authority. There still is this human business.
There’s still this. Well. It’s a little like trying to turn a pig into. Oh. An ear of corn. I mean. With modern plastic surgery techniques. With modern surgical methods. To the untrained observer. To the casual observer. There may be a slight resemblance after years of surgeries. After many many operations that I’m too squeamish to get into. And the poor pig. He. After all that. He remains. He is. Whatever wishful thinking we may engage in. We may wish to employ. He remains. Unfortunately. Recalcitrant. Uncornish, finally. Unmaizelike. If you get my drift.
But oh. Let’s not go the other way either. Let’s not say. Well then. Well then. It doesn’t matter what I do. If perfection or the approach to perfection isn’t possible. Well then. I’ll simply wallow. I’ll simply defecate all over the place and wallow in it.
No. It does not follow. I’m sorry. There is no reason anymore for wallowing. There is no more excuse. We have Christ after all. He does hose us down. Every day. Every new day. Without fail. He comes out of the house, pulling on his overalls. Gadding about in the yellow, orange, and red level light like some nature boy. Some farm boy completely thrilled with nature. And he hoses all of us down. Every single one. And we are pink and brown and black and yellow and clean. We are doused with the warm clean water ultimately from heaven itself. And bathed in the pure level light that God has created for us. And our pleasure.
But this is no excuse to wallow, is what I’m saying. No. When Christ comes bounding out of the house in the morning, pulling on his overalls, what I’m saying is that it would be nice to be. Well. Not all that dirty. Not all that filthy rotten dirty. It would be nice to have just a little mud here and there. A little dust here and there, and that’s about it. The less, the better. Because. Well. It’s always a shame to disappoint him. A person feels better, the less one does of this. The less, the mess. So to say. Because this. This cleanliness in one’s personal habits. This tidiness in one’s person. I don’t know. There’s something aesthetic in it. Isn’t there. A symmetrical just-so sense to it. A sense that one is doing pretty well with what one has. Some way.
Or Perhaps It's Gerard Manley Hopkins' Birthday
Perhaps it’s today, July 28, 2005. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ birthday. Gerard is 161 years old today. Garrison Keeler, America’s funny looking, wry laugh master of the Great White North, says so on his radio show. Early morning five-minute show. Funny looking because I think what happened is that when he was young someone folded his face in half around a copy of Ring Larndner’s You Know Me Al, and it never fully recovered. Hopkins, 161 years old today and counting. I hear this, and I pull one of his books.
One of the many compilations. One of the many collections. Editions. One of the many attempts to sum up Hopkins for us. One of the largely failed attempts.
I turn to “The Windhover.” I read the first few lines: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding/High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing/In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing….” And so forth. Until it ends with the line, “…Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”
Lovely stuff, I’m thinking. Lovely stuff. Pack up. Saddle up. A bit old fashioned, is what I’m thinking. A bit. Well. Swooning. In its sensibility.
Head out on the highway, and find the sun. The sun . It’s neither gold nor vermilion so much as it’s yellow and white by now. It’s been up. Oh. Maybe forty-five minutes, an hour. And what’s happening is it’s turning the wet grass to a yellow-white sheen. Or white-yellow. The white’s the main thing. The main element. Like a good friend used to say, white light of eternity. Which I think’s a good characterization. A good thought about what this color is. When you see it in a fire.
And so. The sun’s white-yellow on the leaves of the trees and here on the beige upholstery of the car and on the red paint of the car’s body and on the trunks of the passing trees and on the glass of the passing cars and in the sky. White-yellow on the golf course grass. Like a sheet. A white-yellow silk sheet that has its own light. That shines its own light back upward into the air and all around. That makes the close cut golf course grass difficult to look at this early in the morning.
The sun hangs up there. Hangs up there. Burning above the golf course and the interstate and the fields where the crown vetch rollicked a month and a half ago. Blossomed into that white-pink-purple color that has the feeling. That has the feeling about it. Of gentleness. Of sacrifice and gentleness. I don’t know why.
The sun hangs up there over the golf course and the trees and the fields and the buildings and the other cars and the extinguished street lights and the horizon like some alien. Some UFO looking over the place. Inspecting the place for. Well who knows what. Who knows what it’s inspecting us for. But that’s what it appears to be doing, hovering as it is, this close to the planet. This near in the sky. Close as an alien spacecraft or a bird. A high-flying bird. A mythical bird, hovering. Giving us a look-see. Giving us its morning once-over. Just in case. Who knows. It might see something it likes and swoop. Swoop and drop. And then take whatever it is away.
Perhaps to another planet. Perhaps to another part of the whole cosmic enterprise. Who knows.
It turns the normally blue sky a sort of white blue. A very pale, pale blue that is typical of this time of day. This driving to work time. This time of year.
Certain places where the land is low and the grass is tall, fog is coming off the grass like smoke. Burning off the grass in the white yellow light as if the low, wet grass were burning. Were hot enough, this close to the burning alien, that it has burst into flames at its roots and is burning there. Smoldering there. In the wet.
This is what I’m thinking as I drive. As my tires spin over the concrete and asphalt. As the world rushes and the sun burns up there like some alien that has instruments. That has secret devices or methods or both. For knowing. Knowing everything I can think of. Before I think it, even. As I’m driving. Just driving to work. Like normal. In the white-yellow light that’s dazzling all around. That’s splintering and turning to a luminous sand or powder all around. Dusting. Burying everything. Deep and blinding so I have to put on the shades and squint.
So I just drive. I’m driving into it. Into all the white. Into the brightness the alien is making. That intensifies off the steering wheel and the hands there. Hands that are on the wheel and that appear to belong to me. But I’m not strictly speaking sure. Since they’re bright as suns themselves. A brightness that’s laid down like a burning rain now. A dry burning rain that’s cool. Cool and warm and flickering like a flame. Everywhere the car heads. Everywhere I look.
One of the many compilations. One of the many collections. Editions. One of the many attempts to sum up Hopkins for us. One of the largely failed attempts.
I turn to “The Windhover.” I read the first few lines: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding/High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing/In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing….” And so forth. Until it ends with the line, “…Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”
Lovely stuff, I’m thinking. Lovely stuff. Pack up. Saddle up. A bit old fashioned, is what I’m thinking. A bit. Well. Swooning. In its sensibility.
Head out on the highway, and find the sun. The sun . It’s neither gold nor vermilion so much as it’s yellow and white by now. It’s been up. Oh. Maybe forty-five minutes, an hour. And what’s happening is it’s turning the wet grass to a yellow-white sheen. Or white-yellow. The white’s the main thing. The main element. Like a good friend used to say, white light of eternity. Which I think’s a good characterization. A good thought about what this color is. When you see it in a fire.
And so. The sun’s white-yellow on the leaves of the trees and here on the beige upholstery of the car and on the red paint of the car’s body and on the trunks of the passing trees and on the glass of the passing cars and in the sky. White-yellow on the golf course grass. Like a sheet. A white-yellow silk sheet that has its own light. That shines its own light back upward into the air and all around. That makes the close cut golf course grass difficult to look at this early in the morning.
The sun hangs up there. Hangs up there. Burning above the golf course and the interstate and the fields where the crown vetch rollicked a month and a half ago. Blossomed into that white-pink-purple color that has the feeling. That has the feeling about it. Of gentleness. Of sacrifice and gentleness. I don’t know why.
The sun hangs up there over the golf course and the trees and the fields and the buildings and the other cars and the extinguished street lights and the horizon like some alien. Some UFO looking over the place. Inspecting the place for. Well who knows what. Who knows what it’s inspecting us for. But that’s what it appears to be doing, hovering as it is, this close to the planet. This near in the sky. Close as an alien spacecraft or a bird. A high-flying bird. A mythical bird, hovering. Giving us a look-see. Giving us its morning once-over. Just in case. Who knows. It might see something it likes and swoop. Swoop and drop. And then take whatever it is away.
Perhaps to another planet. Perhaps to another part of the whole cosmic enterprise. Who knows.
It turns the normally blue sky a sort of white blue. A very pale, pale blue that is typical of this time of day. This driving to work time. This time of year.
Certain places where the land is low and the grass is tall, fog is coming off the grass like smoke. Burning off the grass in the white yellow light as if the low, wet grass were burning. Were hot enough, this close to the burning alien, that it has burst into flames at its roots and is burning there. Smoldering there. In the wet.
This is what I’m thinking as I drive. As my tires spin over the concrete and asphalt. As the world rushes and the sun burns up there like some alien that has instruments. That has secret devices or methods or both. For knowing. Knowing everything I can think of. Before I think it, even. As I’m driving. Just driving to work. Like normal. In the white-yellow light that’s dazzling all around. That’s splintering and turning to a luminous sand or powder all around. Dusting. Burying everything. Deep and blinding so I have to put on the shades and squint.
So I just drive. I’m driving into it. Into all the white. Into the brightness the alien is making. That intensifies off the steering wheel and the hands there. Hands that are on the wheel and that appear to belong to me. But I’m not strictly speaking sure. Since they’re bright as suns themselves. A brightness that’s laid down like a burning rain now. A dry burning rain that’s cool. Cool and warm and flickering like a flame. Everywhere the car heads. Everywhere I look.
Or Perhaps It's The Death
Perhaps it’s the death of someone. Perhaps it’s the casket of someone. And that someone in the casket. Who will shortly be taken away. Who will shortly disappear forever. In the earth or in a fire.
Ridiculous. You’re thinking. This is absurd. And wrong. And unfair. And stupid. And. And.
And the person seems. So unlike himself. So unlike herself. So like himself. So like herself. So much the same and different. So impossible lying here. Lying there. So possible lying here. There.
It seems like a dream. It seems like real life. More real than real life. More dream-like than a dream.
What is this, you’re thinking. What is happening here. This makes no sense. This makes perfect sense. This is a mystery. This happens every day. But not to me it doesn’t.
Time has been destroyed by this. There is a hole in time in which you have fallen. You are falling even now. You cannot stop yourself from falling.
Or maybe you’re rising. Maybe you're rising at a terrific rate. Or maybe what this is. Maybe what this is like. Is an elevator that goes up and down. Maybe you will go up and down like this forever. Never stopping at a floor. Never getting off again to stroll about in time. Stroll about again with the rest of humanity.
Maybe what this is. Maybe where you are going. Is nowhere. Nowhere now. Up and down in the nowhere now that is nothing. That is the zero at the heart of everything. That is the nothing at the center of all things.
But you don’t know. You speculate. You cast about for answers as you ride up and down the elevator of the now. On the walls are pictures. Maybe they’re moving pictures in frames upon the walls of this device. Of this machine in which you find yourself. Pictures. Sound pictures of your life. Sound pictures of the person who has died and you. Moving pictures of what is happening now in the realm in which time appears to exist. Appears to have meaning. Appears to be a dimension in which the rest of humanity exists.
