Advent, Day 9: Let Me See You In Darkness

(Day 9 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about uncertainty (again); today we consider seeing.)

Let Me See You In Darkness (I)

Let me see you in darkness,
As by no other light.

Let me see from the facets’ inside plane;
Let me touch your pulse,
Your blood line’s other vein,
The sundown flow from
Heat or heart unknown.

Let me know you by that which you hold
Unseen,
As by no sight can every truth be shown –

Let me know, as things unsaid,
That which daytime answers fail to frame.

Let me see you in darkness –
Where words and worlds end; 

And, caught by your far Other side,
My day-bound eyes –

Transcend.

A river runs through Austin. Part of my day is crossing it twice: once in the early morning, once in the evening. 

As with most rivers, it is often wrapped in mist or sunrise and egrets. And it is a beautiful thing to see like that.

But it is a different creature when the clock does not match up to the sun; when the human habit of hours turns my transit nocturnal. Then, it is something not-seen – and bigger for it. 

The river breathes in darkness. The sense of it swells towards immensity; it becomes more than the place dividing two shores. It is every sense other than sight. One feels the weight of the water, the flow of a piece of the continent; one feels on the edge of – 

Something that requires setting aside sight, and perhaps speech, to comprehend.

Advent, Day 8: The Unequivocal “Maybe”

(Day 8 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about negative space; today we (again) consider uncertainty.)

Here is a fact: I place my firm belief in the unequivocal “maybe.” “Uncertainty” is (quite possibly) one of the strongest recurring themes ‘round these parts. 

This observation arose from the following: today’s Advent piece – according to the original sequence c. 2022 – was already posted here in 2024, under the title Lady of Liquid & Silver & Salt. 

Lady of liquid and silver and salt, 
Lady of mist and flame –
Strike in my heart your burning bush, 
Devour my soul again. 

Lady of risings and leavings and flux,
Lady who moves most unseen –
Unmake my certainties into dust, 
Awaken my dust with your wings. 

Lady who changes all things as She will,
Lady whose peace is to bend, 
Unmoor my sight from promises firm,
Your holy uncertainty tend. 

Bet you didn’t see that conclusion coming. 

In fact, in Advent Day 1 we also touched on uncertainty, although in that case, more as an antidote to the foregone conclusions of reality’s wake. 

And the three posts prior to Advent dealt with: embodied uncertainty; fluidity as a crucial thread binding meanings to myth; and, last but not least, the porosity of the emotions that shape relationships: 

It seems nothing is definite, certainly not something as crucial as the twinned shapes of love and grief. Their focus is not static, and neither should they be. They are held, given, mined, stolen, shared.

A reasonable question, then, would be: “Why uncertainty?” What do I hope to find, eventually, from an apparently bottomless well of (???)…? 

You know, I too would like to know. 

Fortunately, past-me (c. 2020) left a few clues lying around. 

In the spirit of pinboards and string, then, here is a crucial piece of answering that question. 

I Dislike Telling Stories

I dislike telling stories. People always say, start at the beginning, and I get lost looking for it.

Stories don’t really have beginnings; they’re more like cats. They like to wander in and out as they please, and you’re left picking up small furry corpses and thankful they didn’t bring in a live raccoon this time.

As for endings – most people have a pretty good sense of where stories should end. The problem is, they end – and then they continue. It’s like the drive-through scene in Dude, Where’s My Car: “And then? And theeeeen? AND THEN?”. 

I think of stories more like moments of small revelation, piling up. When enough of them accumulate, the mystery or displacement or unease driving your interest in the whole thing collapses like a house of cards into a (hopefully) satisfying sense of resolution…until the accumulation begins again. Call it the Snowdrift Theory of stories.

The trick with revelations and resolutions is they are incredibly subjective. Monsieur Poirot closing a case is, realistically speaking, the middle of five or six other narratives that have likely been going on since about the middle of Dame Agatha’s novel. One can imagine characters coming home for dinner, chatting over mid-century modern and martinis  – “Oh darling, you’ll never guess what I heard today. It was the stepson all along!” – and then getting back to the all-consuming business of their own storyline. 

So: every story is just a point of view. Call it the Point of View Theory of stories. 

It’s also hard to pinpoint stories because, once you know people for a while, you just hear snippets of their life, fading in and out like a radio station. 

