Well, I’ve been absent for a while and I am planning to continue to be to be honest. I have backed away—ever so slowly as to not rouse the machines attention—from screens as much as possible.

The other morning, to my surprise a wedge of light flitted its prism past my closed eyes while sitting at my desk and I was caught up in blindness becoming sight and Messiah spit and Ents and a poem found it’s way out of my pen. My friend Scott Aasman’s work with the story from the book of Mark careened through my imagination as I was writing.

I hope that it finds you well and nourished and maybe nourishes where you are in need.

I have not decide on the form of the poem yet. Would you offer your feedback? I will provide two versions. The second version would look better on a desktop computer as it will function in shape like prose but on your phone will seems too similar to the first.

Big thanks to my friend Garett Walker for letting me use one of his startlingly beautiful photos above.

Though the posts may be occasional, if you’ve found your way here would you consider subscribing? You’ll get everything for free and your readership is generosity enough but maybe you’re interested in extending that generosity further and supporting this work with a few extra dollars? Either way thank you so much!

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FROM A DARKNESS


I see acute angles pinch light through
gossamered skin, I see
columns of shadow pass and settle
in periphery like lasting presences
soft hunk split hunks
which seem like root
which seam like branch
it all seems right but disks of light
which pull the light like singularity
like the mass of soul beckoning
gravity with its sphere with the slippage of 
the rotund in rounds of passing
the feature which makes it mean
which casts possibility in swaths
which makes it man, then
warm padded palms of light and
pressure the suction of flesh curve
over funneling for two chasms
for sight is how the past travels on light
how memory meets it with the hospitality of
its offering and all is some kind of clarity
and with clarity:
“don’t go into the village”

FROM A DARKNESS

I see acute angles pinch light through gossamered skin. I see columns of shadow pass and settle in periphery like lasting presences, soft hunk split hunks which seem like root, which seam like branch. It all seems right but disks of light which pull the light like singularity, like the mass of soul beckoning gravity with its sphere, with the slippage of the rotund in rounds of passing, the feature which makes it mean, which casts possibility in swaths, which makes it man.

The warm light of padded palms push the suction of flesh curve over funneling for two chasms. For sight is how the past travels on light, how memory meets it with the hospitality of its offering and all is some kind of clarity and with clarity: “don’t go into the village”

A few weeks ago I was in South Carolina with my family. A big sky one day whispered to me that clouds are the questions of the Earth. It’s been reverberating its mystery in my heart ever since, smoothing out abrasions, abrading the smooth.

While playing with my kids I’ve been telling them, Finley, Arthur, clouds are the questions of the Earth. They roll their eyes.

I’m planning to speak to them in poems more and more, maybe as much as anything else. Hoping for that look of disdain in their desire to out grow such nonsense, but knowing it tugs at the playful inside them still, betrayed by the light lifting on the corners of their mouths. And as their lives will inevitably cast high walls as fortresses from the forests of their imagination, I hope that each small utterance of a poem will be a toehold for them to climb and escape on outings in the wild, until, one day they make the demand out of their own volition that doors be cut in that wall to move in and out of freely.

A poem came out of the whisper. It follows and, I hope you are well.

(Audio of Types of Billowing)

TYPES OF BILLOWING


Clouds are the questions of the Earth

they are secrets of how their shadows cast out swaths of continuity over one grey horse and one black horse in a field but how to see a rabbit there loosens the range of its contour, it becomes a trade of types, types of billowing

becomes new circumstances for what light means, becomes negotiations for trembling, for abrasions in song 

as the world flickers there, someone invents dancing and pummels, nearly wind-born, this red rock they have found and binds it with rendering boil while readying torches

preparing the dark trough and burgeoning crest of their soul

how the body looks when steadying, bent with a hand upon a rock, intuiting how sound, polished by the duration of incremental hands

bent low and flickered, the flames dance draws out the reminiscence in loam, recalls again its query

the world plays out by memory working its way through hands, onto a sheet of heaved granite

on it collides circles, melded to puffs of swollen eddying, hovering over beasts he tames with marks

pock and raise the ground whispers lifted intonation

it takes where blue is an impossibility to raise the reverberations in voice

to coddle the metanoia of space

from deficiency to abundance

Happiest of Summer Sundays to you. Here’s a poem:

THE CREEK RUN LITHELY VEES


The creek run lithely vees glass lines from a stick
within that flat womb a trout holds its flexing and dappled corrections
among the sky shifting the same wind flicking leaves
all else: amounts of light, the dark tug under roots, irreverent croaks
a correspondence of character which
gathers without receding, nothing without in its exponent
an eye gathers down its blouse

under the creekbed are dark waters
mirrored in the lee when
light and wind are one
the disparate’s havoc
bound in cataclysm
something vees a flat womb
where fin negotiates
a paled eye longing

First, the shortest poem I’ve ever written:

HELL

is birdlessness

Off of our kitchen is a garage. The garage has a front door which leads to the driveway, and a back door to a fenced yard. We also have a puppy. Since December, Maple has complicated our love in the best of ways and it has been easiest to leave this back garage door open during the day for her ease of access to the yard. As you can imagine, this looks, to the incivility of the wild, like an invitation, though I’m unsure of the appeal of it to beasts other than, perhaps, a cave’s seclusion and protection.

Two weeks ago, I was putting away some of the kids’ toys left strewn and on the top shelf of an old bookcase we now use for storing the ubiquitous odds and ends of accumulation, was a blip of earth. A hole fissured between the ungodly green sheen of polyethylene, shattered the wash of the cumbersome with a sampling of selected anachronism: twigs from oak, shagbark hickory, sweetgum, pinch-fulls of pine straw, woven and tucked by jitters of largest of little motivations.

I could not and cannot fix its shape within my rationale, this nest. The edges, disordered and be-longed in a way that is severe but tightens in symmetry quickly and maintains through to the minute cavity, front-facing, just the right size to protect and depart, and woven to withstand all the mothers ins and outs, the eventual clamored strain of fleshy necks, and flight education. The quality of it, its shape, its size and composition strikes me as, indeed, motherly and evades me.

Immediately I showed my children. From a distance I lifted them to see her little face, veed to its slender point, an ocher mask wrapped in bands around her soft, umber head. While she is out, doing whatever birds do, we peek, lifted on tip-toes to see beyond the nest’s rim two speckled eggs, like the merest swelling of matter.

The garage is lit dimly by a single bulb and each time I walk through it, I look toward the nest and in the incubating dark look for what is only the slightest of contrast from her downy face and when she is there I talk to her.

Talking to an animal is a matter of faith. It is shot through with the ignorance that is necessitated by wonder, but also foolishness. And so, yes, I hesitate to write it but have, for years now, when encountering a deer by the roadside, stopped, rolled down the window and asked, specifically, and mean it, what do you know that I don’t know? Nothing, so far, has answered. But asking questions is fruitful in its own right as the act instantiates an acknowledgement that is an absence: I don’t know things and shouldn’t. The uncertainty in this is a womb. A womb is a void. A womb is dark waters. It resembles our constitution, questions mirror the depth of the world, mirror a life whose state is true in its plea of:

Search me, God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.1

And so:

Hello, Mother Wren. What do you know that I don’t know?

We stare at one another. She blinks and I hope that my attention, stillness, gentle movement turn her skepticism and fear toward, what?, toward, well, trust! I don’t know how else to name my hope in her visit, and I feel sure it’s what I mean. Trust. I wipe tears from my eyes and console her with alphabetic strands of what can only be murmurs to her. I try to make them mild in tone and cadence. She, Mother Wren, is a locked box. I simply cannot cajole a note from her. She barely moves, and I know that I can’t know, and she helps me. Helps me to learn to hold not knowing as a warmth.

There is something else about her being here, something about the whole mess of the matter, the nest, our attempts at this hospitality, her panic when the kids (and my) threshold for stillness shatters, the compression strength of the piebald calcium of shells and how protection of fecundity expands into metaphor, she is a grace. A grace of the wild. In all that we have learned to control, or exhaust ourselves trying to maneuver into straight lines and dotted i’s she blesses us with the benediction of being near as she acts, perhaps solely, on intuition. As if she, in the circumstance and crammed calculability of our lives beseeches God for us, if only in the weave of her nest. The interruption of her into this modern mess of our hearts is a profound gift I’m not entirely sure what to do with.

