" . . . and once again I am a singer in one of the lower choirs, born fifty years ago to raise my voice this high, and no higher."

— Leonard Cohen, from "The Book of Mercy"

"From there, you will have a bored gorilla."

NOTE: A bored deity is a DANGEROUS deity!

I arrived in Keene, NY as a guest of 2 co-madres and partners in Conscious Shadow League on March 13, 2020 and as we were pulling in to the drive-way after the 6 hour drive listening to bulletin after bulletin of the covid plague descending upon nation and world, driving down the long dirt driveway to the house we heard Governor Cuomo officially SHUT DOWN New York State with mandated masks, gloves, etc. Trump shut the nation down very soon after (I think that was the order of how it went down) .I had intended to be in Keene for 2 weeks early spring break but as and it turned out, I spent the entire tsunami of c19 in Keene then returned to East Village, NYC in mid-November.

I must say honestly that I LOVED being in those high mountains for such a long stay. I worked remotely with clients so continued to work. Mail was forwarded to the Keene post office. I phone paid bill and mailed the rent by Express Mail, etc. Worked out very fine.

While in Keene, I spent many an hour in a park, Footbridge Park, in the town of Elizabethtown, NY, a quiet lovely settlement about a 12 miles drive from my friends driveway.

Rarely was there more than 2 people at the park at the same time when I was in my second office (picnic table). A lot of dog walkers, moms pushing baby carriage, eyes out for any person in the vicinity and ready to back away, mask up, etc. But mostly I "owned" the park and its Boquet River, "the steepest...n New York State. It drops more than 2,700 feet from its source on Dix Mountain to Lake Champlain."

As one can imagine, Autumn begins early upstate, close to Quebec (French Canadien music on the a.m. radio), so lysergic mountains and vales induce the color spectrum's vivid side, as we as wonder, joy, ecstasy, humility, praise, and much much more. I would return to my ground floor digs with leaves, boughs, river rocks, tree knots, brook work bottle glass. Loved to forage at the park, the woods there and in the river, shallow by the park where a literal footbridge crossed with a steep staircase other side leading to the E-town hospital and a faster walk into town near the grocery store, court house, school, et al.

At the park, actually everywhere I sent, my camera was very very busy. A number of shots are here on my FB page.

This shot below is taken from my E-town office "desk" - aka picnic table, silver sheen from ages of hotter sun and the more potent rays since the elevation is higher cuz "Adirondacks" (Mount Marcy's just behind, well, LOOMING behind, the smaller mounts extending from it, one of those, say, 40 yards behind the house.

There upon, the Footbridge desk/table, as well as in the ground floor apartment I lived in I reread yet and yet again my tried and true masters of poetry, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, Chaz Olson, the "Creel's", Spicer (LOVE), and Lorca, Rilke, Hopkins, Leonard Cohen, Philip Whaten (a delight to read, his zen ear and eye, his humor and grand capacity to surprise into basho (means "place"), surprise, and pathos without boo hoo but heart breaking in two & two - and so many more poets all kinds..

I continued zen (and varietals - it's prone to branching (as it should but cannot help but do) for all its intention to achieve the One not One which conjures the many so get a good pair of skates to wheel in, through, upon, away, over, under the rumored to be Zen Way of many ways through the gait-less gait.

I studied/read and zafu-sat aka 3 pillows stacked on top of each other purchased from the Dollar Store in E-town,; I'll have you to know that the Buddha would NOT frown at my cheap three layered sn-afu meditation cushion-cake which served (and serves still these 6 years hence) to at least keep my mind somewhat focused/refocused - aka FAT CHANCE - MY zen is FAT CHANCE ZEN - where often, in Keene, now in NYC, visions of Preparation H spontaneously presented/present because of prolapsed zen sitz, I mean, sits in/with/upon my (covid year) late 60's year old body, so sitting too long reminded me, insistently, of impermanence (why can't I remember how to spell the damned word?), of the body and it's functioning for 6-decades- plus "machinery" -

I wonder, though, did Siddhartha Gautama, 

Der Buddha, have "rhoiids" from his seven

years not budging from the Bodhi Tree?

KATZ! (and I hear some snickering from the small fake gold traveling Buddha who travels with me).

Enlightenment can happen anywhere at anytime and it may be "mini' by "maxi" flashes that accrue then one day

ACHOO!

becomes/brings on

AH SO (as*hole in tact or trying).

*

This Zen koan, very famous one, asks over and over, and the sitz-er monk has to come up with their own response from pondering itn....but this famous one points to zen's embracing of

irreverence aka NATURE at work:

What is Buddha-nature?

A DRIED SHIT STICK !(which was what folks used back in the olden of days).

My favorite zen tale because it is so psychological (Jungian re: shadow and, yes, shadow work even for the Zen Abbot:

One Note of Zen

The Most Valuable Thing in the World » Eating the Blame

Circumstances arose one day which delayed preperation of the dinner of a Soto Zen master, Fukai, and his followers. In haste the cook went to the garden with his curved knife and cut off the tops of green vegetables, chopped them together and made soup, unaware that in his haste he had included a part of a snake in the vegetables.

The followers of Fugai thought they never tasted such good soup. But when the master himself found the snake’s head in his bowl, he summoned the cook. “What is this?” he demanded, holding yo the head of the snake.