For example. For most of my life, I thought I knew a story in full. A boy grew to the age of 14, ran away, Did Drugs, Became An Alcoholic, Was Saved, married, and lived happily ever after as a carpenter in the mountains of New Hampshire. It was a pretty good story.

After he lived happily ever after, his wife started hearing voices telling her to divorce him. They were separated for a while and then she came back. They lived happily ever after, again. They restored an antique barn. 

After they lived happily ever after, again, he learned he had Hepatitis C. 

His wife said she didn’t have time to take him for blood transfusions. 

He got sicker and sicker. 

His wife, a very loud person, talked about praise and martyrs. 

Sometime in the winter, he died. His family didn’t find out until after he’d been cremated. It felt like he just got lost somewhere in the winter and never came out to springtime. 

The last part isn’t completely true, because it isn’t true to him; that’s not how he would tell it nor want it told. But it’s true to the pain of loss, like dark water under ice, in the silence of wintertime woods. And even that isn’t an ending, because it doesn’t explain how the dark water and the silence now runs through other lives, changing them in small everyday ways. 

Words are different from stories, because words don’t try to give an ending. The purpose of some words is just to help you find a way through. When you’re walking through dark woods, you don’t look to the right or to the left; you look at the path, because if you look away you might lose it. It’s also a bad idea to think too much about where the path goes, either in hope or fear.

From the Point of View Theory, I work with words, rather than stories. I work with words, at the end of stories, outside and around the stories I see, a framework of understanding and a misguided attempt at benediction. I try, over and over, to make some sort of path through the confusion and mess and fear. Faith, hope, and love may abide, but in order to “abide” I have to understand where I am – in the thick of it. 

From the Snowdrift Theory, the cards come together to say something like: I may not see a beginning, and I certainly won’t see an end. Lives and events happen around me, some of which I may be aware of and some of which are beyond my understanding. I try to make a neat framework of understanding, but the system is greater than the system. 

Pay attention to what is in front of you. You may not see it again. Seek to craft a way through that is better than what is on either side, for anyone who may follow behind you. 

Like most stories, this has no true end. But I’ll leave it here. I may wander into it again, like a cat wandering into a kitchen. Or sometime in the future I may again happen on my own tracks, leading into stories for which I can find no beginning or end.

(Originally posted here January 2020).

Advent, Day 7: I’ll Leave You Space

(Day 7 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about moments that hold themselves; today we consider negative space.)

I’ll Leave You Space

Dear heart, I’ll leave you space:
I’ll quiet the seas
And close the mouths of lions’ roar –
I’ll welcome thieves,
If they take all and leave more
Room for you. 

This only gift I have 
To share: what I have not,
What I fill not, 
What is open in the center –

What I leave as space untouched
By best intent.

There is, of course, a notorious phrase surrounding good intentions. Yet even setting that aside – I have never been so tangled up in life as those times I tangled myself, usually through…well, maybe not just good intentions, but a certain dash of “desire to perform the right thing” – gently muddled into the cocktail of “unrealistic expectations” and served at room temperature –

Let’s leave that glass to trap fruit flies on the counter. Put it down, set it aside, pull out an empty glass in its place; place that glass on the counter, too, then leave the kitchen.

Sometimes an empty glass holds everything it needs to.

Advent, Day 6: Stillness Under Sound

(Day 6 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about the squirrel-space continuum; today we consider the contradictions of stillness.)

Stillness Under Sound

This morning, so much stillness
Under sound – 

The stillness of all thousand souls alive
Before the fall.

What fall? This morning – flight:
All trembling leaves

Share this soul’s
Delight.

Imagine leaves, tossed reddish-gold-green against a blue so high your eyes want to shout. The air around is moving, has been moving all morning – brisk and constant and timed to its own knowledge of space; the leaves never stop moving in this air. They are on a branch, but that branch is moving too. And after watching upwards for a while, you also are conscious of moving. Leaves, air, branch, you: you’re all flinging yourselves upwards towards the sky, all bathed in high blue, wave-caught in an instant – later thought of as – the “updraft joy.”

Such moments hold themselves.

Advent, Day 5: Can I Offer You A Nice Squirrel

(Day 5 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about bodies and question marks; today we consider squirrels.)

