In Order to Uncloak the Hidden Garments Lying in My Soul

In order to uncloak the hidden garments lying in my soul, garments
Of obsidian and gold, flashing by turns in the light like
Spears or cornered steel or twilight rows of setting
Rays each piercing thick testimony of earth, rays each
Racing like the falling of the down, racing like the movement
Of the globe, whispering of lips in the night (fair winds and
Leaves by the steady spread of a sail like a white omen
In the infinite tumult of black) spreading and gleaming for your
Kisses I long, give me the kisses of your lips, for their taste to me
Is sweeter than wine; sharp wine poured fair by the Nemean band,
Liquor of youths and casting caskets floating in the bays, floating
On the walks and by the poles and near the beaches where the wood
Roughs the feet and poles and canopies bridge the distance from a gap of cool, dry
To some undiscovered, unseen, tower-rising walls that insignia insignia
Swirl out in sharp patterns, swirl out like pushing storms sucking up the water from the
[seas:
Seas, cool season of the bees, the frolicking of sand with sweets
Of flowers: periander, nectar, glories and the soft wilt
Of fragmenting leaves, petals like silk, sitting ‘neath the golden trees, where
The youths at night danced and kissed by bright fires, all gleaming
Sinuous turning to sizzle, all hissing smoke like devouring
Into the air; they turn and bodies brush, bodies in an excitement pounding
Of sweat, the heart, the mind cannot fathom into the depths, the cool darkness
Of the solid core, the heart; let all brush circles widening of fire, let all lips linger love:
Do not call: do not whisper: do not speak love before its time: time
Of the falling petals, time when the leaves begin to wrinkle, purple of the periander,
Periwinkle fading, falling, like petals strewn about the floor for all the gods
To walk on love: first in the procession, lovely Venus, she walks with folds and gowns
Tumbling down like waterfalls, tumbling down like the lily perched
In fariest place of grass, and followed by the crown of Virgil’s ears, who ever gazing
Into the wood, resounds his mind, resounds with the fair resounding halls
Of marble, and a vague sword lies clutched within a statue’s chest, and a warrior’s breast-
Plate gleaming, arms and torrents and hoards: all beginning in a spark, an instant,
Like the flash of white (periander) white in Myrtle’s leaves. He is a whisper
As Athena clutches Nike in the night, the moonlight streaming down her silver hair,
Falling into the earth, falling like the woven threads of Atropos and all three maids
Who gaze with longing at the wood-work of the works: here she cuts
With a gleam like all refractions of the sun; their she measures
Like mountains – and who spools the thread with a grim glimmer in her eye
Reflected like the shadows of the torch-light on the waters, where the perfect bodies
Raise and move and lap like waves by the sea, waves cascading, pounding on the shore?
The youths will turn – they will dance arm in arm, they will rediscover
The secret ways of seemings for their peers, and peer into the sullen
Stone faces carved in the mountain, stone dwellings of their fathers in their basilisks of
[old:
Long, empty halls, dark, where the scrape of foot echoes like a lyre-song drifting
From beyond a door, a chasm, a shadow in the mists: the mists coil thick and howl
Like beasts, like banshees, slobbering on their pray, they devour
Torches, they eat light like
Blind souls hungry from darkness, they splice
Their bodies into the chaos of a frame, they carve and whittle away the rock
To a smooth surface, uniformity of time, a single icy peak, cloaked in snow,
Jabbing like a hand to grab the stars: stars, fair youth, your face has watched them
Come and go like dancing prey and hunter on this tapestry of sky – I have watched
Your form heave, I have watched you gather in at cold the folds
Of your layered cloak, your cloak that seemed so thirsting to absorb and shutter in the
[gleams
Of all the manifold heavens: here again the archer lifts his arrow at your back, guarding
Against the scorpion, the bear, and all brave beast, whose eyes yet gleam the certainty
Of some stream that flows from edges of the earth, some stream to feed and find
The hunger of birth, and I have watched you part your lips, and laugh,
And in the gleam of your teeth, I have desired, how I have desired…

And so, in the throes of the great enlightenment, in the birth pangs of light, of tolerance, of individualism, of serious scholarship and study -- the dark child destroys the mother candid, fair: Judaism perished.

O my soul, all of this today: we must speak of living a life of religion that conflicts with our own secular life. Do we dare to flee back into the darkness from whence...? There are scorpions --

But the enlightenment was no light! It was a fire, a flame, a kindling, a torch, not the true shining gleam of the sun (and science says photons, and there is no difference between lamp-light and sunlight [at base, at essence]: another glory defeated and deranged, an eagle wrestled to the ground by vultures, hungry carnivorous and no longer satisfied with their waiting, far-famed or desiring it at least already they would struggle down, not suited with their natures, yes, how they fly, for DEATH has conquered life).

Lord God has been abandoned, and never will be found. I would trade every ounce of my soul, everything of my being for something, something of meaning in the world. Do I surrendur to the neccessity of the truth? What is in the thing so supremely valuable? It is a truth of dust, it is a truth of threadbare, diseased, and I cannot hang it about myself without that I am impure, and I am fallen.