But not you. No. Time is outside you now. All the world’s a video that plays upon the walls of your machine. And your machine goes up and down. The machine is metal, and it goes up and down. You know this from what is happening to your insides. From the way they seem to rise and fall within your body as your machine changes direction or speed.
Oh. It is quiet here. One might stand or sit. It is good to stand or sit. And not to be concerned with decorum. One might sit cross-legged on the floor or stand. Or sit propped up by a wall. In the corner of this little room that goes up and down. Or lie down here on the floor of this machine. Decorum does not matter. You are not concerned with this.
What you are concerned with is what is happening here. What the videos are that are playing. What this sense of timelessness is. Where it comes from. What it means.
What you are concerned with is the profound sense of absence there is in this. The profound emptiness. The echoing quality to all sound. The feeling that what matters now is this. This empty feeling. This feeling that at the heart of things, there is this absence. This cavity. This resonance.
There is to it the feeling of a concert hall. The feeling that if you speak you will be heard. Way over there. As easily as you might be heard right here. Right next to you.
And now the elevator seems like something out of Alice. Something out of Alice’s adventures. It has grown ridiculously large. It was small, but now it’s large. As large as a concert hall.
And you continue to ride up and down. You think maybe you are going crazy. You think these feelings are not normal and may mean you are losing your mind. But you don’t know. Maybe these sensations and thoughts are normal. You don’t know.
You look around for God. You remember God, and you therefore look around for him. But he isn’t here. As far as you can see, you are the only one here in this room, with the videos playing on the walls. Day and night. Always running here everywhere you look. These stinking videos. Reminding you. Playing scenes you can live without. Scenes you’d rather had been cut. Had been left on the cutting room floor. So to say.
And you look for God. You look and look. You watch the videos for him, but he is not there. You look around your elevator when it is small. When it is large. But you cannot seem to lay your hands on him.
You would like to lay your hands on him. You do not know what you would do exactly, but getting hold of him physically is something you’d like to do. You feel your hands compulsively opening and closing. You can almost feel God’s body in your hands. Your hands closing on him. His flesh giving way. Compressing and perhaps breaking as you close your hands tightly about him like mechanical claws. Metal robot claws.
Then you think. But what is this room, I wonder. Where did this room come from that goes up and down. In which I’m living up and down. Big and small. That is quiet mostly and controlled. That is new. This is new, is it not. This is different from the days before the death.
And you think some more. Speculate some more. Maybe this is God, you’re thinking. Maybe this room is God. Maybe what is happening here is that I am inside him now, and this is why everything is so confusing. Maybe he has made a place for me to be until time starts up again. Until I’m ready for time to start. Again.
Maybe. Maybe not. And then you listen. You concentrate on listening and looking. You concentrate on the emptiness. On what this is. Your heart seems to shrink and expand. Shrink and expand. And so does the emptiness. It grows and shrinks. Grows and shrinks. As though it were alive. As though it were all about you and held you in itself. Keeping you safe here in this quiet place.
You breathe, and this emptiness all around seems to breathe with you. Your heart swells and shrinks, and the emptiness does as well. And what this is seems to be a synchrony. A synchronicity. And this feels. Well. Right. There’s something good and familiar in this. Something paradoxically sensible in this. Surprisingly like God in this.
Yes. Yes, that’s what this is. You think. No. No. How can this be. That’s ridiculous. Then, yes. Then, no. Oh. I don’t know. Let me just breathe and let my heart beat like this. Let the emptiness breathe and its heart beat like this. Yes. Just like this. Oh, this. Just this.
And this is. You do not know how to say this. This is. In a sense. A comfort. This emptiness. This heart that seems to beat all around you, that you hear now all around you, as you concentrate. These lungs that seem to fill and empty. Fill and empty. All around you now. The feeling of a living thing all around you now.
Everywhere there is the evidence of God. The sounds of him all around. The feel of his definite presence in this. A blessed solitude. A beneficent aloneness. That he has given. He has granted. This time that is untimely for a kind of healing in the emptiness that. Strictly speaking seems. Has come to seem. To open up like the universe itself unfolding. Like the darkness of the universe itself with its many many stars opening its arms to you. Embracing you. Like any possible impossible loved one.
Ridiculous. You’re thinking. This is absurd. And wrong. And unfair. And stupid. And. And.
And the person seems. So unlike himself. So unlike herself. So like himself. So like herself. So much the same and different. So impossible lying here. Lying there. So possible lying here. There.
It seems like a dream. It seems like real life. More real than real life. More dream-like than a dream.
What is this, you’re thinking. What is happening here. This makes no sense. This makes perfect sense. This is a mystery. This happens every day. But not to me it doesn’t.
Time has been destroyed by this. There is a hole in time in which you have fallen. You are falling even now. You cannot stop yourself from falling.
Or maybe you’re rising. Maybe you're rising at a terrific rate. Or maybe what this is. Maybe what this is like. Is an elevator that goes up and down. Maybe you will go up and down like this forever. Never stopping at a floor. Never getting off again to stroll about in time. Stroll about again with the rest of humanity.
Maybe what this is. Maybe where you are going. Is nowhere. Nowhere now. Up and down in the nowhere now that is nothing. That is the zero at the heart of everything. That is the nothing at the center of all things.
But you don’t know. You speculate. You cast about for answers as you ride up and down the elevator of the now. On the walls are pictures. Maybe they’re moving pictures in frames upon the walls of this device. Of this machine in which you find yourself. Pictures. Sound pictures of your life. Sound pictures of the person who has died and you. Moving pictures of what is happening now in the realm in which time appears to exist. Appears to have meaning. Appears to be a dimension in which the rest of humanity exists.
But not you. No. Time is outside you now. All the world’s a video that plays upon the walls of your machine. And your machine goes up and down. The machine is metal, and it goes up and down. You know this from what is happening to your insides. From the way they seem to rise and fall within your body as your machine changes direction or speed.
Oh. It is quiet here. One might stand or sit. It is good to stand or sit. And not to be concerned with decorum. One might sit cross-legged on the floor or stand. Or sit propped up by a wall. In the corner of this little room that goes up and down. Or lie down here on the floor of this machine. Decorum does not matter. You are not concerned with this.
What you are concerned with is what is happening here. What the videos are that are playing. What this sense of timelessness is. Where it comes from. What it means.
What you are concerned with is the profound sense of absence there is in this. The profound emptiness. The echoing quality to all sound. The feeling that what matters now is this. This empty feeling. This feeling that at the heart of things, there is this absence. This cavity. This resonance.
There is to it the feeling of a concert hall. The feeling that if you speak you will be heard. Way over there. As easily as you might be heard right here. Right next to you.
And now the elevator seems like something out of Alice. Something out of Alice’s adventures. It has grown ridiculously large. It was small, but now it’s large. As large as a concert hall.
And you continue to ride up and down. You think maybe you are going crazy. You think these feelings are not normal and may mean you are losing your mind. But you don’t know. Maybe these sensations and thoughts are normal. You don’t know.
You look around for God. You remember God, and you therefore look around for him. But he isn’t here. As far as you can see, you are the only one here in this room, with the videos playing on the walls. Day and night. Always running here everywhere you look. These stinking videos. Reminding you. Playing scenes you can live without. Scenes you’d rather had been cut. Had been left on the cutting room floor. So to say.
And you look for God. You look and look. You watch the videos for him, but he is not there. You look around your elevator when it is small. When it is large. But you cannot seem to lay your hands on him.
You would like to lay your hands on him. You do not know what you would do exactly, but getting hold of him physically is something you’d like to do. You feel your hands compulsively opening and closing. You can almost feel God’s body in your hands. Your hands closing on him. His flesh giving way. Compressing and perhaps breaking as you close your hands tightly about him like mechanical claws. Metal robot claws.
Then you think. But what is this room, I wonder. Where did this room come from that goes up and down. In which I’m living up and down. Big and small. That is quiet mostly and controlled. That is new. This is new, is it not. This is different from the days before the death.
And you think some more. Speculate some more. Maybe this is God, you’re thinking. Maybe this room is God. Maybe what is happening here is that I am inside him now, and this is why everything is so confusing. Maybe he has made a place for me to be until time starts up again. Until I’m ready for time to start. Again.
Maybe. Maybe not. And then you listen. You concentrate on listening and looking. You concentrate on the emptiness. On what this is. Your heart seems to shrink and expand. Shrink and expand. And so does the emptiness. It grows and shrinks. Grows and shrinks. As though it were alive. As though it were all about you and held you in itself. Keeping you safe here in this quiet place.
You breathe, and this emptiness all around seems to breathe with you. Your heart swells and shrinks, and the emptiness does as well. And what this is seems to be a synchrony. A synchronicity. And this feels. Well. Right. There’s something good and familiar in this. Something paradoxically sensible in this. Surprisingly like God in this.
Yes. Yes, that’s what this is. You think. No. No. How can this be. That’s ridiculous. Then, yes. Then, no. Oh. I don’t know. Let me just breathe and let my heart beat like this. Let the emptiness breathe and its heart beat like this. Yes. Just like this. Oh, this. Just this.
And this is. You do not know how to say this. This is. In a sense. A comfort. This emptiness. This heart that seems to beat all around you, that you hear now all around you, as you concentrate. These lungs that seem to fill and empty. Fill and empty. All around you now. The feeling of a living thing all around you now.
Everywhere there is the evidence of God. The sounds of him all around. The feel of his definite presence in this. A blessed solitude. A beneficent aloneness. That he has given. He has granted. This time that is untimely for a kind of healing in the emptiness that. Strictly speaking seems. Has come to seem. To open up like the universe itself unfolding. Like the darkness of the universe itself with its many many stars opening its arms to you. Embracing you. Like any possible impossible loved one.
Or Perhaps It's Grant Wood's "Spring In The Country"
Painting. Iowa. Or what looks like it may be derived from Iowa. The rolling quality to the land. The prairie-like movement of the land. And we know something of the aesthetic of the painter. So we know that this is derived from this land. Because he was adamantine about this. The taking of his subjects from the life around him. The life that is ready to hand all around about him here in this country.
Which is a sort of praise. A sort of thankfulness. A kind of offering. A kindly giving, one imagines. Looking at the thing. Here in the CRMA. Here in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. A kind of offering back as he worked. As he was given the opportunity to work. In Clear Lake. In the prairie sunlight there. The good last summer sunlight of his life.
And the scene itself. In it, the world’s in spring. The derived Iowa world’s deep in spring. A plant is flowering, for example. In the lower right corner of the painting. And the pastures are green. A light spring green. Where the cattle are grazing off in the distance.
And off in the further distance are windmills spinning. Spinning. Tall even in the distance above the green of the pastures. Bringing up the water from the wells, when it is needed. Water from the earth before the days of electricity to drive the motors to bring the water up. But no. No. That’s not quite it. No. Because in 1941, when this was painted, there was electricity for this sort of thing around these parts.
