Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation
Thursday, August 31, 2006
A SHORT NOTE TO ADD FROM EMMAUS
42. A SHORT NOTE TO ADD FROM EMMAUS:
"Sit back my son and listen to this because the seasons as they change will make you notice and the words you hear others speak will only re-assert what you will hear and if this short life is a curve of learning you might as well take it in and relish the moment – so here’s the actual part of what you need to know : ‘Ah Prometheus! Heaven scaling! In such hours of exultation even the faintest heart unquailing might behold the vulture sailing round the cloudy crags Causacian!’ Longfellow wrote that and I just lifted it to give to you and FURTHERMORE my fine fellow there’s more than that to come : ‘the greatest of American Prometheans was Herman Melville and the maniacally brilliant Captain Ahab in Moby Dick is a latter-day Prometheus in the isolating Pacific wastes’ and maybe that’s no different in its own way than you or I wasting away on Garside Street looking for things which are no longer there and singing like Harrow some old tune from another day WELL for that all there’s nothing to go by to guide to take us hither and yon for lost as WE too can be amidst a sea of rivets and a swarm of darts we struggle forward alone and try to figure what to make of the rest the all the very very best of everything and the rest and the highest most fertile God there ever was of whom once (it was noted) looked downward far and said his piece: ‘As for long suffering men he took no care at all and indeed his plan was to make the whole of their race extinct and then form another race instead and EXCEPT FOR ME no one opposed his purpose’ - so the high earth swivels on the shuddering sea."
"Sit back my son and listen to this because the seasons as they change will make you notice and the words you hear others speak will only re-assert what you will hear and if this short life is a curve of learning you might as well take it in and relish the moment – so here’s the actual part of what you need to know : ‘Ah Prometheus! Heaven scaling! In such hours of exultation even the faintest heart unquailing might behold the vulture sailing round the cloudy crags Causacian!’ Longfellow wrote that and I just lifted it to give to you and FURTHERMORE my fine fellow there’s more than that to come : ‘the greatest of American Prometheans was Herman Melville and the maniacally brilliant Captain Ahab in Moby Dick is a latter-day Prometheus in the isolating Pacific wastes’ and maybe that’s no different in its own way than you or I wasting away on Garside Street looking for things which are no longer there and singing like Harrow some old tune from another day WELL for that all there’s nothing to go by to guide to take us hither and yon for lost as WE too can be amidst a sea of rivets and a swarm of darts we struggle forward alone and try to figure what to make of the rest the all the very very best of everything and the rest and the highest most fertile God there ever was of whom once (it was noted) looked downward far and said his piece: ‘As for long suffering men he took no care at all and indeed his plan was to make the whole of their race extinct and then form another race instead and EXCEPT FOR ME no one opposed his purpose’ - so the high earth swivels on the shuddering sea."
Saturday, August 19, 2006
WINSOME INTERLUDE #1
41. WINSOME INTERLUDE #1:
(This ghost in the old machine left a trace of everything it scrawled past along the way and the figments in the mind of the very old crowd still stand and standing applaud – whatever something and how – and what remained only was the echo some kind of echo some loud resounding echo some hollering wide-mouthed elated echo and it somehow said to me “Jesus was only possible in a barefoot world and he was crucified by the few who wore shoes” and I listened carefully to be sure what I’d heard and what I’d heard listened carefully back to me and I said “no matter never makes no mind because it’s how you define the shoe and the shoeless that makes up the rhyme” and thunder pealed like the A-line train and something shuddered and sounded the same and out from the blue another voice it came forth saying “this is too much what I’m hearing from you” and already feeling the pinch I declined to say any more and went off on my way leaving this as my due “I don’t want to complain nor to leave with a grumble but to me what it takes is a man to be humble and that’s all there is for there’s nothing else there but if you make some other move even then I won’t care” and at that (it seemed to me) the crowd stopped laughing and put on their shoes while two clowns arrived to tell them the news ! ‘the whole situation has dwindled to naught – get out of here now before you get caught!’).