To paraphrase the immortal words of Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia): Can I offer you a nice squirrel in this trying time?

I mean, these first four days of Advent we’ve already covered topics including: bi-stable states, problem children, maybe-surveillance, and um, a eulogy. So yeah, have a squirrel or two. Heck, take three.

Angels In The Squirrels

This morning – there are angels in the squirrels 
And squirrels in the trees
As nuts and leaves drift down in blessing 
From this holy trinity.

(For years, students of philosophy, physics, and IKEA have all known the real question of the universe is: not how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but how many can fit in one pecan tree.)

Advent, Day 4: On Sacraments & Soup

(Day 4 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about stillness vs. Mary. And today, I mark an anniversary.)

My friends, you know I am allergic to conclusions. When they show up, they are usually some sort of asymptote. But sometimes this is not the case.

A year ago, walking to work in the early December darkness, I received a phone call from my father. That call was, indeed, a conclusion. There was no ambiguity framing the end – the very particular cessation – of my mother.

We waited until August to hold a memorial. I am deeply grateful to have had nine months for words to form.

Today I leave those words here: not because you knew my mother specifically, but because the main points are ones which I hope might be helpful to anyone who finds themself caught between body and question mark.

That is, the practice of having a body is the only confirmed option we have for experiencing anything; whatever structures of revelation and/or faith and/or oblivion, there is no guarantee of reaching them except going through a body first – however you wish to read that.

Or on my less talkative days: have body, will speculate.

And that is precisely where things sit, this Advent.

One more note: my mother’s memorial was in fact a bit more akin to one of the parties she used to give. My father arranged her artwork around the room, set up spaces for all to sit and talk; a family friend miraculously and generously created a full meal, pimiento cheese and cucumber sandwiches and lemonade and tea and much more; and other friends played music, sang, brought memories, kindnesses, and their own knowledges of pain. I mention this so you have context for the specific references to the setting.

On Sacraments and Soup

(Read in memorial of Leanda Maria Grogan, d. 12/04/2024) 

My friends – 

Thank you all for joining us here, this evening.

As each of you know, one of my mother’s great qualities was that she found rich meaning in preparing spaces for all to come together, to eat, talk, laugh or cry, and share. 

This is something which she did over and over, across changes in time, community and place, throughout her life. 

You may have seen her artwork outside. As pictured in one of the pieces, as a child growing up in the clay hills of Tennessee, she made cakes from earth and rose petals to share with her playmates. 

In her years of professional and teaching work, she put on gallery events and student showcases full of homemade treats and music, where the joyful atmosphere was as much an artist’s craft as anything on the wall.

Throughout my childhood, she made sure to host at least one party every year to bring together families traveling schedules’ divergent paths. 

And in the later years of her life, many of you received to-your-door baked goods or letters from her at times when you might have had need of such things.

Each time – each of these acts – she understood as a sacrament. A sacrament – according to Augustine – is “an outward sign of an inward grace;” or, if you prefer Merriam-Webster, “a sign or symbol of a spiritual reality.” 

Somewhere between inward grace and…grace that encompasses reality, then – we are left with the space in which sacrament-work is performed. 

Of all ways my mother could be remembered or labeled – obviously I am partial to “my mother” but “artist, teacher, friend, spouse, cook” all apply from different mouths – I have come to my own conclusion that “sacrament worker” – while clumsy of diction and unwieldy – is perhaps the most true to the sum of how she sought to live her life.

That is to say, my mother was acutely aware of the intersection between the physical and spiritual realms: between dusting or doing dishes, and Divinity. 

She not just saw, but invited, God – constantly – into the routines and spaces that surrounded her. 

Doing schoolwork in the next room over, I frequently overheard my mother have deeply engrossed conversations, for quite extended periods of time – with God’s Presence. These conversations were usually of such detail and familiarity that I would not have been particularly surprised to hear an answer back. 

The natural overflow of this sort of hands-on approach to inviting God was her deep-seated commitment to inviting others. And although my mother could carry on quite a conversation – all while insisting she was a very quiet person – it is important to note that these invitations were not all of the spoken or mail-box-delivered kind. 

By this I mean: she made many incredible things throughout her life, things that were beautiful and things that were delicious and things that were full of meaning. 

But – through all of her artwork or cooking or writing or teaching – there was really only one thing she was trying to make. 

