Christian
ThinkTank Homepage...[http://www.Christianthinktank.com]
I took a walk the other night...
Just me and the moon and my sense of wonder...and, seems like I remember a couple of melting trees and a condo-dog, struggling to prove his wild-heritaged existence by moving the air violently as I passed by...
I walked briskly in the cool, clear night and the moon didn't fall behind -- the smell of winter grass in the park was very, very green -- a full, rich, dripping wet, iceberg slowly drifting, almost-fattening, green. I could taste it in my nose, and on my tongue, and in my eyebrows, and on the soft skin on the non-hairy side of my forearms.
But I couldn't taste it in my eyes...
The moon did his Jack Frost imitation again -- and my eyes only saw frozen tundra (doesn't he tire of that old routine?) I think he's starting to get irrationally jealous, for even man's puny halogens can cause that night-green to burst into flame.
Now, in all honesty and humility, the flame is a sterile one -- no motion, no consumption, no change, no passion. But...its not frost, either...
I think I hurt his feelings, for as I arrived home he had covered himself with wispy clouds -- the ambiguous kind -- solid by day, bastions of aristocratic stability , but by night...
ah, by night...!
ethereal, ephemeral, epiphaneal -- a quicksilver difference of heart!
Not Janus, not Jekell, not Judas -- but maybe the moon's wife of age-after-age, who at night, in the dark, urged on by his gentle, patient character is his mistress 'de passione'
(but I know his character better, he is oh so deceptive with that facial expression of his---pure innocence and naivete, eh? - why not draw close to such purity?! Spiders have the same look when in the center of their web, I bet...
well, perhaps his wispy mate knows him better than I, or perhaps humors his attempts to seem dangerous...maybe I'm just jealous of that look...give him the dignity of the benefit of the doubt, especially since his lovemaking is done before an audience of mortals and celestials!).
They seem a happy couple, especially when they dance cheek-to-cheek so incredibly slowly...
What does he do for fun, I wonder? - deceive leaders? - conduct the symphony of wolves? - scare natives? - whisper to babies? - give lovers another excuse? - dominate and override poets' intentions du jour? - tease scientists? - have a laugh with the Hunter about duping old Ptolemy? - try to shout down man's halogen fireflies?
Or does he simply enjoy his work ...
- bearing witness to Another's artwork - helping the sea weave its mystic spell over the dreams and moods of Siren-seeking mortals - marking time's almost imperceptible cosmic crescendo toward the eschaton, where its Maker invades history again...
I have a special sympathy for my friend the moon...we are alot alike, he and I.
What must it feel like to have once been a god and then to have been trodden underfoot (and by synthetic boots no less) by those who demoted you to a telic artifact, a specimin-in-a-box (did you scream like Bacon's man?), an ageing executive -- almost out to pasture, endured and patronized by the upstarts--
How does your self-esteem fare? Is it more difficult to give your light to a mundane mundus? Does it take more emotional energy to wax and wane? Does the flag hurt, or merely irritate your vampiric skin?
Or was it all your doing?! The 'la bella luna ' fascination of man -- you inspired it-- was it not really man's conquest and mastery, but rather the triumph of your extended seduction? Is that landing the consummation of your desire for contact with the spirit of your admirers? Did you joyously and gently and wondrously take man's virginity in that act? Are we not bound to you now, humbled by your silence and your coolness and your distance?
Are you any less unreachable, though?
You can be so like a strange lover -- we took blood samples, and skin samples, and measured and metriced and zoomed in and digitized and scalpeled and poked and checked for reflexes...
But...we still don't know why you won't look us in the face at night, or what you're about to say...
the word you form eternally --
It seems to start with a vowel, probably an 'O', but it might just be an exclamation of surprize, or scorn, or worship... or a vocative that draws us to you.
Perhaps I give you too much credit -- after all, with millennia behind you, you should be showing a 'wiser' face -- perhaps with furrowed eyebrows, or pursed lips, or sad eyes...or have I it backwards?
Is wisdom an open expression as yours -- the face of a three-year-old's wonderment at a red ball? or a clown? or at you?
I wonder what you'll think when you read this tomorrow night. I'll leave it out on the outside table, for your purview (I'll even leave a halogen flashlight out for you -- just kidding!)...