(This ghost in the old machine left a trace of everything it scrawled past along the way and the figments in the mind of the very old crowd still stand and standing applaud – whatever something and how – and what remained only was the echo some kind of echo some loud resounding echo some hollering wide-mouthed elated echo and it somehow said to me “Jesus was only possible in a barefoot world and he was crucified by the few who wore shoes” and I listened carefully to be sure what I’d heard and what I’d heard listened carefully back to me and I said “no matter never makes no mind because it’s how you define the shoe and the shoeless that makes up the rhyme” and thunder pealed like the A-line train and something shuddered and sounded the same and out from the blue another voice it came forth saying “this is too much what I’m hearing from you” and already feeling the pinch I declined to say any more and went off on my way leaving this as my due “I don’t want to complain nor to leave with a grumble but to me what it takes is a man to be humble and that’s all there is for there’s nothing else there but if you make some other move even then I won’t care” and at that (it seemed to me) the crowd stopped laughing and put on their shoes while two clowns arrived to tell them the news ! ‘the whole situation has dwindled to naught – get out of here now before you get caught!’).
Saturday, August 12, 2006
THE TEMPORARY ILLUSION OF THE MISTS OF TIME
40. THE TEMPORARY ILLUSION OF THE MISTS OF TIME:
“The small farms and hundreds of broken acres making up some gentryman’s last dream are still staggered and lost in the mists of Jefferson’s time but even HE doesn’t know - and the horses seek retreat but get only rocky trails - what he’s started as the highwaymen try to survey what they see (and the liquid land moves and churns its way along like water EVERYTHING changes there’s not a new moon left) and there’s nothing to be seen no matter (‘and up on the screen it was I saw Rod Serling ruing his own day and nearly crying over some wicked ‘spilt milk’ as five advertisers swarm the proscenium and award each other prizes while pushing him off stage’) and Jehovah rang the doorbell trying with a briefcase and a key to find some other land but no one answered who wanted to listen so every ‘witness’ went to perdition and that was the end of that but nonetheless the farms we mentioned once before were put in place in relation to highways and the moon and two fellows in jagged clothes with sacks and walking-sticks trembled and began sketching the falls in charcoal gray and they called themselves some wizard’s name we’ve now forgot” and thus the blind man started talking to the historian taking notes and recording all this for posterity (or perhaps it was thought he said ‘prosperity’) – either way we understood – and sitting there like evidence the likelihood was good there’d be abrasion coming for this guy talking was a blinded monk who’d seen the ABSOLUTE and the distant ends of life but now returned was lost in memories of ocelot and old Virginia and we watched his wife the little one file down her teeth so they would fit and she was singing some hillbilly mountain song about ‘Old Harmon’ and the kilt he wore while the blind guy whittled ancient water and spit back a modern tale but legality mattered for nothing and what he said came out SOME SAID as wisdom’s other end – “right now right now all I really want is silence and the chance to be left alone and I’m really tired of the living and everywhere I go there’s noise and busy people pushing stupid schemes or wearing bad ideas as birthright and cadaver and they’re fighting to the death somewhere I’m sure to elevate their destitute story and make others see it so but without a goal there’s nothing to strive for and time seems so endless when you’re hot and the lines of children and mothers cross the two lines mingling to death and deliverance and everything kept hard in my aging memory is a story now lost – like the white clapboard house on the side of the road with the old horsetrack oval out back and the chapel and everything meandered to something back then and the old days I tell you they were something to see them old days were something to see” and he motioned to me to come over and whispered “everything I have everything I ever saw I would gladly now throw away and make my sodden trash-heap higher than the sky for nothing’s worth a whip ‘cept the death and all that comes with it so SALVATION be your necklace fellow and may you hoe a happy road yourself” and with that I figured there was some value in a handshake so I took his trembling hand (which I noticed just as well was blind too) and shook it up and down with a miser’s grip and the little guy grimaced and fell back and got up and fell back and got up and disappeared and went away and returned and even the little wife who was working on the teeth blamed no one for nothing and she walked away - oblivious to everything else they disappeared into the mists of time itself.