And how does all this work? Will the eggs hatch under her? Will she feel the tremor and pull herself out in a flick? Once hatched does she sit back on top of them? How have I been alive for 43 years and do not know the answers to these? How can I know the market price of, well, anything, how can I know the right pressure to trigger even the recoil of these keys and I can’t pick out a wrens call amidst street noise? How long is a wren’s lifespan? I am, I’m afraid, more guilty than you Mr. Neruda2:

I declare myself guilty of not having made,
with these hands they gave me, a broom.
Why have I made no broom?
Why was I given hands?

Why was I given a mind and do not know these things?

And you Mr. Leopold, I heed your words:

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm.3

I hope to dodge the dangers of not befriending a wren. More and more I am convinced, and Mother Wren tips the scales, that rather than fulfillment, Hope, even in all its openness and its waiting, its long-suffering, may be itself the best answer we can receive for Ache.

The resonant hum of God, perhaps once a glorious clamor, retreats and quiets just below the threshold of everyday appeal in order to draw us back from the glamor of the surface and into depth. This happens incrementally throughout life within the continuity of our willingness to chase it, never retreating so much that we cannot desire it but also never still enough to stall us toward stagnation. And so we grow toward wisdom and rootedness and connection with Divine ground.

This though is at the expense of the cataracted haze of the familiar, a catastrophe of the every day, the demolition of affirmation. This is the necessary negation of God in God’s willingness to fill anything whatsoever.

VARIATIONS

Easy to see in the splay of the hundred year old sycamore
guardian of this creek

more hidden in matted grasses, tall but low-folded in the stalk
the shape of the memory of deer

even less in the clinging froth of spittlebug nymphs
the slender hour glasses between glossed spheres

late overcast sky darkens openings in the thicket
confused by the garble I lean close and as still as possible 
something nearly frightening, nearly familiar in the murmur

Just a short poem on, what I hope for you is, a happy Sunday.

THE GRACE OF OLD LIGHT

.

There is a nearly green of green

that notch that

East increment before dark

light as a sheet retreating

a lifting line of light which

swathes open the curtain

of night with

each tooth of star grinning

the efferent grace of old light

sky’s sage oracles

effulging pictures as memory

humming out their

syncopations with

shadow

Every once in a while I feel as if I am asked to collaborate with the Beckoning Will in writing a poem so porous it hardly retains its constitution as a whole something. When I picture this it is a kite in a tornado, its string a nearly imperceptible thread tethered to the pappy, reflexive grip of a newborn.

It’s like asking, how many characteristics can I remove from a chair and still have a chair? and if removing one, two or three legs when does it stop being a chair and just a bucked section of a tree? What sort of pressure can I apply, and how much does the rest of the thing in question need to adapt to maintain its nomenclature? How much pressure is too much or, I suppose, how little substance is too little?1

Applying this kind of force can be helpful for a few reasons. It can further our understanding of the limits of language, but also see beyond those limits to prelinguistic forms of communication, forms which—though we tend to not realize—we rely on deeply and which may be more prominent than we allow our value systems to reach.2

More broadly though it can help us become more charitable about ideas of Unity. Unity and similarity are not the same thing, but when we are stuck in the rut of the false equivalence we can’t, it seems to me, learn the difference without stress testing. You have to let in the anomaly to see if it fits or strip the thing down to the bones in order to really see what binds it and how robust it is under the veneer of the superficial.3 This is as uncomfortable as watching Christ’s feet washed with the hair and perfume of the ostracized. I want to think I’d see things as clear and receptive as our Lord but I’d likely be murmuring in the shadows about the market value of spikenard.

This is especially difficult with language, which is why poetry is such a powerful force. The ubiquity of unconsidered language has us bamboozled into thinking language is something it is not. No matter how precise, there is never a one:to:one ratio between what we say and what we are wanting to say. Furthermore, all language—yes, all—is translated, and there is no telling what can happen on that bridge of translation between two feeling landmasses of expectation, presupposition, desire, confusion, willed and unrealized concealment, and more.

This does not even get into our academic and religious relationship with language and written text. There is a lot to say about religion’s affect on the expectations of words. For another time.

The last benefit to mention is, this stripping bare, helps with allowing the strangeness of the world to come back through our ever-deducing, ever-rationalizing, ever status-quoing minds. We open the door just a little more to comprehending the simultaneous solidity and fluidity of the world, like the first time seeing a non-newtonian fluid (I think I was in my thirties when my daughter showed me oobleck!) and the world expands even a little, and also, our parameters for the word God enlarge, even if just a smidge, that is, if we let them.

How thin can I make language and it still be language? Another expanding metaphor is aerogel. Have you seen this stuff?! The point isn’t how weird can we make things, it is, you thought you knew things about the world, oh, you’re far more ignorant that you realized.

Ignorance is the substance of Wonder. There’s no way around it.

Well, all this is to say just the other day I was feeling this exact invitation. Where this is raw material and I still have quite a bit of thinking to do about what I’ve learned I thought I’d share a the resulting poem.

So, Heat:

HEAT



If





water fits around a fish

there is a hemlock which standardized desire for the Greeks or maybe it was the French

spoon sizes

we have all received dogs like a supplement

There used to be a grass, nearly silver, that shook off its dew at 5:45 a.m., before anyone could see, so that the dew on any grass blade actually belonged to its neighboring blade but also belonged to some kind of longing

No one knew all of that about me

Fingers splayed, arms stretched forward because of a shoulder injury, his breath gathered a mass of texture and expelled and someone was sure of something he sang but that certainty left almost immediately when he gasped something guttural.  It was as if the earth were churning.  They felt pity.  He felt ecstasy

I wonder about a lot of heat

The other day I was confronted, yet again, by a tree, by bustles of wind and plumage; by a giggle and the pregnancy of the world. What it rustled up against in me was some misplaced trust, some spurious poise lurking, otherwise undetected in the deep.

Christ didn’t seem concerned about the foundations we build.1 We are good builders after all and their surety will be just fine, its our discretion for environment, our choice for a plot of land which gathered his empathy. There may be bedrock under the sand that we’ve built upon but it will take a good amount of displacement to get our footers settled on granite.

Iain McGilchrist’s work on understanding the human brains hemisphere dominance shift within the modern West is a fascinating thing. Essentially—and likely overly generalized—the left hemisphere’s job is an explicit rationalism, to simplify and categorize and as a result, often polarizes toward discrimination. The right hemisphere is more subtle, deals in gradation and, therefore, can accommodate, as Emily Dickinson says, telling the Truth slant. It receives and wields poetic nuance and the inclusion of paradox because it sees the gestalt and rubs shoulders with the implicit.

Neither side should be disparaged. We, of course, need both, but the amenable quality of the right hemisphere allows for the necessary work of the left side, whereas, the left hemisphere is far too exclusionary to cooperate with the right. It is, so to speak, its way or the highway.

McGilchrist speculates a cultural shift. The premodern world functioned from a right hemisphere dominance. When it broke the world down it did so in story and song. But with the innovations of the modern world and their utter transformation came a shift in the brains favoring.

McGilchrist is clear that The Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, etc., were and are of the utmost benefit to humanity but left a predicament in their wake. One that we are living within the amelioration of.

Have you felt the whispered rumors within gathering substance?

All this has left me wondering, what else was in the bath water with the baby careening through the air? What sort of ground to we have to regain?

As an artist in a rational-driven world I’ve had to do quite a bit of work in repairing a trust of my emotions and intuition. There’s been quite a lot of me, nerve wrecked in the passenger seat, handing over the keys.

What needs restored from hundreds of years of neglect of the imagination? What reparative work in its lineage? But this question is too broad.

No, for now, we will fight the battles as they come which status-quo the grasses and blunts the force of rivers to mere hydrogen and oxygen, to percentages in weather pattern. We do the hard, rewarding work of paying attention. We will do as Wendell Berry says:

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.

Here is a poem from a brief encounter which dislodged my modern hip to a limp, just this past weekend.

I didn’t stand a chance.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

A creekside sycamore groaned and I dismissed its voice as
matter upon matter to console myself and my children
but then considered the matter in saying love, justice, poetic–
a bit of force and friction and time–
and whether I have anything at all to do
with what drives the desire that results in
a poem, a song, a sigh

there is a generosity in the 

where were you when I…?

how taciturn

the rocks

Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber of A Brusk Night’s Crisp Morning. Your support is considerably meaningful to me.

As we are passing through Lent and now in Holy Week this little poem keeps coming to mind. He has died and he is risen.

DIMMING TOWARD


A duck laughs in the dark
twice
it rounds out
by abrasion

some conclusion within

most of me agrees
what doesn’t
preserves for
considerations in forbearance

the stars east
are dimming toward
a duck laugh in the light

This past weekend was our yearly Breath and Clay event in Winston Salem, North Carolina. It was—as it always is—tender, warming, inspiring, full to the brim, challenging, heartening, and exhausting in the beautiful way that good work is.

