What Is Known Is Variable and Dependent Upon Available Light

Little Warren, unintentional clown face, already too much glare...

"I am old enough now to realize we are all trying to live sufficiently long to see the self come true.  None of us is likely to make it.  Therefore we invent selves, we prance and pose and dream and labor, confirming what we might be by what others think we are and by what we see we have been." - Dave Smith, "A Secret You Can't Break Free

"We go towards something that is not yet, and we come from something that is no more. We are what we are by what we came from. We have a beginning as we have an end. There was a time that was not our time. We hear of it from those who are older than we; we read about it in history books...It is hard for us to imagine our 'being-no-more.' It is equally difficult to imagine our 'being-not-yet'. " - Paul Tillich


The day before I moved to New York City after being kicked out of North Carolina by the Blue Ridge mountains Greybeard, Looking Glass, Shining Rock, the diminutive Huckleberry, the myopic Lookout and Height Enough, and from over the border in South Carolina the mountain of my childhood, Roper, which swallowed Wickerbill the best hunting dog in the world ever in its red clay maw, thus was confirmed my non-negotiable eviction. One does not argue with mountains especially when they are right. I was broken, a miasmic meander on the hiking trails flailing loudly at invisible judges, an asthmatic muddle of labile glossolalia and spiritual aphasia, symptoms of which were a profound sense of having once again failed a life which could never get off the ground (much less the urgrund of which I was muchly addicted and compelled toward), and my clearly having failed 'following' or, rather, discipleship.  Apparently I only excelled at flunking deacon, sanyasin, chela, devotee, all the 'spiritual diminutives' related to being a lowly 'follower.'  As my malaise jelled, settled in then hardened into an aspic concretion of babbling self-defeat, I was most morose over not being able to get one, ye gods and little fishes, just one good poem written. Never mind the usual common-to-everyone maladies, the maladjusted scraps and scrambles of relationships human, divine, bungled, mangled in all flavors of tango and tangle.

All this and more bored even the solitude of patient mountains, their constancy challenged even by my mess ups and heart staggers - this is a prideful statement but it must be said to make a point, I felt at the time as an absolute truth, I could sway even the mountains. Pre-eviction, I hermit-ed in rhododendron-wrapped prison walls of books and empty wine bottles, each book, each bottle, a prayer to the "God who was supposedly there" but I never saw Him or, rather, occasionally caught an indisputable glimpse but could not give a good description of Him to the god police since He did not match their profile and fingerprints codified in The Book. But usually I had mis-perceived something out of the corner of my thigh mistaken for merriment most forbidden.  This God of the Magician's Hat - now you see Him, now you don't - revealed Himself most to me via "Cathoholic Ways" and Meister Eckhart's "Via Negativa" which was and is my most pronounced and natural "way" of soul and stumble through wine wretches (instantly spiritually orienting - on the knees shouting please please to tree limbs and what they perpetually point to always swaying swaying.  Barring spiritual cures and pathetic prayer the "hair of the Wickerbill" served - a triple Alka Seltzer shot with a local "moon" chaser, a homeopathic remedy derived from mostly hidden fires of spirits coiling alchemically in night tree tops (now pointing downward) easily mistaken for Moon shyness, never mind the rust and lead infused.

In the Blue Ridge valley, before eviction came, I escaped nightly to work, late night ward sits as an attendant at the local psychiatric hospital, wee hours reading Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Berryman, Roetke, and the many poets who seemed to have turned woes into great poesy.

I woke up one mid-afternoon after graveyard shift all night reading Basho Matsuo's "Narrow Road to the Deep North," then begot to stumble-bed visions of pagodas, temples, chrysanthemums in my head 8 a.m - "chysanthemum" means "golden flower, "gold" = chrysos, and "anthemum" = "flower" which, by the way, "anthemum" is where the word "anthem" derives). I dreamed of a mountain's voice shouting, "Go away!" and that was enough for me. Where I'm not wanted I don't stay so I made plans to flee. I followed my exiled self into further exile, Deep North, a symbolic defiant suicide-by-New-York-City.  Someone or something in me had to go, to flower-wither, to summarily croak, so plans were made, lodgings arranged, Harlem 1980, Dinkins era, the wilderness wander further ensuing urbanly hardcore, Basho's book in my coat pocket just in case I needed a reminding map in upper-upper Manhattan's mad, Lorca-esque, squalid beauty and subway squall, salsa and merengue nights pitched from cars, windows, stoops, sidewalks, "Thriller" and Tina Turner's question,"what's love got tah do with it" became the new and enforced meditation, children's play all ages in all night fountains bodies hot summer lamp glow orange apocalypse by the river dreaming native bark canoes and the long ships sails full by West 142nd, Cathedral Divine -Saint John's hang - just beyond reach to occupants north of 116th street much as Gothic gargoyles can relate or earnestly try to immigrant joys amalgums years of chewing gum pressed sidewalk lichen no longer stuck to shoes the millions passed and passing over...