Will you be angry at me for my almost-pity-on-you? or for exposing a secret or two that you shared with me in confidence?
Will it be awkward walking with you tomorrow night? Will there be short, but stiff silences - "Heavy starch, on Hangers" -- Will you finally speak your word:
"O.......petty, petty hubric mortal, who gives no light, and who scrapes the heavens with a mind that sits barely six feet above the earth..."
Or will you trivialize me by ignoring me, save perhaps a slight shift of eyebrow to tell me of your 'holier-than-thou' disdain?
Or will you do, as a million times before, simply play the "Mona Lisa" game with me -- teasing me, drawing me out, defying my exegetical intrusions, thawing my heart out with what I thought were 'icy' beams...
Tag, you're it...
Thanks for the company, old friend...I look forward to standing and shouting arm-in-arm with you at His coronation...
How can death be so beautiful...
The leaves from the train - a blur of stillness, a flashing stream of quiet
I cannot taste these - the glass between us strips away the flood of other joys - yet the joy of differences
A mellow red teasing yellow, teasing green - is it reversible or is the train merely rolling backwards?
One tree differing - in its own timing - is it individual pride or a well-directed orchestra of glory?
The stereotype - "New England in Autumn" - as much content as "Oh!"
Are there dreams in those leaves? Do they know Romans 8? Are they before the spring or after the spring? Look! An evergreen in their midst! What a contrast! Ever green vs. ever changing - which is more beautiful? Eternity or robustness?! Extension or Intension? Both, I think - sortalike a person - the child changes to a man or is the child present in the finished man - is growth just a backward telescoping - or maybe just an unfolding - eternal joys in the Robust One? He Who never changes but who always surprises us?
What is the red - a passageway to brown? or a moment in itself - is change exactly that - sip of wine - half a breeze?
And why are some still green? Are they just more patient or are they afraid of the vulnerability in winter - do they still dream of missed Easter parades and of missed 4th of July displays? (yet they will match those fireworks, you just see) And remember...they get to clap their hands someday at the coronation.
What is this bondage? this cycle? "their leaf shall not whither" - could they kaleidoscope without decay/death - or is the 'eternal tree' an evergreen--or an everchanging..
Ah...but now an eclipse! a sunset both steals their colors/ or more like it - tucks them into bed/ and dwarfs their instants of bursting with a millennia of red!
The clouds are a frozen-frolic cauldron of bubbling swirling switching foam - all quick frozen into strobe-like pulses - the change is imperceptible (probably deliberately so, to teach us to value slowness, an obviously alien notion to our race today)- My values look away for a moment - Oops, why is that?
The trees have the last laugh after all - they crowd the train and block the view of the sky! This one-upmanship is killing me!
(A glimpse of sky - a river clinging upside down, the red clay in the bottom - the dark granites up top - the river of light)
And now a town - the spires! They almost make me close my mind/heart in stereotypical generalizations - but...this is a locus of persons, like finite points of God-likeness, little my/du's bumping around in slow "faster"-flurries, but ever so mist-that-evaporates-by-noon fashion - all with hopes that span forever, and complaints that rival tinfoil for pettiness - strange creatures these
with minds only 5-6 feet off the earth, they soar into space and create dreams and nightmares - and sometimes never get beyond 18" - at night they dream dreams so much smaller than daydreams and so much more real than hopes.
We bump and twiddle and chirp and spin around, but do we often still our hearts when in a pile of leaves or tapped on the shoulder by a sunset or disturbed by the worry on another's brow at the station - the eyes, often empty, often harsh, rarely joyous - cry quietly for an irruption of the eternal, the bigger, the meat...
The tree, the sunset, the heart - the brooding, brewing matrix of life, of time, of privation, of experience, of grace.
First Deposition.
I was violated by rage tonight...
I'm ok now. I hold it at arms length and study it...
It sits in the cage I banished it to--over against me--and wears my face, but with the cruelest smile on those quiet lips...a superior glint in the eyes (surely, it can't be my face)...
Its not arguing like I suspected it would do after capture, but it only bides its time, I know...
And, like untold bursting times before, at each moment of personal moral choice (over at least the next two weeks, dammit), it will cease its silence with a snide but well-groomed sardonism:
"O righteous and pure one...its time for the dance of the Jekell"
...and then just that quiet, and cruel smile again.