There are a thousand things to say about it, which I’m still processing, but thought I would share the text from my talk.

THE SPACE IN ELIJAH’S EAR

The inner ear houses the cochlea. The cochlea is a spiral, like a snail’s shell where sound waves translated through the friction of three tiny bones is received by frequency-corresponding hairlike sensors through the friction’s ripple in liquid, endolymph and perilymph. These twenty-five thousand sensors are staggered strategically through the progressive twists in the cochlea’s labyrinth. The receptivity of this is changed from vibration to electrical information, like some kind of divaricated jerk-lined alchemy; and as this plays over the brain, this wonder, this mysterious process opens to the kind of wind that could possibly ghost out something like:1

In the beginning was the Word

And the Word was with God and

The Word was God

He was with God in the beginning

A space is made in Elijah’s ear. The world has filled with fire and storm and is too full at the door of the cave of his waiting. The clamor–it too resembles his tumultuous life and he perceives the space in his ear because of how sibilance fills the height, fricative the sides and diphthong (diff-thong) the hallowed and hollowed and hollowed depths.

And there is within that susurrus the something flitting between the keratin of the four iridescent humeri of Memory and Thought who tend to hunger and within that hunger is what causes scribes to painstakingly recount, to gather galls and pummel them to pigments with the painters, who, by the light of their wicks gather into the chthonic rupture of granite for, well God knows why, but they do, WE do.

The sleeping minds of our loves scatter, recall and gather in phantasmagoria, we collect words and pluck taught strings and cry melodies and harmonies and dissonances past our teeth and it gathers in the cochlea as the stirrup, anvil and hammer tremble their reverberative pittance.

And the dancers, having imbued what rides on that wind in the waves of that sound and in an instance intuited how their bones and bodies might shimmer the mirrored complexity of the inner workings of the heart, the mind, the spirit, the soul, the inspired, the transpired, the glory, the call, the pleading, the awake, the slumbering, the gloaming, the noon sun, the shadow of night and on and on and on and on.

We wonder and wonder and wonder and ache and ponder and make things and scatter our making in the hopes of gathering the attention of those we want, REALLY want to love more and more and more and more.

And there it IS, hope. That hope that is a space we make, and hope is a kind of:

In the beginning

In the beginning with

In the beginning was

and in having made that kind of space we…..

And there it is! Odin’s eye floating until sated and encumbered in the waters, and the little skin-toothed, sopped ridges of Fionn’s thumb. Our uncles have pleaded, our aunts are keening. And how soon is it that you inhabit praise, upon the tongue? when instantiated by action? or is it when one rides the wave of mirth upon the heart or the even the summoning swell of absence in its trough? You play upon our being, our being in time, across time and into the cataclysm of kairos, and so our bodies sing and so our making our dreaming our hoping sings.

And having made that kind of space we…..

And there, Elijah’s chair, somehow it is–otherwise–the chair of my father, the chair of my daughter, the chair of Great-grand, the chair of the first Adam reserved, and when you met Christ on the mount what would you have said, but I imagine you offering that chair in your modest zeal compared to flaming eyes, compared to the inhabitants of any chair since, abandoned in a lack of sitting, for we are kneeling, for we are standing, with a brush in our hand, with a song or a stanza is in our cheek, we have an idea that we have to work out….

And having made that kind of space we…..

Oh God, give us the stapes, give us the anvil, be the Theseus of this labyrinthine cochlea, its darkness is as light to you, Oh, my dear God, won’t you give us eyes to see, won’t you give us the grace of ears to hear.

And having made that kind of space we…..

It’s been a little while because I’ve been scurrying to and fro from one project and engagement to the next. All good things.

I’m thrilled to let you all know about the upcoming exhibition of my work at The Mary Condon Hodgson Art Gallery, Visual and Performing Arts Center. The exhibition will be up through March but opening on Saturday March 7th with a reception and I’ll be doing a little talk from 5 to 7 p.m. Here are some details in the image caption, but let me know if you have any questions:

A few more announcements:

I'm also glad to be leading a break-out session on Friday March 6 from 9:15-10:30 a.m. The focus of my session will be about the artist belonging to the edges and the margin, and the danger of being beckoned toward the status quo. The Square Halo Conference is a wonderful event and there are more details HERE:

Last announcement. One of our favorite times of the year is coming, The Breath and The Clay! The Breath & the Clay is a community of artists and creators showcasing beauty, life and wonder through works of art, community and faith.
Each year since 2014, The Breath and the Clay has gathered in Winston Salem, North Carolina for a 3-day experience curated to inspire, challenge and transform your creative and spiritual journey. The event consists of live performances, keynote talks, an immersive art gallery and instructional workshops.
Details HERE.

Now! Onto the meat of it! I wanted to share a few words about my upcoming exhibition, The Cure For Light. Some of this will be reiterated at the coming artist talk but I know a few of you are at a distance from our stretch of the Appalachian Foothills.

THE CURE FOR LIGHT

The details aren’t clear to me, nor to any of my family but when my grandfather was a boy he and some friends got a hold of some fireworks. Through either some misstep or miscalculation one burst in his face. The gulp of light nearly blinded him. The doctor’s prescription was that he was to stay in a room for several weeks which held no light. Sun blotted from sealed windows, switches off, matches hid. I remember my grandfather seeing.

The work in this exhibition takes as its point of departure–at least to some extent– a cultural iteration of the doctor’s prescription. We are, afterall, in the aftermath of a gulp of light that has been detonating for hundreds of years and is so named, The Enlightenment. We have at every turn a blinding effulgence of its repercussions, endless facts, clear axioms, a facility of food and pleasure and knowledge; limitless light.

The way we receive and distribute our information and interactions is still brand new. For centuries and centuries and centuries humanity’s allocation of knowledge and understanding were dispensed through story. Where the proliferated ease of information in our modern age can be compared to staring at an eclipse with sunglasses, a story is a dance between gradations of light and shadow.

And within humanities oeuvre of story, across time and culture there are countless iterations of a similar troupe. One which sets up the metaphoric possibility of my grandfather’s story.

Now, where the circumstances and characters differ, the narrative, if generalized, is the same, wisdom is worked into humanity through difficulty. Moreover, zooming into particulars are story after story of repentance, deepening, or downfall as a result of blindness. Oedipus, Tiresias, Polyphemus, The Blind Salmon of Assaroe, Samson, Tobit, St. Paul, St. Lucy, St. Bridgid, Tarvaa, The Blind Man and the Loon, The Blind Men of the Menominee Tribe, and on and on.

How does all of this imbue the work of this exhibition? There are hints of these stories throughout the images and narratives within the work, however, part of the work vacillates between hinting and alluding. This isn’t because of a desire to be cryptic, but is an allegiance to intuition and association. I’m not as interested in retelling a story as I am allowing the story to work and move within my psyche, to comingle with memory, radiate off of my own ignorance, perturb and caress whatever technical ability and knowledge I may have, link with the olfactory, become chummy with what is withheld even from my own rationality.

What interests me the most is the way that creative work leans away from the type of light exposure that may be damaging. Being a modern person and one in the West I am swimming in the light of Modernity, breathing it in, and have found art-making to be a way of exercising a different type of seeing. Myths, poetry, and painting, and nearly all creative work are a Truth that is not contingent upon fact, and more than that they rely on a kind of seeing that really can’t be described as anything but an inner sight. We court the imagination, are caught up in dalliances with the Muse (who we do not see), we rely on something as breathy and invisible as the wind of Inspiration. We drop a bucket into the darkened world beneath our feet hoping to pull up something to slake our collective thirst.

I hope, if it is within the realm of possibility you will come see the show and will let me know what you think.

Thank you dear reader.

Sycamore, Middletown, Frederick County, Maryland

Orientalis but slipshod Occident. Stammers in the bare-bone woods. Fish-white tree, like petrified lightning, struck rising from the electric cloud of earth. The eye of the leaping, white stag, a twist of burl against it.

Some rot or bug, some circumstance known to some time hollowed it, bore the heart to a tube, so that the bark curled inward like a dough, a soft beckoning, propitious and awe-full.

