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In fifth grade we hung around after school to play Sumo. We’d stuff the teth­erball under a sweat­shirt and charge ‘til the rope snatched us back. Cuffed by the invis­i­ble clothes­line. Invis­i­ble is soft, I remem­ber think­ing, while my stom­ach scaled my ribs.

Now that it’s allowed, my love’s going every which way. And each way whole, like a teth­erball sail­ing hard and light. I feel that small and hilar­i­ous, now. I want knock you over with my belly, painfully and in short range. But of course you’re all a step too far and I’m just wrap­ping myself to a pole.

There are four of you. I had to count. There is one other, pos­si­bly, and then all of you who already know it any­way. I am giv­ing it bound­lessly. Not reck­lessly, but if you’d let me. It’s why I keep cof­fee, wine and choco­late on my nightstand.

I feel expen­sive, fat with unan­swered love. My soli­tude high-ceilinged and fur­nished. I take deli­cious self-portraits, now, like a saint. Not like the years in cloth and pen.

And what’s courage? I would’ve said devo­tion, and now I sup­pose I would, too. It’s in me still, charg­ing it’s slack.

As a kid, cer­tain books (Jane Eyre, A Lit­tle Princess, Lit­tle Women, Girl of the Lim­ber­lost, The BFG, The Oz series, etc.) appeared and swal­lowed me whole, whales to my Jonah. I sat in the ribs’ cor­ri­dor with­out a match, lis­ten­ing to blood course through the fish. But The Good Book was some­thing else.

I was raised on the B-i-b-l-e and, when spit up by the whale, I hap­pily wan­dered its blis­ter­ing shores. With my fam­ily, in church study groups, or alone in my room, I rarely approached another book with the same eager, med­i­ta­tive diligence.

The Bible was always pre-parsed, each word a geode wait­ing to be cracked. We read verse by num­bered verse, absurdly audit­ing every phrase. This was my edu­ca­tion in seman­tics, and how I came to love the study of signs and mean­ing. I can’t help but won­der how this early, intense study has shaped the way I read and inter­pret, well…everything else.

I’m grate­ful for my time spent por­ing over scrip­ture. Despite my church’s fun­da­men­tal­ist lean­ings, I was allowed to spec­u­late. When we gath­ered in a cir­cle and dis­cussed how Deuteron­omy might apply to daily life, it was with the awed con­vic­tion that the Bible was a liv­ing, breath­ing thing; as much about our voices as its printed word. And we took it slow because, after all, it would be with us the rest of our lives.

I’m not sure when I last read the Bible. It’s weird what’s lodged in my mind, and all that’s passed through the sieve. This is the longest pas­sage I can remem­ber off the top of my head:

…in view of God’s mercy, offer your bod­ies as liv­ing sac­ri­fices, holy and pleas­ing to God, for this is your spir­i­tual act of wor­ship. Do not con­form any longer to the pat­tern of this world, but be trans­formed by the renew­ing of your mind. Then you can test and [some­thing some­thing] what God’s will is—his good, pleas­ing and per­fect will.

This was my favorite verse for years, which I had to look up just now:

I am still con­fi­dent of this:
I will see the good­ness of the LORD
in the land of the liv­ing.
Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the LORD.

What must it all sound like to other peo­ple?! Strangely, only through regard­ing the Bible as fact, or truth, can one truly inter­act with it as a poem (I think). Susan Stew­art sug­gests that we receive poems the way we receive promises,

…in the sense not of some­thing scripted or repeat­able but of some­thing that “hap­pens,” that “occurs” as an event and can be con­tin­u­ally called on, called to mind, in the unfold­ing present.

Isn’t that how we saw the Word, as one giant promise? Yet the one receiv­ing doesn’t always feel sat­is­fied. A “believer,” lay­ing her whole self before the text, may sense the imbal­ance Stew­art acknowl­edges in poetry; that “what goes out over­whelms what comes back.” For me, scrip­ture was like so much fruit sur­round­ing the stone. But what hap­pens when the stone dissolves?

I don’t miss read­ing the Bible; this isn’t about that. Basi­cally, I’ve been try­ing to under­stand my pref­er­ence for the phrase or caesura over chap­ter or prose. Recently I thought, Maybe it’s because I was taught to value the verse so much. As in, the Bible’s arbi­trary meter. Oversimplification?

Of course, the psalms and epis­tles did more to me than that. When I say the Bible taught me to read, I mean it taught me to trust fic­tions. Implic­itly. It taught me to make story my most inti­mate author­ity. And, like a poem, it’s short­com­ings shaped me, too. To para­phrase some­thing else Stew­art said, we begin to cre­ate when we feel estranged. Each bib­li­cal fail­ure to answer my pre-and-post-adolescent ques­tions allowed me to do some meaning-making of my own.

*UPDATE* Ocean Bar­ber is avail­able here, through us *UPDATE*

I am glad to finally house this col­lec­tion somewhere.

<3

1.
Did you know that Prob­a­bil­ity The­ory didn’t exist until the 17th cen­tury? Up until 350 years ago (give or take) it was incon­ceiv­able that we could mea­sure the like­li­ness of an event and then express this like­li­ness in num­bers. I was shocked to learn that this was so recently out of mind’s reach for us.