I tire even now, thinking of the effort that I will then face. For before I can even address "the little moral choice" I must first run the ad hominum gauntlet...and forced-march through the litany of forgiveness:
"I look in history and I stand forgiven..."
I will rehearse the parsing of the tetelestoi, and wade through the images of slave markets, and courtrooms, and altars, and prodigal Fathers...
I will exercise great and expensive discipline to avoid the memory rabbit trails of professors and cognates, and pride-over-papers, and regrets, and pedantic disputes, and bibliographies, and even more guilt over handling pure truth with unappreciative hands...
But eventually I will get back to the issue at hand...I will see the reality of the bloodstains (not mine) and the thorns (not mine) and the pardon(mine)...
It seems so strange that His forgiveness, even though so much more infinitely costly and irrepressibly final, can be so much more easily pocketed than my own...
But eventually reality will wrestle me to the ground, and I will get on with this explosion I call 'life',
and the one-with-my-visage-in-the-cage will grow pale, and grow weak with hunger from the siege of being ignored. He will atrophy, and his voice become fragile, and his taunts turn to appeals-to-reason, and then to bargaining, and finally to pleas for rage...
and the smile, once cruel, will now only draw me out, into the warm and noble humility that sometimes follows in the wake of guilt...
Dissection Two.
A strange thing about this rage I study...the metaphors were reversed!
I did not 'see red' -- I 'saw black and white.'
I saw the world in the starkest of black and white, no greys or even grays...
the world I saw had such clarity and precision (and unreality)...the line which separated the white from the black was so thin and so scalpeled and did not have the ambiguous character of the world I know when calm...
The calm world is of course, soaked with colors with names as exotic as the hue, and it bounces sounds, and voices, and music, and squeaks, and gurgles, around all the time, it seems... and bumps into us with "tactile projectiles" (TP's for short) of silk, and warm soapy water, and fuzzy carpet, and sunlight... and rains down moments of smell that drag up memories of fried chicken, and fresh-cut lawns in summer, and even snow...
But that world-of-30-minutes-or-so-earlier-tonite...
had no smell, had no TP's, had no sound (but seems like I remember a faint machine-kinda hum in the background, like in The Time Machine), only a stark black and a stark white...
Now the white was a very cheerless white...a dull lifeless white...actually, nothing more than just a white. It gave no light at all, and gave no information either.
The black was dead too. It neither intrigued nor beckoned like a shadow, and it gave no indication that it knew it was surrounded by a chastened student...
"Stark Black, Stark White, Only Thing I See Tonight"
The world appeared to shrink to 7% of its life-size during that time, and be much more predictable, and measurable, and controllable (like a dead leopard is to a big-game hunter)... and correspondingly sterile, I suppose...
and the ambiguity that makes that world a delight closed up shop, rather that waste its charms on one who only saw a Euclidian black or white, where there was none...
The loss was obviously mine.
Third Glance.
The other metaphor in gravity boots:
I did not seethe, bubble, boil, or approximate a cauldron of any size, weight, or fluid volume.
Instead, my head drew all heat from my life...
I quick-froze, and felt a heat, but the heat of dry ice...the cold that burns without flame (and almost without healing)...an icy, white (a very stark, stark white), frosty calm (more a stillness than a calm...more the immobility of rigor mortis...)
a deceptive calm, a disturbingly pervasive cold-calm, a terrifying cold-calm, actually...
The terror stalks me now, for my world is dominated by a warm-calm;
a warm-calm that reaches out from my eyes...
that calms the elderly when I 'sneak up on them' on my evening walks, and 'teases out' the smiles of babies ahead of me in line in shopping carts, and soothes ruffled customers, and encourages homework-hearts, and even once drew a curious tender-spirit close, for a deep, deep draught...
But a cold-calm! Siren-alerts wail! A Tinman accusation from ages past?! Are the banshees not gone?! A Baconian man who stopped screaming and filed away the feeling under both "Undocumentable" and "Irrelevant to the Box"?!
Cold-calm casts a cold, indistinct, shifting shadow over grief, and struggle, and hope, and acceptance, and all that I deliberately try to melt away into...
It holds the noble and the "in full color and 3-D" up into a laboratory light of stark, stark white...and Procrustes screams again...