The sycamore’s white deepened the landscape’s gradation, blued its umber, and contrasted this obscene absence inward, to seem all the more hollow, as a nothing-hollow rather than a something-hollow. My father urged us in. To stoop sideways through its narrow chasm. He knew the woods and his urging could be trusted but I remember hesitating for fear of bats and the unknown; refusing most trips, waiting on vicarious courage to spill from my brothers, but must have–once, at least–surrendered to curiosity. I remember the blue-white coin of the shrunken sky, the womb of constricting sound, the hull, dust and chitin floor, the staying low toward the consolidation of the world. I recall absorption and the dark, but knew all this in the moment as the quick roundness of a burst, hemmed in duration and diffusing.

The event of entering into the heart of the sycamore. The subtext of indirect umph. The unbeknown hints of passage rite. Oh, that its grip in the recesses remains.

Cairn, Inistioge, County Kilkenny, Ireland

Something I do not know and should never know. Our honeymoon, obstructed by circumstance. No car and distant, paid-for plans, against the busless, cab-less leisure of Easter weekend. A result of poor planning.

Patricia, our host, is a strange binding agent to the memory. She is injured and brash. Sits with us at dinner making demands of her neighbor Cathleen, whose goodwill has just barely overpowered her reluctance and it shows in her furrowed brow and grumbling.

Cathleen prepares and serves the meal to us. Three couples, each within their own celebration, and Patricia–pearls just overlapping the scooped neck of the same black dress she rose from the gravel to greet us in–bellows commands from her seat to the kitchen, for salt, bread, a fork. “Cathleeeen! Oh Cathleeeen!” We guests shrink glances at one another wondering if we are in a dream.

Having been driven by the friend of a grocery store clerk whose cab was out of service for the holiday, we were dropped off thirty yards from the house as a blot of black in the drive impeded our nearing. This blot was Patricia. She had suffered a gash in her leg from a–hinted-at–shopping cart incident and “must lay with it elevated or they will have to amputate.” And so, presumably, either for lack of a readily accessible prop near a reasonable chair, or for want of fresh air, she chose the slight grade of the stone driveway over the lush grass just beside. As she rose to shake our hands, straw, grass and stone-dust clung to her dress and my eyes darted away from the bright red of her lipstick-dashed teeth.

The cabby left and before loading in our suitcases Patricia solicited our help in finding her missing cat. The cat had “cat aids” she told us and she was concerned it had gone off to die.

We found it by climbing stacks of hay in the barn and luring it with the specialty cuts of meat Patricia procured from, undoubtedly, the same grocery store which was a battlefield.

Patricia’s wildness continued, but at some point we wound up on a trail cutting through the epitome of an Irish countryside which, purportedly, culminated in a four-thousand year old stone cairn. The “just” of “just over” or “just at the end of….” nudged us past our wavering about the time of day. Evening was not far and flashlights or maps were waved off with bemoans of brevity.

There was no end in sight. The clarity of the hares dash turned to disconcerting gray and blurred blips of “what was that” and we still had the return journey to consider. I had been longing for the cairn. Longing for something just beneath the soil of our circumstance. Some experience of Ireland.

The weight of the unknown tethered to the dark got the best of us. We turned back and an ache settled that I still feel, a sehnsucht. The mysterious knowledge in nostalgia for what is never encountered. How can our longing feel so specific for what we haven’t known? I didn’t experience the cairn, didn’t–in all my expectations for it–engage Ireland but for hints between disorientation. We were held back by the hand of circumstance, and know it less–it seems–for having been. Unless the deepening of not knowing and longing is a trait.

Ritual, St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Mecklenburg County, Charlotte, North Carolina

Most of my experience with formal religion is a feigned ritual-lessness. The charismatic churn of my upbringing prided itself in what it said was spontaneity and informality but was really the stricture of a kind of downstream apophasis.

Our seeming lack of ritual was itself a ritual, all the while it side-eyed the liturgically forthright. The taboo of it has–as it tends to–become a magnet of curiosity as I go through the customary inventorying of principle in retrospection. For the last ten years or so formal liturgy has been whispering its psst of possibility to me from the corners.

A few years back my wife Christy’s talents of hospitality and event-making were called upon by a friend whose daughter was getting married. We made the drive from Maryland to North Carolina with a truck full of decor and event gear, and pulled into the parking lot of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church.

It had been around thirty-five years since I’d been in a Catholic church as a ring-bearer for my second cousin’s wedding; two years since I had taken my first and still, only steps into an Orthodox church for a friend’s Chrism. It is like visiting unknown relatives in another state or country, the knowledge of our relation had me squinting for any similarity of kin, any quirk or quip for a frame of reference.

As we entered we were met by a church administrator who whispered an introduction and explained there was a funeral mass in session for a prominent church leader who died suddenly the week before. Her whispers were unnervingly set against a murmur of chant muffled by the glass wall that sealed the Nave with a closed door.

Inside the Nave was standing room only and had the grieving packed with their backs concealing any view of whatever it was that was happening. It seemed a procession of sorts was taking place, there was singing, I swear I saw–through the cracks between black garb–a tinsel-winged angel descended from a cable. Was the priest levitating? Was that a donkey?

We were ushered to a back room where we could load in the decor and flowers for the next day’s wedding. Through the foyer we walked the articles of celebration nearly tiptoed, tucking it away to not contaminate the contrasting milestones and with every pass of that glass wall I strained to see the fire of glory descend upon the altar through a haze of incense, stretched hope toward a palpability of sound beyond the incomprehensible, labored an extension of heart to cling to the housed breath of the Almighty.

As Victor Hugo said, “there’s nothing more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening.”

Unloaded, we were whisked away by obligation without a bereaved face to hold in memory. The stores of formal ritual still cobwebbed in the corners and longing for something with the direct formidability of a two-thousand year old tradition.

But what is the substrata of breath? And how many times have I breathed?

LORD, Consider my sighing.

From what soil does authority bloom? And what of the roots? The darkness is as light? I mean really; to God, the darkness is as light? Did you descend as a flame beneath the slain hide of Joshua’s tent as you did between the gilt cherubim of the tabernacle? And the mountain? You were in the rumbled shifts of the tectonic? You were on a slight puff of wind after having obliterated Baal? Were you in the “not” of “not my will but yours be done”? The sopping-up of angels, tipping back the cup?

We do not have wonder where we are sated. It is possible that we know less in the glut of clarity. What’s more, deep experience is instantiated by lack’s indirectness. Our positivist belly is showing.

What if disappointment itself is not an absence, but a messenger, a catalyst. A positive rather than negative, a giving rather than taking away, generative rather than depletive, an efference from abundance. Daren’t we take the hand of Virgil? If we deny his guiding hand we risk the rootless sweep of being unexamined, we are bedridden, volumeless; we are thinned, pallored clear by atrophy; gaged to asphyxiation by a kind of knowing.

Well Merry Christmas to you! We are in the thick of Advent season. I’ll begin with a poem.

The Scent of Hyssop

He has come. Shoo the nosing cattle from the four-thousand year old amnion. Dissuade the evil eye from–where?–a manger? A cave? Under which of Gilgamesh’s cedars was your umbilical cord buried? Is it massive shade for the same livestock which lowed anthems with angels? Dirt roiled by hooves clung–He has come. Which two wrung birds gave their bones to flame for your purification? God has inhaled an eternal lung and made space for God’s matter–He has come.

Nestled between stretches of Appalachian foothills, each year our town celebrates Christmas along a cordoned off street with song, food and the lighting of the town tree. This year, the evening ended in the Lutheran Church singing Joy To The World with our daughter’s Elementary School Choir. We shed layers of coats while trying to find the tempo between the ill-matched organ and song-master. We were greeted by the pastor, who pointed out–among the prominent red decor and clumsily matched garb of the choir–hints of sarum blue symbolizing the anticipation of Christ as the color of the dawn sky before his arrival.

In a culture widely skeptical of formal ritual and tradition, Christmas holds a magnifying glass to our inability to completely dispense with them. The days darken and this jarring culpability presents itself. If we double down on our suspicion, we grow calloused. Scrooge and the Grinch are troupes for just such a state of mind. But the heartlessness will no doubt suffuse the rest of our lives. Where Christmas is a maximal example of the gravitational pull of season, cycle and the body and psyche’s need for them, all of life is made of such rhythms.

If we–on the other hand–lay our barriers of skepticism aside, the heightened sense of nostalgia around the season can so easily offer disorientingly disparate emotions. There is just too much real life in the mix for us to get swept away and too much of the raw power of custom to ignore. There is new light in children’s eyes, and darkening light in others. All too often grief and happiness mix into tenebrous gradations the way the red and green may if leached from their boundaries.

And I’ve been wondering, perhaps we are ritualizing the wrong thing. It could be that we are longing for simplicity for something far more complicated.

