April 5, 2010 · 11:38 am

Easter Morning

Good morning. Today is Easter Sunday. Lance and I ran into Nancy and Renny on our walk along the bayou. She wore large pink and white fuzzy rabbit ears . . . and sunglasses. “He is risen,” Nancy said, by way of greeting. And then: “He did die for our sins, after all.” That considered, we agreed the least we could do was wear funny bunny ears in tribute to our savior.

The pealing bells of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary fill the sky. Trilling birdsong drifts down from my neighbor’s rain gutter where some loudmouth has built a nest. I have a vague atavistic notion that I should be in church today. There is a distinct sense of uplift in the air. Everywhere I went on my walk this morning, people called out, “Happy Easter!” Does this happen so consistently elsewhere?

I also saw Diane walking her Jack Russell Terrorist, who happens to be named Grace—of all things. I mentioned Easter Mass in passing. Diane shook her head, no. “I’m in church, right here,” she said, as she passed beneath the arms of a giant oak. That’s the spirit. I’m not going to church. I’m staying on the porch with my coffee and Lance and Emily.

Random Chance tossed out the perfect Easter poem.

#712, c. 1863

Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —
And Immortality.

We slowly drove — He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility —

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess — in the Ring —
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain —
We passed the Setting Sun —

Or rather — He passed Us —
The Dews drew quivering and chill —
For only Gossamer, my Gown —
My Tippet — only Tulle —

We paused before a House that seemed
A swelling of the Ground —
The Roof was scarcely visible —
The Cornice — in the Ground —

Since then — ’tis Centuries — and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity —

I’ve been trying to avoid the poems on Emily’s Hit Parade, but this one wanted to jump out today. I’ll try to treat it as though I have never read it before.

Her sense of Death here is a radical restructuring, unheard of before or since. Death is not the enemy or the terrifying, scythe-wielding skeleton. He is a gentleman. The soul of kindness, and nothing if not civil. Here, Emily finally meets her perfect consort. Her courtier. Death pauses in his carriage to bring Emily to their wedding feast. This is not their first date. They have been long acquainted and proceed toward the consummation of a mutually agreed-upon contract.

She goes to him gently, discreetly, as to her lover whom she would have as her husband. He escorts her with the unhurried courtesy of a mature, thoughtful man about to take a wife, not the passionate, rock-and-roll boyfriend. The two of them move carefully toward their sacred union, crossing the threshold by slowly attending to all the relevant details. She soaks in the gradual pace of this journey, as she leaves her father’s house, so that her new husband may bring her to the house he has made for the two of them.

This is the courtship of Emily. No other man would do for her. Any earthly marriage would just be a preamble, and she doesn’t have the patience for that. She was born to wed Death. That means radical honesty, accepting that her life is a trajectory toward that union with death. For her the honesty is the lure, the attraction to Death. All the love affairs in the world are just a shadow play before the main event. All the lovers are merely straw men, stand-ins for the one true mate she knows is waiting for her.

I can see Emily freeze and choke at the prospect of an ordinary, human love. She has to save herself for the real thing, if for no other reason than she just doesn’t have the stomach for pretending. Perhaps Emily is not entirely human herself. Or too human?

Last night Geoff and I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell aloud, alternating each section in the manner of our “slow reading” of The Symposium. Among Blake’s many trippy insights, the one I held most dear was an observation his speaker made in one of the sections titled: “The Voice of the Devil”. The speaker offers an essential truth that contradicts the incorrect belief promulgated by scripture, chiefly that we must expunge the false notion that Body and Soul are separate. Body is simply an aspect of Soul that can be perceived with the five senses. How New Age, really. This physical life is not fundamentally divided from the life of the spirit, rather it is the concretized portion of it. Whatever we touch we receive through our hands some aspect of an immortal force. Continuing from there, when we depart our bodies, this so-called death is not an end, but a re-working of a thing that remains fundamentally whole. Neither created nor destroyed, but simply changed in form. And a happy Easter to you!

Then we read the best part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which are the Proverbs of Hell. My favorite: “Shame is Prides cloke.” Also: “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Geoff’s favorite: “The nakedness of woman is the work of God.” Or maybe it was: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” So many to choose from. In any case, you can see where this was going.

Next Week: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Do stop in.

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April 2, 2010 · 7:24 pm

Love the Uncertainty

Today is Good Friday. The candles in the sanctuary are snuffed out. And the president of St. Bernard Parish went through his office today washing the feet of his employees. He said he did it because he ought to be “as humbled as any other sinner in the world.” Apart from these gothic pockets in our strange swamp, the rest of the world doesn’t seem to know that today is meant to be spent in solemn contemplation of the greatest sacrifice. The parks are filled with joyous dogs and kids freed from school.

Someone drove their car into the Bayou this morning. Again. Another early morning jaunt gone awry. It always happens at the same bend in Moss Street. I wonder if the people who live across from this fateful turn in the bayou have documented each wreckage. It’s comical to everyone except the driver of the car. Fortunately the water is shallow so you can walk out.