It is not given to me: I hate the truth. I love the lies that we tell ourselves, the lies that we whisper to our hearts at night, the lies that we consume moreso than every meal to give us strength, the victuals for our soul in strength, our garments. And if you can see through? The gauze, the mirror, something flashing and a vague panoply of smoke? Rising to the heavens, some consequence we have not observed, some message as yet unseen?

O Lord of Lords God, God Holy of Holies: to separate Judaism from its purpose, as if there were something worthy in the mere fact of its being, as if the quest and the darkness and rocks for pillows, altars and a thousand years of martyrdom and the holy scriptures -- if we indeed would call them holy -- might have any meaning exclusive of you, these works of our own hands, our idols!

And for this our fathers died? We have idolized the scriptures! We have transformed the True Religion into a golden calf. Everything is thus, everything is so. But there is still hope. When the Israelites made the calves, before that the holy of holies -- have we fallen from grace? Can we return? O Lord of Lords, O Lord of Hosts, save us from our enemies, and save me from death, and find some comfort for a small and suffering soul.

You mock me? Do you think that the things of religion are pitiable, are unenviable, are unwarranted? It is the only saving grace mankind could find. If all this is wickedness with just cause and reason -- a soul that can conceive of an absent being the highest of all beings, in order to ascend to such heights would hurl himself off of cliff in protest at the cruel and consuming darkness of a world that knew not His Name.

A tear falls for Zion in the wilderness.

Somnambulent

In the calm of night
A quick thrust while
I lay on my bed dreaming
Chiseled marble dripping
Candles, wax and smoke
And clearing mist:

To cool shadows
In acerbic delight
A burning sensation, the
Ache of sight; I am
Roasting my fingers in solid
Flame:

Old flames bubbling on the Male-
Bolge: slime-green bubbling muck and redding
Hands below the surface stroking
Corpses’ nails’ sharp scraping like the tapping and a grinning
Skull, face; eyes as white as
Teeth, sharp scisors, shredded
Fibers and the sockets’ darkling glass

(Like the unfailing) glimmering crowned
In the midnight sky, among the setting
Pleiâdes and the murmured moans
Of lying alone (dog-star’s light.)

Father

Like trickling drops that fall on the mountainside,
That slick down and fall over ridges,
That smooth and bend and break the rock,
Like trickling drops that fall from the sky --

I would always call on your name, a darkness
That spreads in fog and lights, a thread
Curving through a threadbare world, a pause
Of velvet fabric in the sagging folds, in darkness
I would always call on your name

Alone, afraid, and bearing
Heat in a flickering pinpoint,
Rising the greater to join the lesser
Shivering cold like a soul frozen in ice
Alone, afraid, and beam to smite

My enemies innumerable, smite
The days that pass like golding
Leaves always falling down
Through the rivers of Eminent-Father-Time
Like trickling drops that fall down the mountains,
That slick and slide and smooth to wear the rock,
Carving indellibly, indellibly a face
That peers gaunt-eyed and hollow from the rock

To the rising sun and night's delight
Of cool shadows and succulent shade.

Sleepless in Seattle

So on Friday, I believe it was, I got an email from a buddy Devin who I hadn't talked to in about three or four years after a nasty little fight (nasty on my part) in eight grade. I decided, being the adventurous lout that I am, to pay him a visit. I bought a bus-ticket to Seattle for a reasonable price, packed my luggage and my comforter, and here I am.

I've spent the time mainly alone, doing probably what I would have been doing at Reed, except that I'm in Seattle. I picked up, from my friend, a copy of the book "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok. It's interesting, but I'm somewhat perplexed -- why does everybody think this book is so great? The writing is fine, even efficient, but maybe a bit pedestrian, if I can say that; the plot is engaging, sure, but it ain't exactly Ibsen. Someone in the opening remarks compared this book to Ulysses! What hyperbole -- people, I think, like to praise a book vociferously because it flatters them to think that they are living in an age of such genious. I am unconvinced that there is anything supremely worthwhile being published in our own time. But I am also unqualified to say so. So I am a skeptic, or an anarchist, or an idle scribbler.

I am also lonely. Hence "Sleepless..." I think I'm going to be single forever. Everyone says (which is so infuriating!!!) that when you stop looking, you find someone. So what? They might as well tell me that I'm never going to find anyone at all, because I can't conceive of reaching a point where I wouldn't be looking. It's been a year since I broke up with my last boyfriend, real boyfriend, and though I've met six or seven guys who are either uninterested or uninteresting and gone on six or seven dates to boot, well...

And I suppose if I were dating, I wouldn't feel so bad. But aside from a miscommunication last Friday I haven't been on anything remotely resembling a date for at least two or three months. I must be doing something horribly wrong. Perhaps because I'm such a disagreeable person (viz. above comments about Chaim Potok)? Or a recluse (viz. above comments about Chaim Potok)? Or pretentious (viz viz)? I should go back into therapy; but I wonder what a therapist will be able to offer in the way of advice -- how am I going to meet gay guys at Reed? And off campus is a jungle; it's much more likley that I'll meet someone I can actually talk to at Reed, but much less likely that I'll meet anyone at Reed, a Catch-22 or something like that.