This will not be popular amongst the greeting cards and department stores, but, maybe Christmas is meant to be disorienting. It’s at the heart of this problem of expectations that I think it would behoove us to consider more deeply the monumental themes of Advent: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.

Borrowed Feelings

In her book Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard says,

That is why scenes of high drama–suicide, rape, murder, incest–or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings.

This, I think, can be expanded to include almost all of life: life does not operate on borrowed feelings.

The words housing the themes of Advent are far too familiar. So many of us have been told how to feel or think about these words our whole life and their familiarity is often the result of being set aside for high places as the caretakers of them brush by in casual obligation. The result is essentially asking others too to operate on the borrowed feelings encapsulated within each word.

Advent is the perfect opportunity for us to exercise an allowance of complexity to language with its focus on four words we claim familiarity with and perhaps in doing so we can recognize the disorientation of the holidays that so many feel as a feature of them and not a problem to be solved.

Hope As A Deep Principle

These four words (Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love) are Deep Principles. We imagine them connected to the heart, something housed within, or something planted.

As, perhaps, a planted seed, what springs forth as a result of growth, does not entirely resemble the seed, but is more than it; more colorful, more materially. But also, what comes from the seed is not just what breaks through the surface, but what also penetrates deeper into the Earth. The whole health of the tree isn’t just resembled by the trunk and foliage, but is contingent on the establishment of the roots, which also were kept within the seed as potential.

Each principle then manifests in differing ways. Ways on the surface and ways in the depths. Both, in the light of the sun and the chthonic deep. These metaphors are helpful because a casual glance at these themes will have one looking only at the surface manifestation. Typically this is how words flatten. We recognize their growth but not their depth, and this is particularly true in the modern world whose obsession is growth.

What then are the manifestations of the seed of Hope? On the surface there is anticipation, expectation, fulfillment. Hope has future tied to it. This thing is moving toward something. We foresee, casting a line from the past into desire and an enticement builds. We see green, we think generative, lively, healthy. We see red, purple, we see bloom and we think–not just effective and progressing, but an added layer, beauty. And that addition, that component of the assuaging of beauty, casts all doubt of goodness and health aside. We are convinced, Hope is here.

But let’s go deeper. Hope is impregnated, bursting at the seams, with lack. This is not the kind of lack that is a deficiency, but one that houses possibility and is lack nonetheless. In this way it is an abundance. All hope is contingent upon it.

Just as the bloom on the surface signifies a certainty, perhaps there is a bloom of the deep. The interwoven knot of roots, unmanicured and grim-edged. A highway of nutrients, murky and soiled.

What then of the Hope of Advent? What of the lack that the holidays reveal and even magnify? The holiday is not just a filling in but also a kind of deep breath of spirit. The leaves have thinned, fallen and molder toward the purpled umber of a stygian pulp. The wind is palpable in its incision. The sun greys.

Can we allow for Winter to be a hope? Not just hope for Spring’s sake, but its own abundance? We often look toward Spring but not Winter, look for the brightness of the sun rather than the sun’s interaction and conversation with shadow. If we only see light as the contradiction of the darkness, Winter as the contradiction of Spring we deny the cyclical nature of all things. Within cycle and season the parameters of definition expand enough to house paradox. This is abundance, a full appraisal.

Disorientation Is Not a Bug Its a Feature

We must be slow to ward off disorientation. We should be wise, of course, and too much of the thing is of ill use but how will we grow if part of our being doesn’t wander into what it does not and cannot know without engagement? The seed must crack, the growth of it must risk a breaking of surface and the roots must venture out in search. This is what solidifies whatever is green, whatever is red.

Each of the principles of Advent holds a potential of understanding that accommodates the paradox of surface and depth, and in that way they mirror–disorientingly–the story of Christmas. Expecting a king, the world is given an infant. Angel’s melodies weave with the abrasion of brays. The scent of frankincense and gleam of gold are set within a tableau of musk and scat. The effulgence of the star’s light is swallowed black within a hollow of cave.

In the process of thinking, an answer without a question is devoid of life. It may enter the mind; it will never penetrate the soul. It may become a part of one’s knowledge; it will not come forth as a creative force.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:12

Zugunruhe

In mid September a Cerulean Warbler incrementally turns its seam-filled flits South. Its wings rhyme loose the flexor tendon in each foot as the hormone ghrelin swells instinct and the land is reduced to umber, white and blurs of cardinal.

The warbler amasses its winter fat, it burns the energies of zugunruhe through burgeoning chitter and frantic prep. Until the anxiety peaks and tips the mentality of the flock into a din of particulate cloud.

The cloud warms and undulates in sky-blot ribbons as the edges smooth from the qualms of the mystery of intuition.

The Hagiography of Trees

The stream is a rumor to the sycamore, a murmur of vibration, a siren lap lap lapping over stone. It is the interminable council of energies which calls to energies. The tree’s indirect knowledge is certain and duplicates cells in its confidence.

Auxin is like a courage within the tree, its forces displace the compaction of tight soil, resists the will of rock, for some plant prophesy had insisted on milk and honey and the sycamore insists back in a kind of exodus. Each doubt and recounting displays as juts and twists in the tree root, diversions which correspond to the call of the stream, for streams themselves are a conversation with gradation and clouds, permeability and wind. A root’s bulges are a multidimensional cartography of surrounding phenomena, a chapter in the hagiography of the trees. If one were versed in their language one would hear ten thousand stories of an acre in the contour of the cataclysmically uprooted saint.

The will of trees. The hunt. The gravitational pull on waters. All moves toward a voice, an efference whose impetus is hope and hope whose impetus is lack.

Lack

To be human is to contend with our orientation toward an intrinsic lack. This lack is paradisal, it is right and we are whole.

The story goes that our Father, Of-Earth (Adam) was split, cloven like the hoof of Pan and separated as Eve. The goal of this splitting? To be reunited; that two would become one.

Why, then, the splitting if they were one to begin with? Because there was something missing in their wholeness. Of-Earth lacked lack.

We Never; You Always

We are born peltless in heaps, nourishment severed to a blackened knot.

Where others are born follicled, scaled, and carriaged for steps, we are wrapped, held and coddled until our bones are buttressed and taut.

We fend and fend in the face of deficiency; twirl or rub sticks for fire till our hands bleed. We slake thirsts with the plunge of our faces and flint chert for the hunt. We sever and skin and reduce in flames and gnaw, gnaw, gnaw.

Gathering together our sons and daughters into the earth, our deficiency multiplies and with it our fight against it.

Within all of this is a second birth, where some Will consolidates nothing into a photon which flecks cognition toward re-cognition. Instinct transubstantiates in a chrysalis crack. An increment swells and in a burst vaporizes the moisture of the present, behind and forward in plumes. Feeble, Future grasps the heel of Memory as its wince shoos the brightness from the eyes it can’t seem to close. Consciousness gasps out amniotic fluid and lack projects. It is spouted we never; you always.

Enrichment

Animal conservationists since the 1980s have used food-based enrichment as a means to quell anxiety and depression among carnivorous animals held in captivity. Continuing studies show that hunter and forager animals in the felid (lion, tiger, cheetah), canid (coyote, fox, wolf) and ursid (panda, bear) families have reduced abnormalities, such as over-sleeping and pacing, and presented a significant increase in foraging and behavioral diversity when their food is hidden rather than presented directly.

Lineage

Lack is the mother of twins: Deficiency and Hope; the grandmother of Malaise and Wonder.

The Will of the Oak, The Will of the Pupa, The Will of the Scribe

The heart that is in drought is flint-ready and easily caught up in flames. The poor in spirit respond in earnest and purposefully reduce their lives. The monk pads his cave bed in the wilderness just enough to not cripple the work of his body. He fuels his belly in accordance with the limits of virtue, sees beyond sight, beyond the parameters of material. He slaughters and skins and scrapes skins translucent. Wracks them taut as they shed their swelling.

A gall wasp lays its eggs on the tips of an oak tree. The wasp’s saliva alters the tree’s cellular growth and forms a tannin shield around the larva, which, when fully grown, burrows out of the incubating sphere.

Some wild-eyed dreamer, needing to wrangle the turmoil of his imagination, and through appalling vigor found that boiling crushed oak galls (these seeds of incubation) and sieving their juices into gum arabic (an alchemical miracle all its own) produced something one could sling onto the month-long-prepared hides of calves to pacify his desire.

The will of the scribe. The hunt. The gravitational pull on oaks and hearts and pupae. All moves toward a voice, an efference whose impetus is hope and hope whose impetus is lack.