“The small farms and hundreds of broken acres making up some gentryman’s last dream are still staggered and lost in the mists of Jefferson’s time but even HE doesn’t know - and the horses seek retreat but get only rocky trails - what he’s started as the highwaymen try to survey what they see (and the liquid land moves and churns its way along like water EVERYTHING changes there’s not a new moon left) and there’s nothing to be seen no matter (‘and up on the screen it was I saw Rod Serling ruing his own day and nearly crying over some wicked ‘spilt milk’ as five advertisers swarm the proscenium and award each other prizes while pushing him off stage’) and Jehovah rang the doorbell trying with a briefcase and a key to find some other land but no one answered who wanted to listen so every ‘witness’ went to perdition and that was the end of that but nonetheless the farms we mentioned once before were put in place in relation to highways and the moon and two fellows in jagged clothes with sacks and walking-sticks trembled and began sketching the falls in charcoal gray and they called themselves some wizard’s name we’ve now forgot” and thus the blind man started talking to the historian taking notes and recording all this for posterity (or perhaps it was thought he said ‘prosperity’) – either way we understood – and sitting there like evidence the likelihood was good there’d be abrasion coming for this guy talking was a blinded monk who’d seen the ABSOLUTE and the distant ends of life but now returned was lost in memories of ocelot and old Virginia and we watched his wife the little one file down her teeth so they would fit and she was singing some hillbilly mountain song about ‘Old Harmon’ and the kilt he wore while the blind guy whittled ancient water and spit back a modern tale but legality mattered for nothing and what he said came out SOME SAID as wisdom’s other end – “right now right now all I really want is silence and the chance to be left alone and I’m really tired of the living and everywhere I go there’s noise and busy people pushing stupid schemes or wearing bad ideas as birthright and cadaver and they’re fighting to the death somewhere I’m sure to elevate their destitute story and make others see it so but without a goal there’s nothing to strive for and time seems so endless when you’re hot and the lines of children and mothers cross the two lines mingling to death and deliverance and everything kept hard in my aging memory is a story now lost – like the white clapboard house on the side of the road with the old horsetrack oval out back and the chapel and everything meandered to something back then and the old days I tell you they were something to see them old days were something to see” and he motioned to me to come over and whispered “everything I have everything I ever saw I would gladly now throw away and make my sodden trash-heap higher than the sky for nothing’s worth a whip ‘cept the death and all that comes with it so SALVATION be your necklace fellow and may you hoe a happy road yourself” and with that I figured there was some value in a handshake so I took his trembling hand (which I noticed just as well was blind too) and shook it up and down with a miser’s grip and the little guy grimaced and fell back and got up and fell back and got up and disappeared and went away and returned and even the little wife who was working on the teeth blamed no one for nothing and she walked away - oblivious to everything else they disappeared into the mists of time itself.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
AS RESIDUE THEY COME FOR ME
39. AS RESIDUE THEY COME FOR ME:
1. GET UP FOR I KNEEL BESIDE YOU:
I am (do you see Dr. Matterschnict?) intensely dreadfully tired and I have forgotten some million things and the shadows ! even them I can no longer read - for I have surely reached a time of something : something special - ('there is no PARTIAL sensitivity - either it is the state of one's whole being...or it is not there at all') and they WILL be heard in the middle of the night saying nothing and everybody will come to their senses.
'Bene fundata est Domus Domini / supra firmam petram'
'The house of the Lord is well founded - on a strong rock'
For many years I had been fixated on Thomas Merton for no real reason I could fathom other than some attraction of willed seclusion and the contemplation which a 'life alone' can bring - but Merton in living as he did did not consider himself a 'model' hermit in ways which to me now seem odd - for what he meant was that he was not 'strictly' isolationist and dour for although there was something 'remote' in him he was also gregarious funny and a good companion and although there was within him what he called 'the one thing needful' - which I suppose was his need for contemplation and seclusion and silence with his God - he was also a writer teeming with ideas and images and as a practitioner of the 'strait' way of contemplation and a scholar of same within his own Christian tradition and yet one who venerated ones whom he claimed as teachers belonging to many traditions : Chuang Tzu Hui Neng Basho al-Hallj fourth and fifth century Christian hermits St. John of the Cross Julian of Norwich D. T. Suzuki : and his eventual separation from the rest of his Cistercian community came from his own having found a deeper vocation within his first vocation - he'd uncovered a vocation to Solitude and the lost Cistercian practice of the hermetic life - in 1965 he was finally granted a place apart 'the hermitage' - a small cabin on the edge of a woods in Kentucky - and was gradually permitted to spend full days there until in 1965 being granted authority to take up sole residence therein with much reduced obligations to the rest of the community.