And off in the further distance is the horizon, where the greening earth touches cloud and sky. And as one looks at this. Considers this. It is clear from this that the earth itself is curved. And the sky is curved. Because here where they meet there is a curve that describes the rounded shape of the world out there. And by extension. Or intension. Here. Here the world is curved as well, which one can easily see in the curve of this slope here in the foreground.
Then there are the figures. The woman with hoe here in the foreground. Hoeing up a hole for the next plant. And the young man next to her kneeling in the dirt, setting out the plants. Worshipful in the dirt. Setting each plant from a wicker basket in the hole the woman makes in earth. A bucket next to them with water and a ladle. For watering each plant.
Over the crest of the hill, another figure. Over the curving crest. Coming up toward us. A man also with his shirt off. Behind two horses that are presumably pulling a plow. But we don’t actually see the plow because of the crest of the hill. The plow turning the green under for planting. Unseen here.
And so. And so there is no tractor either. But this is 1941. And there are of course tractors in 1941. Many many tractors in 1941.
And the figures. The people here. How to say this. These aren’t quite like the people who we know. The people we actually run into every day. Because. Because the features on these figures are. Well. Generalized. They’re rather smooth and bright in all this light. Rather calm and mild. Peaceful, I’d have to say. Rather absent of pain and stress and. Pride and shame. And anger. And. Well. Worldliness. Absent of the particular lines and creases and shadows we see every day in the mirror and in the faces of everyone we meet in our actual lives.
And the dirt. Well, the dirt. It’s not lumpy. Furrowy. Like normal dirt after plowing. It’s more uniform. More like an abstract dirt that is smooth. That has been generalized also and improbably smoothed. Like something. Like dirt that isn’t strictly speaking of this world.
But the clincher. The thing that really gets us to take a moment here. That takes us by the head and into this picture here. As though it were a place one might truly live. Or in which one does only and actually live. Is the tree. The singular tree here in the foreground that grows out of the hill going down. That angles oddly up out of the hill descending to the left and back. Around which has been left a disc of green. A green circle in the plowed up dirt.
The tree. The tree itself. Has been transformed by sun. By bright, bright sun that is coming from outside the frame over to our right and behind. Here in the literal world of our lives, where the real metaphorical sun lives.
It’s an extraordinary spring morning sun that. When one turns. Doesn’t strictly speaking exist here in the museum. In this abstract space. Is not visible directly here in the museum. But it nevertheless is here. Is adamantly present in this painting and has turned. Has transformed. The one tree’s leaves and explosive blossomings to white. Yellow and white. A dazzling effusion. Yellow and white as sun that has transformed it. Into a joyful, paradoxical, cool burning. Yellow and white as clouds floating overhead. Floating up and out over everything. Everywhere. From here to the horizon that is far away and curved under the brightness of sky out there. That is curved and smoothed by the liveliness of the world’s long spinning.
And now we know. Now we are sure of ourselves with this. This understanding. Because this. This is a picture of what happens in the world sometimes when. A light outside the world. A light that is pure as heaven’s light. Sometimes. Is admitted. Is permitted entrance here. Into this world of particular care. Of particular want.
To bring it back alive again. To bring it back from darkness again. To transform what we do here into something. Something that isn’t altogether. That one may struggle all one’s life to know or say. Walk about in. Enjoy.
Which is a sort of praise. A sort of thankfulness. A kind of offering. A kindly giving, one imagines. Looking at the thing. Here in the CRMA. Here in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. A kind of offering back as he worked. As he was given the opportunity to work. In Clear Lake. In the prairie sunlight there. The good last summer sunlight of his life.
And the scene itself. In it, the world’s in spring. The derived Iowa world’s deep in spring. A plant is flowering, for example. In the lower right corner of the painting. And the pastures are green. A light spring green. Where the cattle are grazing off in the distance.
And off in the further distance are windmills spinning. Spinning. Tall even in the distance above the green of the pastures. Bringing up the water from the wells, when it is needed. Water from the earth before the days of electricity to drive the motors to bring the water up. But no. No. That’s not quite it. No. Because in 1941, when this was painted, there was electricity for this sort of thing around these parts.
And off in the further distance is the horizon, where the greening earth touches cloud and sky. And as one looks at this. Considers this. It is clear from this that the earth itself is curved. And the sky is curved. Because here where they meet there is a curve that describes the rounded shape of the world out there. And by extension. Or intension. Here. Here the world is curved as well, which one can easily see in the curve of this slope here in the foreground.
Then there are the figures. The woman with hoe here in the foreground. Hoeing up a hole for the next plant. And the young man next to her kneeling in the dirt, setting out the plants. Worshipful in the dirt. Setting each plant from a wicker basket in the hole the woman makes in earth. A bucket next to them with water and a ladle. For watering each plant.
Over the crest of the hill, another figure. Over the curving crest. Coming up toward us. A man also with his shirt off. Behind two horses that are presumably pulling a plow. But we don’t actually see the plow because of the crest of the hill. The plow turning the green under for planting. Unseen here.
And so. And so there is no tractor either. But this is 1941. And there are of course tractors in 1941. Many many tractors in 1941.
And the figures. The people here. How to say this. These aren’t quite like the people who we know. The people we actually run into every day. Because. Because the features on these figures are. Well. Generalized. They’re rather smooth and bright in all this light. Rather calm and mild. Peaceful, I’d have to say. Rather absent of pain and stress and. Pride and shame. And anger. And. Well. Worldliness. Absent of the particular lines and creases and shadows we see every day in the mirror and in the faces of everyone we meet in our actual lives.
And the dirt. Well, the dirt. It’s not lumpy. Furrowy. Like normal dirt after plowing. It’s more uniform. More like an abstract dirt that is smooth. That has been generalized also and improbably smoothed. Like something. Like dirt that isn’t strictly speaking of this world.
But the clincher. The thing that really gets us to take a moment here. That takes us by the head and into this picture here. As though it were a place one might truly live. Or in which one does only and actually live. Is the tree. The singular tree here in the foreground that grows out of the hill going down. That angles oddly up out of the hill descending to the left and back. Around which has been left a disc of green. A green circle in the plowed up dirt.
The tree. The tree itself. Has been transformed by sun. By bright, bright sun that is coming from outside the frame over to our right and behind. Here in the literal world of our lives, where the real metaphorical sun lives.
It’s an extraordinary spring morning sun that. When one turns. Doesn’t strictly speaking exist here in the museum. In this abstract space. Is not visible directly here in the museum. But it nevertheless is here. Is adamantly present in this painting and has turned. Has transformed. The one tree’s leaves and explosive blossomings to white. Yellow and white. A dazzling effusion. Yellow and white as sun that has transformed it. Into a joyful, paradoxical, cool burning. Yellow and white as clouds floating overhead. Floating up and out over everything. Everywhere. From here to the horizon that is far away and curved under the brightness of sky out there. That is curved and smoothed by the liveliness of the world’s long spinning.
And now we know. Now we are sure of ourselves with this. This understanding. Because this. This is a picture of what happens in the world sometimes when. A light outside the world. A light that is pure as heaven’s light. Sometimes. Is admitted. Is permitted entrance here. Into this world of particular care. Of particular want.
To bring it back alive again. To bring it back from darkness again. To transform what we do here into something. Something that isn’t altogether. That one may struggle all one’s life to know or say. Walk about in. Enjoy.
Or Perhaps It's The Doxology
The praise itself. The song of praise. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him above you heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
And its variants. All its variants. Its possible thousands of surrogate variations.
I’m thinking of the days. The creaking wood-floor, wood-paneled ancient chapel days. When as a tenor I stood in choir robes. The little bespectacled Woody-Allen-wannabe atheist agnostic commie pinko pseudo-rich boy. Singing the Doxology. Turning to the cross on the altar three feet away and belting out this song for all he’s worth. Six hundred boys and masters and their families belting out the same words, the organ trumpeting and crashing. The back of my neck and the back of my head and the back of my back down to my butt all tingling and electric and warm. Like a lion maybe. A lion as tall as me. Were rubbing itself up against the back of my head and my naked neck and back. And then maybe breathing on me there. Its breath warm as a fire and welcome on a cool day. Like this is bliss. This is. Well. A great pleasure. But. Well also. Loony. I must be getting loony. And then. What in the heck is going on, I’m wanting to know. As this is happening. As the lion is rubbing. His soft hair tickling. Exciting a warmth that penetrates through the skin and down into my solar plexus.
And it happens every time. Sunday after Sunday. Year after year. Three years in all. When we come to that song. That one in particular. That hymn.
Acoustic weight. Acoustic weight is how I explained it to myself. The acoustic weight of 600 boys and masters and their families singing. The force of their voices all bearing down upon my head and neck and back as I turned my back to them and faced the altar and the cross. But otherwise kept quiet. Otherwise made this a secret because. Well. You know why. Candidate for the Funny Farm.
And then several years ago. As I became a Christian again. Attended church again. Began singing again the praise songs and hymns and occasionally the Doxology as well. It began again and generalized. The feeling came on with various. Not just the Doxology. Not all, but many. Many of the songs we sing.
Sometimes it’s the full body rub. The full rubup treatment. The full embarrassment. And others. It’s just a breath. Just a warm quick breath to remind me. Here I am. I’m right here, Buddy. I’m with you. I like your singing. Keep it up there, Fella. Let yourself go there. Give it everything you’ve got.
And it doesn’t matter where I stand. In front. In back, with the rest of the sinners. To the side. No more acoustic weight theories. No more pretending this is anything else.
And if I’m loony, well then. I’m loony. A loon for Christ. Warble, warble, warble, warble, warble. I could do this all day. All night. I could. Yes. Yes, certainly. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Warble, warble, warble.
And its variants. All its variants. Its possible thousands of surrogate variations.
I’m thinking of the days. The creaking wood-floor, wood-paneled ancient chapel days. When as a tenor I stood in choir robes. The little bespectacled Woody-Allen-wannabe atheist agnostic commie pinko pseudo-rich boy. Singing the Doxology. Turning to the cross on the altar three feet away and belting out this song for all he’s worth. Six hundred boys and masters and their families belting out the same words, the organ trumpeting and crashing. The back of my neck and the back of my head and the back of my back down to my butt all tingling and electric and warm. Like a lion maybe. A lion as tall as me. Were rubbing itself up against the back of my head and my naked neck and back. And then maybe breathing on me there. Its breath warm as a fire and welcome on a cool day. Like this is bliss. This is. Well. A great pleasure. But. Well also. Loony. I must be getting loony. And then. What in the heck is going on, I’m wanting to know. As this is happening. As the lion is rubbing. His soft hair tickling. Exciting a warmth that penetrates through the skin and down into my solar plexus.
And it happens every time. Sunday after Sunday. Year after year. Three years in all. When we come to that song. That one in particular. That hymn.