The Reach of Eros

Without lack there is no eros. Without eros there is no our, no we, no us. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people of things in general.1

There is a zugunruhe, a hunt, a scrawl, a hope in Adam that swells his lungs and constrains his exhale to a murmur; wraps the something of that breath around the distinct umph of a bilabial plosive, the compiling of air around the teeth, the burst from lips; repeats it in parallel, perhaps slowly, bone of my bone. Then rings out digraph, the reaching fingertips of the labiodental to voiceless fricative, stretching for what isn’t in him, toward the hope of the working tongue of logos, flesh of my flesh.

It’s been quite sometime, but for good reason.

I’ve written a poem that I thought I’d nudge out the door.

Here you go. I hope you’re well.

THE NEGOTIATIONS OF HUGGING


Its so simply complicated
volleying grip
managing release times
once, I hugged someone with
a backpack on
my hands–to the forearm–
confused because of
the durability of fabric,
at least two zippers,
and the bulging mystery.
My instinct was to deflate it
like rolling a tent
there was something 
I wanted
the only surplus to be
the necessities of modesty
the reasonable barriers to the awkward
wanted what that instinct points to
the work of an icon
whispers toward 
the exchange of warmth

Well, theres so much to say. How was poetry born? My friend Stephen Roach pointed me toward a book called The Bible and Poetry by Michael Edwards (Here’s a good introductory essay). Stephen’s relationship with this book and what it unfolds is really inspiring and I think we’ll be hearing more about that in his coming book with Zondervan Publishing, but just a simple idea that I haven’t been able to shake is Edwards pointing toward the obvious, the first recorded words of Adam are a poem:

Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh

This in its own right is a beautiful thought but it points to something else. Isn’t it odd that God’s rationale for splitting this Earth-being in two, is caught in the statement it is not good for man to be alone? And that the goal of two is to become one? In other words, the goal is for Adam and Eve to be what they already were before God split them. This makes no sense. Why split something that was one, in order for their life together to work toward the goal of being one? Weren’t they already one? Then why cleave the being?

The answer I’ve been settling into with this question is that the Earth-being, this dusty one, was lacking something in its wholeness. It was lacking lack. It was unified without distinction, and that is not the image of a triune God.

Further, God gives Adam lack within paradise. This is pre-Fall stuff. A fulfillment within paradise is the presence of lack. This should adjust our notions of the afterlife.

I look at this lack as a suffering. It is a being without what will fulfill, and make whole and the response to this, the only adequate response to the beautiful abundance of this is poetry.

This has washed over me, been applied as a balm to a lifetime of guilt for the deep sense of longing, the Sehnsucht, the Eros (desire/longing) that I’ve carried.

Over the last few days the following prose-poem has spilled out of me as a result.

GOD TOOK

There was within Of-Earth a lack of lack. The Wind, The Fire, The Cloud caught Of-Earth up and they were enrobed in a dream and in the dream God clove them like the foot of Pan and God took from Of-Earth a blooming.

When Of-Earth woke he was Adam. Perceiving his lack he saw the lack as her; she was Abundance. Her absence was a vibration within him and it bent the languages of mere nomenclature, skewed the syntax, breathed upon the embers within the core of his tongue and spiraled out the first poem:

bone of my bone

flesh of my flesh

God had drawn near to notice the animal's name gifting ceremony but here God backed away in correspondence with the longing in lack for God had taken.

⃝

The spirit flinted thin some bit of spirit that rends matter within the realms of arcane capability. The sharpened ghost of it cut through the flickering existence of nearly any thing and given gravity met hair through to rock and God sewed somehow a garment; all the while God’s curiosity tumbled the phrasing of Adam in the unshadowed corners of quintessential corners, over and over again. Of all that could have happened God was filled with wonder in Adam’s lack and imitating, openings of new refractions of light grew:

bone of my bone

flesh of my flesh

⃝

Eve’s belly swelled and she thought the excess curious, like a filling of lung, some zim zum of room making. Then Cain came. He was removed from Eve and she recalled her Adam and sighed a spiral:

bone of my bone

then Abel:

flesh of my flesh

Each was cut and given a vestige of knots for navels.

⃝

The boys deciduous teeth descended plinking a confusion and turned and turned in the pocket as an anxious relic, they muttered in mimicry’s maturation:

bone of my bone

⃝

With a red and dripping stone and whitened face Cain’s spirit tore and the absence between each part wriggled his tongue, defiant to his will:

flesh of my flesh

⃝

The blood of Abel seeped into the soil and sang a dirge to the cochlea of God and God wept a question in stanzas:

bone?

flesh?

⃝

Seth with the easing whilom of ancestry recognized the button of his belly and foresaw the redemption of teeth, but never knew his brothers. He searched for a song in the soil but heard only the tree-line footfall of ghostly Cain and he called with hands cupped to no reply:

bone of my bone!

flesh of my flesh!

⃝

Azura anticipated Enosh and her language straightened with the hemming-in of precedent. Later, when asked about his great-grandfather, Enosh bent to the earth, gathered a visage in the dirt and his words bent, one end toward wonder; one end toward folly, he recounted the ancestral song:

bone of my bone

…

flesh of my flesh

⃝

Good morning to you all! It’s a new day and we here in the more Southern Northeast of the States are receiving morning-whispers of Autumn and building in anticipation as we still endure the high-noon of our glistening foreheads.

Our Well community is gearing up for our next Gathering on August 17th, and we are in the thick of planning a Supra (Georgian Toasting Feast) for later in September in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Details are being worked out but you can find more about the coming Gathering on the 17th here: www.coreysfrey.com/the-well

So, on to it! Where some may look suspiciously at the idea, I’ve been enjoying engaging in a bit of syncretism. The odd correspondences of it is doing the work of enlivening stories I’ve heard my whole life, and for that reason have become pallid with a lack of the necessary imaginative spaciousness they require (and perhaps used to have before their ubiquity). What they are also doing is filling me with a respect (re-spect: to look another time) for the kinds of places God is willing to hide. So scorn if you so desire! I’m finding glowing embers of palpable reinvigoration.

Here’s a little amalgam of a story for you and think about subscribing and supporting more of my writing by clicking the link just below:

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MEMORY & THOUGHT

The air compressed between feathers thudded out palpable spheres in the raven’s flap. Settling into a gentler balance of pulses its branched toes slowly gripped and it waited, silent for its brother and the shoulder perch loosened in a sigh, leaching the anxieties of their return.

A hand reached and stroked the bird and eased a crooked finger just between beak and feather with a scratch, and upon the wind a black blot grew.

Odin’s shoulders were heavy and the weight slowed his breath. Memory sat on the eyeless side, the side patched with strung hide. The muscles around the ocular chasm elongated and flexed in anticipation. The orphaned eye’s lid retreated and gathered air, drying a winced wink and returned as Thought’s heart slowed to match his poise.

They began their daily recounting.

A simultaneous string of clopped caws began as a sibilant whisper at both sides, each beak rounded in a harmony of concomitance. The keratin hollows gained momentum, filled and spilled and grew into a blazing frenzy with the days rousing. A hysteria built and within the retellings was a shock and the shoulder perches remembered their tension as the excitement of the story of the day forced open the raven’s wing’s angles. Any onlooker would think this an attack, the work of a malevolent deafening.

Their story was this:

In their travels South the pair were overtaken by a wind, but a wind less aimless than wind. It corralled them, overtook their intentions and made demands upon them with a compulsion that, when slack and flapless, turned or lifted or dropped them toward something.

Weeks before, descending over The Great Sea, they had noticed a browning in the grasses of Zarephath and a woman in black weeping with her young son. This morning they were hastened over the sea in a blur and set down by the wind on the edge of the same widow’s property. From a distance they saw that she was kneeling in prayer near a dwindling fire. Suddenly their attention was diverted with a jerk and two seemingly familiar, red-fanged wolves darted in a blur from the brush nearby. Hopping toward their departure and with a hesitation between each upward spring of their feet, they came upon a deer halted in a clump of tangled legs. Its neck was torn and the cool of the morning pulled steam from the wound in the collision of temperatures. The abundant black of its eyes drained toward a flat plane caught in a clear sphere and its ribs stilled in their last rise and fall.

The instinct of carrion took hold but diverted slightly toward particularity. From around the spine, before the back hip, Memory tore a slab of meat and cradled it conscientiously, on just the other side of impulse. Just as it had done so the wind gently worked its way under the four, iridescent humeri, lifted and allowed their curiosity’s pause and placement near a bread loaf lying under the window of the widow’s home. Off again in flapless flight, they were carried over the Naphtali region and then East, crossing over the Jordan River and in that crossing the wind ruffled, roiled and spilt as if linked to each cascade of whitening water, twinned in the gyrations between each granular distinction of matter.

