On fall and falling

October thoughts...
selections from annie dillard, frederick buechner, björk, sufjan and andrew peterson:

"The gnawed mock-orange hedge and cherry tree leaves, they are uncurling now, limp and bluish, on the top of this desk. They didn't escape, but their time was almost up anyway. Already outside a corky ring of tissue is thickening around the base of each leaf stem, strangling each leaf one by one. The summer is old. A gritty, colorless dust cakes the melons and squashes, and worms fatten within on the bright, sweet flesh. The world is festering with suppurating sores. Where is the good, whole fruit? The world "Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain." I've been there, seen it, done it, I suddenly think, and the world is old, a hungry old man, fatigued and broken past mending. Have I walked too much, aged beyond my years? I see the copperhead shining new on a rock altar over a fetid pool where a forest should grow. I see the knob-footed killdeer, the tattered butterflies and birds, the snapping turtle festooned with black leeches. There are the flies that make a wound, the flies that find a wound, and a hungry world that won't wait till I'm decently dead.

"In nature," wrote Huston Smith, " the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be." I learn this lesson in a new way every day. It must be, I think tonight, that in a certain sense only the newborn in this world are whole, that as adults we are expected to be, and necessarily, somewhat nibbled. It's par for the course. Physical wholeness is not something we have barring accident; it is itself accidental, an accident of infancy, like a baby's fontanel or the egg-tooth on a hatchling. Are the five-foot silver eels that migrate as adults across meadows by night actually scarred with the bill marks of herons, flayed by the sharp teeth of bass? I think of the beautiful sharks I saw from a shore, hefted and held aloft in a light-shot wave. Were those sharks sliced with scars, were there mites in their hides and worms in their hearts? Did the mockingbird that plunged from the rooftop, folding its wings, bear in its buoyant quills a host of sucking lice? Is our birthright and heritage to be, like Jacob's cattle on which the life of a nation was founded, "ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted" not with the spangling marks of a grace like beauty rained down from eternity, but with the blotched assaults and quarryings of time? "We are all of us clocks," says Eddington, "whose faces tell the passing years." The young man proudly names his scars for his lover; the old man alone before a mirror erases his scars with his eyes and sees himself whole.

Through the window over my desk comes a drone, drone, drone, the weary winding of cicadas' horns. If I were blasted by a meteorite, I think, I could call it blind chance and die cursing. But we live creatures are eating each other, who have done us no harm. We're all in this Mason jar together, snapping at anything that moves. If the pneumococcus bacteria had flourished more vitally, if it had colonized my other lung successfully, living and being fruitful after its created kind, then I would have died my death, and my last ludicrous work would have been an Easter egg, an Easter egg painted with beaver and deer, an Easter egg that was actually in face, even as I painted it and the creatures burgeoned in my lung, fertilized. It is ridiculous. What happened to manna? Why doesn't everything eat manna, into what rare air did the manna dissolve that we harry the free live things, each other?

An Eskimo shaman said, " Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that men's food consists entirely of souls." Did he say it to the harmless man who gave him tuberculosis, or to the one who gave him tar paper and sugar for wolfskin and seal? I wonder how many bites I have taken, parasite and predator, from family and friends; I wonder how long I will be permitted the luxury of this relative solitude. Out here on the rocks the people don't mean to grapple, to crush and starve and betray, but with all the goodwill in the world, we do, there's no other way. We want it; we take it out of each other's hides; we chew the bitter skins the rest of our lives.

But now, although we hear the buzz in our ears and the crashing of jaws at our heels, we can look around as those who are nibbled but unbroken, from the shimmering vantage of the living. Here may not be the cleanest, newest, place, but that clean timeless place that vaults on either side of this one is no place at all. "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead." There are no more chilling, invigorating words than these of Christ's, "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead."

...That the world is old and frayed is no surprise; that the world could ever become new and whole beyond uncertainty was, and is such a surprise that I find myself referring all subsequent kinds of knowledge to it... I still now and will tomorrow steer by what happened that day, when some undeniably new spirit roared down the air, bowled me over, and turned on the lights. I stood on grass like air, air like lightning coursed in my blood, floated my bones, swam in my teeth. I've been there, seen it, been done by it. I know what happened to the cedar tree, I saw the cells in the cedar tree pulse charged like wings beating praise.

...I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply, "Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love."

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loose; I walk on my way."

[annie dillard - exerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek]

"What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds?... Gentle Jesu, Mary's son, be thine the wounds that heal our wounding."

[frederick buechner - exerpt from Godric]

"I’ve seen it all, I have seen the trees,
I’ve seen the willow leaves dancing in the breeze
I’ve seen a man killed by his best friend,
And lives that were over before they were spent.
I’ve seen what I was - I know what I’ll be
I’ve seen it all - there is no more to see!

You haven’t seen elephants, kings or Peru!
I’m happy to say I had better to do
What about China? Have you seen the Great Wall?
All walls are great, if the roof doesn’t fall!

And the man you will marry?
The home you will share?
To be honest, I really don’t care…

You’ve never been to Niagara Falls?
I have seen water, its water, that’s all…
The Eiffel Tower, the Empire State?
My pulse was as high on my very first date!
Your grandson’s hand as he plays with your hair?
To be honest, I really don’t care…

I’ve seen it all, I’ve seen the dark
I’ve seen the brightness in one little spark.
I’ve seen what I chose and I’ve seen what I need,
And that is enough, to want more would be greed.
I’ve seen what I was and I know what I’ll be
I’ve seen it all - there is no more to see!

You’ve seen it all and all you have seen
You can always review on your own little screen
The light and the dark, the big and the small
Just keep in mind - you need no more at all
You’ve seen what you were and know what you’ll be
You’ve seen it all - there is no more to see!"

[björk]

"Everything You are
Is everything we have
You're the only good thing
A sun came
Burned our faces round
Burned our faces red
You are still the rage, a rock
From the enemy
There is still a house, a cage
For the enemy
When my friends turned out, I found out
There is still a Lord
But I never felt so lonely
A sun came"

[sufjan stevens]

"But here we toil and we till the hard earth, where even the warm times with friend and kin are lonely because we know they won't last long enough to quiet the ache. Our sadness points to Home the way hunger points to the feast, the way the light of the cratered moon is always facing the sun, always pointing to where the dawn will come like a pillar of fire when this rock we walk on turns again to burning day. All over the quiet plains and the cold stone cities full of dying and shame the promise is not drowned out by the weeping; it is declared by it."

[andrew peterson]

*paintings by kathleen earthrowl