And that was a space where God could enter the world. 

A space where, for however long that miracle took place – those who wished to, could catch a glimpse of something sacred. 

Something – sacred? 

My friends, please understand. I do not use that word lightly, but I also do not use it, in anything other than completely profound ignorance. 

Unlike the definition of “sacrament” or even “sacrament work” – it would be utterly disingenuous of me to place the bushel basket of definition over it. 

From the glimpses my mother’s work afforded me, therefore, all I can whisper is this. The sacred is – whatever is found in a space, that sends guests out with the beauty or courage, truth or words or silence, to carry them just a bit further along their path than they had thought they could make it, when they arrived. 

In the course of your friendships with her, I do not know what you might consider the last sacrament she left you with. Whatever that might be for each of you, it is now uniquely yours to cherish, and to carry forward as best and however far along your path you are able.

Of those things I have just named, what has stayed with me –  is silence. As my mother’s breathing failed in the last portion of her life, she had no words. 

I do not know what conversations we might have had if she had been able to speak, the last year of her life. As I’ve said, my ignorance is profound. All I can hope, for her and for myself, is that sometimes Grace is best found in the silence left by – simply having no words. And for the end of my mother’s life, I truly have no words. 

Out of my carrying of that silence, then, let me lay out these three truths:

Most things go unfinished. 

Most things go unsaid. 

Most things’ meaning is unknown.

I do not know the meaning of my mother’s life. It feels unfinished, and so much feels unsaid – the obvious things, like the last, “I love you” – and also – the things simply not thought of until there’s no time left to speak. Perhaps you, too, feel the same. 

I also do not know the meaning of her death, other than to try to understand it as a sacrament – and one in which each of us will eventually take part. That is the real meaning of the intersection of the physical and spiritual worlds: that last glimpse of the Divine opening up in this world. The threshold of that sacrament is the space where all of us will arrive as empty-handed guests, from whatever path we’ve been traveling.

Of course, for those of us here tonight, we are all still firmly on the physical side of that threshold. Our hands are still full. We are still doing dishes, and dusting, and maybe having conversations of which only one half can be heard, from the next room over – 

On behalf of whoever’s in that next room, then: please allow me to offer this invite – to remember these three truths. 

First, most things are unfinished; second, most things are unsaid; third, most things’ meaning is unknown.  

That is to say – faith is found in what is unfinished; hope is made on things yet to be said. 

And the meaning of love is, as yet, completely unknown to us who live here in profound ignorance, guests under our bushel baskets as it were – still working, still sharing, still making spaces in the weave of those baskets – where the sacred can come pouring in around us. 

In invitation, then, to my fellow guests, let me close with a poem. 

Twofold Cup

The sacrament of death is twofold –
A cup shared in parts, one sip offered
To the self who departs, 
And the dregs for those who carry still 
The lifeblood mark.

It is the greater rule of love,
This table set – a place for each, 
That all may find – yet –
Their seat by love, which says: 
My brother, my window, my heart – 
My precious unknown other,
My breath apart: 
How would I know your face, 
If not given us to meet
Bound by this table of sacrament? –
As lifelong friends we greet:
So by embrace, this grave hospitality –
We join each in whole to learn 
This untold gift, eternally.

Advent, Day 3: Blessed Are Those/Our Lady Of The Morning

(Day 3 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about time, beasts, and problem children; today we consider stillness vs. silence vs. surveillance.)

As previously noted, these pieces were written in 2022 as an Advent surprise for my parents. The original piece for today – Blessed Are Those Who Walk Out In Stillness – was also shared on this blog at that time.

Re-reading it now, I note that my understanding has – changed. Obviously I’m deeply interested in not just re-sharing something which some of you (maybe?) have already read; but the nice thing about three years’ passage is that I can invent completely new meanings out of things past-me took pains to set down precisely(ish).

Let us briefly tangent away to context-land. On the mornings when writing occurs, I enact a three-step plan. Step A: catch the 6:28 a.m. bus. Step B: walk 1.1 miles along a precise street in a precise neighborhood in East Austin. Step C: spend the rest of the day helping students in an academic lab and completely coincidentally, writing stuff in the down time. The only part of that which is currently important is Step B: walking. Most of the Advent pieces were thought up during Step B. So when I say:

Blessed are those
Who walk out in stillness – 
Who walk out
In the calm of the day
The early sun
Or afternoon’s scorched hum,
In the byways and alleys,
Shadows and lanes
Or the tracks’ farther lonely side.