“Oh, thank you, master,” replied the cook, taking the morsel and eating it quickly.

http://successkey-101zenstories.blogspot.com/2008/04/69-eating-blame_27.html

*

And this other tale presents bold female ZEN having none of the 2-faced zen or gender zen aka men are better at it or or or or boring but stubborn zen

but it's all grist for the zen mind millstone in the all male zen school the zen nun is in

(all religions, truth be told, cannot exist without the 2-faces (good/evil, male/female, etc., it's the dialectic in one flavor West or East or other):

5. If You Love, Love Openly

Twenty monks and one nun, who was named Eshun, were practicing meditation with a certain Zen master. Eshun was very pretty even though her head was shaved and her dress plain. Several monks secretly fell in love with her. One of them wrote her a love letter, insisting upon a private meeting. Eshun did not reply. The following day the master gave a lecture to the group, and when it was over, Eshun arose. Addressing the one who had written to her, she said:

"If you really love me so much, come and embrace me now."

**

And a pre-zen, pre-Jungian analysis, pre-move to NYC for both and massive doses of neccesary shadow work poem....but it's, zennish-esque enough with 'murrain fluff there in ,

this writ, say 1980, on my 28th birthday, Saturn Return already kicking in, kicking my ass hard which led to my moving to NYC on a whim in '82, from a sliver of Huckleberry Mountain to West 142nd Street Harlem NY....arriving there January 2nd, one of two gringos in a totally Korean (South) house hold brown stone beside a Hispanic Pentecostal church! and a house full of zen monks east of the brownstone. So, yeah. And the Koreans were Calvinistic Christians! So glad I found a Jungian analyst to begin working with a month after I arrived not knowing what to expect.

WOWZA.

Definitely NOT in Kansas anymore. And the Trickster God, God IS THE TRICKSTER, THE COSMIC JOKE AND (GUT)PUNCHLINE

But seriously, folks.

Again, a Blue Ridge early attempt at a poem, and the question's within it, zen with it, and fundamentalist despair but at least out of all than outwardly and dealing (and failing) with it inwardly.

Context/cornflakes:

I ate Chinese food on my birthday and my fortune cookie conveyed (see second line):

Delusion Of One

Born: Year of the Dragon.
Horoscope: 'Today's the lucky day.'

Luck, you say? O.K. Once. In a small town
on a snowy road, the scenery spinning round.
When it stopped you were pointing toward a good
place - Home. The message: Go back.
You can decide again to begin again
or stay warm there:

Wombtown, population: 1.

No Lions Club or local Jaycees.
No chocolate bars and brooms for the blind.
Free room and board. It's kick and dream,
kick and dream and cleanliness more efficient
than a space suit. Talk about luck!

You're here aren't you? Don't say good or bad.
It's no accident the year's the Dragon's.
Chinese or no, the year has a tail long as a river.
Peel the scales behind the ears
you'll still roar for pain o roaring boy
spinning in the world, the recurring dream
of vortices whirling pink and red, a large
mouth with teeth spitting you into
an even muddier river. You'd fish it
if you could. More likely you'd dam it
at the source. The occasional catch is
more likely snag in undertow.

It's undertow that matters.
The real power's there.
Ask the undertow, you'll get answers.
Don't say need. The bottom's filled
with old cars, tin cans, bad seed.
All you'll ever want. Get lucky.

This is the day.

The glass on the window's steamed.
Outside's a blur.

What's that gone by spinning with rustling wings,
roaring like wind, glint of mirrors hurling down?

You'd swearthere was a splash.

Something's pointing,

Go back.

**

And a surrealiistic zennish "Murikin pome/mondo" (a NYC early computer find, Dell of the 800 pound modern, and the marvelous electronic gurgle and hiccough sound it made when "thinking" and me talking amongst my many selves waiting for attention on the monitor blue screen, in the dark the entire room blue, too.

How Do You Make The Gorilla Com On Pocket God? (Sic) - A Found Poem

Light the torches using lightning,
place one islander on that central beacon

(he'll stick there spread eagle) .

Then, place one islander on
the drums on the right side,
and one on the crank on the left.

Their eyes will glow red.

Make sure it is night time,
then in a circular motion with
your finger, make the possessed
little dude on the left turn the crank,
spreading the hapless guy in the middle out

... but JUST until the little lights on
the bottom of the altar turn on...

crank too far and he'll explode.

THEN, FINALLY, lightly tap the
drums under the islander on the right...
and voila.

King Kong will eat the guy on the altar.

From there, you will have a bored gorilla.

[this is me, not the poem -

NOTE: A bored deity is a DANGEROUS deity]

*

And a Keene covid19 refugee poem,
zen again, and zen some:

Z-ENTRY ZEN TRY — Day 13:

Sensei tells me:

It's undertow that matters.

I am stumped.

One adjusts. Continually.

The persona is adaptation
appearing to be solid but sleep reveals the neutrality
of the animal.

Dreams tell us otherwise
when we remember them as it takes an ego to witness,
to remember.

They reveal that we are
caught up into something so much greater than
flush and stir.

It's a wonder we make do
as much as we do and still
call ourselves by name, a
species of animal,

homo sapiens.

I regret self pity.

I'd reject it if I could but it adheres,
last resort of old coots born honestly
into it no matter the copious Mercurochrome
baths, the smelling salts obviating the needed nipple.

The stippled trout I nightly catch,
pink insides turned out by blue
blade kept beneath the pillow

baits me with the riddle
again and again -

Something about a stand of trees,
a man carving some bark,
what breath is for.

Today the Market reports a run on Mercurochrome.

Birth goes on.

I am for rebirth.

A dirth of days makes me suddenly Hindu
foregoing gurus and a bindu point.

I've made my own here,
one foot well into 'Cracked and Crank',
the drunk tank a memory
worn out.