"I have the money and can pay for the past. - Richard Hugo"

All this the above said may make me sound like I was a bad-ass but that's not true. Irreverent, yes.  And bluster. Bluster counts here as disguise for I was pretty.  Not handsome.  Prettiness counts for much in youth, in older age it is (sadly) sacrificed for Beauty..  A necessary assault in order to grow wise.  Wisdom comes from loss and blood, always of the Moon.. Even gorgeous buds must go.  Nature says it so.  And we can and should protest their going but in older age one loses energy to fight so gives in to what is "just so." In sorrow sore, in broken mendicant hearts having touched tenderly and tasted the binding buds wisdom is born.  

But pretty boys make for an awful confusion amongst men, a real trouble, and, yes, violence verily.  Men like pretty in their women but find it most disturbing in boys and young men. Then Golden Flowers are crushed, righteously so.  Chapter and Verse.  Sanctified wrath against sublime wraiths-most-lovely wars and destoys, it is by polite and holy society "of the male born" considered a duty harsh, justified, manly and rushed, and the feminine is saved from tempting male beauty..  

Thus I hid my blushing pretty at war against myself in most forbearing mountains but one must not even in mountain world surpass their beauty or their pretty.  While in their secure embrace I cultivated both gods and verse in remote cabin shade; the pretty and the beautiful by day - the bluet, the rhododendron, the mountain laurel - I braved to boldly reveal ahead of  inexorable shadows that mountains make because that one and only golden Sun, ours, flowers only-danced in shortened pretty skies bluet-blue, because those who know mountains true know that valleys are king and sunlight brief tip to top, and in between a brief span brightness stops both Sun and seer mid-afternoon.  And obedient, some of us, the pretty ones,  to the sheltering darkness get. Much may get done between 10 a.m and 4 but then shuts the revelation door,  the valley/the veil resumes its reign. There both pretty and beauty pander to stained human palettes painfully returning as I did to fire or bulb light for all Beauty burns away into shadow (only in memory Beauty stays).  One develops night vision to see it.  Thus did I work the night surrounded by others tears, lost their pretty selves the youths of wards and afterwards, and also those in tenements the old, or homeless, for such verse is a bestowal most holy in their sleeping faces, chrysanthemums each a pretty, a beauty, black buds made mad with themselves the blunted social world could not contain.

One more day in Carolina before the drive north, Tillich's "being-no-more" chasing hotly behind me pushing me compellingly toward "being-not-yet," I gathered myself inwardly for the journey with a friend, Asa, a missionary kid who grew up in South Korea.  He was newly married to a woman named Dahlia who, too, had grown up in Korea, also a missionary kid.  Asa was living in Dahlia's family home where both he and Dahlia were taking care of her very elderly grandmother who had spent her entire life as a missionary in Korea until retiring to the North Carolina village mostly occupied by retired missionaries and ministers of her particular denomination.

Grandmother, in advanced old age, a hundred years old, was beginning to "lose it" mentally.  Her room was a dark one, small, cramped, musty with old yet well cared for black lacquered chests from Korea. Exquisitely designed, balanced, ornate but not precious, these ornaments were shining presences from an era of the Hermit Kingdom now rapidly receding into the past yet resonate and alive in the dark space that grandmother's long, richly occupied and fruitful life was now confined to.  A small window with a single homemade faded curtain, white, obviously hand sewn Korean lace delicate at the bottom hem, was, too, darkened by the mountain hill within arm's reach just outside the house perched high on a severe grade of the house-resistant mountainside, perhaps a symbol of the immense effort of transplanting an alien religion in Korean native soil which somehow took root, held on and now flourishes in the southern half of the Korean peninsula. 

In the early morning I was going to drive up to Manhattan with Asa whose brother lived in Harlem, a Korean Studies student with a Korean wife and many of her family living there as well in the revovated brownstone near the Hudson.  This was to be my home for six years.  Suicide by New York, indeed.  Just what I needed.