What I probably mean is… it was a nice walk to work.

The really odd thing, though, is over the intervening years I somehow convinced myself the piece was actually about silence. “Blessed are those/who walk out in silence –”

Nice try, memory.

The first thing is: the street I walk along is not quiet. It’s not busy in the sense of “traffic” – in fact it is blessedly car-less except for a bus every 15 minutes, each direction – but it has: roosters, ducks, donkeys (the small urban farm); squirrels; the sounds of pecans hitting the ground, often just after the sounds of squirrels; dogs; mockingbirds; grackles (if you haven’t heard a grackle, imagine a rusty door hinge gaining sentience and turbo-powered vocal chords); and the high voices of school children and their caretakers, overlaying the deeper sounds of workers and diesel engines arriving early to the aforementioned farm, the tree nursery, road work, and intermittent home demolition/rebuilding projects.

The second thing is, the whole street (and broader neighborhood) is watched by Mary.

I’m not exaggerating. There’s a Mary in almost every yard. Sometimes painted blue and sometimes painted seashell pink or neon green. She shows up on porches, car dashboards, bird baths, upstairs windows, a church (obviously) that has two grottos each with their own Mary. I have this terribly uneasy feeling that there’s a duct tape line down the center of the churchyard demarcating territories in such a setup.

There is even, in my favorite yard, a small shrine. The shrine is about the size of a doghouse, neatly painted with contrasting trim and a shingled roof. It is fully furnished inside, with tiny glowing LED candles, and glassed over so that the shadow of blue can just be seen within.

The overall effect… is not one of surveillance. It’s more – a kind of consistent stillness that accepts and dances through all the movement and sound: not silence, but the counterpoint swell that lifts and carries along each part of the whole.

Well anyway. You may take that as literally or as metaphorically as you like. Enough to say I wrote a piece about it, a different morning.

Our Lady of The Morning

Our Lady of the Morning
Lives in twilight –
White walls, candle glow
Through spotted glass.

Against dark trees she flames 
Like mockingbird –
She trills like silhouette 
In topmost branch, 
Like gift of song on every
Throat’s behalf.

Where donkeys graze, and chickens 
Ask the earth – 
In mounded mould, tangled fence
And sectioned rounds 
Of tree trunk once so strong 
And home to squirrels. 

In the squash and in the seed
In the corn and in the corn
Tortilla, wrapped in foil
Gilt with grease. 

In the hand that gives,
Or holds the gate;
In the workman’s glove
Or child’s bag of books
On parent’s arm;

In the coffee’s scent
Of deepest wake;
Or oil burned
And spilled across
Each road and bridge.

She moves in these
She walks in these
She gifts us these
That we may know her
In the chapel yard’s 
Small holy dwell
Of bright blue paint.

Our Lady of the Morning 
Walks through darkness – 
From night’s far edge 
Towards night drawn down again.

She walks all day 
Beyond white walls, 
In any guise and place –

As candle glow grows back
Towards night-time’s grace.

Advent, Day 2: Looking For Those Who Have Time

(Day 2 of this year’s Advent series. Yesterday’s piece was about leaving space for uncertainty; today we consider time, beasts, and problem children.)

Looking For Those Who Have Time

I’m looking for those
Who have time –

The mythical beasts and angels
Complex
In rest.

Now, in a moment –
No stirring dawn before its rise;
No shadow
From gravity’s sunlit dance
Spun round too soon;

And the breath rises out
And the cells turn their rhyme
For the heart of the blood
Should be peace. 

You have heard, I am sure, of the phrase “problem child.” 

It is not exactly a phrase any parent uses. No, it is the phrase other people use when discussing a specific family dynamic at that point in the gossip session where complete candor has melted unctuously into its juiciest, densest center.

No names are ever specified. Instead: “Oh, yes, that’s the problem child.” (It is possible, given the context, that no names ever need be attached because everyone present has…already read Calvin and Hobbes, as it were.)

My point here is that the “problem child” (that tiny entity rendered transcendent by lack of name) generally serves as the perfect raison d’être for any problem being discussed. This little creature becomes the hinge for – everything. 