Doubt is my companion.

Love, too.
No remorse here.

Buys me time, aftershave, and
loads of underwear for the trickles ahead.

Thank the gods for all that.

Oh. And one last good cigar.

*

Post Script:

Given the ongoing nightmare of human
(first world = worst world) willful insanity and Chaos,

I'm switching to
GROUCHO MARX Zen viz:

YOU SAID TH' WOID
YOU GOT TH' VOID

Indubitably

*

Considered by some to be Leonard Cohen's most Buddhist poem...wadda ye think it may be if not this one...I know it's been played to marana (death - in Pali & Sanskrit):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN7Hn357M6I

"It is enough. It pretends the miracle of never falling" —from the disaster notes, a journal kept off and on around this day since 9/11, the EVENT

"…descend…and of the curveship lend a myth…" —Hart Crane

World Trade Tower 

(I own no rigths to this photo)

[from the disaster notes, a journal kept off and on around this day since the EVENT - not perfect cuz daily scrawled half-asleep waiting for espresso to kick in so….]

from 

 

[][]_____Le Funambule*____[][]

 

Disaster Journals - 9/11

*The Rope Walker

"Those that believe in the evidence of empty space argue that nothing can be in motion unless there were empty space for it to fall in . . . Melissus accepts the argument that movement implies the existence of the void. . . " —from Aristotle's "Testimonia"

I agree with Melissus. Ironically, VOID IS. Words are funny that way - O say can you see…

- for J. who fell that day - tightrope walker, dancer, eye glancer where I once and forever fell continually onto soft landings. My demands are over. I find you now in clover beds behind the Metropolitan, Temple of Dendor overlooking our search for the rare four-leaved still-common flower. You are uncommon always to me. I am the grateful commoner once supplicant at your heart's many chambered door. I am content enough 

Look! 

no wobbling! no net!

the tent walls tremble,

for us he

pretends the

miracle of never falling.

**

Journal entries dates removed:

"This day again, that day I slept in (being a "server" so it was not hard to "lie abed" as my Malaysian friend says), and missed the event but woke at 1 pm, made coffee then noticed that my answering machine was flashing red red red and the entire cassette was full. What? Took a few minutes to rewind - but the day cannot yet be rewound no matter how often we see it or, late night, are compelled to watch the 3 hours of its sudden beginning, the Picasso-like "impress" on the first building airplane angled in, or perhaps Derain or Cezanne daubs but pastel hues blue, gray, dark gray for where structure remained, hints of it, while edifice bore brunt of the "brute brush" stroke into smoke and where there is smoke there is inevitable ash with which a city adorns to mourn.

Even tho the event seems distant, clients still bring in dreams of the ruins, walking over them, bent steel beams over abyss that hopefully lead out of the mess, or over the river or bay, or stuck there on the balance beam in a twisted way glancing nervously up at sky for more planes or the rest of what hasn't fallen to fall...discovering that it is the nation in an infinitely slo mo fall still, grandiosity has no set speed when it falls, it can explode, shatter, or burn burn so,

let El Greco paint a New York City sky that burns eyes 

and throats, chemical scent was still in the air conditioner 

filter for a year after the event.  

Turn it on and down they come, 

the jumpers, 

the countless pages

(are there angels whose jobs are to count exactly how many pages burned in the fires, 

how many scraps action painted, say, Kline or Pollock, between buildings, past windows, on rooftops, water towers mocking their sudden elevation in height 

confusing buffeting scraps for pigeons, but knowing quickly that something was wrong when 

sudden flocks of crows gathered at the site, the cavernous hole choking still on einfalle, 

its arrogant declaration still absurd 2 decades later, that MONEY/MARKET rules. But, 

you may accurately point out, IT DOES, have only to ask any fool and they know that it, the gelt, rules 

even though human flesh melts, disintegrates in 10 seconds as do 3 floors of twin buildings that suddenly 

know how to spell M e r c u r y, the Trickster, he whose name is where we get the very words 

"market"    "merchant"    "mercantile"    "merchandise" 

to name a few.

Conversion On The Road To Damascus

— Caravaggio

So, indeed, Tricksters flew, Mercury with His winged feet, protector of thieves and 

of those who are robbed by thieves, and He is subject to His own medicine, shape shifts a

nd finds out what/who He becomes....and World Trade, yes, Market/Money/Thieves et. al.

Can't make this shit up but can 

bring 

down 

the 

TT-owers.

So, the daily Swamp Singer sends poems today about THAT day, when I pull Tarot cards on that day and now years later and get major arcana aka the Wheel of Fortune card meets the Lightning Struck Tower card meets the Judgement Card imaging Archangel Gabriel blowing His Horn while, beckoned, dead, naked, humans rise up from their graves in order to give account, Last Judgement, of tiny little lives that seem, so it is insisted in Abrahamic religions, seem to "chap God's ass" so much that even the presumed "peace" (= certain surcease) of death is disrupted for further terrors aka that of God,THAT trauma, sez Jung, "God is a trauma", he's painting in broad strokes, telling it straight out, that the day of Shouting, 

that of Resurrection, is not exclusively a promise for Glory

(etymology of "glory" is from Greek "doxa" (the word "doxology" which a hymn of praise sung in Churches,means, going way way back in earlier usage, "reputation")

because gore seems to feed the sacred just as much as glory so - there is that.

EVIL

from whence it came and still doth come
Dum TEE dum-dum DUMMMM

a Fruit (Apple) tree "set up" (more to come)

from the beginning. At the beginning  

Who's really to blame?  

