Monthly Archive for September, 2008

I was always out west

Published on September 23, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Dear chokecherries,


Bright down low. Dear ponderosas and smokey chipmunks harvesting pine cones in a fall morning. Last night,
the creek was so clear and cold–

–two bull trouts flashed by, away, even the blooming olives could do nothing to lure them–we waded through the braiding stream and over driftwoods turning to mulch, casting nymphs, stripping back streamers through pools which, as the atmosphere darkened, grew no less clear, and we caught nothing–we were “fish, naked inside the wind.”

Something in me likens a letter I will never send, dear chokecherries, at the base of the ponderosa which reminds me of home, in which someone has hacked a terrible cave–for firewood? or just to be cruel? I touch the tree and look up, it branches less fully on the hacked side, but still, the tree stands higher than the rest. The top of it young as new growth on the ground, the lower branches darkened with moss, and this looking pauses itself in an inability. A lack of communication between life forms. My pity and awe, my blindspots, my inability to imagine being, the bark breaking–I want to throw all my ideas away, but they keep coming back to me–

Like nature.

Dear father, we are learning how to fish.

Another argument for the ordinary

Published on September 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
Once, recently, I tried to explain Domestic Mysticism to a glass artist. The whole articulation made me wonder, again, about the nature of the idea in particular, and also about the nature of ideas in general. How much fluidity can an idea bear to run with? An idea is not a vessel for something real and contained/containable, but it is a vessel in that it is a thing made (and which can be, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, unmade.) The glass artist said, I too make vessels. We are in a world of vessels, I said.

And then what I said was this, or something like it: Mysticism in traditional terms privileges, and tries to open the individual up through specific ritual practices to, the experience of the divine. To experience the divine, in these terms, is set apart from ordinary experience–so, one must practice asceticism, take hallucinogens, chant, spin, sit for hours, and then, and thus, enter an abnormal state: ecstasy, realization, transcendence, purification.

But these states, exoticised and idealized, presume that ordinary experience is static, not real, and impure in some way. The mystic feels an intense need to transcend the world, the ordinary, the domestic, the mundane, the self. The mystic feels an intense separation from the divine, and a need to dissolve the boundary between self and the source of light and otherness. This longing is emblematic of the escapist tendency in humans which, at its most interesting, causes mysticism and art, and at its most dogmatic and vile, causes orthodoxy and fundamentalism. I do not intend, as a domestic mystic, to rail against mystic tendencies, certainly not against all art; even religion has its place sociologically.


Took a walk one day in the torrential rain

Published on September 5, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

The world’s a-thunder and I find refuge only in lightening. The streets swim with stray dogs and books moisten into amoebic sutras of suffering and persistence. I don’t know which direction home lies, I’m that close to the equator. My pants stick to my legs as I throw a borrowed and broken umbrella in the gutter; the banyan trees do nothing to keep me from this warm disintegration of sky.

In lightening, or in the moment just before lightening, I imagine a silvery cave, a geode suspended in space, no other ground or gravity. When it cracks open to reveal lavender, its silver going matte, I see myself inside it and maybe a desk and chair, split from wood or wrought from iron by the electric moment. I stand upright in the isolated diorama and think, I could fish for stars from here.

Or in another time, I sit at the edge of an ocean amongst palm fronds whipping in the gray wind. A waiter comes to me to give me his uniform which I do not want. He strips down naked and sits beside me. We cannot see any fish in this ocean, we only see mute crows battling day.