Ten Tens
A poem about being
Hello all, attached is another, somewhat longer poem. I will get back to writing the sort of thing you likely actually signed up for here shortly, but am in the middle of a particularly reading and writing-heavy semester, so what I have to offer is the stuff with which I have been tinkering for a while. I appreciate your patience and readership, and am open to suggestions on things you would like to see more of on this page. As always, may God bless and keep you, and please pray for peace.
I. And there is nothing left behind the mask. The fruit that was not there cannot return. The hymnist wrote a reading of the scene that I loved far too much to still believe- for that is something from behind the mask (and there is nothing left behind the mask.) But do not try again to gather up the thing that slipped away, some essence weak and airy, insubstantial as a piece of fruit that only should have been there, then. II. "Remove yourself," the teacher said, "and give up everything you are, forget the one that speaks, and those that he seeks to address and only let the subject be itself." I am poorly trained to look at others as others othering, without reference to the thing or set of things that view them. Beauty is not found in any eye, for It never can be both contained and loved. So beauty is not found in any I III. Occupying places constitutes them. The people gathered make a space a place. The gathering, a generative act. All collecting creates something new. Gather to yourself from every people something new and foreign and absurd and we will call it foolishness, together and we will say our wisdom went unheard. Something new is always being made and spaces exist only for a time. IV. We-I, cannot contain the things we love. For by containing them they are not loved except as self, and that is not a love that any learned doctor recognized. Only by losing "we" can we learn love and, ceasing to be subject of the thought, let Him, the object’s presence, fill the space and constitute the we, and I, and us, til He and I are one, and one in Love, for You and He are One and Love and I. V. Such pious words, self-consciously proclaimed are vain, like every thing, for every thing is vapor, and the forms you try to grasp are never apprehended, seen or touched. In fact, the thing you want you cannot do. In fact the thing you hate is all you are. You manufacture presences obscene and violently oppose the stage itself. But signaling some thing cannot be helped So why not sign the beautiful or true? VI. You come upon the tree You’ve come to hate. Eucatastrophic providence in mind, But this cannot be manufactured either. The only way to go back up is down. Even madder tracks the foolish leave Than those whose guide was human craft. I bring no gift, no lawful gift, unto my host. And still the tree declines to signify. We speak and we contest the meaning but the tree and mirror just repeat the words VII. The thing upon the tree, the mirror’s speech- the only thing that grants myself a self- is finitude, extending after me: eternal other than myself. The wood, the glass, the frame, they speak of something else, that is not merely order, uncaused cause (To speak of such is but to comprehend. And beaten paths do not lead from the tree but to it, leaving must go through the wood, and risk the last encounter with the beasts). VIII. The beasts make offering upon the tree. They understand the thing it signifies. It is for them alone to understand, and ours to glean the things they leave behind. The mask is what we gather from the tree and grasping, wear it, being what it is. Taking what the mirror offers back. Hell is where the self is in dispute. And walking through the door, away from home is Heaven. Only what is lost is found IX. And so He cursed the tree, and shattered clay and analog is failing even now. We who have not shattered in His hand only put off becoming something new. (Not that one could choose to so remain) For being such is not an active state, but only vacancy and vaporous self-pondering and staying in the room without mirrors, and no trees to fear, no fruit to offer, one becomes the tree. X. And so He blessed the tree, and gave the mask in His own image to be sacrificed. The heavy air of caves but weighs itself. The lamb is sacrificed on higher ground. But even then the fruit will be preferred, and that to be consumed while on the way out from the tree, and past the flaming sword and past edenic gates without entry. For there is nothing left behind the mask. And even that was from behind the mask.