Semaphore signals

Calling Cain.  

Calling Job.  

Calling Jonah. 

And on and on 

and on-ah.

And, to conclude with the Bard,

"the world wags on" despite a  

new and very tempting tower 

(TIK TOK) 

close to South Ferry, its (not smoke, not yet) all mirrors to reflect, to deflect GPS planes intent on painting yet another Greco or Munch, another open-mouthed eyes-wide silent scream soundtracked by jet engines screaming at highest velocity, another paint brush thrusting at glass canvas, hard on the outside, soft with flesh in the middle, 

Counting Angels Legions poised';

I once heard painter Roger Bacon, 20th Century artist of despair, tell an interviewer, who asked, about his relationship to canvas -

"I do no paint.  

I HIT!"

Photo [tilted left] by Mario Novac

[I own no rights to this photo]

Today, 9/11 2024, I woke up and while "lying abed" said a complete Rosary on my 10 fingers, arthritic, offering their pain for Jesus's and His Mother's sorrows, finger prayers, not beads, on purpose making mental note to ask if ever given the opportunity, the Angel in charge of counting fingers, how many were lost and how were found, and not, how many are still on the hollowed/hallowed ground or beneath it. How many lost fingers are there unaccounted for, unclaimed.

A sudden image, all these fingers, handless, but painting, as school children do, on any, each and every surface of or above "the Site" or at night, the perpetual orange glow is canvas enough to easily impress, a sky of finger prints only, countless (but for angels in charge of keeping tabs of dabs, daubs, the curves and turns of one finger, unique to itself tho partaking of "fingerness", same for all the others at work leaving cave wall like cyphers, little nests, or labyrinths through which future souls may use as maps once freed of/from matter.

Or - thread counts they are, too. Finest sheet for such nightly shrouding, there at day too but then the thin web is not seen, no sheen but sunshines through like Gabriel's glory on that Day when, too, tops of every skyscraper become mouths of Trumpets while somewhere graves open and "the dead shall be," are "raised incorruptible".

As all those fingers raise too,

follow the sky map they nightly make to reunite with the rest of remains returning without scars or deformities since archetype rules, primal patterns that LAW and lord over disaster ('bad star' the meaning of the word), disintegration, dismembering, and the Whole, never seamless, always a tear, a stray thread for imperfection is required for there is no Wholeness ever without it, fingers and other parts, angels writing names of those who were scattered on that day and who died from that day after the plummet.

So do say implicate psalms yet to be written but are always "in the works" and are noted, stored, given report of to the the Committee Heads to "better the feathered choirs" always chorusing, a muzak of sorts, They who do what They do which is Mystery (math appears to always be involved in every single thing) but we, I, mortal, can conjecture or at least imagine Their meetings, and those to Whom the Committee report and then make sense of and organize and arrange Fate and such.

Busy Busy.

Is there money in the abstract (money is abstract, is symbol, as too is heaven and facsimiles as similes and metaphor -

wherever, in whatever there there that is
where "They" are in (if They are a They
and are capable of "In-ness")? "

*

Mercifully, an end to some entries.

**

All photos are by W. Falcon except the World Trade Tower, the Caravaggio, and the photo by Mario Novac.

[CLICK ON PHOTOS TO SEE ENLARGED] 

**

Selfie snapped in woods walk 

covid days - Spruce Brook Farm

Keene, New York

Canto Four Perebluebols Writes to the bishop

Reprise -- "Ecrites de l'Enfer"
Pere Bleubols Writes To The Bishop


God has knowledge of the opposites but not the experience of their effect. He has experienced only their peaceful unity...The repressed value contains transformative energies and a consciousness of its own; that to achieve consciousness and discover the nature of one's own inferiority it is at times necessary to go against one's own ego-dominated commandments.
-- Charles Ponce, Working the Soul, pgs. 68-69


Dearest Bishop D'Boue*,

Thank you for the subscription to the science journal. You are correct that I find the new science tempting and attempting whether consciously or not to come to terms with aeons of intuition that there is more to Reality and humans place within it that meets the eye or thigh...I reread your letter with great relish and with great appreciation for the tremendous patience you have with my ongoing battles 'twixt heaven and earth. This, as you know, is still the battle of all humanity caught between the animal instinctual and the rational/spiritual...

...Have been in a 'hermit' phase since the recent Trial and the Purgings...already a spiritual exile long before the Inkling Inquistors I now am more than ready to move to my own self-chosen Patmos...I am a mendicant now, without real temples to kneel in...to quote once again my beloved Rimbaud, "Ah, I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection," only the word perfection, as you know, you who bothers with the roots of all things including words, this misused word actually means complete, as in evolving in space in time, ripening like fruit, into maturity and readiness...

...I dreamed last night I was in an old European city, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Brussels, Bruges-type city, late 1800's (gas lamps in the streets)...old dark city, heavy with something or other, some spirit/zeitgeist...I was some dark powerful man/force whom the zombie/daemon/vampire-like creatures roaming the city ignored since I had some of them, their energy, in me or was partially of them (a hopeful indicator, I think, of ongoing shadow integration) which allowed me to safely deliver a mother (my mother in the dream but NOT my mother in waking reality) and her son (just-adolescent, perhaps my baby brother, about 13 y/o or so with that fuzz just beginning over the upper lip) to a "safe house" owned by a still beautiful, late mid-aged blond/graying woman of magnificent eyes and bearing. She was the widow of a powerful man and prior to whatever had befallen the City was the 'queen' matriarch of society but not superficially...she had bearing, depth, wisdom, had suffered and was suffering but bore it with dignity though with concern and pain. She looked like a combination of my late and beautiful friend, Mdm. M., who died last December, and Madame Curie and some Nordic actress or other whose name I cannot recall. I was compelled to leave having accomplished the delivery of mother and son to the safe house.