And how do I tell which is which?! -- (that's all I need now, a grenade of ethical dualism...)
Reverse Flash! Strange how the sarcastic resignation of that last line burst the seductively gratifying and esteem-inflating feeling of epistemological self-pity. Yes, the in-vogue Peacocking of despair, and being-picked-on by the universe and being disturbed...
A steady stream of Turkish Delight...But the snow melts from a sun of overdone Miltonic proportions!
Boom. Crash. Shades of James. I'm over-reacting again, I can tell...it is real but is not majority...the robot brain of 2D (hummm... Machiavellian seems a strangely appropriate adjective here) is judged by the laughing/weeping/empathetic spirit of 20D, with the ultimate ontic put-down: "It's just a subset..."
Besides...the cold-calm would never agonize such over the warm-calm, now would it?
Ah, but the comfort from the converse!...
(The warm-calm just winked at me and smiled, obviously pleased at my "insight," but teasing me that it took so long...)
Glenn Miller, 10/18/90
On the carpet now - ignoring the scores of buzzing and explosive itches from the nylon, each shouting for attention and diplomatic recognition by my brain - hoping to incite a reflex? Maybe to later brag to the others who didn't 'score' tonight? What an existence...a fiber without a violent metaphor...
Tape A in the left, Tape B in the right, press the 2X button, then go...
The music flows faster than I can drink it, and spills out over the corners of my mouth...
Did I just sacrilege someone? A complex swirl of life and passion and color and joy and protest-against-human-driftwood...
this complex swirl was incarnate in that song...
a smoke swirl dancing in still air by sheer will (with a less than sheer sensuality), a flashing, ringing, pinball game of images, an forceful underground stream of forgotten vignettes--
all collocated for one intense moment of vortex--the connotations and memories smashing into one another and learning and seeing the horizon and making new friends and forever changed and now linked like a secret treehouse club (one for all, all for one)...the whole greater than the sum of its parts...
This delicate, almost crystalline mobile of one soul's history, encapsulated experience...
kaleidoscopes the rays of the sun, dances like a reborn windsock in May, sings with the urgency of a four year old at a birthday party, weeps like a father at a firstborn's graduation, grieves with the depth of the aged at the passing of life-long friend... This history was someone's -- someone precious, someone loved, someone prematurely weaned, some locus of will and hope and fragility and vision -- they labored and gave birth and delighted in the tiny smile...and took notice that this life now stood over against them in its existence, helpless maybe, upset maybe, but with a grand inborn fire to bring order and magic and melody first to itself, and then to its world...
This two minute, 37 second gift -- a place marker for hundreds of thousands of intersections of timid sharing, and moral choices, and painful tradeoffs, and laughter with abandon, and teaching, and doing without and sorrow --
its brilliant diamond intensity seems a quick-frozen explosion of significance, an utterance glanced at for a moment, then ignored, a geometric point, dwarfed by the vastness and darkness and coldness of time and space...
"Seems" -- but to the actor, blinded by the stagelights and floodlights, there 'seems' to be no audience, only the harshness and baking of the unforgiving line of lights that forms the actors' "beyond not which"...
Ah...but our 2 minute 37 second sunrise was seen and savored by an Eternal Eyeglass (beyond the lights) with an eternal vision...and the actor's honest soliloquy (with only the commitment unrehearsed) is not frozen, but flows eternally within itself, its stage-set within , its context within, ever happening - first note and last, simultaneous...and One lauds (eternally in tempo with it) with a warm, connoiseured smile that dwarfs the vastness and darkness and coldness of time and space...
What a gift! A tiny point that fills infinity! A font of delight and depth!...A stream of purest and uncoerced liquid will...!
And I spilled it on the floor?!
the stock-in-trade metaphors ,that shape the under-current, assault me with all the force of later heideggerian violent images...a vortex of poignancy...they never, never seem to launch from the implicit into the explicit--they only toy with that boundary, it seems...I think they do it to tease me down into their world...I see the outlines of their swimming forms, and their impish smiles...but, I don't know the rules down there...and my bathysphere leaks badly, I have discovered in this decade...