I slept in the small guest room beside grandmother's.  I had retired to bed earlier than usual in order to get up early in the pre-dawn for the drive north.  Writing in my journal, reading Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot which had become my "Bible," a post-Christian guide in mine own "dark night," I heard Dahlia enter grandmother's room.  She was calling out in her frail voice, a voice laced as the curtain hem was laced, a voice hanging in dimmed stillness at the top of the stair, traces of an old order still alive in a voice woven with manners and bearing of a gracious Southern woman who had managed to live an most unusual life, a non-traditional life, a life that most Southern white women were not allowed to live, indeed dared not live nor, frankly, cared to as it was a life of hardship, alienation, determination built upon steely will and Biblical vision, dependent totally upon Holy Spirit and grit. And palpable grace.

Times enough that that grace seemed to be muted, remote in what was perceived as obstinate darkness of minds, "pagan" minds, to be harvested for God's kingdom but rejecting, or at least strongly resisting, that unsought for and proffered missionary grace. Still, grace was present as anchoring thought often unfelt/unseen and thus was clung tightly to in underscored and memorized Bible passages, desperate/obstinate/woeful/hopeful knees-worn prayer, and a growing steely capacity, a sure sign of grace and adaptation, for living in the absurd contradiction and presumption needed to impose an alien belief system sincerely believed in native  inhabitants and owners of their own spiritual soil, a people content enough with their own root belief systems formed of their local earth, river, sea, sky, history, their unique soul and spirit inherent in whatever combinations of all these elements and more which make a people and a nation, whose religions are containers of their ultimate values and concerns.

Yet, Spirit-seed, no matter how foreign and other in the earthern veils variant, can adopt, take root, then adapt and uniquely grow though that original seed has been altered by the old indigenous gods/seeds. And the missionaries, too, are worked-upon within and by the land and culture they pilgrim-roam preaching through becoming more like the new soil and soul that they've transplanted themselves upon.  As one religion professor once told me, "In the history of religions, when an old religion transplants itself in a new land with its own religions and gods, within a generation or two the old gods have their way with the new ones and the new ones, too, are transformed."  And so religion wags on.

Grandmother politely called out, "Dear? Dear? o Deeaaarrrr?"  a lilting child's singsong, a voice of charm endearing the heart.  Upon the hearing I was struck by a deep resonant and somehow reverant (almost wrote "revenant") sadness.  A natural sadness. Of "the end of the road," the end of a "toiling for the Kingdom" life, of having pursued and been pursued by a profound sense of calling, of mission, new seeds in an old soil made of all common and excruciating givens which form human suffering, the patient (and impatient) yearning toward immediate surcease as well as hopeful increase of one's own children and the generations to come. For grandmother, having "run her God's race," the finish-line human and divine was near, dire, but tinged with the smoke of Pentecostal fire now dampened in her to simple kindnesses bestowed in gentle smiles, a soft yet ripened presence atop a stair in a dwelling hard-pressed into an unyielding mountain.

 

I had no clear sense of calling or mission.  For me was only a gripping desire and devotion, a lifelong draw toward the arts, toward writing, toward poetry, which would thus redeem my existence from the mundane failures of being "human, all too human."  If like Eliot, like Lorca, like Rilke and so many others, I could follow "the draw" and sew a hem of words for the window soul of some single reader in need of companionship and presence, of revelation, even if only that image mundane of  dancing dust "caught" in a shaft of sunlight (Eliot's image) then that would be satisfaction enough for me in my own "craft and sullen art" outborne, "Exercised in the still night / When only the moon rages / And the lovers lie abed" (Dylan Thomas), a grandmother is patiently dying in her own ancient vision bed followed, lived, and lived out into a harvest nigh..

I heard the young granddaughter's feet upon the old stairs as she ascended to attend to frail grandmother's beseeching in a voice a century old.  I listened in the dark, the mountain's palpable gloom in my small window, too,  matching the darkness within myself having lost available light but for that orienting flicker of Eliot's Quartets and a blear smear in the coming dawn toward the American northeast whose bricks and steal I would soon enough founder upon, stalled again. Apalled.  Yet enthralled by the spanses of bridges spiring horizontally over rivers which below carved spaces their own like the the manmade ones above - up from mountains and rivers could I enter those spaces of shapely air and be at last reborn? 

I then heard the tender door-knock, the muted creak of an opening, a soft entrance into the ruminate room, "I'm here, grandmother. Here I am. Your Dahlia. What may I do for you, dear?" Silence. "How may I be of help to you before eventide and slumber?"