Under The Sign Of The Problem Child

Now. Since I am happily childless, let us consider this in the context of things I care about. The above piece, “Looking For Those Who Have Time,” has been a bit of a “problem child” since its inception. It’s not even the whole piece; my choking instinct is specifically triggered by the last two lines (“For the heart of the blood/Should be peace.”), every single read-through. 

And what am I to do about that? Every time I try to change it – through tiniest surgery or blazing keyboard strokes – the whole thing collapses. It does not want to change. 

But I can’t get over the deafening triteness of “peace” as the conclusion to – all that comes before. Really? Really? –  

Well, no, not really. I lately realized that the problem isn’t the last two lines per se. Instead, the last two lines are linked to the actual core of the piece: “The mythical beasts and angels/Complex/In rest.” 

I love that phrase. It’s the opposite of my choke response, every time I read it. 

That line is the hinge, the center about which everything else swings. (I do not subscribe to the “kill your darlings” philosophy, that’s how you end up with Othello.)  

So after everything, finally, I left – everything. Whole, as-is, intact, nothing changed. I still wince every time I read the last part and then end up staring miserably at my poor mythical beasts and angels, happy in their complex rest and serenely not giving me any ideas. 

Creature Feature

It’s worth noting here that ever since I was a kid (not a problem child, you can’t be “the” problem child if you’re also “an only child”) – I’ve loved Creatures. I was firmly on the side of the Harpies, the Sphinx, and Scylla and Charybdis (which are technically two sides at once?) – I was furious with Heracles/Hercules for ecological vandalism and accelerating multiple species along the endangered-to-extinct pipeline; and I hate many versions of Beauty and the Beast because…who the hell wouldn’t stay a Beast? Talk about de-evolution. 

When Suddenly, A Borges Appeared

Obviously, then, given this and my elsewhere-noted penchant for Borges, I double-love The Book of Imaginary Beings. It is a collection of creatures, across cultures and time, who are defined by impossibility.

The interesting thing about Borges is that he often does this shell-game effect with the real and the unreal, symbol and source. He conflates the library and the labyrinth. 

He habitually writes of encyclopedias with bogus entries (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius); words that contain language and the end of language (The Aleph); fictitious writers of books which are then alluded to by other, equally fictitious writers – set in entirely different stories (notably The Secret Miracle’s Jaromir Hladík (which I write about here) is mentioned by a (nonexistent) theologian in Three Versions of Judas). 

The translator’s note to my edition of Imaginary Beings (trans. by Andrew Hurley) neatly sums this effect: 

“…the creatures…are stitched together, like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, out of the parts of real creatures, but the whole is a whole that is impossible, ‘fantastic,’ never seen in nature.”

And, immediately following, the linked observation that the act of detailing these “impossible” beasts effects that most alchemical of transformations, tipping them into the possible:

“…This fantastic encyclopedia, like that earlier alphabetized universe, has ‘penetrated’ our own: the imaginary beings it chronicles are creatures we have lived with and think of as ‘normal’ aspects of our world – if not our real world, then the inner world of our fantasies and dreams and fears.” 

That is to say, refer to a fiction often enough, and a sort of shell of “nonfiction” will eventually form, by virtue of its inclusion in many nonfictional things. The opposite, of course, is also true: many facts have an entire apparatus of accepted non-facts (if not outright lies) orbiting their unseen nucleus.  

It is these shells that Borges is most adept at swapping around, spinning in ever-more-complex patterns of image and idea, before letting them come to rest – tantalizingly still (tantalizingly identical) – on the table of our contemplation. Pick one. 

I recently picked one. 

That is to say: “Looking For Those Who Have Time” was written in 2022, part of a series of Advent poems I shoveled into envelopes and mailed off to my parents throughout December. 

Yet I recently looked at it again, looked differently at its real/unreal shell. As happens when one turns over a shell, I found something that was – part of the same game, yes, but utterly different. An Imaginary Being. 

Three Winged

A bird’s wing on
Concrete. Fanned
Like unmatched angels’ un-
Steady 

Beat –

Later: mesquite leaves’ perfect
Flared pair, green and neat.