Acoustic weight. Acoustic weight is how I explained it to myself. The acoustic weight of 600 boys and masters and their families singing. The force of their voices all bearing down upon my head and neck and back as I turned my back to them and faced the altar and the cross. But otherwise kept quiet. Otherwise made this a secret because. Well. You know why. Candidate for the Funny Farm.
And then several years ago. As I became a Christian again. Attended church again. Began singing again the praise songs and hymns and occasionally the Doxology as well. It began again and generalized. The feeling came on with various. Not just the Doxology. Not all, but many. Many of the songs we sing.
Sometimes it’s the full body rub. The full rubup treatment. The full embarrassment. And others. It’s just a breath. Just a warm quick breath to remind me. Here I am. I’m right here, Buddy. I’m with you. I like your singing. Keep it up there, Fella. Let yourself go there. Give it everything you’ve got.
And it doesn’t matter where I stand. In front. In back, with the rest of the sinners. To the side. No more acoustic weight theories. No more pretending this is anything else.
And if I’m loony, well then. I’m loony. A loon for Christ. Warble, warble, warble, warble, warble. I could do this all day. All night. I could. Yes. Yes, certainly. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Warble, warble, warble.
Or Perhaps It's The Lake
The lake at evening. Summer. Late and north of the 45th parallel. Still a little light left this far north. The water quiet. As far as one knows. The water quiet for its full extent, say 20 miles by two. Forty square miles of quiet. And the light.
The light is something never seen before. The light upon the water. The water strangely gray and liquid. Oddly colored by the just down sun and sky transitioning to a sparsely spangled black. In the water a kind of gray purple and gray yellow and gray orange and gray red. All of it heavily gray and turning grayer. All of it mixing and merging. All of it focusing down to the northwest portion of the lake, where the sun went behind the trees some time ago.
But the surface. The surface is like a liquid mirror. A mirror in which the glass has been oddly turned to liquid. Like in a dream. And the colors there are the colors of the sky as it transitions from its last memory of day to dark.
And so the lake is in a sense the sky. Its earthly reflection. The colors made in it duplicated here below, in the mirror of the water.
There are small water sounds as the liquid of the mirror comes up against its stony frame. Its rocky irregular frame.
And there is no wind. Oh. No wind. No wind. And it is quiet for miles and miles. There is an occasional bird. An occasional unidentifiable bird. Singing in the small woodlot here.
And there are the shapes of trees becoming less and less distinct. Less and less defined. Like so many words turning in the mouth of the geophysical metaphysical world to something more and more like a series of sounds only. Sounds disconnecting from their meanings.
And so. This seems very odd. Seems not quite like the world one thinks one knows. A world in which there is sky and earth and lake and trees and wind and sound. But these are all. Well. Changing. Disappearing now. No wind. No wind. The color of the sky. The color of the lake. The color of the trees. And their distinctive shapes. Their defining leaves. All of it going now. All of it fading now to black.
Turning from the noisiness and the brightness of day to this. To this diamond dark and the quiet the dark keeps like a secret thing wrapped in the bundle of its darkness. Rolled into the center of its hiddeness.
And this feels. Oh. This feels like something is happening here. Something mysterious is occurring here. And one doesn’t know quite what. One can’t quite get one’s mind to fully understand this.
Where is God, one wonders. Where are you God in this. Then there is an answer in the extraordinary subtle—this never-before-seen—careful light upon the lake and the gentle liquid sounds and the song the bird begins to make and stops, as if it had thought better of its portion of the answer. There is an answer back in the quiet deepening in the darkening trees and the small water sounds reflected there. There is an answer back in the stars that have begun to brighten here as the world. The lovely daytime geophysical metaphysical world. In which one does the lion’s share of one’s living business. Is replaced. Is regrettably and fortunately replaced.
By this other world. This other more ascetic. This more monochrome. This world of less. In some outward senses. This world that requires great quiet in oneself to hear the little that may seem to be offered. This world that offers little help in seeing what it may suggest for our reflection. This world that requires much and perhaps contains as much as it requires. This largely contemplative world. In which the action shifts its locus. And place turns largely on itself. Curls into itself. Leaving us mostly placeless. Here. In an abstract wood beside a dream lake. Lost beneath the star-scattered black-domed infinite that is only now fully revealed and that descends. Descends farther and further down. All around us as we sit here in the almost dark. A white-star-lighted dark that seems to come from the end of time and touch and gentle. Well. Everything.
The light is something never seen before. The light upon the water. The water strangely gray and liquid. Oddly colored by the just down sun and sky transitioning to a sparsely spangled black. In the water a kind of gray purple and gray yellow and gray orange and gray red. All of it heavily gray and turning grayer. All of it mixing and merging. All of it focusing down to the northwest portion of the lake, where the sun went behind the trees some time ago.
But the surface. The surface is like a liquid mirror. A mirror in which the glass has been oddly turned to liquid. Like in a dream. And the colors there are the colors of the sky as it transitions from its last memory of day to dark.
And so the lake is in a sense the sky. Its earthly reflection. The colors made in it duplicated here below, in the mirror of the water.
There are small water sounds as the liquid of the mirror comes up against its stony frame. Its rocky irregular frame.
And there is no wind. Oh. No wind. No wind. And it is quiet for miles and miles. There is an occasional bird. An occasional unidentifiable bird. Singing in the small woodlot here.
And there are the shapes of trees becoming less and less distinct. Less and less defined. Like so many words turning in the mouth of the geophysical metaphysical world to something more and more like a series of sounds only. Sounds disconnecting from their meanings.
And so. This seems very odd. Seems not quite like the world one thinks one knows. A world in which there is sky and earth and lake and trees and wind and sound. But these are all. Well. Changing. Disappearing now. No wind. No wind. The color of the sky. The color of the lake. The color of the trees. And their distinctive shapes. Their defining leaves. All of it going now. All of it fading now to black.
Turning from the noisiness and the brightness of day to this. To this diamond dark and the quiet the dark keeps like a secret thing wrapped in the bundle of its darkness. Rolled into the center of its hiddeness.
And this feels. Oh. This feels like something is happening here. Something mysterious is occurring here. And one doesn’t know quite what. One can’t quite get one’s mind to fully understand this.
Where is God, one wonders. Where are you God in this. Then there is an answer in the extraordinary subtle—this never-before-seen—careful light upon the lake and the gentle liquid sounds and the song the bird begins to make and stops, as if it had thought better of its portion of the answer. There is an answer back in the quiet deepening in the darkening trees and the small water sounds reflected there. There is an answer back in the stars that have begun to brighten here as the world. The lovely daytime geophysical metaphysical world. In which one does the lion’s share of one’s living business. Is replaced. Is regrettably and fortunately replaced.
By this other world. This other more ascetic. This more monochrome. This world of less. In some outward senses. This world that requires great quiet in oneself to hear the little that may seem to be offered. This world that offers little help in seeing what it may suggest for our reflection. This world that requires much and perhaps contains as much as it requires. This largely contemplative world. In which the action shifts its locus. And place turns largely on itself. Curls into itself. Leaving us mostly placeless. Here. In an abstract wood beside a dream lake. Lost beneath the star-scattered black-domed infinite that is only now fully revealed and that descends. Descends farther and further down. All around us as we sit here in the almost dark. A white-star-lighted dark that seems to come from the end of time and touch and gentle. Well. Everything.
Or Perhaps It's The Christmas
That glow. You know. That fireside. That family. That time with. That laidback. That time within time that seems a leetle timeless. A leetle bit of timelessness imported into this streaming roaring hooting moony starry spinning merry-go-round of time. Or embedded in it. Or implicit in it. Like the center of all turning. This bit of stasis in the rush. This spot of time. This eye of time. This time’s eye at the end of the year in which one lives for a week or so, maybe. If fortunate. If blessed. As though one had literally. All of eternity. Right here. Right around oneself like a fog of light. A cloud of light. To move around in. To relax in. And it is.
How to say it. Something suffused. Something pregnant with. Oh. Let’s call it this sense that. What one has. All that one has. One wants to. Well. Give it away. Clear out the attic. Clear out the basement. Clear out the drive. Blow away all of the snow and all of the money and all of the stuff. And relax in this. Remain in this. Bask like a buoyant whale in sun on the surface of a wide calm sea. A blue and black and green and wine-dark and red and yellow and golden and silver and bronze and steel and chrome. An infinitely extensive sea.
A sea that almost seems the universe itself. That seems the one verse itself. A sea in which all that is needful is a sayer to say what it is singing. To translate this great wide color and shape and manner and movement and stasis and light and dark and. And. And. Into words one may hope to have a language for. Into language that may contain something of what the thing itself may be. Into something one might say to someone else in this high season that may. Oh. Who knows. That may strike.
That may travel direct. Past the outer defenses. Past the suburban battlements of another. Into the inner City. Into the inner park of the heart with its fountain. Its ever running artesian fountain. In the intimate public park of the heart, with its fountain running there. Ever. Summer and winter. Bubbling up. Forced up out of the stone of the world and into this public pool. This rugged, delicate water. Sweet. Unaccountably sweet. Here in the City. The inner City of the other.
Which is astonishingly open this time of year. Open to the public. Available for enjoyment. Accessible for inspection. Cleared of the renovation activities. The preservation and conservation crews and their equipment. And the anti-terrorist barricades and men with body armor and machine guns and helmets and so forth. Cleared of all these. And now open once again to the others. That they might enjoy. Might come upon and rest here. Sitting beside the fountain. Watching the light move in it. Through it. Listen to the subtle sound of it that seems. Oh. The sound one heard at the beginning of the world.
And it is perhaps also something that. Something that is. Something that seems out of the ordinary eternity of the season. Something that seems to burn here at the heart of all this. That happens. That one is shown but. One has no idea why. Why one has been chosen. For this. To see this. To be blessed and burdened with such a thing.
But here. In the house of one’s brother. Here on the night in question. On the night of God’s birth. On the anniversary night of his entry into the rapid flesh of the world. Here in the living room with one’s family scattered randomly all around. One’s parents and one’s brothers and their families and one’s sister and one’s wife and at least one of one’s own children. Scattered like so many leaves. So many grass-like leaves. All around in several rooms. And this room dark. And a movie playing on the leetle home theater doohickey. A movie about evil. But about evil that isn’t all that bad. That is a leetle silly in fact. A little bit of a nuisance in fact. That is overcome by everyday heroics. Quotidian almost. Ho-hum. Naturally supernatural acts. That are. Well part of the repertoire. If you will. Part of every really good guy’s bag of tricks. Every good pirate’s bag of sword tricks. And word tricks. And sailing tricks. And money tricks. And. But I digress.