(Siren goes off backstage...author exits left....awkwardness...an almost soliloquy...he returns and seems distracted)
and now, my detail-now-life has intersected this stream at 9:37 pm...a lostness was thrown overboard, but it will soon dissolve and become part of the implicit also...
but the mixture of urgent now-demand and the glacial movement of the under-mind, create ripples in the surface texture, spikes and tensions, and a yearning almost for that clear-blue melancholy stillness (was it a hidden form of self-pity or luxurious grief that only now floats upward to break the surface?)...
and even the stillness is strange...the Mississippi looks lazy and impotent at its end, but sixty feet under...the dragon merely waits and watches and beds those less wise'd and age'd than itself...
those metaphors again...they like to back up and run and smash into one another and shock me with the spark--so intense--that light that gives the false euphoria of truth insighted..."I saw it!"..."Eureka"...but the content?...like the product of two probabilities--even less sure?...another idol that labors to bring all else into subjection to its alleged absoluteness...better wood and stone that can be used when dethroned!
sometimes these metafriends crash like waves of surf...they vigorously maintain their identity and independence (in arrogance sometimes I think) over against other crests of the same wave (!), but they merely are one expression of the same restless ocean...they attack the beach and tumble forward, as if by some epistemic miracle they might exist alone, over-against that churning mass of relativizing (but supporting) union...
but, alas...when all is said and done (if anything ever is said and done), they must return to the ocean to form another wave and crest, to seduce our ostensive intentions...they return much more humbly and formless than when they charged...that 'when' which was filled with vividness and power from the whole...charged with flash from that semantic field...that 'when' the other concepts waited their turn to take the stage...to earn our notice, our respect, and maybe even our bucket...
the ebb and flow and conversion and donation...the restless ocean, forever contained, forever the same, forever one-named.
and even here, in transcendental fashion, they hypocritically fault me for lack of metaphorical 'purity'--these sometime-whores who barter and sell worldviews and paradigms...and load the spirit down with pharisaic subtlety...and demand our worship and time and money...(sometimes they're fun and even noble, but when they play god, they are so difficult to live with!)...
but tonight...I will only throw them a glance...and maybe a penny or two...
They will retaliate (of course) by hassling my other, more settled images...they will rant and rave and try to unsettle me (by re-defining or limiting or 'qualifying' my older friends)...to create that epistemic disturbance...that 'dissonance and doubt'...that disorientation in this semi-cognitive existence...and they will succeed, no doubt, for that time that I idly peer into the water instead of sailing my ship to the suggested shore...
But I still treasure their context-companionship along the course, and do indeed praise Him for their kalideoscopic beauty (shimmering plus symmetry?) ,their elegance of movement and the silent wonder they sometimes evoke in me....
it seems like vortex is all my life images....
its always this, swirling, ceaseless, confusing, moving... as soon as i understand a piece--it moves, changes, anti-chameleon, unpredictable....
all that anchors is You....not me, not faith, not truth, not love....only your face in my heart.
i wait for only-you-know what...my directions unclear and yet clear, so good yet so bad, so lost and so lost and so lost...
the red wine that spills onto my greyness tonight cannot even stain it red...
i fear the anger i cause, the slander i cause, the coldness i incite in others...the falsity (but well-meaning and well-zealed, to be sure) and mocking hollow echoes of righteousness....
why is everyone else so far ahead of me.? my bungling, and bumbling, and blustering, and babbling, and bantering, and blathering, and badgering, and intellectual indecisiveness?
tonight i will cry for no one but me...
(and why the hell is my whole life done with ellipses like these...)?
maybe the wine will dance with me, and forgive my moods and morbidity, and smile that dark, and satin, and almost-lusty smile of red at me....that only a good old red can do...and sit on the couch and listen to me play God (or at least Pope)...
I have driven my old friend the moon away by over-analyzing his slow dance and pretending to know more than I really do....(He really, really can tell that about humans...and he responds so much faster than the others do)...
"and so it goes, and so it goes, and so will you soon, I suppose."
but the slowness is good...and maybe you stop the wrong thing...and maybe I should still believe you, and trust you to change the destruction in my wake to life-giving impetus to your cares and charges....i stand in faith, i rise to move, i aspire to thanks, i hope for humility and honesty....
i take another step....
time for coffee...
Christian
ThinkTank Homepage...[http://www.Christianthinktank.com]