Together, these make trinity

For some rare
New beast;

Three-winged,
Singing 
And

            afloat        

Where 

Bodies known

End. 

Rare New Beast: Bodies, Time, Peace

It isn’t really as neat as the first shell it wore. I’m not really as neat about many things these days, insofar as my ability to say what anything means has vanished even further away than it once was. However:

It seems the idea of time – having it, not having it, losing or savoring it – is always tied to bodies. 

They may be mythical, they may be real; composite, Frankensteined, perfect, failing, falling, floating, difficult, or draining. But it is through bodies that time is had: bodies are the sense by which time is perceived. We cup our hands, so time can pour through. 

Bodies are, of course, eventually lost to time – or perhaps bodies eventually become overwhelmed with their sense of time. 

Or perhaps the more one thinks about time, looks and tastes and pokes at it (as it were) – the idea of using a body to experience time becomes stranger and stranger: 

“…This fantastic encyclopedia, like that earlier alphabetized universe, has ‘penetrated’ our own: the imaginary beings it chronicles are creatures we have lived with and think of as ‘normal’ aspects of our world…” 

Bodies, time, peace; each of these are reality’s “problem children,” the imaginary beings, the hinges, the raisons d’être for everything else: tiny entities rendered transcendent by lack of better names. They are each the symbol and the source: we cup our hands, so that they can pour through. 

It’s certainly a strange shell game to play. At least you’re guaranteed something is under the shell, figuratively speaking: finding “peace” rather than “the piece you were looking for” is still…pretty good. 

Now after all that, I’m off to read Calvin and Hobbes. In case I need backup theories for handling any more “problem children” – imaginary or otherwise. 

Citations
Borges, Jorge Luis, and Margarita Guerrero. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Illustrated by Peter Sís. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Advent, Day 1: No Desert, This

No desert, this:
No time of giving up
Nor letting go – 
Nor gathering in
A harvest,
Rich or spare.

Now is time
For the unresolved – 
By wander or by call,
Wait or weight not moved
By best intent.

Now is time
When birds and stones cry out –
Though yet unknown;

In wheeling winds, 
In the unmown place,
Their gifts are building
Growing towards
Lengthening towards
Some flight of season –

Rare.

My friends –

Once again, the year has washed us ashore – here.

Where?

One of the two great “question mark” spaces built into the liturgical year; those spaces which, if we are wandering them correctly, offer us not a single guarantee of what we are wandering towards.

I greatly prefer Advent when I do not know what I am wandering towards.

There is, you see, a terrible temptation to fixate on cute little manger scenes this time of year. I do not precisely object to the manger scenes per se – I had an early habit of stealing Baby Jesus from pre-natal residence in my mother’s sock drawer – but hear me out: convenient crèches do not pop up anywhere else in life, at any other time, to form a conclusive little “point to all this.”

My mother passed away last December, at the beginning of Advent. A Reverse-Advent, if you will.

I don’t know what she thought about the fact of her passing, because she effectively ceased to speak months prior. I still don’t know what I think about it, either: there is some sort of terrible, constant gratitude, and the strange wonder one has for death. There is, of course, also a steady background drip-drip-dripping of random little deadweight thoughts and memories on any given day.

In the spillage, the crèche becomes akin to the classic perception trick known as Rubin’s vase: a black-and-white image which is in fact two images, depending on your focus. Birth, death: a bloody Mary possibly needing stitches, and definitely needing a more hygienic environment than a goddamn bed of straw. Put the angel on the roof, folks, right up there next to the star: I guarantee Sister Death (as a later St. Francis would name her) was much closer to the crib.

And yet – Sister Death, too, that figure in black and white, becomes vase and face at the same time, helping to birth –

What?

The classic Advent calendar, of course, involves opening doors. Theoretically one does this to get at the secrets hidden behind each door, but the promise of invariably-stale milk chocolate (they never, ever make them with dark chocolate) is a ridiculous effacement of the accidental symbolism here.

A door, figuratively speaking, is the original Rubin’s vase – a space that gives and takes, welcomes and sends off. It is bi-stable. It is unresolved. Its function is to remain unresolved. It is a gift of uncertainty.

Lord, take this certainty. I wish I didn’t know exactly what I was wandering towards, because of course I do in at least one sense. And I wish I knew what to do with the steady drip of things that won’t change; pain, and the costly price of its few antidotes.

