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xeniot 1999-12-02

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aristotle looked at the physical world and saw natures and elements striving toward the higher and the lower, toward themselves, earth towards the center and fire toward the celestial spheres. perhaps that is not so good as a physics, but it is a universe that literally aches, from dirt to ants to humans, for the incorruptible, for that which need not pass away. perhaps that is all anthropomorphism, purely human demons passed on to the ghosts of reality that swim inside my squishy brain; even so aristotle tells us something about what it is to be human. and if the notes, like mountains seem to stretch themselves into the heavens, toward you, o God, then who am i to rob them of their ascent, even if it is only in my mind?

they almost speak: they are (like Hamlet) groping at the boundaries of reality. they cling to the rafters of heaven and if they are inarticulate, it is only because i have forgotten how to hear them, so far below. the rafters of the universe, its crystalline cathedrals of numbers, lighter than light, its secret towers and dungeons and libraries--all floating just out of reach. and when i pull aside a veil, when i am in fierce pursuit of the notes, there is more simplicity, more incongruity, more words that move like oceans, more oceans of time and memory, and behind that, sometimes, a laughing face. forgive us, Increate, but it is the face of a child, and a laugh that is at once derision and joy, pity and love, and we wonder, we mystics (who travel hand in dead hand in dead hand, still reaching from the dust toward you) if we are really in the right world.

and if it will not shimmer away or fall apart in rags if you laugh too hard or (worse) cease to think it funny.

yet i (we) want you, though you turn - and have turned - us to thistle down. we play the notes, again and again, and when they grown old we find new ones. we write words, whole books in the hope of stumbling across the one book in the library of babel that will...but i dont know what it will do. blow me to into thistle dust, probably. explain me, or this strange shape i share (and do not share) with so many others, or the expansion of a series that holds reality between the operators and exponents -- but I do not think i want to be explained, or justified, or completed. i chase you, but i cannot imagine possessing, or even touching, you. i want you, somehow, without wanting you; without fearing you and being terrified. and though even now I try to pry apart these antinomies, these lies, in search of truth, i do not want to hear a truth that will grant me certainty. i suppose that is an epistemological nightmare, to at once think that truth is not knowledge (that truth, in fact, destroys knowledge) and yet to go straining after it (inelucidible, ineludible gnat) with my tools of knowledge, to seek something that is inexhaustible, like a spring of eternal youth that must be completely consumed in order to derive any benefit.

but i live, in aristotle's conception (dream? could it be that all his vast accounting of the world was written after a terrifying, inexplicable fever-dream?), in a world alive with desire. with desire both for the infinite and desire for the demands of its own natures. so that a fires desire to achieve its own telos is also a desire to touch the infinite. and that to want God is somehow an undertaking to become what i am intended to be. which is in turn a question of wanting the right things, of moving by my own will toward those things that my nature, my soul, longs for. what does my soul long for? for God of course - all desire is ultimately for God - but it also wants beer and bread and stars and games and love and shared nights; and, too, it wants cold and hunger and uncertainty and defeat and loneliness. It is as if all these things, these and all the other gifts, were intermediaries, as if by wanting them in just the right way I would also be wanting you, and wanting with you, and finding you without possessing...

such gifts, all bearing your mark. like the mark of cain, but a mark of goodness, a pencil stroke in a vast map that tells us where we are and also where to go. a map that can be folded and ignored and forgotten and lost, so that the world seems strange and beautiful but purposeless, its enigmas mere mockery, and its laughter bitter. Until i see, unexpectedly, an ugly or evil thing, and it does not seem ugly or evil but blind and dumb and lost and beautiful and good, and art is reborn and i remember that everything and everyone is worth loving, not so much because they deserve it but because love is seeing others as God sees them (Borges), and it is always worth seeing something new, even if it is only an old woman or a noisy child or a rust streak on a sheet of metal.

and your love is so great that it is impossible to ever exhaust anything in the world. it is not so much in the making of the world but in your love for it, every bit and particle, that i must give thanks. for people, for hands and faces and voices and laughter, for whiskey, sex, and death, for trees and stars and playing cards and more books than i can ever read, all of which would be, without your love, flat and miserable conglomerates of atoms and energy. and with your love, more than the combined might of shakespeare, whitman, chesterton, borges, and wolfe will ever encompass, so that it does not matter that i am rewriting their books and poems because i might accidentally slip something new in accidentally, some little secret you were keeping up until now.

-- xeniot

(Portland, 12/2/99)