So as we’re watching this movie. This entertainment. This simulacrum. This miniature. There appears in the darkened Christmas tree. Lights turned out to enhance the entertainment pleasure. In this dark tree. A light. A light like a light-filled fog. Like a phosphorescent light shining out of the water of the sea. A cloud of light that is all along the trunk and extending outward from the trunk nearly touching the tips of the branches. All the way up and down the tree. That in fact fills the tree with light. That remains in the tree for. Oh. Maybe three quarters of an hour to an hour. Dwindling all the while. Starting out bright and full and strong. And then retreating toward the trunk. Shrinking from the trunk ends and branch tips. All the while. Until it finally. At a time when I’ve looked away. Disappears.
And as one experiences this. As this supernatural event is happening. One wonders, well. One wonders. Is. Or could. Or would. Or how. One says to oneself. Oh. This is literally happening, isn’t it. This. This metaphor is literally occurring. Here. Here in my presence. In this life right here. This place where. Oh. We have a. We have the. Oh. I don’t know. In this world right here. God. Isn’t it. Isn’t it. Oh. God. Ho. Ho.
One is a leetle giddy. One doesn’t mind admitting. One is a leetle silly. Light-headed, if you will. Feeling a leetle. Ho. A bit of. Well off-balance. What with. Well. This light here. This white light with a bit of gold and silver shimmering in it. This cloud of light that is. Whew. That seems. Well. A real beauty of an unworldly light. A real strange. A real odd. God light. At the heart here tonight. Of maybe. Of certainly. This extraordinary. This ordinary. This supernatural. This natural. This created. This written. This storied. This figurative and literal, dark-bright and bright-dark, timely and untimely, turning and unturning, material and immaterial, sensical and nonsensical, prosaic and lyrical, eternal and temporal, actual and imaginary, conditioned and unconditioned, artificial and thoroughly real world.
How to say it. Something suffused. Something pregnant with. Oh. Let’s call it this sense that. What one has. All that one has. One wants to. Well. Give it away. Clear out the attic. Clear out the basement. Clear out the drive. Blow away all of the snow and all of the money and all of the stuff. And relax in this. Remain in this. Bask like a buoyant whale in sun on the surface of a wide calm sea. A blue and black and green and wine-dark and red and yellow and golden and silver and bronze and steel and chrome. An infinitely extensive sea.
A sea that almost seems the universe itself. That seems the one verse itself. A sea in which all that is needful is a sayer to say what it is singing. To translate this great wide color and shape and manner and movement and stasis and light and dark and. And. And. Into words one may hope to have a language for. Into language that may contain something of what the thing itself may be. Into something one might say to someone else in this high season that may. Oh. Who knows. That may strike.
That may travel direct. Past the outer defenses. Past the suburban battlements of another. Into the inner City. Into the inner park of the heart with its fountain. Its ever running artesian fountain. In the intimate public park of the heart, with its fountain running there. Ever. Summer and winter. Bubbling up. Forced up out of the stone of the world and into this public pool. This rugged, delicate water. Sweet. Unaccountably sweet. Here in the City. The inner City of the other.
Which is astonishingly open this time of year. Open to the public. Available for enjoyment. Accessible for inspection. Cleared of the renovation activities. The preservation and conservation crews and their equipment. And the anti-terrorist barricades and men with body armor and machine guns and helmets and so forth. Cleared of all these. And now open once again to the others. That they might enjoy. Might come upon and rest here. Sitting beside the fountain. Watching the light move in it. Through it. Listen to the subtle sound of it that seems. Oh. The sound one heard at the beginning of the world.
And it is perhaps also something that. Something that is. Something that seems out of the ordinary eternity of the season. Something that seems to burn here at the heart of all this. That happens. That one is shown but. One has no idea why. Why one has been chosen. For this. To see this. To be blessed and burdened with such a thing.
But here. In the house of one’s brother. Here on the night in question. On the night of God’s birth. On the anniversary night of his entry into the rapid flesh of the world. Here in the living room with one’s family scattered randomly all around. One’s parents and one’s brothers and their families and one’s sister and one’s wife and at least one of one’s own children. Scattered like so many leaves. So many grass-like leaves. All around in several rooms. And this room dark. And a movie playing on the leetle home theater doohickey. A movie about evil. But about evil that isn’t all that bad. That is a leetle silly in fact. A little bit of a nuisance in fact. That is overcome by everyday heroics. Quotidian almost. Ho-hum. Naturally supernatural acts. That are. Well part of the repertoire. If you will. Part of every really good guy’s bag of tricks. Every good pirate’s bag of sword tricks. And word tricks. And sailing tricks. And money tricks. And. But I digress.
So as we’re watching this movie. This entertainment. This simulacrum. This miniature. There appears in the darkened Christmas tree. Lights turned out to enhance the entertainment pleasure. In this dark tree. A light. A light like a light-filled fog. Like a phosphorescent light shining out of the water of the sea. A cloud of light that is all along the trunk and extending outward from the trunk nearly touching the tips of the branches. All the way up and down the tree. That in fact fills the tree with light. That remains in the tree for. Oh. Maybe three quarters of an hour to an hour. Dwindling all the while. Starting out bright and full and strong. And then retreating toward the trunk. Shrinking from the trunk ends and branch tips. All the while. Until it finally. At a time when I’ve looked away. Disappears.
And as one experiences this. As this supernatural event is happening. One wonders, well. One wonders. Is. Or could. Or would. Or how. One says to oneself. Oh. This is literally happening, isn’t it. This. This metaphor is literally occurring. Here. Here in my presence. In this life right here. This place where. Oh. We have a. We have the. Oh. I don’t know. In this world right here. God. Isn’t it. Isn’t it. Oh. God. Ho. Ho.
One is a leetle giddy. One doesn’t mind admitting. One is a leetle silly. Light-headed, if you will. Feeling a leetle. Ho. A bit of. Well off-balance. What with. Well. This light here. This white light with a bit of gold and silver shimmering in it. This cloud of light that is. Whew. That seems. Well. A real beauty of an unworldly light. A real strange. A real odd. God light. At the heart here tonight. Of maybe. Of certainly. This extraordinary. This ordinary. This supernatural. This natural. This created. This written. This storied. This figurative and literal, dark-bright and bright-dark, timely and untimely, turning and unturning, material and immaterial, sensical and nonsensical, prosaic and lyrical, eternal and temporal, actual and imaginary, conditioned and unconditioned, artificial and thoroughly real world.
Or Perhaps It's The Lingo
You know. Perhaps it’s the Word. Or the Words. Or the. It’s how we maka the Lingo. It’s how this happens. It’s where this happens. It’s where this happening’s taking us. Making us. Raking us along. It’s. Well. It’s hard to think about. A thing that isn’t a thing. That’s more like a think. But that isn’t so much a think, because think is impossible to do on it’s own. More like a say. How we say to ourselves but. But we don’t say things to ourselves because. You can’t say a thing, can you. No. You can’t speak a thing out of nothing. You can’t speak a think out of nothink. No. We say what we say and that’s all that we say. How do I know what I think until I see what I say. But. It’s often like. It’s alika the saying doesn’t strictly speaking come from us. Or seema to. It’s alika the saying comesa froma somewhere else and we. Wella we. We chime in. Echo on in. A nanosecond after we heara the words as they stream along and we stream along also, saying whatever it is that someone else is saying. Someone we might think. We might imagine is there, but. But. What do we know.
It seems. Maybe. We’re a little bit like. Megaphones maybe. Amplifiers kindalike. Unidirectional power amplifiers.
Or oracles. Or prophets. Or writers. The writers of our lives. Our Words. The Words that emerge from our lives or our lives from our Words. Our stream of Words. Our rivering words. Our artesian Words that flow up out of the rock of experience and onto the surface of this rock, where they flow all about the place. Where they rock on out all over the place. Where they flood all about and up and over everything all around like. Collecting debris. Collecting the earth. Collecting any number of artifacts and natural world items. Ripping all of them loose. Tearing all of them off and swirling them down. Down and down the slope of land toward the sea. Toward the level of the sea.
And so it is talking in which. It is in talking we find. Or writing. Or thinking in Words. In the Lingo we have. In the Lingo we are. In the Lingo that is maybe outside of us. That rivers through our minds like a river in flood. Or it is in reading. In letting another’s river of Words pass through the riverbeds of our minds. Of our lives. Mingling with Words that have spewed up out of the rock of our lives. Two rivers now merging. Now diverging. Now pooling. Now flooding and falling. Always dropping and shussing and rushing and bubbling and forcing. Wrenching and twisting. Shoving and roiling. Pressing and rolling. Turning and curling and spinning and churning and drilling and dragging and trolling and drolling. Reading and reading. In which we lose the sense of where we. Where did that spring go. Where is that spring of oneself that there was here somewhere. Lost in the flood of the Lingo.
Lost in the whorl and the whirl of the waters. The waters like Words rising all around in the spring of the year. In a flood that does not stop. That does not so much quiet as flatten. But runs strong. And quick. And dangerous. Everywhere one knows to look. To read. To listen. To a land turned to a river in flood. A land turned to Lingo. As far as one might see. As far as the horizon. Rising up to our ears and up to our eyeballs. And then over them. Way way over them. Deepening deep over them. In every direction. The underwater sound of the waters that are like the Words of all time whispering and roaring and snickering and chortling and raging and ragging and ripping and jazzing and rocking and crashing and smashing and singing and crying and droning and listing and subordinating and arguing and jetting and clunking and tittering and. And pouring themselves forth, lifting all of us up on their shoulders and carrying us. Floating us high on their shoulders. Then dowsing us. Then dowsing us down. Pulling us underwater for great long stretches. So long we forget we are here. Forget the world is submerged. The world is awash. The world apprehensible. Comprehensible only through this. This remarkably breathable and transparent. Or perhaps apparently transparent. Medium. Atmosphere. Intermediacy. Interposed mystery. This lens. This filter. This prognostic. This speculative. Device. This great wide whitewater flatwater rivering Lingo. Wherever we know.
It seems. Maybe. We’re a little bit like. Megaphones maybe. Amplifiers kindalike. Unidirectional power amplifiers.
Or oracles. Or prophets. Or writers. The writers of our lives. Our Words. The Words that emerge from our lives or our lives from our Words. Our stream of Words. Our rivering words. Our artesian Words that flow up out of the rock of experience and onto the surface of this rock, where they flow all about the place. Where they rock on out all over the place. Where they flood all about and up and over everything all around like. Collecting debris. Collecting the earth. Collecting any number of artifacts and natural world items. Ripping all of them loose. Tearing all of them off and swirling them down. Down and down the slope of land toward the sea. Toward the level of the sea.