Open the door, leave it open. (Leave the milk chocolate too.) Don’t bother looking for a desert beyond; this is no site of personal transformation, no vision quest or pilgrimage.

It is a practice of leaving space for versions of yourself, myself – maybe even Mary, Sister Death, and many others; versions that might look quite different from the faces framed by our daily lives and concerns.

And as we each move forward into this Advent – as, each day, I post a piece here – for now let’s just start with that lack of certainty. No desert, this: enough to say, “What is it?” and wonder (wander) forward, uncertainly, between the lines of black and white on either side.

Tiresias Struck Through

As with most myths, the story of Tiresias exists in multiple versions that often cheerfully contradict and/or overlap each other. Their Wikipedia page makes for quite entertaining reading.

The relevant, reasonably stable thread is this: Tiresias was a prophet who existed as both male and female for different portions of life, either as gift or grievance from the usual Greek kick-line of gods. Given the strict Ancient Greek categorization of women, the fact that everyone seemed to just roll with this is sort of hilarious, in a what-are-y’all-not-saying kind of way – or so I’ve always thought.

At any rate, Tiresias’ sex-change is usually tied to their act of striking a pair of snakes engaged in, um, co-slithering behavior. You heard it here, kids – gender panic comes back to bite ‘ya.

(Also, if explicit language is not for you – consider this the Universe releasing a scurry of metaphoric ADD squirrels to distract you from the rest of the post.)

1.
I’m a prophet not a whore but:
But for –

For a while lines blurred. Hera
And He two snakes I struck through 
Politely, as one does with Gods.

As a prophet and a whore I can’t remember which
Happened before – 

Strike or – form –

2.
I’m a prophet not a whore but for
A while all lines blurred yet

The really
Ridiculous thing is in a place like
Ancient Greece 

Where I should sit at home and comb
Fleece –

How the hell did I get to
(Fuck around)
(Fill my)(Seek my fill)
(Seed my -)(Sex)(O)(So full)
See the world

As a woman? –

3.
I’m a prophet not a whore and for
A while all lines blurred no
Words

Fit my state. No parthenos to gynē
Pipeline, nor hetaira, pallakē, pornē
To thēly
To discuss, Aristotle only touched 
My neutered form 

“In some species the female is more
Aggressive 
Than the male”

(Not-neutered-I can say I touched 
As blind
On more
Than Aristotle –
Many times -)

4. 
I’m a prophet not a whore but still – for

A while all lines blurred all all
(Inside with need all seed all) 
That other form – I –

All grain on threshing floors, oil
Slick with first press stores, wine’s heady
Heavy gush down to the blind-colored sea 

Now hush I – voiced to rise – as women’s threads
Stretch 
On spindled tides’ 
Retreat-and-follow sighs –

The sea with tides that form away
Land’s substance-shores and hold
No space no lines blurred all 
By time but what times all unwinds –
All I unblind –
(Rise, fill) find –

Other form I now find whore more

Inside lines I –
That other form, inside my lines – I,

All lines blurred, I find. 

5.
I’m a prophet not a whore but did

My substance receive form, did
I birthing-warm-and-score my womb
For two, four, none or more? Where
(Hold, skin, no-lines-more – give -)

Are those pieces 
(Where was I -)

6.
I’m a prophet not a whore but for
A while, a time, all lines
Could not hold me. I blurred.

When (I) saw those snakes again 

Did (I) hesitate?

7. 
I’m a prophet not a whore but for a while –
Sacred and profane or all such tame
Concepts as men
Give form to –

Substance sees differently. 
All different sides, all-alive all un-
Lined. 

∞.
(I’m a prophet, perhaps
More, or no more – un
Defined -)

I’m a prophet, and blind. All
Lines blurred 
A long time 
Ago, or too far 
To future-find –

Forms’ unsteady state.
All things happened then or when and
I, I (blurred lines, blind, reception site)
Receive, in my substance –

Opened soft as unwound wool 
‘Til Gods take up to spin.
Change, then, many times –
Wrap and rise, twist both, all same
Time 
(Prophet-whore-truth-blind)

Twist-combine the wool to know
Best, its kind (blurs lined) now –

Now all-twined, as snakes 
Just struck –
Just un-lined –
From-about all form Divine.