In Todesbanden

I was riding bus 70 to Central Square last night, as penitential an experience as I've had so far this Lent. Loud, ceaseless, squealing conversations assailed my ears, the inhumanly molded plastic seats transmitted every unabsorbed pothole shock to my ischial tuberosities and spinous processes, and, every time the bus idled, an eardrum-busting grinding and ratcheting rattle surged like machine-gun fire from the back of the bus. 

I was thinking about invisibility. I'd written about it, yes, but in a half-baked manner. Was it a good thing ? A bad thing ? A neutral state ? Something to be cultivated ? Something to be resisted ? Something intrinsic and immutable ?

Suddenly I remembered the movie The Invisible Man. The hero wraps himself in bandages to make himself seen. There was something in that that has applied to my own lived invisibility: the things I've done in community that call attention to myself function precisely to undo invisibility. Is that their intent ? To be constituted, to be realized in the eyes of the other or of the group ? To be given substance, or, at least, an outline ?

But visibility is dangerous. Without being seen one is not vulnerable. On the other hand, being seen invites a sense performance and an expectation of -- what ? -- appreciation ? Applause ? Reward ? Or, conversely, for all the myriad failures and fallings-short, scorn and rejection. On the one hand, the ego swells, and, as it feeds, grows hungrier and hungrier. Nothing satisfies it short of the impossible: triumph over everything and universal adulation. Becoming, in other words, God. On the other hand the ego fasts, rejects everything, supreme hunger artist, wallows in its own self-loathing crapulence.

The lectionary readings today -- Ezekiel's dry bones putting on flesh, St Paul's rejection of flesh over spirit, and Lazarus emerging, Todesbanden-wrapped from his tomb -- further complicated my reflections on invisibility. If it's the community that unwraps the resurrected one, what of its wrapping of the invisible one ? A wrapping unto death ? The death of the deepest, truest, most invisible self ? Or a wrapping into a life which can only be lived with others ? Our homilist, today, interpreted St Paul's rejected flesh as ego. Are death's strong bands, somehow, the ego ? The carefully cultivated self ? The self of selfies and blog posts, that self takes great pains to cultivate its  brand, its personal style, its ticket to celebrity however local ? The self that strides along, easily, visibly, affably, with its brothers and sisters ? The self which, if it cannot be loved, can at least be admired ? The self that, if it cannot love, can, at least, covet ? The self that wants to be the apple of everyone's eye and yet is, itself, blind ?

The reflections coil inward toward an intimate vanishing point. I drag myself -- despite myself -- into the light, the light that makes visible, resisting the eternally upswelling  I would prefer not to, detecting somewhere within the fume of the communion wine on my tongue a strange whisper of don't be afraid.

I began Lent with re-reading TS Eliot  -- Because I do not hope to turn again -- and, as this ragged Lent draws to a close, the vine-tangled wastes of my favorite landscapes evoke Father Hopkins' --

Not untwist -- slack as they may be -- these last strands of man /  In me --

and even, maybe especially, a bit of Walt Whitman:

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour, O soul,
thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from Art,
the day erased, the lesson done.
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing
pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

And Found

Maybe this weedy vocation of mine has something to do with making the invisible visible. Now don't get me wrong: there is an upside to invisibility. I am an long-time practitioner of the art.   Small, solitary, quiet, gray-haired, drab -- the world passes right through me in its drive toward the next new, bright thing. 

And why should the vast, sociable, babbling and brightly spandex-clad citizens, their clever, hungry babies in screeching tow,  stop to notice a common weed, battered to the edge of non-being by a long winter ? After all, spring is fast upon us. Already the yellow banners of the witch hazel have prefigured the cold yellow of the forsythia, and then there's no stopping the riotous flowering-forth.

So be it, and it is a good and seemly thing, and yet time after time I return to the tangled and thorny vacant fields on the grounds of the shuttered asylum where the new and the old mingle in companionable invisibility. Last Saturday I returned with a small agenda. On my last excursion I'd lost my hat. Realizing it late in my visit, and too tired and cold to retrace my steps, I reasoned that it would still be there, likely snagged from my pocket by a thorny rosa multiflora branch, when I returned.