And so it is talking in which. It is in talking we find. Or writing. Or thinking in Words. In the Lingo we have. In the Lingo we are. In the Lingo that is maybe outside of us. That rivers through our minds like a river in flood. Or it is in reading. In letting another’s river of Words pass through the riverbeds of our minds. Of our lives. Mingling with Words that have spewed up out of the rock of our lives. Two rivers now merging. Now diverging. Now pooling. Now flooding and falling. Always dropping and shussing and rushing and bubbling and forcing. Wrenching and twisting. Shoving and roiling. Pressing and rolling. Turning and curling and spinning and churning and drilling and dragging and trolling and drolling. Reading and reading. In which we lose the sense of where we. Where did that spring go. Where is that spring of oneself that there was here somewhere. Lost in the flood of the Lingo.
Lost in the whorl and the whirl of the waters. The waters like Words rising all around in the spring of the year. In a flood that does not stop. That does not so much quiet as flatten. But runs strong. And quick. And dangerous. Everywhere one knows to look. To read. To listen. To a land turned to a river in flood. A land turned to Lingo. As far as one might see. As far as the horizon. Rising up to our ears and up to our eyeballs. And then over them. Way way over them. Deepening deep over them. In every direction. The underwater sound of the waters that are like the Words of all time whispering and roaring and snickering and chortling and raging and ragging and ripping and jazzing and rocking and crashing and smashing and singing and crying and droning and listing and subordinating and arguing and jetting and clunking and tittering and. And pouring themselves forth, lifting all of us up on their shoulders and carrying us. Floating us high on their shoulders. Then dowsing us. Then dowsing us down. Pulling us underwater for great long stretches. So long we forget we are here. Forget the world is submerged. The world is awash. The world apprehensible. Comprehensible only through this. This remarkably breathable and transparent. Or perhaps apparently transparent. Medium. Atmosphere. Intermediacy. Interposed mystery. This lens. This filter. This prognostic. This speculative. Device. This great wide whitewater flatwater rivering Lingo. Wherever we know.
Or Perhaps It's The Chicken Soup
Or perhaps it’s chicken soup I ate that one evening. Oh. Maybe a year and a half ago. I think it was chicken soup, but it could have been chicken stew. I had the slow cooker then. I think. So it might have been more of a stew than a soup because I like a chunky kind of a soup.
A substantial sort of a soup. A soup that will stick to your ribs type of deal. A soup that will last all day if need be and well into the next if push comes to shove. A soup you can sink your teeth into, if you will. A carnivorous soup, so to say. The soup that ate New York City. Or the soup that fed New York City, I should say. One pot feeding the multitudes. Feeding the millions. That kind of a soup.
But maybe it was a chicken sandwich. It could have been. A year and half’s a long time in these fast paced times. A lot happens every day. Hard to keep track, exactly. What I do know is that it definitely involved chicken. Little beady eyed beasts anyway. Little primitive sharp-toothed little. Nothing behind the beady eyes except a hunger and a meanness and a lot of nervous energy. A lot of nervous and jerky noisiness and movement. A random kind of movement around the barnyard. Around the barnyard and nearby fields.
A free range type of situation. A freedom of choice if you will. That kind of humane treatment. That sort of kindness to the mindless little beady-eyed creatures. Little mean-spirited peckish creatures. Before they’re slaughtered. Before they’re transformed from a feathered bipedal noise into soup, let’s say. Or stew. Or a sandwich. But I digress.
What I’m getting at is the dream. The dream that followed the soup or the stew or the sandwich or whatever it was. They say old men dream dreams and young men have visions. That’s a nice way of thinking about things, if it’s true. Well it’s probably nice whether it’s true or not. Letting old men like myself have our dreams. Allowing as how we may have our dreams.
Anyone can have a dream, you know. Whether or not it says so in a book. You, for example. You. Whether you are old or young or somewhere in between may have a dream. You may have more than one dream. In fact, you are permitted to dream promiscuously, if you will. You have a free range freedom yourself to dream to your heart’s content, if that’s what you like to do.
If that’s the direction your feet take you. Or your mind, really, isn’t it. If that’s a direction your free range mind wants to lead you. But as I say. I digress. What I want to talk about is a particular dream of mine. Why. Well, it’s interesting. To me certainly. Perhaps to you. I don’t know.
But what the dream means. Ahhhh. That’s another question. I have no idea. I mean, it’s pretty clear what the plain meaning is. But what is the deeper meaning. What is trying to be got at by someone or something or God or whoever at the deeper levels of the universe is anybody’s guess. But here I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m outrunning the telling of the thing.
Here’s the dream: “Serve the Father’s house.”
That’s the whole thing. No visuals. You’d think in this video age there would have been some visuals. But no. That’s just the sort of dream I would have. A dream that is visionless and that is just. Well. Words. Words and words alone. Delivered with a certain authority. A command, really. No wiggle room there, apparently. No outs. Serve the Father’s house. Well.
Does this mean the church I’m attending, I wonder. The church I was attending at the time and still attend is actually called The Father’s House. So. So does what I’m being told connect with this, do you think. Does this dream mean that I should serve my particular church or the church in general. Church with a capital C.
Does it mean I’m not serving either my particular church very well or the big C church very well. And that I should get on the stick. Get on the ball. Get going, in other words. Put my shoulder to the wheel, so to say. Put my shoulder to the bumper, rather. Since putting my shoulder to the wheel could actually be pretty dangerous. And God wouldn’t want me to do anything very dangerous would he. Well.
Maybe he would, come to think of it. Think of all the people in the Bible. The people there he talked to and asked to do dangerous things. So there’s precedent. There’s plenty of reason to think. Well. He’s not so concerned about my danger. He’s not so concerned about my particular free range chicken comfort.
Think about David, for example. Being chased from piller to post by King Saul. Murder in his heart. His little chicken heart. Or think of the Apostles, for example. Who all died martyrs. Many of whom died quite bloody deaths. Quite messy deaths. Like so many chickens running around the barnyard without their heads, for example. Spouting blood all over the place. Well, then. Well.
And the dream. Back to the dream, just to fill you in. It was morning. It was before the alarm was set to go off, and those words were said audibly. I heard them. And then I was wide awake. Totally awake. Completely out of sleep mode now. And on my feet by the side of my bed. A featherless biped. Listening. Cocking my head. Listening. What more, I’m thinking. What more.
Now, you might think, what more does he need to know. What on earth more does he need to know. He’s been told what to do. He has his marching orders. So why doesn’t he march. Why doesn’t he get the lead out. Why isn’t he serving the Father’s house. And all I can say is I am. Or I’m trying to. Maybe I’m not doing such a hot job. Maybe I can do better. But this is to some extent what I am in fact doing. And this is the thing that’s driving me right round the bend.
If that is God, what in the heck is he saying. It would be one thing if he had said, “Keep doing what you’re doing. What you’re doing is the right thing to do. Serving in my house is what you’re doing, and I want you to keep doing that.” But no. Noooooo. That isn’t what I heard. What I heard him say was, “Serve the Father’s house.” That’s all I know, and it’s driving me loony. Absolutely wacky and quirky. Clucky and random. So this mystical shmystical. This mystical shmystical life. It also can be this kind of thing.
A substantial sort of a soup. A soup that will stick to your ribs type of deal. A soup that will last all day if need be and well into the next if push comes to shove. A soup you can sink your teeth into, if you will. A carnivorous soup, so to say. The soup that ate New York City. Or the soup that fed New York City, I should say. One pot feeding the multitudes. Feeding the millions. That kind of a soup.
But maybe it was a chicken sandwich. It could have been. A year and half’s a long time in these fast paced times. A lot happens every day. Hard to keep track, exactly. What I do know is that it definitely involved chicken. Little beady eyed beasts anyway. Little primitive sharp-toothed little. Nothing behind the beady eyes except a hunger and a meanness and a lot of nervous energy. A lot of nervous and jerky noisiness and movement. A random kind of movement around the barnyard. Around the barnyard and nearby fields.
A free range type of situation. A freedom of choice if you will. That kind of humane treatment. That sort of kindness to the mindless little beady-eyed creatures. Little mean-spirited peckish creatures. Before they’re slaughtered. Before they’re transformed from a feathered bipedal noise into soup, let’s say. Or stew. Or a sandwich. But I digress.
What I’m getting at is the dream. The dream that followed the soup or the stew or the sandwich or whatever it was. They say old men dream dreams and young men have visions. That’s a nice way of thinking about things, if it’s true. Well it’s probably nice whether it’s true or not. Letting old men like myself have our dreams. Allowing as how we may have our dreams.
Anyone can have a dream, you know. Whether or not it says so in a book. You, for example. You. Whether you are old or young or somewhere in between may have a dream. You may have more than one dream. In fact, you are permitted to dream promiscuously, if you will. You have a free range freedom yourself to dream to your heart’s content, if that’s what you like to do.
If that’s the direction your feet take you. Or your mind, really, isn’t it. If that’s a direction your free range mind wants to lead you. But as I say. I digress. What I want to talk about is a particular dream of mine. Why. Well, it’s interesting. To me certainly. Perhaps to you. I don’t know.
But what the dream means. Ahhhh. That’s another question. I have no idea. I mean, it’s pretty clear what the plain meaning is. But what is the deeper meaning. What is trying to be got at by someone or something or God or whoever at the deeper levels of the universe is anybody’s guess. But here I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m outrunning the telling of the thing.
Here’s the dream: “Serve the Father’s house.”
That’s the whole thing. No visuals. You’d think in this video age there would have been some visuals. But no. That’s just the sort of dream I would have. A dream that is visionless and that is just. Well. Words. Words and words alone. Delivered with a certain authority. A command, really. No wiggle room there, apparently. No outs. Serve the Father’s house. Well.
Does this mean the church I’m attending, I wonder. The church I was attending at the time and still attend is actually called The Father’s House. So. So does what I’m being told connect with this, do you think. Does this dream mean that I should serve my particular church or the church in general. Church with a capital C.
Does it mean I’m not serving either my particular church very well or the big C church very well. And that I should get on the stick. Get on the ball. Get going, in other words. Put my shoulder to the wheel, so to say. Put my shoulder to the bumper, rather. Since putting my shoulder to the wheel could actually be pretty dangerous. And God wouldn’t want me to do anything very dangerous would he. Well.
Maybe he would, come to think of it. Think of all the people in the Bible. The people there he talked to and asked to do dangerous things. So there’s precedent. There’s plenty of reason to think. Well. He’s not so concerned about my danger. He’s not so concerned about my particular free range chicken comfort.
Think about David, for example. Being chased from piller to post by King Saul. Murder in his heart. His little chicken heart. Or think of the Apostles, for example. Who all died martyrs. Many of whom died quite bloody deaths. Quite messy deaths. Like so many chickens running around the barnyard without their heads, for example. Spouting blood all over the place. Well, then. Well.
And the dream. Back to the dream, just to fill you in. It was morning. It was before the alarm was set to go off, and those words were said audibly. I heard them. And then I was wide awake. Totally awake. Completely out of sleep mode now. And on my feet by the side of my bed. A featherless biped. Listening. Cocking my head. Listening. What more, I’m thinking. What more.