The birds are going nuts in the trees and beyond my house. Gulls are screaming. They tend to come inland when we have weather coming in from the lake. The air smells like rain.

For Good Friday, Emily sends a thought:

#861, c. 1864

Split the Lark — and you’ll find the Music —
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled —
Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.

Loose the Flood — you’ll find it patent —
Gush after Gush, reserved for you —
Scarlet Experiment ! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

She likes to write about Doubting Thomas. He was the disciple who would not believe that Christ had risen from the dead until Christ took Thomas’s hand and placed it in the wound in his side. Only that literal touch of flesh upon flesh could move Thomas’s mind and heart to accept the truth of this miracle.

As a story, it’s interesting. Particularly so since it engages Emily. She is the sublime doubter, making her altar on the windowsill of her house in the church of her garden. Here she draws an image of someone looking for the Lark’s music by splitting open the bird. The music must be in there, right? The lark opens its beak and music comes out, so naturally the most literal and precise way to locate the music is the cut the bird open. This “scarlet experiment” of course, will only kill the lark and the music. She uses Thomas and all his doubts to describe the destructive force of literalism. A search for proof—whether proof of love or the divine—will yield nothing. The search itself will in fact destroy the source of that precious ephemeral thing.

Here is something else to know about Thomas. He did not have real faith because that does not require proof. In the story, Christ the magician, performs another one of his famous parlor tricks to amaze and astound the onlookers. It was meant as a one-time shocker to become a story that we would read and believe. He can’t keep doing that for everyone.

The real purpose of the story, as I and Emily see it, is to show the inadequacy of literalism. How paltry is this proof, really. In the end, doesn’t this proving do more harm than good to faith, splitting the lark to find the music? To break open the mystery at the center of existence and render it as something prosaic doesn’t serve the action of faith. The doubter, who wants to have faith and strives for it, hungers to crack the code, find the God gene, split the lark, so that we’ll understand everything. Well, maybe we’ll understand, but the thing we seek will die. Only the cold light of an autopsy can fully expose how a thing works. Under that precise scrutiny, the essential part most devoutly hoped for has escaped.

Augustine said: Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe

I say analysis annihilates.

Emily says: Better not to demand proof. Learn to love the uncertainty.

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March 29, 2010 · 7:53 am

Hermetic Memory

I wrote this a week ago when it was actually the first day of spring. So it would have made more sense to post it then, but my week ran away with me. Here I am seven days later, still freezing cold, damn unnatural to have the heat running this time of year, and not sure where the time went. In any case . . .

Today is the first day of spring, the Vernal Equinox, equal hours of daylight and darkness. We are perfectly balanced on the borderline. Pause. Hold the breath. Now exhale. What next? Gradually, more light.

What a weird way to begin our incremental slide toward summer. This morning is freezing cold. Not an auspicious beginning. My Bougainvillea has not decided if it’s dead or not. I am still waiting to see if those roots underground survived the hard freeze this past winter. Too soon to tell.

Here is Emily’s contribution:

#895, c. 1864

A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to me

Had I but further scanned
Had I secured the Glow
In an Hermetic Memory
It had availed me now.

Never to pass the Angel
With a glance and a Bow
Till I am firm in Heaven
Is my intention now.

She announces her intention at the end. She will not take angels for granted until she lives among them in Heaven itself. I find this amusing because I don’t think Emily bought this idea of Heaven as a garden of nursery school delight, presided over by a God who resembles Santa Claus. I think she peered over the edge into nothingness, and she was not content to lie to herself that any story made up by humans could explain what lay on the other side.

So when Em goes on about Heaven and Angels, she is setting up a construct for us to see the pointlessness of capture. Holding an experience (or Glory) is like trying to hold onto a cloud. These slip through her hands. She says that if she had held the cloud in memory it might comfort her now. Isn’t she sealing up the cloud in an hermetic memory by writing the poem. No, the poem falls short of the cloud, always.

The moment of capture, the poem, also opens wide the sense of disappointment. The poem catches itself in a perpetual unfulfilled straining to hold the cloud that recedes forever into the sky. Try pursuing that glimmering mirage on the sunny road ahead. It looks like a reflecting pool. The moment you pursue it, the moment you put words to it, is the moment it evaporates.

Emily’s pose in the poem is to pretend to be disappointed. The last stanza that offers Angels in Heaven is the conventional fear-based story, made by humans to explain a mystery that defies human apprehension and language. From behind this mask, she asks: Can we watch the cloud go by? Can we deeply imbibe that glory and let it go without attempting to capture it? Can any one of us co-exist peacefully with this mystery, sensed but not known?

She’d like to leave it alone, but she can’t. The poet, despite herself and her better judgement, cannot stop peering into things that are none of her business. This is not the hell of being human but the hell of being Emily.

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