I apologized inwardly to my hat for my abandonment. I tend to ascribe an odd and usually melancholic sentience to inanimate objects and my lost hat was no exception. And as the weeks passed --weeks of rain and wind and snow -- I confess I rather forgot about the thing. I even (oh faithless me)  bought a new hat in an even drabber color, olive green.  So when the weather lightened and the dead weeds next called,  I decided to return to scene of the crime.

The day was milder than usual, but not warm. I noticed that someone had pried the board off one of the old administration building windows, and went up the rotting concrete stairs past the towering graffitied columns to look in. It was, of course, pitch black; a musty cold wind seemed to blow from within, and I could (standing on tiptoe) almost make out enormous numbers on a wall.

But that was not my mission. I headed toward the smashed chainlink surrounding a trash-strewn little brook behind the building. The ranks of towering, hive-like condominiums erected on the old asylum site threatened to disgorge their flocks of cheerful citizens into their healthful Saturday pursuits, but I was in little danger of being overtaken. We recently watched Andrej Tarkovsky's Stalker: I realized that mine were the landscapes of The Zone -- vacant lots, ruins, broken temples into which rain and snow is always falling, and over which a deep, forlorn religious melancholy hangs like a fog.

Religious melancholy. A few miles east, Piskie clergy and laity are gathered to elect a new Bishop. Some delegates are live-tweeting the event under the hashtag #Diomass,  an twitter stream that's an oddly miscible admixture of gently ironic snark and sincere invocations of the Holy Spirit. You might guess wherein my own affinities lie.

Bishop Tom Shaw, an SSJE brother who has been undergoing treatment for brain cancer, is retiring. He's awesome, not least for being a celibate monk; having someone with the gravitas of a monastic as Bishop has been an anchor for me in my conflicted sojourn among the Piskies. The other two bishops that I have experienced have been over-prone to whipping out guitars and/or insisting on chipper sing-alongs.

I watched the walkabout interview videos of the seven candidates. Much to my chagrin the candidate that seemed most delightfully engaging (and who was said to have recited George Herbert's "Love" at another session) pulled a singalong during his taped interview. I groaned inwardly, trying to forgive, trying to keep the others straight.

Of course, I have no vote, which is just as well. My criteria (judging from my reactions to the videos) are, at best, suspect, at worst simply silly. I liked the candidate who changed "Damascus moment" to "Emmaeus moment." I wanted another candidate to be my Mom. One candidate's hand gestures annoyed me, as did another's soul-bearing; one's curly hair distracted me, and one I seemed to keep forgetting. And they're all upstanding family men and women, full of piety and administrative acumen,  and none are monks.  And none of them at all mentioned weeds.

And then there's the matter of the Archbishop. No, not the presiding Bishop (whose squishiness has also annoyed me), but the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, Justin Welby, ex-oilman and evangelical, now at the helm of the thing called the Anglican Communion.  At least Rowan Williams, for all his wafflings,  had theological and scholarly gravitas. And kick-ass eyebrows.  The new dude, yesterday, claimed that gay marriage must not be allowed in the Church of England because it will cause Africans to kill African Christians in the belief that that the Christians will "turn them into homosexuals," referencing a mass grave of 369 Christians in South Sudan, all supposedly killed for that reason, and referencing other gravesides of African Christians where he'd stood,  of people "attacked because of something (ecclesial) that had happened in America."

That may have been my own Damascus moment with respect to organized religion.

(Emmaeus man on the first ballot, but a long way to go.)

So, long story short, I found my hat, better than new after its multiple immersions, hanging out to dry on a branch by the dirty brook. And long story short, it's Lent and I am falling head over heels into what's becoming my yearly Lenten apostasy.

But as lost and invisible as I become, I will always have a home among the weeds.

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Inspector

The end of winter is like a crime scene. The benign sun beams on the corpse-ridden field, seeming to revivify its dead. In flagrante delicto -- the Inspector scans the familiar landscape. The ancient text never fails to yield its secrets to his piercing gaze. 

He begins the ritual -- the glass, the lycopodium powder, the thermometer struck deep in the liver -- it is meet and right so to do. Husks of flowers, force- and fuse- absconditus -- the old, old, tale, older than She who was there before measure -- the Inspector moves behind the altar of the blasted world, arms upraised as if in blessing or despair.