Now, you might think, what more does he need to know. What on earth more does he need to know. He’s been told what to do. He has his marching orders. So why doesn’t he march. Why doesn’t he get the lead out. Why isn’t he serving the Father’s house. And all I can say is I am. Or I’m trying to. Maybe I’m not doing such a hot job. Maybe I can do better. But this is to some extent what I am in fact doing. And this is the thing that’s driving me right round the bend.
If that is God, what in the heck is he saying. It would be one thing if he had said, “Keep doing what you’re doing. What you’re doing is the right thing to do. Serving in my house is what you’re doing, and I want you to keep doing that.” But no. Noooooo. That isn’t what I heard. What I heard him say was, “Serve the Father’s house.” That’s all I know, and it’s driving me loony. Absolutely wacky and quirky. Clucky and random. So this mystical shmystical. This mystical shmystical life. It also can be this kind of thing.
Or Perhaps It's The Citrus
One day, I’m minding my own business. Cooking. At the moment making a salad. A stew warming on the stove. And I have the bib lettuce. I have the nuts. And both are in the bowl. The salad bowl. And now it’s time for the orange. The two large deep-orange oranges.
And so, I begin to peel one. Break the thick fruity skin. And what happens next is anybody’s guess. I mean I’m not thinking about God, in particular. I’m not thinking about heaven or eternity or anything. I’m simply cooking for the home fellowship because tonight I’m furnishing the meal. And so I alternate thinking about the people in the home fellowship and about the food here that I’m preparing. Oh, you know. The mind wanders. So this isn’t strictly true. I think about work and about the moron there. I think about my wife and children far away. I think about a book I’m reading. A book I’m writing. The beach that I may visit next weekend. A lovely long empty beach, for the most part. My mind wanders. As I say.
But as my thumb pierces the skin of this orange here in my hand, I am suddenly breathing the air of paradise. I mean. I’m suddenly breathing the sweet pure air of heaven. As I breathe in this air, my whole being seems lifted out of itself and transported. Seems transformed. I stop everything except the breathing and the enjoying. Here it is, I’m thinking. Here I am. What more could one want. Heaven. Heaven itself.
As if God had opened the door into heaven and allowed the atmosphere there to mingle with the atmosphere of this world. So that now there is no difference. I am still here in my kitchen. I look around. Yes. I’m still here. But I am also in heaven. Breathing the air there. Or here. Breathing and breathing. I could do this forever, I’m thinking. Just stand here breathing this. Like this. This is enough. Only this.
But this is ridiculous, I’m thinking. This is silly. I mean. Bill. For Pity’s sake. This is only an orange. It’s only a single orange sold for. Oh. I don’t know. Fifty cents. Seventy-five cents. A buck. I don’t know. Get a grip. Get a life. Give somebody a call, for Pete’s sake. You’re spending too much time alone. That’s what the problem is. You’re spending all this time alone and you’re disconnecting. You’re decompressing. You’re disintegrating. You’re discombobulating. You’re deconstructing.
I mean. Get real. Knock on Formica. Knock on pressboard. Knock on plastic. Here’s reality, for crying out loud. Look at this stuff here. Look at the sink. At the stove. At the cupboards. At the living room sofa. At the TV. And so forth. Here is where you live.
Yes. Yes, I’m thinking. This is where I live. But I can’t help it. I’m breathing in this orange’s perfume, and this can’t be just this orange. I’m sorry. What is happening to me can’t have simply to do with this particular orange’s perfume. What’s happening is way out of proportion to this orange, don’t you see. The smell. This orange smell. It’s. It’s the essence of orange. It’s where all oranges get the smell they have. The smell that is normally a pale, pathetic imitation of this.
And what this is is pure excitement. Pure happiness. An ecstasy, if you will. A small moment of cooking ecstasy. My diaphragm is fluttering. My heart rate increases. My breathing quickens. Oh, I feel like. I don’t know. Like the next thing will be an angel with real wings will walk into the room and communicate. Or fly in through a window or a wall. A female angel is what I’m thinking. A female angel on the order of. Oh. I don’t know. Rachel Welch, for example. Or Sophia Loren. In their prime. That kind of very impressive angel. That kind of very humbling angel. Communicate what. I don’t know. Will pick me up like Woody Allen. Like a little Woody Allen type of. Oh. You know. Pseudo-intellectual, very sensitive, artistic, well read type of guy. And dance maybe. I don’t know. Dancing would be good. Pick me up and fly me around the room. Fly me around the entire metropolitan area. Around the entire state, maybe. And up. Up into the crown of stars that arches here overhead. Beyond the illusory blue. Beyond the pure blue sky. Up and on and streaming. Faster and faster. Until the stars begin to blur and the dark disappears and there is only light. Completely light. Everywhere. As though we’re flying through all light, a ball of all light. All the light in the universe. Billions of galaxies of light. As though we’re flying through the center of that. This kind of feeling. This kind of sense.
And all of this from this orange here.
This breath from paradise. This breath of God. This intimation of heaven. Here. Amidst the Formica and the pressboard and the TV. The accidental material world. The time-bound material world. Here in a kitchen at a particular place with particular coordinates at a particular point in time. As I’m peeling this orange. This beautiful big succulent orange. From which all paradise. Silly as it sounds. Seems to have come.
And so, I begin to peel one. Break the thick fruity skin. And what happens next is anybody’s guess. I mean I’m not thinking about God, in particular. I’m not thinking about heaven or eternity or anything. I’m simply cooking for the home fellowship because tonight I’m furnishing the meal. And so I alternate thinking about the people in the home fellowship and about the food here that I’m preparing. Oh, you know. The mind wanders. So this isn’t strictly true. I think about work and about the moron there. I think about my wife and children far away. I think about a book I’m reading. A book I’m writing. The beach that I may visit next weekend. A lovely long empty beach, for the most part. My mind wanders. As I say.
But as my thumb pierces the skin of this orange here in my hand, I am suddenly breathing the air of paradise. I mean. I’m suddenly breathing the sweet pure air of heaven. As I breathe in this air, my whole being seems lifted out of itself and transported. Seems transformed. I stop everything except the breathing and the enjoying. Here it is, I’m thinking. Here I am. What more could one want. Heaven. Heaven itself.
As if God had opened the door into heaven and allowed the atmosphere there to mingle with the atmosphere of this world. So that now there is no difference. I am still here in my kitchen. I look around. Yes. I’m still here. But I am also in heaven. Breathing the air there. Or here. Breathing and breathing. I could do this forever, I’m thinking. Just stand here breathing this. Like this. This is enough. Only this.
But this is ridiculous, I’m thinking. This is silly. I mean. Bill. For Pity’s sake. This is only an orange. It’s only a single orange sold for. Oh. I don’t know. Fifty cents. Seventy-five cents. A buck. I don’t know. Get a grip. Get a life. Give somebody a call, for Pete’s sake. You’re spending too much time alone. That’s what the problem is. You’re spending all this time alone and you’re disconnecting. You’re decompressing. You’re disintegrating. You’re discombobulating. You’re deconstructing.
I mean. Get real. Knock on Formica. Knock on pressboard. Knock on plastic. Here’s reality, for crying out loud. Look at this stuff here. Look at the sink. At the stove. At the cupboards. At the living room sofa. At the TV. And so forth. Here is where you live.
Yes. Yes, I’m thinking. This is where I live. But I can’t help it. I’m breathing in this orange’s perfume, and this can’t be just this orange. I’m sorry. What is happening to me can’t have simply to do with this particular orange’s perfume. What’s happening is way out of proportion to this orange, don’t you see. The smell. This orange smell. It’s. It’s the essence of orange. It’s where all oranges get the smell they have. The smell that is normally a pale, pathetic imitation of this.
And what this is is pure excitement. Pure happiness. An ecstasy, if you will. A small moment of cooking ecstasy. My diaphragm is fluttering. My heart rate increases. My breathing quickens. Oh, I feel like. I don’t know. Like the next thing will be an angel with real wings will walk into the room and communicate. Or fly in through a window or a wall. A female angel is what I’m thinking. A female angel on the order of. Oh. I don’t know. Rachel Welch, for example. Or Sophia Loren. In their prime. That kind of very impressive angel. That kind of very humbling angel. Communicate what. I don’t know. Will pick me up like Woody Allen. Like a little Woody Allen type of. Oh. You know. Pseudo-intellectual, very sensitive, artistic, well read type of guy. And dance maybe. I don’t know. Dancing would be good. Pick me up and fly me around the room. Fly me around the entire metropolitan area. Around the entire state, maybe. And up. Up into the crown of stars that arches here overhead. Beyond the illusory blue. Beyond the pure blue sky. Up and on and streaming. Faster and faster. Until the stars begin to blur and the dark disappears and there is only light. Completely light. Everywhere. As though we’re flying through all light, a ball of all light. All the light in the universe. Billions of galaxies of light. As though we’re flying through the center of that. This kind of feeling. This kind of sense.
And all of this from this orange here.
This breath from paradise. This breath of God. This intimation of heaven. Here. Amidst the Formica and the pressboard and the TV. The accidental material world. The time-bound material world. Here in a kitchen at a particular place with particular coordinates at a particular point in time. As I’m peeling this orange. This beautiful big succulent orange. From which all paradise. Silly as it sounds. Seems to have come.
Or Perhaps It's The Unmoron
Or perhaps it’s the unmoron I work for now. Perhaps it’s the gentleman I work for now. The. The civilized guy I’m blessed with working for now.
Oh, you know. He’s got his drawbacks. He’s human, like the rest of us. Warty. Scummy. Has that warty and scummy side to him, like we all have. So you don’t turn him over. You avoid turning him over and looking at that side of him. But there’s a sense to him. I don’t know. Like he must be on pretty good terms with God. Must spend some time with him. Like he’s treating his Honored Guest pretty danged well and extending reasonably fine hospitality to him. Giving him the run of the house. Freedom throughout the property.
And it turns out, he’s a Jew. Belongs to the synagogue in town. Worked for him for years, on and off. At two companies. Conscientious. Works hard. Not afraid of a little hard work. Family man. Meets his commitments. Dependable. Smart as a paper cut. One of the smartest guys you’d like to meet. But friendly. And careful. And thorough. Well, but what I like most is this sense that he has an Honored Guest as well. A Guest who is honored in his house. And is granted free reign.
Goes most anywhere he likes. Feels sometimes like working for God himself. Feels sometimes like I’m speaking right directly through to Jesus himself. Who is folded in some nth dimension of space-time I can’t exactly enter into directly on a regular basis. But who is nevertheless there. Working in cahoots with this guy. This unmoron I have now for a boss.