What world had I been so fortunate to stumble into to hear such eloquence voiced from a genteel time passed on in inherited speech to a granddaughter just launching into her own young life of vision and fire?

Silence.  Then frail, polite, a voice, the voice of bearing, of manners, of divine mission heeded, obeyed, answered, done, responded, "I need to know, Sweetness, do please tell.  Is your handsome Asa doing a beautiful thing?  Is he? Is he doing a most beautiful thing?"

Stunned. 

A beautiful thing? a most beautiful thing?  a doing of beauty or beauty in the doing?  Deep emotion sudden-rushes up from remote recesses within me, lifegiving waters up and outspring, so much so that I wrack, wrecked, sob unrestrained into a pillow infolded in a delicate handmade Korean pillowcase too perfect and silken for my rough, irreverent,  indelicate American tears. Here was a reversal of mission fields, Korean pillow-grace receiving torrent tears,  a post-Christian son of the South's "Christ-haunted landscape," sheening darkly wet, outlines shown upon silk, blindsided by unexpected flash..

Available light.  More than available light.  Grace sear and sheer.  Surprising.  Invasive.  Breakthrough hard layers, years accretions, fortress fears against inner and outer longing, aspiring, failing, "Jesu" greatly desiring, but unsaid, unstated, unseen but intuited, felt, not known, suddenly collapsing within and crumbling down upon a gentle question innocently, earnestly, asked :

Is Warren doing a beautiful thing?  Is HE doing a most beautiful thing?

This question then (and now) was (is) more than orienting.  Immediately upon hearing it Vocation was finally named, attained and mine.  From a dying grandmother who was dead within weeks of my arrival in New York, whose legacy to me and, I'm sure, many, is Beauty, "a beautiful thing,"  a doing of beauty.  I keep repeating this now to remind me in this Advent season verging on the personal advent of my official and all too real old age, the need to keep being awed, and doing, for grandmother, lovers and loves, for, as the Buddhists would say, "all sentient beings," and as the Psalmist says, "all creatures great and small," as Dylan Thomas circumscribes the doing for those "human, all too human" all and awe, "With all their griefs in their arms,/I labour by singing light/Not for ambition or bread/Or the strut and trade of charms/On the ivory stages/But for the common wages/Of their most secret heart."

And secret no longer, it is Beauty pursues me.  Beautiful things. The doing of them.

It is Beauty then, a containing event, a force, a hint, where all things, good, evil, the gray and in between, and always fragmenting things, the frailty and the reforming of what remains even if just another slant of light casting shard moments in ways that are revelation, revealing Beauty's doing - it is then both perceiver and that which is perceived together comprise a witnessed thing most fine and consonant (even if plain by daily eyes/ears) hitherto unseen/unheard or non-existent but born from the union of the knower and the known, and born even from known me, the useless one, the lazy one (my father's voice) trailing books, words, misused and broken relationships, wary of people-as-paths, the pricks and pieces, all promises of things sucked dry to skins, my skin now, o thin thin. Yet singing.

One framing question and a cosmos is created then.  Out of darkness, light.  God, I believe, still speaks worlds into being.  And what is uttered is a question, a question of "Beauty's doing" and that hidden "Self" of and in matter within matter not-yet-fully-mattered sudden startle-bursts into grateful, stunned existence resonating, breaking things into further opening, unveiling, yielding, God-question quakes into trembling, yielding revelators.

And trembling, finite, we, revelators all, return to solidity as gift. Our being in finity. And God saw that which was created and declared (stunned, surprised, too, and known newly by what was perceived and responding, gazing, speaking back), "It is good."

Pressed against a mountain steep in a hamlet of august Presbyterians Calvin-severe, many of them returned from the Hermit Kingdom driven there and back by King James Word fires, conjurers of a Shining Stranger's irresistable Grace, I find myself alien and broken there again upon a silk pillow in tears, "a word, a question, fitly spoken" wringing forth one odd salvation managed for even me in the narrowing Carolina valley of what then was a yet to be lived and uttered life beholden to a first bridge, a dying gracious lady, a grandmother questioning and in that question a new being comes in from Kingdom exile newly standing in kind and canyon light, Evocation leading to Vocation. 

And Beauty is the Name derived from both depth and height.

What is known is variable and dependent upon available light.

[All photographs in this essay are by Warren Falcon.  All rights are reserved for him]