The Boschers, as I now call them after demons in Heironymous Bosche paintings, look like enfleshed gargoyles of various frightening visages and bodies. They loaded dead bodies into vaults underneath the cobbled streets...they didn't even give me much notice as I comfortably passed by them. At some point they were stacking old blown glass laboratory tubes (like from science lab equipment of late 1800's) in which a forearm or lower leg with foot attached were sealed for future feedings/experiments.

I was a tall, dark, pockmark-faced man with long flowing black hair, caped, black expensive breeches/clothes, with shiney black boots moving quickly with purpose somewhere away from the safe house. At some point I was wearing expensive running shoes/sneakers, silver in color, very designed (like a lot of contemporary sneakers the new Droogs wear now), which enables me to leap easily, almost weightlessly over barriers, up rocky hillsides, leap down from high places...my arms easily grasp tree limbs, balcony railings, bars, eaves, bricks, pipes through the city propelling me over the streets below, over rooftops, to get quickly to where I was going (of which I am not sure in the dream).

I am of the "dark side" or have enough of it consciously in me now (rather than unconsciously) to allow me to move through the city, the countryside, the continent now full of the Boschers and other daemons and vampire/zombie-like beings going about the work of science...I am to assist both sides, Boschers/other underworld beings/forces and the humans, in this difficult transition during the upsurge of the repressed chthonic underworld beings, energies, creatures (brought about by science, Freud, Jung, etc.), the repressed content of the human and collective unconscious now erupted into the once safe, secure Victorian Christian heirarchical society where church and state and high social "crust" dominated the proletariet, those earthy, instinctual, "morally lower" and mentally/spiritually inferior (or so the power and spiritual elite thought).

I suddenly realize that I left my traveling bags back at the safe house/manor which apparently had some necessary things important enough for me to quickly turn around to retrieve them. Upon entering the safe house (passing two Boschers still stacking the human flesh-filled glass tubes under the cobbled street in a vault...I picked up two tubes in passing and tossed them to the Boschers who caught them and stacked them, me helping them out as I passed) the Dame of the House, the majestic beautiful woman who once was top of the socio-political and literati/philosophical strata of the city and the nation, looked at me with concern and pain in her clear piercing blue eyes...she turned away toward some slow and heavy task and I went to my bags intent on my 'mission' whatever that was..."no time to comfort her...must move on..."

I can easily reenter this dream and continue it...it is very real...I can sense, hear, smell, feel the ambiance and the mental/spiritual air of the time and place, the city and the period it all is taking place in. I am both good and evil, conscious and unconscious, human and Boscher (partake of the underworld realm)...the post-modern sneakers, silver colored, allude to the god Mercury/Hermes who is the traveler of and between all the realms, who is criminal and saint, who plays both or all sides, who has some mission of developing consciousness which does not exclude any realm, upper, middle, lower nor values from evil to good and all between...I move swiftly, a kind of flying, earth flight, low to ground but in flight and touching the earth lightly

...a whole era/aeon is undergoing a tremendous shift and it is a troubled, troubling, dangerous, violent, reactive time...Science has unsettled the old paradigm of God on His throne running the universe with the heirarchy of good and evil and His powerful Representatives on the Earth, etc., whereas the Boschers serve the "god of Science", the Lord of this World, eating/dissecting the human body, matter, reducing matter/Mater (Mother) to objects of research and knowledge, reducing or rejecting 'spirit' and 'soul' altogether, actually repressing 'spirit' and 'soul' by reducing these to rational scientific explanations as functions of chemistry and 'laws'). I stride between and within both paradigms, old and new, more of the old where magic silver shoes can help one 'fly', where being partially of the dark forces allows one to pass unharmed, even to assist, the Boschers and other dark ones experimenting compulsively urged by the emerging zeitgeist spirit/god of science/rationality which is the 'New'...yet the 'New' foolishly, inflatedly "thinks" it is not a part of or beholden to history, the past; it hovers, if you will, born like Athena from the head of Zeus, without mother, without history, full blown/full formed with no moral obligation to history, to matter/Mater including humans or Nature...Nature is reduced to an 'it' to be crafted to serve only the human will/ego...but the Boschers are driven compulsively to have what humans have, capacities for consciousness, emotions, subtleties, spirit, empathy as yet unable to fully integrate/embody these human things...

And your letter with the subscription to the Science Journal open a deep[er door to the scientific realm at least 100 or more years ahead of where my dream has me, late 1800's, as the European civilization begins Its outward decay/decline with the release of the unrepressed instincts and shadow surges up in individuals, cultures, nations, continents...all this the necesary antecedent to new consciousness incorporating past and the 'new'...

My gargoyle self in now fleshed out and moving in this dream...his mission? help the mother and the son, the Dame of the House, AND also assist the Boschers/dark ones in and through this transition, these rough beasts "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born" (W.B. Yeats in his poem, 'The Second Coming').