Perhaps you do as well. Or if not, perhaps at some point you may also have the privilege of working for an unmoron such as this. I recommend it. I recommend it highly. It makes life. I don’t know. It brings it up several notches. Turns work into something I wouldn’t exactly call pure pleasure. But I would call it better. Much better than it has been. Much more like it. Much more like the way it could be, if only God were to barge in here and take over. Set the world as we know it aside. And fold us all into his dimension. Into the nth dimension. Into the heavenly dimension. Into eternity itself.
Oh, you know. He’s got his drawbacks. He’s human, like the rest of us. Warty. Scummy. Has that warty and scummy side to him, like we all have. So you don’t turn him over. You avoid turning him over and looking at that side of him. But there’s a sense to him. I don’t know. Like he must be on pretty good terms with God. Must spend some time with him. Like he’s treating his Honored Guest pretty danged well and extending reasonably fine hospitality to him. Giving him the run of the house. Freedom throughout the property.
And it turns out, he’s a Jew. Belongs to the synagogue in town. Worked for him for years, on and off. At two companies. Conscientious. Works hard. Not afraid of a little hard work. Family man. Meets his commitments. Dependable. Smart as a paper cut. One of the smartest guys you’d like to meet. But friendly. And careful. And thorough. Well, but what I like most is this sense that he has an Honored Guest as well. A Guest who is honored in his house. And is granted free reign.
Goes most anywhere he likes. Feels sometimes like working for God himself. Feels sometimes like I’m speaking right directly through to Jesus himself. Who is folded in some nth dimension of space-time I can’t exactly enter into directly on a regular basis. But who is nevertheless there. Working in cahoots with this guy. This unmoron I have now for a boss.
Perhaps you do as well. Or if not, perhaps at some point you may also have the privilege of working for an unmoron such as this. I recommend it. I recommend it highly. It makes life. I don’t know. It brings it up several notches. Turns work into something I wouldn’t exactly call pure pleasure. But I would call it better. Much better than it has been. Much more like it. Much more like the way it could be, if only God were to barge in here and take over. Set the world as we know it aside. And fold us all into his dimension. Into the nth dimension. Into the heavenly dimension. Into eternity itself.
Or Perhaps It's The Moron
Or perhaps it’s the moron I used to work for. Or work for. Or will work for. Perhaps it’s the moron you work for. Or did. Or will. Not that I currently work for a moron. In fact, I don’t. No, just the opposite. But I’ll get to him later.
What I want to flibbertigibbet about now is a moron I used to work for. Little short guy. Little skinny short guy. Thinks he knows everything. Thinks he knows the meaning of everything. Thinks he’s better than the rest of us. A little of that really really irritating arrogance thing going on in there. In fact, a lot of that arrogance thing going on in there.
I won’t go into details. I won’t bore you with the excruciating details, but. Well. For example. He decides he’s an expert on what we can and can’t do in a certain amount of time. What amount of progress is possible given staff and equipment and so forth and so on ad infinitum. He decides on what major milestones we should be working toward, and of course he has no idea. He pretends he knows what he’s doing. Arbitrary, you know. Purely arbitrary.
Here I am. I’m the expert, see. I’ve been through the mill and around the barn. I’ve been through the wringer and back out the other side. I’ve developed an earlier prototype of the thing we’re talking about. Several earlier prototypes. With great sweat of the brow and chilling of the extremities. With many late nights and weekends. With many wakings up in the middle of the night, one’s extremities cold and clammy.
Sweat wetting one’s pillow. Panicked, you know. Purely panicked. So I’ve been through this. And now we’re doing a product. A real product version of this prototype. See. And so we’re putting this schedule together. And we take it to the moron, and he says no. No. But, I say. But.
Which part of no don’t you understand, he says. Here are the dates. Meet them. Well. Of course, he’s the boss. He’s the boss moron you see. He’s the head moron here. He’s got the gold, so he makes the rules. What he says goes type of deal.
But turns out. It actually turns out that. We are not meeting the schedule. We have no hope. There is no light at the end of the tunnel because the tunnel is long. Long. Very long. So long and curvy that there is no visible light from here. And we all know it. We all know this deeply. And we’re all going to turn into failures as a result, you see. We’re all hard-working types of people. At least for the most part. As far as I can tell. And all of us will turn into failures as these dates pop up, and we fail to meet them.
As we utterly fail to meet them. And so I get demoted and I get a new boss between me and the moron. And he says, well Bill. Well, hahahaha. What should I know being the new boss and all. What should I know that I don’t know. That I don’t currently appreciate from our conversations here. From these fun little conversations we’ve been having. And I say, well. The schedule. The schedule is what you should know. It’s absolutely moronic. It’s absolutely impossible. It was put together by an idiot, and I helped.
I helped put the stinking thing together. But it’s ridiculous. You will fail. We will all fail. And we will do so utterly and completely and thoroughly. And so my new boss takes this information to the moron, and the moron calls a meeting, see. A senior level meeting, see. Where all of the senior type guys are all present. The highly paid guys.
And it’s clear what this is about two seconds into the meeting as I’m looking here at the moron. As I’m looking him right in the eye, which he doesn’t like. Doesn’t like at all. It’s one of those butt-kicking meetings. You know what I’m talking about. One of those pull down your trou and get your butt kicked for. Oh. I don’t know. About a half an hour. A meeting in which schedules and teamwork and possible firing are mentioned.
A meeting in which the rules of engagement are established and threats are made if the rules are broken from this point forward. A meeting in which a significant avoidance of eyes is being engaged in by the other participants, as I’m looking around at everyone. Everyone understanding that this meeting is about me and my behavior, see. Me and my petulant behavior. Me and my anti-authoritarian behavior. Me and my adolescent behavior.
All my moaning you see has leaked out everywhere, apparently. Everyone here has heard all my schedule moaning by this time, and my moron has had to take action. Has had to lay down the law so to say. And as he’s doing this. This worldly guy. This guy who is into Rolex watches and sports cars and fornicating every chance he gets and into a certain level of viciousness that is evident to all around. This sinner. This vile sinner.
Suddenly as he’s speaking here about the rules and how he expects me to behave in the future. I suddenly sense that who’s talking here isn’t so much the moron. Oh yes. He’s definitely talking. Don’t get me wrong. But who is really talking through the moron is. Well. You guessed it. God. God the Father. God the creator. I suddenly hear his authority in the irritating voice of the moron.
I suddenly hear God saying. Okay Buddy. I’ll cut you some slack this time. But I expect you to fall into line. I expect you to do what you’re told. You’re not being told to do anything immoral. You’re under this moron’s authority here for a reason. Straighten up there, Bucko. Fly right there, Fella. I’ve got my eye on you. Watch out. Watch your Ps and Qs. You’re on trial here, Buddy. It’s up to you how it turns out.
What I want to flibbertigibbet about now is a moron I used to work for. Little short guy. Little skinny short guy. Thinks he knows everything. Thinks he knows the meaning of everything. Thinks he’s better than the rest of us. A little of that really really irritating arrogance thing going on in there. In fact, a lot of that arrogance thing going on in there.
I won’t go into details. I won’t bore you with the excruciating details, but. Well. For example. He decides he’s an expert on what we can and can’t do in a certain amount of time. What amount of progress is possible given staff and equipment and so forth and so on ad infinitum. He decides on what major milestones we should be working toward, and of course he has no idea. He pretends he knows what he’s doing. Arbitrary, you know. Purely arbitrary.
Here I am. I’m the expert, see. I’ve been through the mill and around the barn. I’ve been through the wringer and back out the other side. I’ve developed an earlier prototype of the thing we’re talking about. Several earlier prototypes. With great sweat of the brow and chilling of the extremities. With many late nights and weekends. With many wakings up in the middle of the night, one’s extremities cold and clammy.
Sweat wetting one’s pillow. Panicked, you know. Purely panicked. So I’ve been through this. And now we’re doing a product. A real product version of this prototype. See. And so we’re putting this schedule together. And we take it to the moron, and he says no. No. But, I say. But.
Which part of no don’t you understand, he says. Here are the dates. Meet them. Well. Of course, he’s the boss. He’s the boss moron you see. He’s the head moron here. He’s got the gold, so he makes the rules. What he says goes type of deal.
But turns out. It actually turns out that. We are not meeting the schedule. We have no hope. There is no light at the end of the tunnel because the tunnel is long. Long. Very long. So long and curvy that there is no visible light from here. And we all know it. We all know this deeply. And we’re all going to turn into failures as a result, you see. We’re all hard-working types of people. At least for the most part. As far as I can tell. And all of us will turn into failures as these dates pop up, and we fail to meet them.
As we utterly fail to meet them. And so I get demoted and I get a new boss between me and the moron. And he says, well Bill. Well, hahahaha. What should I know being the new boss and all. What should I know that I don’t know. That I don’t currently appreciate from our conversations here. From these fun little conversations we’ve been having. And I say, well. The schedule. The schedule is what you should know. It’s absolutely moronic. It’s absolutely impossible. It was put together by an idiot, and I helped.
I helped put the stinking thing together. But it’s ridiculous. You will fail. We will all fail. And we will do so utterly and completely and thoroughly. And so my new boss takes this information to the moron, and the moron calls a meeting, see. A senior level meeting, see. Where all of the senior type guys are all present. The highly paid guys.
And it’s clear what this is about two seconds into the meeting as I’m looking here at the moron. As I’m looking him right in the eye, which he doesn’t like. Doesn’t like at all. It’s one of those butt-kicking meetings. You know what I’m talking about. One of those pull down your trou and get your butt kicked for. Oh. I don’t know. About a half an hour. A meeting in which schedules and teamwork and possible firing are mentioned.
A meeting in which the rules of engagement are established and threats are made if the rules are broken from this point forward. A meeting in which a significant avoidance of eyes is being engaged in by the other participants, as I’m looking around at everyone. Everyone understanding that this meeting is about me and my behavior, see. Me and my petulant behavior. Me and my anti-authoritarian behavior. Me and my adolescent behavior.
All my moaning you see has leaked out everywhere, apparently. Everyone here has heard all my schedule moaning by this time, and my moron has had to take action. Has had to lay down the law so to say. And as he’s doing this. This worldly guy. This guy who is into Rolex watches and sports cars and fornicating every chance he gets and into a certain level of viciousness that is evident to all around. This sinner. This vile sinner.
Suddenly as he’s speaking here about the rules and how he expects me to behave in the future. I suddenly sense that who’s talking here isn’t so much the moron. Oh yes. He’s definitely talking. Don’t get me wrong. But who is really talking through the moron is. Well. You guessed it. God. God the Father. God the creator. I suddenly hear his authority in the irritating voice of the moron.
I suddenly hear God saying. Okay Buddy. I’ll cut you some slack this time. But I expect you to fall into line. I expect you to do what you’re told. You’re not being told to do anything immoral. You’re under this moron’s authority here for a reason. Straighten up there, Bucko. Fly right there, Fella. I’ve got my eye on you. Watch out. Watch your Ps and Qs. You’re on trial here, Buddy. It’s up to you how it turns out.
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