The air of their flight dried the pink flesh in Memory’s beak, but was never strong enough to break the loaf in Thought’s, as if anticipating each molecular grain, the wind intended everything it encountered and placed them at the tear soaked feet of a flame-eyed man in the ravine of Kerith, where the ravens sat nearby watching his undulations between mirth and weeping as he ate.

Hearing all of this Odin warmed and his chest swelled. Memory and Thought, exhausted, nearly collapsed, each to its own humming fur of wolf and slept.

Later that day, with the ramshackle clamor of the eight hooves beneath him, Odin, riding through a squelch of mud, jerked the reins as a clod of wetted dirt slapped his patched eye with such force the circle of leather flew. His good eye–clean and dry–began to cloud, and his empty socket, now filled with clay, gathered light. The light turned to glimpse, and a blurred tree slowly focused. The trunk stretching out its branches made flesh from bark and Odin saw the bending tree become a torso, arms and legs and it lowered in its slow concision over a small, felled sapling which transmogrified–as it clarified–a cold, gray-green skin and the widow’s boy emerged, laying still and stiffened. An illumination of matter settled as a radiance, rejuvenating the constitution of the boy’s lungs and the house seemed to shutter in a gasp. The vision folded time in flits and the light, spread from the boy’s new breath, overtook a drying vessel of oil, then shot down the road, past the departing prophet, then filled a phlegm in Galilee, then a handkerchief in Ephesus, it shattered chronos and the vision settled as the light swelled the mugwort, stoneroot, chicory and chamomile wrapped around a bluing and detached head upon a table. The head’s jaw loosened and lips reddened in a jabber that consolidated in a spewing, Soomme cry Eliyahu, they watch the sky for chariots! I myself kicked the feet I had before birth, met the hindquarters of All-light in a face on Mount Tabor and descended into Hell itself! I sat pooling blood on silver while Salome’s laughs were cut to horror in my handing over. Watched, did I, the decent and thudded splash of Odin’s own eye in the deep. Watched that eye give in to water’s work; give in to the recompense of age. It was sight that saw the fired spark blind young Alton’s face, it was a casting of thick darkness that was its salve. I know the wind of Memory and Thought, know what caught them as it caught me into the clouds before sitting enthroned in the sky! My teeth cut through what hid my ribs! We gathered in the Jordan, we plunged our brows and rose, gasping into the sound of Voice itself. Pure Desire, Pure Sacrifice!

Odin fell from Sleipnir and wept. The tears washed the clay from his face. Still he saw, as if in an illuminated mirror, the obliterating reconciliation of his future. A different Yggdrasil, a different spear in the side and the face of Wisdom itself.

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Share A Brusk Night’s Crisp Morning

Gertrude Stein

Let Us Describe

Let us describe how they went. It was a very windy night and the road although in excellent condition and extremely well graded has many turnings and although the curves are not sharp the rise is considerable. It was a very windy night and some of the larger vehicles found it more prudent not to venture. In consequence some of those who had planned to go were unable to do so. Many others did go and there was a sacrifice, of what shall we, a sheep, a hen, a cock, a village, a ruin, and all that and then that having been blessed let us bless it.

This prose poem by Gertrude Stein is a tough one, but finding it was a pivotal point for me in understanding some of what is possible within poetry and language and what that means for meaning making and truth.

Even after all the years that I have had engaging with this poem, each time I come back it is a shock. What exactly is going on? There seem to be several vantage points or considerations at play in the recounting of what we can suppose is a tragic car accident brought on by inclement weather. Some decided to go, though disaster was portended, some did not. Of those that went it seems Stein’s relationship with them was close enough to categorize the recounted grief as a sacrifice. At the end things jump to a seeming list of unfortunate collisions which breaks into eulogy?

Of all that is not, at least one thing is for sure, Stein is utilizing disruption as a tool to provide a continuity between the language and the disruption felt within the experience of the seeming circumstances described in the poem. In other words, what an injustice, what an incongruous act it would be to write a beautifully formulated, rhythmic and lineated poem about a tragedy, about grief, about memory. What an incongruity to write a poem that “makes sense” for an event that makes no sense, like tragedy. For grief, for tragedy, for confusing times, only a confusing poem will do.

What does this mean for truth? Every time I’ve been a group talking about this poem, people see entirely different things about the exact same poem, even the exact same lines within the poem, even with the exact same words within the poem. Is the truth of the poem relative? Well no. The term relative truth only applies when truth is being conflated with fact. The poem has entirely different parameters than the news or rational, even scientific, understanding and the kind of language we find there.

So what is happening? The poem holds experience, it holds relational engagement as the priority. It means you have to bring your full self to it. If you don’t it will feel like nonsense. If you do there is a reciprocal engagement opportunity. The disruption within the poem can map onto the disruption that we’ve all felt when tragedy befalls us.

Not liking something and dismissing something are not the same thing. You don’t even have to like a poem or a work of art, but relational engagement can still teach you something. If you don’t like a poem, asking yourself why will actually help you to understand yourself better. It will at the very least help you to see what your expectations from poetry—heck! what your expectations of language are.

Art’s possibility is one where truth becomes relational engagement. It allows the complexity of truth to bear its weight upon us. The mystics have been telling us for a very long time that truth isn’t a dislodged inanimate thing, it’s alive, it has a will, it can be wooed and does woo. In fact, if you take a close look at what’s going on in the world you will see that as we study consciousness, and neurology, they are finding what the mystics and artists have been telling us all along, that relational engagement is the primary mode of being.

This poem along with so many others prioritize relational engagement by bypassing the assumption that language need only follow the guidelines of rational communication and rational intelligence. It enforces the idea that language can be an experience.

So what are some of the other modes of meaning that language has to offer us?

Well, one might be sound. We allow instrumental music the freedom to have meaning despite it’s lack rational communication, but we don’t allow language that same affordance. One of the layers poetry reveals is that how language’s sounds is also involved in meaning making.

Take this poem by Ted Hughes:

How Water Began to Play

Water wanted to live
It went to the sun it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back
They rotted it came weeping back
Water wanted to live
It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back
It wanted to live
It went to the womb it met blood
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met knife
It came weeping back
It went to the womb it met maggot and rottenness
It came weeping back it wanted to die

It went to time it went through the stone door
It came weeping back
It went searching through all space for nothingness
It came weeping back it wanted to die

Till it had no weeping left

It lay at the bottom of all things

Utterly worn out           utterly clear

This poem seems to entirely resist our modern conception of how language should behave, other than, perhaps, as lyrics in a song. There are hints and suggestions toward narrative but its as if we are catching bits and pieces here and there, unsure of how one line lines up with the next except on the suggestive level.

There is a fantastic reading by Hughes that I can only find in this clip of poet Alice Oswald giving a talk. The entirety of this video is good but if you want to hear Hughes read it, it is at 27:29 in the video.

In Hughes reading especially, the poem does the rhythmic work of precisely the poem’s subject. Don’t you get the sensation of water lap-lap-lapping on the shore with each water wanted and each it came weeping back?

The sound of language is an offering of meaning, just as much as what the syntax, word pairing, rational coherence and etymological roots offer.

In a close reading of both the Hughes and the Stein poem in a recent discussion group, someone said that both reminded them more of memories than anything else. We tend to forget that the ubiquity of the written word is brand spanking new when it comes to human history. It used to be that we collected memory and significant happenings within our lives and communities through the telling of stories.

This was such an important cultural engagement often tribes would entrust their stories to other tribes in case an unforeseen tragedy wiped them out; their stories, their collective memory, would survive.

Where we do seem to have writings that more closely resemble lists and annotated facts with more advanced ancient cultures, this was hardly the norm and certainly not available to the masses. The stories that were repositories of a culture’s transmitted sense of being, held the atmosphere and phenomenological heft that maintained, not just the informative facts of happenings but—like in the poetry above—had an openness that allowed the hearer to enter them in a relational engagement. There was room for them, for their families within the story. The story bumped around in their psyche, enriching the idiosyncrasy of their world with an imbued meaning. That kind of openness comes at a cost: the facts will not likely remain in tact, but the multivariate hum through its experienced layers will subsist.

This type of story telling’s importance is lost on us. Though not obliterated, often it is pushed to the margin for the sake of more modern types of understanding. Our humanity feels the weight of this. The humus of us resonates. The symptoms of the problem are scattered throughout theater, plays, movies and t.v. shows. Everyone knows the troupe of the father or mother that works so much, or is so engaged in the cause and effect of the modern world they have no time for play or rest or story or deep engagement.