Synchronistically, while sitting at the Cafe Rue de Repos rereading your letter today, writing, reading, amplifying the dream, watching it unfold imaginally, writing it all down, an old still elegant though faded Victoria LTD automobile parks right in front of me, old world splendour of a car, large, cadillac-like, jaded copper/gold color green tinged--that verdigris "micturation of metals" that the alchemists speak of. The man driving it got out and I was shocked to see an older version of the tale dark man who was me in the dream, complete with badly scarred/pocked face, thick dark brown hair pulled back into a pony tale. He wore black boots, black jeans, dark brown shirt and a gold embroidered vest (having an Eastern European/romani flare to the design)...he looked part native american and part Romani/gypsy...I noticed on the large dashboard in the car interior were two black and white European-style images of the Our Mother (not the Virgin of Guadalupe whom you know I adore) along with what appeared to be a sacred card with a red felt frame around a red-lettered/printed prayer.

The driver went to his car trunk, opened it revealing full bags, unpacked scattered clothes, and a bottle of red wine, an Italian vintage whose label I recognized, inexpensive but sufficient for a boiled potato meal, or something like that...he fished a coat out of a rag heap, closed the trunk, put it on then reopened the trunk to adjust the wine bottle further into the rags, clothes and papers (so as not to break from the closing trunk?)...he walks away...watching all this the hair is standing on my arms and my neck is all prickly...this is too too passing strange...he looks just like the man in the dream who is 'me' only maybe 10 or 15 years old, my age now, late 50's/early 60's, but large, in good shape but for a bit of a middle-aged stomach and hips but barrel chested and strong with a powerful aura like a medicine man or wizard where Rasputin meets the Righteous Reaper and the Dear Savior, sharp clear eyes, shining...

I tried to see the car tags as he later pulled away but looked up too late from my writing to be able to make out where he is from...Canada? Wisconsin? Couldn't make it out...damn. I half expected to find him parked in front of my quarters in the church yard upon return home. Not.

This dreams seals it...there is now no wonder why I could no longer be in the Enclave d'Esprit Spirale which inflatedly thinks it can be "all Light", naively spiritualizng Nature and the Chthonic forces of which I believe the Boschers represent in the dreaml. To what purpose can I turn or guide, if at all, the Boschers and other related 'ill-k"? Who leads all this if it is One Entity at all? or some greater force partaking of Dark and Light, some Archon, some Entelechy experimenting, forcing, thrusting, using human consciousness to what purpose which moves manipulatingly through what humans call "Good" and "Evil"...we personify the Powers/Archetypes but these ultimately defy such personifications which are images and embodiments, hints and conjectures with hiccoughs of their work/way/will under the push of the Force...

...In this dream I leap from hill to roof to cliff to church ledge equally at home in the boulevard and the hedge, the city and the valley creche (cradle), the height and the hole; I feel something for the mother, her son, the Dame, the human bits and parts parceled and packed, parked under the cobbled streets but the feeling/emotion is remote and subject to the detached overview and perspective of larger Vision/Mission--Impersonal Forces are at work in the World, in humans, too, almost especially so, therefore sentimentality is dangerous though compassion is not although I cannot stop to comfort or explain (if I know at all) what is going on and wherefore to the Dame of the Manor. I must to my bags then swiftly fly off to some as yet to be known by me the dreamer though the dream Bluebols knows or at least intuitively leans toward the place, destination, further mission...

To be continued. Must be noted that the dream Bluebols was not inflated, not full of himself at all though he strode with magnificent confidence, authority, power and assurity through the city and the world. There was no question as to right to exist, purpose, no 'moral confusion' but a sense of ethical obligation to the Forces and the creatures born of such, human and otherwise, a mediary between what appear to be opposing worlds/energies, the Opposites Jung wrote so much about.

Please accept my gratitude along with my apologies for sending you all this and taking up so much of your time. It aids me so to know you are constantly present to receive my rantings, my prayers, my quandaries with such equanimity and genuine interest. I am forever indebted and grateful.

Yours humbly,

Pere BB

* Boue means mud in French

REPRISE: What Is Known Is Variable And Dependent Upon Available Light - Instants Upon The Approaching Night

12/22/12 2:43 p.m. - Original publication date

Little Warren, asquint in sun, 

unintentional clown face 

permanently stuck in place

 

"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

That place among the rocks--Is is a cave,
Or a winding path?  The edge is what I have. - Theodore Roethke"

I have occasionally described my standpoint to my friends as the "narrow ridge,"’ writes Buber. ‘I wanted by this to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.’ (Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith [London: Kegan Paul, 1947] p.184). Perhaps no other phrase so aptly characterizes the quality and significance of Martin Buber’s life and thought as this one of the ‘narrow ridge.’ It expresses not only the ‘holy insecurity’ of his existentialist philosophy but also the ‘I-Thou,’ or dialogical, philosophy which he has formulated as a genuine third alternative to the insistent either-or’s of our age. Buber’s ‘narrow ridge’ is no ‘happy middle’ which ignores the reality of paradox and contradiction in order to escape from the suffering they produce. It is rather a paradoxical unity of what one usually understands only as alternatives -- I and Thou, love and justice, dependence and freedom, the love of God and the fear of God, passion and direction, good and evil, unity and duality." -- from Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue by Maurice S. Friedman (online book: http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=459&C=371)

"The narrow ridge is the place where I and Thou meet," he [Buber] added. When I asked him to clarify this symbolism to me, he replied...'If you like, you can think of the narrow ridge as a region within yourself where you cannot be touched. Because there you have found yourself: and so you are not vulnerable."

"I have already said that every Thou in our life is doomed to become and It, a thing. The man or Woman whom we love, whom we seek to fulfil totally, becomes a given imperfect person with a known nature and quality. A young medical student dreams passionately of curing suffering humanity. Then he becomes a doctor in a crowded hospital with pressure, with not enough time to devote to every patient. And the suffering humans become objects. They recede to the world of the It. This is the tragedy of being human. And in order to avoid losing the I-Thou we must take our stand on the narrow ridge, as a company of soldiers takes up its position on an embattled hill and says, From here we shall not retreat!"