['That is where the silence of the woods comes in...trees are sufficient exclamations of silence...this is religion and the further one gets AWAY from this the MORE one sinks in the mud of words and gestures - the flies gather.']
SOLITUDE : 'Awareness consists of 'bare attention' which simply sees what is right there and does not add any comment any interpretation any judgment any conclusion - IT JUST SEES - and learning to see in this manner IS the basic and fundamental exercise of Buddhist meditation - IT IS not the eye that sees - not the eye only - it is the whole.'
-
HOW I PRAY IS BREATHE.
-
Whenever I think of oneness and the solitude which goes with certain states of 'grace' I think of Merton kneeling in the dirt and letting a fistful of it slowly fall through his fingers his out-stretched fist his hand in the light of day as the rich dark soil silently makes its own way downward BACK to where it came EARTH and EARTH alone from where he took it and it sense itself deftly handled light but heavy dark and moist as it falls back downward and I think of the toil of the world and of other people who do the same with money and the illusions money brings and the everything else of matter and moment and I see : 'the end of illusion is another illusion' : and can almost understand what it is YET I go on simple and determined to make what I can of the places I am in - the tiny visitations of self both here and there the light crawling across windows and glass the moving clouds within the sky the sketch of shadow as it plays with the shadings within the eye and all of this TOO is seen and witnessed and grasped through a silence of a time and a location where people are not normally found and learning to see in this manner is AGAIN basic and fundamental - the great work of a sunrise the awful solemnity of it : 'Put everything else aside and SEE what is happening.'
2. LOOK AT THE WORLD THROUGH HOPKINS' EYES:
'The world is charged with the grandeur of God....it will flame out like shining from shook foil.'
3. LET ME SAY A FEW FAVORED WORDS:
The body leaves its trailings - they are there upon the ground and within it : a pile of whitened bones withering and fallen-in and taut dry leathery skin peeled off and cracked as it flakes from skull and chest the grimace of the spread mouth the deadness of the eyes now gone the stiffness of hands holding nothing and the withering too of the dirty old cloth - that is all that is left beneath the ground silent bereft with nothing to claim and nothing to claim it - the dim scene of visitors above making no reckoning now and nothing is done with nothing to do - helpless and hopeless and silent (we too) and the painful definiteness of what can be seen - the long forward-creeping curls of newly-leaved trees (it is Spring after all and Spring has its own shade of green) in sweeps and rows all lodged one with the other down the meadow edge - beautiful - but distraction and the want of a canon only makes these shapes in the keen seasonal air carved out of one's thought grow deeper and sadder and more profound the more that is seen : the Meadow bears its maker's handlings the thin air is crisp blue with meadowlark and bunting whirling with a noise and the small face of nature here meets the large.
['Hopkins thought that humans were created with one purpose - to praise and glorify God and there are myriad ways to praise : a man with a dung fork in his hand a woman with a slop pail give Him glory too''].
1. GET UP FOR I KNEEL BESIDE YOU:
I am (do you see Dr. Matterschnict?) intensely dreadfully tired and I have forgotten some million things and the shadows ! even them I can no longer read - for I have surely reached a time of something : something special - ('there is no PARTIAL sensitivity - either it is the state of one's whole being...or it is not there at all') and they WILL be heard in the middle of the night saying nothing and everybody will come to their senses.