Where it may show up as a troupe because we intuitively recognize a problem, the enacting of it on our screens and our consumption of it as entertainment is hardly a solution.

My full time job is as an Exhibitions Manager in a visual arts center. Part of my job is to pay attention to how people engage with the works of art. One thing I’ve noticed—not just in others but do this myself—is, when a person approaches a painting on a wall, as they get closer and closer their eyes gravitate toward the artwork label.

The artwork label will tell you the who, what, when, sometimes where, how much. It offers you the news. Rational, factual information, and in our Information Age, we land comfortably here. I would contend that all of the artwork label information is important but it is secondary to a relational engagement with the work.

I was lucky enough to have teachers in art school who taught us and emphasized that you should go into a gallery or museum and first, emote. What is it that springs to the surface? If its confusion, if its frustration, if its misunderstanding, so be it! But stay with it, hold on to the feeling being evoked and simply ask why?

All that the artwork tag has to offer you may very well be important information but it doesn’t actually tell you who, doesn’t actually tell you how and certainly doesn’t tell you why. There is a deeper understanding of these (who, how, why) available. Ready and waiting to be engaged and its all happening IN the work.

If part of your body is injured, and the repair requires movement you go to a physical therapist. And the therapist demands something of you: relinquish control of your strength in order to exercise what is weak.

As a culture the musculature of our emotional and intuitive intelligence is weak. Our ability to tell and receive story as a culture, is weak. Our ability to enter the open work of the poetic—in whatever form—is weak. We are glutted on the comfort of fact. We need the deep, revivifying, enlivened work of truth.

There is a world of hospitality within the poetic. And when I say poetic, I mean that across disciplines. The poetic is waiting to accommodate your showing up. It will give to you, it will receive from you, if you’ll come with your whole self.

(AUDIO AVAILABLE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST)

First a poem:

THE WINK OF THE CORNER


the wink of the corner
calls out diameter
the efferent embrace

scowl, tongue, fang
a hammered knowledge

casts amongst the glory
the festered side of heaven
adding gradation to triumph

metal’s opulence
is the call of reflected light

what is not included is caught
stretched arms mirroring

what good is gold?
rarity?
recountenance?

THE EDGE OF GOD

All things have a center and edges. The body’s center is the heart. Its edges, keratin: fingernails and hair. The cell’s edge is a wall; demarcation, keeper of distinction, it’s center, the nucleus. Property too is bound in by a wall, a coast, or an imaginary line.

Ideas even have an edge: the boundary of language is poetry. Its center is agreement, annotated, lineated and bound in dictionaries; but poetry frays and calls into question while simultaneously furthering substance.

Saint Paul tells us that the invisible qualities of God are made visible through what has been made.1 Do all things have centers and edges because God does? We understand God as having both unity and distinction in the idea of the Trinity. Distinction requires brim, requires delineation, requires an edge. The gem of the Divine turns and catches new light to disperse.

THE WANDERING EDGE

As nomads, when the Israelites left Egypt they were accompanied by a mixed multitude.2 Traditionally, this was understood to mean that not all of those that wandered through the desert were descendants of Jacob but some deemed The Rabble were a mixture of those, who, through marriage or friendship, had joined themselves with Israel. The Other, the marginal, were linked to the homogenous. The center had an edge that made the center more than it could’ve been without it.

Later, in Leviticus 23 the Israelites were instructed to leave the crops at the corners (edges) of their fields for the outsiders to take. An edge left for the edge.

THE EDGE OF GOD’S DWELLING

The devised architecture of the tabernacle was composed of several stages. In order to get to the Holy of Holies, the priest had to pass through an outer court and then enter The Holy Place which was enclosed by four coverings: linen, goat’s hair, ram’s skin dyed red, and the outermost, said to be either badger skin or manatee hide. Even if you are sure you know which (manatee or badger), take a moment to think about the means of production for either; how does this compare to the calculated ceremonial fluidity of the priests?

Prophetic zeal gathers hunters and sharpens knives. The wild-eyed mob slinks surreptitiously and disperses at the spread sett’s openings, waiting. Shot-through with adrenaline, they are somehow silent, somehow still, until sprung like a trap. This repeats toward exhaustion with the need of countless hides.

Or

Prophetic zeal gathers the shipwrights while hunters sharpen knives. The wild-eyed mob boards vessels with woven nets. Pods of dugongs are herded into the shallows. The water soaks red the flailing. Harvested, rendered oil from fat lights the work of tanners.

Where is it that God resides?

To the modern mind the entirety of this is obscure and barely conjurable to the imagination. But perhaps it is important that we are unsure about the makeup of the animal hide of the outer covering? Pertinent to our predicament that it is unclear to which camp the grotesques and gargoyles3 on the fringes of our cathedrals belong? That we haven’t the foggiest idea about the beasts between which the glory of God descends on the ark of the covenant and why THEY seem to be the right kind of hospitality to the tangible accrual of the Glory of God. These things push human comprehension to the psychological brink of the necessary inclusion of the unknown, the mysterious, the very edges of understanding.

THE EDGES OF THE TEMPLE, CHRIST, AND COUSIN JOHN

The structure of this paradigm continues in the temples of Jerusalem but with a culturally significant shift. The Temple, within its very structure, includes courts for the gentile–don’t let the significance of this pass you by–the fundamentally excluded is included. And one could go further with the flow of the life of Christ. Even the edge of his clothes, the hem of his garment, heals. He tos and fros from the dinner tables of the marginalized and moves between the centers of his culture to a breathy-wind-coaxed stint in the wilderness. The Christ’s extremities were washed by an extremity. His thirst sated by waters never made unclean by those through which it passed. For him, this way of being was so fundamental, there seems to be no bravery needed in the contact of his skin with the skin of the leper. Those, quite literally cast to the edges of society, grabbed, touched, by what conjured existence from the center of all things.

His cousin, the preparer of his way of being, was a disruption, a shimmer of glitch. Cousin John was meant for the center, his lineage tugged him toward its gravitational pull, his ancestral trajectory bound him maternally to the first priest Aaron and paternally toward the opulent sheen of the altar of incense. But John strayed. He grew a taste for thoraxes and had sticky knuckles. There was an irregular glint in his eye, a window to skeletal flickering, his way was angular. He was followed by the daring—plunging them into the currents of the Jordan as if they’d caught flame by John’s frequent charges on chariots of fire.

John’s uncompromising way in the margin made him a fly in the ointments of the status quo, until his perturbations disrupted an enthroned center and—his head undone, mouth agape—was readied for the torrents of rain on cathedrals, taming the shimmering of the silver platter.

A SPIRIT FOR THE EDGES

All of this has me hoping for a kind of renewal. My how we’ve tried to form identities around exclusion, leaving whatever characterization that is left of self, of identity, impoverished, malnourished, gasping for breath under a sort of calcification of lung and of heart. It is true that not everything is everything. This seemingly radical inclusion is not a call toward the ubiquity of all things, not a call for the elimination of edges. A cow is not an altar, a cloud is not a mountain, a pen is not the Euphrates. But what was in stars is in torsos, and the seeming incongruity of that is—in fact—only seeming when you see through a dim glass.

My hope is not that the edges become the center or that the center becomes the edge, but that a generosity and faith re-enter and enliven what we are choking out with our white-knuckled grip; that maybe our institutions of wonder, our mega-churches find the gumption and claim the lineage that would drive them to the madness of fashioning gargoyles for the corners of their malls.

I cannot help but think of those tasked with the creation of each of the symbolically-glutted aforementioned articles of the tabernacle. Someone was needed to create a space that brought a hum of continuity, a resonation that bound together both the luster of precious metals and the other-worldly strangeness of the sea-cow.4 Those that were chosen to make it so, were filled with the Spirit of God.5

One of the leaders of these was Bazelel. His name means in the shadow of God. The one tasked with holding together the unity between the center and the edge of this symbolically heaving structure lived within the edges of God, in the shadow, not the direct light. Shadow is not darkness, but is swathed in gradations of light; is aware of the relational currents between the sun and the cave.

EDGE DWELLERS

Artists–those that live in question, in shadow, in curiosity and exploration–are intuiting a call. More generally, modern culture is intuiting a call. In our having been Enlightened–engorged on rationality and factuality–and in our Protest–defining ourselves by what we are against–we have found our systems wanting. Found the modernity we’ve craved insufficient and are being called toward a symbiosis between old ways of understanding, enlivening our new ways of understanding. It is a call for the edges to revive the center and the center to stabilize the edges.