"And, as you have asked me for a clearer definition, I will say, the narrow ridge is the meeting place of the We. This is where man can meet man in community. And only men are who are capable of truly saying "Thou" to another can truly say "We" with one another. If each guards the narrow ridge within himself and keeps it intact, this meeting can take place."
-- pg. 69-70, from Encounter With Martin Buber, by Aubrey Hodes, Penguin Books, 1972


"Religion could be called “Meaning and Belonging, Incorporated...There is a need for thoughtful people to make some discriminations between and within religious groups -- to look for curing impulses that are latent in the faiths that so easily can spread disease." - Martin Marty, from "Religious Cause, Religious Cure"

1971 - Christian college days/dazed, but

trying, not succeeding, "don't try to hard"

was counseled then, but was no comfort

I'm holding a kid from downtown Chat.

TN. at a crowded concert at the college.

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, Chimney 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 meanderer along cone-strewn hiking trails flailing loudly at schist, thrusts of snowy quartz and invisible judges, those hold over Puritans still adamantly flinging hell and grace thickly about and I eventually came undone, psychologically wasted, pooped, popped, in what is nowadays called a state of "spiritual emergency."  I had been reduced by these Buckle Toes - a friend's moniker for the self-appointed heavily-godded Christian ones spreading/spewing forth projections and hatred from Salem over the homeland to even a mountain in Tennessee.  Rather than being an obedient follower I apparently only excelled at flunking  "bleat" - deacon, sanyasin, chela, devotee, all the 'spiritual diminutives' related to being a 'lowly follower.'   I was also 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 human relationships bungled, mangled in all flavors of tango and tangle, and the immense social pressure to conform to group mind and coercions which as Jung says "are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics."  And hysteria.  Thus Salem.  Thus New Age circle jerks.  Thus, alas, myself, jerker and berserker in chief.


All this and more bored even the solitude of patient mountains, their constancy challenged by my morass on the moraine. the harlequin heart-staggers - a prideful statement but it must be said to make a point: I felt at the time as an absolute truth that I could sway even the mountains where 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 almost indisputable glimpse but could not give a good description of Him to the God Protectors, the Infidel Police, since my description or approximation (which they ALL really are, right?) did not match their True God profile and fingerprints codified in The Book, their reserving all rights and authority about what is True and not True about the Almighty's apparitions and whereabouts, "Nope, sonny boy...not Him"...apparently I had only misperceived something out of the corner of my thigh mistaken for merriment most forbidden. I was with Nietzsche by then, "I can never worship a god who didn't dance." I had tried all my youth long to worship a barnacled-pier God. But no more. Dance I did in the mountain glades and trails when the travails of mind did not so much prevail upon. But even in travail the dances continued. Silent. Heavy. The nearby stream promiscuously offering it's massive wet stones as my dance partners.

And I broke my back lifting God to heaven.

This God of the Magician's Hat - now you see Him, now you don't - revealed Himself most to me via Meister Eckhart's Via Negativa which remains the natural way of my soul's stumble through wilderness stretches and wine wretches, instantly spiritually orienting on the knees shouting "please please" to tree limbs, what they perpetually pointed to always swaying swaying. Barring remote 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 ghostly hidden fires, copper spirits coiling alchemically in night tree tops (now pointing downward) easily mistaken for Moon shyness, never mind the lead and rust infused. After those wasted moments I recovered on the front porch with bitter espresso, some Gregorian chant wafting through the screen door, a car battery powering the record player stacked with chants and such to soothe the burning stomach, the shaking hands, a view of the apple orchard in the valley below, an old cedar in the sloping yard just a few yards ahead made of once were two saplings which had early entwined, now-years-wound, creaking into one massive trunk, such a groan it made with the high wind crushing shrilly down from Mount Mitchell's dark hover behind the hut, or valley gales rushing up from fallen apples and Barron's Creek to my perch settled in without electricity, the cedar's drone become a home to nestle a sore head upon and within; therein I turned to Chinese poets of old to savor, one now a thoughtful lifelong companion through all cycles so far lived, Liu Tsung-yuan (773 - 819), a human homing device, an in-the-moment course correction when intercourse with the world, and my pitiable self, was just too too much to bear. Old Liu would lift me out of pathetic self muck, gather my scattered bones from the sandy bottom by the creek as he did the bones of old Heng the hired hand whose name means "persevering," and orient me toward the western woods, "I only wish for fine wine and friends who will often help me pour. Now that spring is drawing to a close and peach and plum produce abundant shade and far, far, the homeward goose cries, I step outside, greeting those I love, and climb to the western woods with the aid of my staff. Singing out loud is enough to cheer me up; the ancient hymns have overtones."