We, the ever lay, the ever broken, watch. He is an exemplar of something; a refusal to utter; an absolute redaction of terms -- love, soul, healing, heart, mercy -- all hauled in for questioning and never heard from again.

And in their stead ?

Husk, corm, scale, seed, stem.

But what about us: the widow, the baker, the milkman, the loner, the muse ?

Is it all too much to swallow, even for the uninvited guest ? The withered fruit, despised and rejected, hangs like blood spatter frozen midair. Under his breath the inspector, working,  sings --

He gave his love a banquet
of apples and of bread
and water from a puddle
and (take, eat) dread.

We queue up in the motionless air, outstretched phalanges clattering.

It is a question of the unoriginal Original, he intones, proffering.

That which slippeth through and through and through. Selah. Amen.

Case closed.

Abandon

The lure of abandoned places:  asylums, vacant lots, winter fields. Places surrendered to time and the elements. Places relinquished as too far gone evenby the legions of painters, contractors, gardeners, and landscapers, happy Pelagians usually hell bent on refurbishing everything into profitable condominiums or civically beneficial recreational parks. No, these are places given over to rust and deer ticks,  poison ivy, brambles and rot. 

Given over, given up, relinquished, surrendered: these are the XXX theme parks of the post-apocalypse, anathema to children and most adults. The price of admission is, well, everything you have.  Group rates ? Ask that and you'll be turned away. This is the world of the singleton, of parallel play, of the quick nod and quickly averted gaze.

These are the edges, the interzones, the deserts visible only to the invisible.

Wait, wait: but what about the crystalline water of life, flowing down the middle of the city street ? What about the trees of life with their twelve fruits and healing leaves ? Isn't that the landscape of the post-apocalypse, and not this blighted domain of staghorn, bittersweet,  and brackish, iced-over inlets jutted with rusty cans and discarded TVs ? Where on the scale of already-and-not-quite-yet does this louche kingdom belong ?

Listen closely, now, and look. We've been through this before.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish ? ...

                                        ...I do not find 
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

Well, yes, ahem. Death by water ? That sounds familiar. And what incomprehending hand wrote water is important in this poem in the margins -- this one ? This very one, admittedly more translucent now, or one wholly other, haunted by the first ?

These (but you knew that already) are the places into which we have asked not to be led, but into which we are led, inevitably. These are the places into which some of us, wordless, headlong, rush.

Surrender. Relinquish. Give up. Give over.

Lead us not.

Surrender.

Instruction follows petition, subtle, open-ended, infuriating. Surrender ? To what, then ? And then what ?

Even in midwinter, in places that could not be more abandoned, you will see things wool-white, upraised, bridal, nearly bodiless, balancing, tranquil, in icy air. Angels ? Spectres ? Fingernail clips, precise as the newest moon ?

What is this desert's particular temptation, then ?  Here the heart, so poor at love, loves; it surrenders; it lets and is let be. And is this a trial, a temptation, then ?

A riddle ?

Stay ? Leave ?

All of the above ?

Instead of Sheep

In her daydream it's eternal winter,

twilight, snowing or about to snow.

Foot cracks twig, nut, ice, rib,

oak hands jazz the windy overhead,

creatures ignite the bone-dry underbrush, 

and sleep, like a bored P.I., shadows her.

Night's net's poised to tumble from the rafters,

            sleight-of-lantern, windfall, snowrise -- everything

harder and harder. Footsteps quicken, hers , theirs , ours,

and just as the iron maiden starts to spring

there, at the end of the path,

is the house, the hut, hovel, midden, squat,

            hell, it shapeshifts from night to night.

But, no matter what, the key --

at least so far -- fits the lock (when there is a lock)

and the door opens (when there is a door) --

flies open under her weight and the weight of the wind,

            or whinges, too-long ankylosed in an oilless world,

and she, the dreamer, upright, navigates black

space. The house haunts her, bowel to crown,

as she haunts its stairless wells and lidless flues,

very eye in very eye,  breath to the four winds

            (or is it windows ?) until eddying

inked scraps, dander, dust, those motes of her

are housekept, wept or swept into the night.

2/8/2014