Everything is difficult. The lines of W.B. Yeats (misquoted to be sure) keep coming to mind, "The best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate intensity"...

Rosebud.

The sky cleared and the stars.

Uggh! Loud rap music AND loud blaring death music from the KRRC. Something has got to give.

I am a member of a college that is dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom: how happy I am!

Today I'm twenty. Tomorrow I'll be thirty. In two weeks I'll be dead.

Sigh.

Two funny little quips straight from me to you:

That man: I would sooner stick any spear in him than my own.

Professor: Today I will be lecturing on ancient Greece. [ahem] Now before I begin, you may wonder what are the merits of studying ancient Greece? I will answer this question first. Well...[achem]...hum...in fact, I cannot think of any good reasons to study ancient Greece. [Long pause]. All right, you can go. Off with you. Shoo.

Can we have such confidence in the prophets? Were they able to deliver God's message to us correctly? Did they not make some irremediable error in transcription? This error: the laws, the doctrines concerning the messiah. They were unable to see beyond their own society and their own temporal concerns into the eternal God. No one can; the work of the prophecies is the great failure: it is a failure because it cannot be taken literally, but it is great because it is the clearest revelation of God's message that we have. It is a failure of rich rewards.

God is infallible; it is human beings who have erred.

This is not to invalidate the work of interpretation, the writings of the rabbis, or perhaps even the writings of the Church, though I think I would have to hold that if the Jews erred in taking the prophet's message too literally, which was still essentially God's message, then the Christians erred in taking too literally the message of a man who may or may not have been privy to any directly divine insights at all.

A distinction: God of course reveals Himself to all human beings who seek him earnestly. However, simply because He reveals Himself doesn't mean that all men attain to the same rung of revelation. There are those who see God from afar, as the Israelites in the desert, for whom God was fire and ice. There are those who see God in His revealed nature: Moses at the burning bush. And then there are those who have spoken to God directly and those who have seen him in his hidden-ness -- Moses ascended to this level at the very height of his vocation.

So of all great writings, certainly they are great because the author has discerned somewhat of the divine (even should he deny the divine altogether). However, different people at different times have discerned somewhat more or somewhat less. And what is true of individuals is certainly true of nations. Hence Israel is a nation of prophets, but the Canaanites are scarcely more than barbarians in comparison (but not necessarily in fact).

But even those who ascend to the highest level of prophecy are still subject to human fallibility.

So Jesus certainly must have attained somewhat to God. However, it is unquestionable that he did not attain to the rung of Moses. And furthermore, I cannot for myself take the Christian scriptures any more seriously than I might take the writings of any religion that did not produce prophets [though I am forced to take it more seriously than I might take Thucydides (though not Plato)] because they verily base their arguments on a supposed revelation that is indisputably recorded after the fact and may or may not be the speech of a man who himself was certainly not a prophet. This is not to say there is nothing of interest in them, or that there is nothing to learn from them -- for Jesus did, I think, have an important insight into the failures of the Jewish faith at the time of his preaching -- or perhaps a foresight into potential failures, as these practices he decries were in fact reforms and much needed at that. So we learn from him that one must not take the revelation of fallible men so seriously that a vision of justice obstructs actual justice. But contrarily, Jesus himself professed faith, and very likely for personal reasons, in the doctrine of a messiah, which is just as much of a mistake as is the law. Surely the prophets believed they saw in the mind of God an actual historical event embodied in a person when what they perceived was the redemption and love awaiting the pious. Or otherwise, they spoke rightly, and the messiah did come, but he was not who any of us might think -- the messiah was, in fact, King Cyrus of the Persians, who did deliver the Jews back into Israel and thus inaugurated the Second Temple Period. More likely it is some mixture of these two, for certain prophecies are unfulfilled in the second view, and so these visions are caught up in the first, and we might perhaps say that the prophets were thinking politically in terms of what ought to have been taken religiously -- that is, they were so spiritually fervent that it seemed to them that the return to Israel could in no way be separated from the personal redemption of all the Israelites who attended upon it.

And I must agree with Erasmus concerning the fate of the virtuous heathens.

However, this does not much clarify or defend why one would read poetry, philosophy, and history for any reason beyond personal edification, because of all things we cannot say that they are related to God. And if someone professes to be atheistic and writes atheistic philosophy, perhaps we are not so justified in saying there is something of God in his writings. But there still must be some reason to read them -- if they are beautiful, they refine our sensitivity to beauty; if they are witty, they refine our wit; if they are concise and perfect in expression, they certainly refine our expression -- tools that the author himself did not apply in the service of God, but which we might ourselves. And if they, using blunt hammers and pickaxes, tried to hack away at such a magisterial edifice, we should all the more be able to repair, shine, and polish the beauty of truth after sharpening our own blades on these learned monuments of everything that is in the world ugly and false.

The gates of prayer are always open:
Blessed be the holy name.