'Bene fundata est Domus Domini / supra firmam petram'
'The house of the Lord is well founded - on a strong rock'
For many years I had been fixated on Thomas Merton for no real reason I could fathom other than some attraction of willed seclusion and the contemplation which a 'life alone' can bring - but Merton in living as he did did not consider himself a 'model' hermit in ways which to me now seem odd - for what he meant was that he was not 'strictly' isolationist and dour for although there was something 'remote' in him he was also gregarious funny and a good companion and although there was within him what he called 'the one thing needful' - which I suppose was his need for contemplation and seclusion and silence with his God - he was also a writer teeming with ideas and images and as a practitioner of the 'strait' way of contemplation and a scholar of same within his own Christian tradition and yet one who venerated ones whom he claimed as teachers belonging to many traditions : Chuang Tzu Hui Neng Basho al-Hallj fourth and fifth century Christian hermits St. John of the Cross Julian of Norwich D. T. Suzuki : and his eventual separation from the rest of his Cistercian community came from his own having found a deeper vocation within his first vocation - he'd uncovered a vocation to Solitude and the lost Cistercian practice of the hermetic life - in 1965 he was finally granted a place apart 'the hermitage' - a small cabin on the edge of a woods in Kentucky - and was gradually permitted to spend full days there until in 1965 being granted authority to take up sole residence therein with much reduced obligations to the rest of the community.
['That is where the silence of the woods comes in...trees are sufficient exclamations of silence...this is religion and the further one gets AWAY from this the MORE one sinks in the mud of words and gestures - the flies gather.']
SOLITUDE : 'Awareness consists of 'bare attention' which simply sees what is right there and does not add any comment any interpretation any judgment any conclusion - IT JUST SEES - and learning to see in this manner IS the basic and fundamental exercise of Buddhist meditation - IT IS not the eye that sees - not the eye only - it is the whole.'
-
HOW I PRAY IS BREATHE.
-
Whenever I think of oneness and the solitude which goes with certain states of 'grace' I think of Merton kneeling in the dirt and letting a fistful of it slowly fall through his fingers his out-stretched fist his hand in the light of day as the rich dark soil silently makes its own way downward BACK to where it came EARTH and EARTH alone from where he took it and it sense itself deftly handled light but heavy dark and moist as it falls back downward and I think of the toil of the world and of other people who do the same with money and the illusions money brings and the everything else of matter and moment and I see : 'the end of illusion is another illusion' : and can almost understand what it is YET I go on simple and determined to make what I can of the places I am in - the tiny visitations of self both here and there the light crawling across windows and glass the moving clouds within the sky the sketch of shadow as it plays with the shadings within the eye and all of this TOO is seen and witnessed and grasped through a silence of a time and a location where people are not normally found and learning to see in this manner is AGAIN basic and fundamental - the great work of a sunrise the awful solemnity of it : 'Put everything else aside and SEE what is happening.'
2. LOOK AT THE WORLD THROUGH HOPKINS' EYES:
'The world is charged with the grandeur of God....it will flame out like shining from shook foil.'
3. LET ME SAY A FEW FAVORED WORDS:
The body leaves its trailings - they are there upon the ground and within it : a pile of whitened bones withering and fallen-in and taut dry leathery skin peeled off and cracked as it flakes from skull and chest the grimace of the spread mouth the deadness of the eyes now gone the stiffness of hands holding nothing and the withering too of the dirty old cloth - that is all that is left beneath the ground silent bereft with nothing to claim and nothing to claim it - the dim scene of visitors above making no reckoning now and nothing is done with nothing to do - helpless and hopeless and silent (we too) and the painful definiteness of what can be seen - the long forward-creeping curls of newly-leaved trees (it is Spring after all and Spring has its own shade of green) in sweeps and rows all lodged one with the other down the meadow edge - beautiful - but distraction and the want of a canon only makes these shapes in the keen seasonal air carved out of one's thought grow deeper and sadder and more profound the more that is seen : the Meadow bears its maker's handlings the thin air is crisp blue with meadowlark and bunting whirling with a noise and the small face of nature here meets the large.
['Hopkins thought that humans were created with one purpose - to praise and glorify God and there are myriad ways to praise : a man with a dung fork in his hand a woman with a slop pail give Him glory too''].
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