On the edge over the bee-loud Blue Ridge valley all apples and manure shining flashing of green-tailed flies, before further exile, I escaped nightly to work, late ward sits as an attendant at the local psychiatric hospital, wee hours reading Hopkins, Rimbaud, Rilke, Lorca, Berryman, Roethke, many other poets of the world who like Liu Tsung-yuan turned woes into ancient hymns and overtones. After one fateful graveyard shift all night reading Basho Matsuo's Narrow Road to the Deep North, in dawn's hut I begot to stumble-bed visions of pagodas and temples, fog-draped mountain passes, high peaks - names like Dismal Crouch and Turn Around Fool - spare anthems, such are haiku, of chrysanthemums in my head 8 a.m - "chysanthemum" means "golden flower," "gold" = chrysos, and "anthemum" = "flower" which, by the way, "anthemum" holds within it an "anthem" - with such a mind full I dreamed a Great 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 some malformed thing in me had to go, to flower-wither, to summarily croak, so plans were made whence and whither, lodgings arranged, Harlem 1980, Koch era, the internal 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 where mad Garcia Lorca once fled the sorrowful fountains of Spain to roam awhile before his return to yellow feathered assasins and an invisible grave, "some say the crime was in Granada" :

Friends, carve a monument 
out of dream stone 
for the poet in the Alhambra, 
over a fountain where the grieving water 
shall say forever: 
The crime was in Granada, his Granada. 

 - Antonio Machado, from "The Crime Was In Granada"

 I was enchanted like Lorca by old bricks squalid beauty, each a story told, a private gesture open to witness, mud memory mute and chrysos, sonambulant subway pitching interminably forward, graffiti scrawls clutching after a bit of fame or notoriety into what was still a pandemonium most pentecostal long ranting after dark, jazz, salsa, merengue nights gore and glory dispatched from cars, windows, stoops, sidewalks, "Thriller" and Tina Turner's question "what's love got tah do with it" my new enforced mountain-exile meditation - children's play, all ages, 3 a.m. hydrant fountains bodies hot hard in lamp glow orange apocalypse by river curl following apparitions native barks and Dutch long ships sails-full passing West 142nd, blocks south looms Cathedral Divine Saint John's hang, just beyond reach of workers, trabajadores, immigrant occupants who north of 116th street earnestly try to migrate joys few coins rolling in gutters, millions passed and passing by overlooking the Christ, hungry abject crowds, slogging for the American dream,

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

Wasn't all this redeemed/revalued a long Palestine ago? The crysos of Church and churches remains more that of fools and not of the Christos. There's much to blame. Still, I'm a gargoyle perched-a-ledge mis-churched and worn, God of the Western and American world stuck in my craw, a lightning bolt bolted to my left paw beside near-dead Aquinas-Saint about himself/his work lifelong, the Summa and more - the Church more in mind and himself in terms of the real value of all his theologizing - "All straw! All straw!" For this reason though, post-Christian, pre-Manhattan, I had hid, nay, sequestered mad-enough in mountains tall, stalled, a being-not-yet. Bequestered and confundidated. Hiding out in Nature's beauty was all I then could do. So I waited for Mister Godot. Until He showed up, a cheap bordeaux would do. And reading the nights slowly through.

Till the "Go way" notice came.

The Sorrow and the Pretty

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, that the feminine is preserved and men are saved from tempting male beauty.  

In most forbearing mountains thus I hid my blushing pretty at war with myself (having internalized the Christian cultural fulminant Funda-fomentalism).  But one must not in mountain world surpass even their beauty, or their pretty.  They win such wars by time which wears down flesh and minds. Respectful of this then, and gladly, while in their secure embrace, I cultivated both god and verse hunkering down in remote cabin shade. There I braved the pretty and the beautiful by day - the bluet, the rhododendron, the trillium, the mountain laurel - to boldly reveal them ahead of  the 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 is brief tip to top, and in the between-brief span brightness stops both Sun and seer mid-afternoons. 

And obedient, some of us, the pretty ones (then),  to the sheltering darkness get. Much may be 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 did I to fire or bulb light for all Beauty burns away to 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, the homeless Good Will-ed, for such now my verse is bestowal most holy gentle upon their sleeping faces, chrysanthemums each a pretty a beauty, black buds made mad with themselves the blunted social world could not contain. 

Toward "Being-Not-Yet" A Mountain Self Is Reborn

One more day in Carolina before leaving the spurnful mounts, Tillich's "being-no-more" chased hotly from behind 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 they were both taking care of her 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.

Actually, my mom, in Starbucks Bliss

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 needed to transplant an alien religion in Korean native soil which somehow took root, held on, and now flourishes in the southern half of the Korean peninsula. 

The drive to Manhattan would begin very early in the morning with Asa bound to see a brother living in Harlem, a Korean Studies student with a Korean wife, many of her family living there as well in the renovated brownstone near the Hudson.  This was to be my home for six years.  Totally other cultural immersion.  In Harlem at that. Suicide by New York, indeed.  Just what I needed.

I rested in the small guest room beside grandmother's.  Asa would touch my door all too early so I retired to bed earlier than usual in order to get up in the pre-dawn for the long drive north.  Sleepily 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 would soon hear Dahlia enter grandmother's room.  Grandmother will have called 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 spit. 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 who owned 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. When the first missionaries arrived disease and poverty were rampant. Of such is a soil made ready - and also souls care-worn and hard laboring against regressive forces of nature and overweening foreign power usurping land and leadership - for strange nurture bearing strange fruit but barely, tree by tree, so please the patient Fructive Power.

Spirit-seed, new stuff, no matter how foreign and other in 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 finally 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 dampered down in her to simple kindnesses bestowed in gentle smiles, a soft yet ripened presence atop a stair in a dwelling hard-pressed into an begrudging mountain.

 

I, on the other hand, 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 patiently dying in her own vision bed of an older time 2000 years followed/lived and lived out into a personal 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 those manmade above - out from mountains and beside 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 say, "all sentient beings," and as the Psalmist says, "all creatures great and small," as the Cristos says, "for the least of these...the last shall be first," and 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 sees that which is created and declares (surprised, too, and known newly by what is 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 come 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.  

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