I went to hear NPR’s Math Guy, Keith Devlin, deliver a lec­ture on his most recent book, The Unfin­ished Game. Devlin reminded me of the guys from Radio Lab, com­mu­ni­cat­ing “advanced” con­cepts to diverse audi­ences with the help of dif­fer­ent media. His book claims that a sin­gle document–a let­ter between Blaise Pas­cal and Pierre de Fer­mat–changed the field of math­e­mat­ics and rad­i­cally trans­formed the way peo­ple think and reason.

The story I heard goes like this: Early prob­a­bil­ity was lim­ited to gam­bling, where, for exam­ple, it was com­monly known that the odds of rolling two sixes is 1/36 (I had to look that up just now). Deter­min­ing odds in a finite set­ting was one thing, but apply­ing this kind of logic to messy human behav­ior was (and is) alto­gether different.

For cen­turies, a by-our-standards sim­ple prob­lem con­founded schol­ars, who rou­tinely failed to solve it. Say two guys–Albert and Bernie–are play­ing a game of stakes with 5 rounds. The first to win 3 rounds takes the pot. At the end of round three, Albert has 1 win and Bernie has 2. For some unknown rea­son, they have to call it quits and part ways, never to resume to game. With­out a clear win­ner, how should they divide the pot?

Well, if you work out all the pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios for how the game could have pro­ceeded (there are only 4), you find that odds are 1:3 in favor of Bernie tak­ing the pot. Albert’s chances of win­ning are 1 in 4; Bernie’s: 3 in 4. So, Albert should take ¼ of the pot, Bernie: ¾. DUH Blaise!

Until 1654, math­e­mati­cians claimed that this was an unsolv­able prob­lem; the ques­tion of how to divide the pot of an unfin­ished game was impos­si­ble to answer. While strug­gling with the impos­si­ble, Pas­cal sought the help of Fer­mat, the most respected math­e­mati­cian of his time. And, after some cor­re­spon­dence, Fer­mat (remark­ably) arrived at the solution. !!!.

Pas­cal still couldn’t com­pre­hend the solu­tion even after it was spelled out for him. He whined and con­tested and devel­oped a more com­pli­cated (and less cor­rect) solu­tion. As Devlin repeat­edly pointed out, peo­ple sim­ply didn’t think this way. Sure, they could draw on past expe­ri­ence and data and make rea­son­able pre­dic­tions, but they didn’t bank on their pre­dic­tions; they didn’t mea­sure and quan­tify data, then cal­cu­late out­comes and pre­scribe behav­ior. Not like that, anyway.

Schol­ars once thought non­de­ter­min­is­tic events (those con­tain­ing ran­dom­ness and vari­able fac­tors) were the mys­te­ri­ous yet-to-be-unfolded ways of whatever’s-in-control. The belief that the future was out of our hands, impos­si­ble to pre­dict, was pow­er­ful enough to block or con­tra­dict the logic of basic prob­a­bil­ity. Belief and logic aren’t so dif­fer­ent: they’re wed, for bet­ter or worse.

When I try to put myself in that mind­set, not tak­ing for granted the world I was raised in, I can almost feel the logic. The future belongs to Fortune–it can’t be com­puted. It would be arbi­trary, silly, unfounded to divide the pot accord­ing to an unknown future–according to noth­ing. Sud­denly, sooth­say­ers, palm read­ers, and folk almanacs don’t seem so cocka­mamie. What more appro­pri­ate weapon to wield before the absur­dity of For­tune than, well, absurdity?

2.
Super­sti­tions learn from metaphor, emu­lat­ing the way words leap from sense to dis­con­nected sense. Our minds are full of things we’ve made up; rela­tion­ships that don’t exist; sky­scrap­ers with­out skeletons.

Since I can remem­ber, my par­ents have anointed my fore­head with oil. On the first day of school, Dad with the squeeze bottle–the same oil used to rub beach tar from our soles. Mov­ing out, Mom with the extra-large, Extra-Virgin Olive. Spilled it on the tile and my dog licked it up. Gen­tly lift the bangs and two quick strokes with the thumb. Don’t exhale ’til it’s done. Don’t wipe ’til you’re gone.

3.
For pro­tec­tion from bad things, do the fol­low­ing with­out fail: Adopt an old dog. Dry out his eyes when he’s dead and tie them to your left wrist. Write a let­ter to your sweet­heart. Write it again with Chee­tos fin­gers then lick it clean. Sing the Prayer of Jabez out your base­ment win­dow as long as it’s rain­ing. Sing it with the water in your mouth.

Do it with­out fail. In doing so, you will erase your credit his­tory. Count your mutual funds, clip the weather reports, apply for loans that aren’t FDIC insured. Go back to school.

For pro­tec­tion, for money, for love: climb the golden arm and be sure the cam­era is ready. Don’t call and don’t wait. Always get the idiot’s insur­ance infor­ma­tion. For secu­rity, for friend­ship, for suc­cess: join the Wall Street Choir, become a young pro­fes­sional, have luck, have tim­ing, have tal­ent, will travel.