La bougie

a translation of an excerpt from The Journal of Albion Moonlight, by Kenneth Patchen 


Nous n'avons pas encore apprivoisé le royaume du mot.
Pour le dire clairement, le mot est illettré.
Le mot est l'appel de la tribu de sou l'eau.
Le mot est la façon dont quelque chose flotte, qui ne peut être vu.
Le mot est la chose qui parle aux morts.
Le mot est la bougie au pied du trône.




Note:  This final post is, in a sense, my creative response to the Feast of all Saints.  I had been working on something for several days that I simply could not live with (which is saying something, given some of the pieces I've put up here in a potentially misguided effort to keep my word).  I came across this short excerpt, in English of course, the language The Journal of Albion Moonlight was written in, thanks to a friend.  My piece dealt with language, and the dead, and I was experimenting with writing in French and English, and this piece seemed to say everything I'd wanted to, but infinitely better.

the heart, and burial places known and unknown

loving, and singing,
the heart paced
on night feet through the desert
that lies between you on god's mountain,
and a home whose name you don't know.

the heart
swoons
like a femme fatale slipping
with her frighteningly slim waist
onto a couch.  the heart

knows how to get what it wants.  it is natively
neither open nor closed, but is something
like a goldfish;
it opens its mouth to sip its tiny breaths,
then closes so as to think it over for awhile.
the heart

is simpler than all of this:
two middle-aged men with earlocks
will stand across from one another,
holding each others' hands;
they'll revolve in slow circles, dancing
just one night of the year, every year,
over caleb's grave.

but singing in an ever-lowering voice,
your heart might find itself ready
to sleep.  the longing
grew too long, the desire and gold dirt
ever-lengthening away from you.  it is a good
place to die, this place, to be gathered
up, it is a good place to rest,
sings sleepily the heart.

On Pace

Wow.  This blog thing is nuts.

Obviously I haven't held up my end of the bargain, which was a commitment to posting a new piece every week.  My explanation for that is twofold.


Firstly, I have been working on something, but it was not a piece that I could rush very much even in getting it to a first draft stage.  Rushing was sort of the point of creating this blog - I can certainly be very, very, very precious) - but I am learning as I go.

A month or so ago a reader posted a comment which was, shall we say, not entirely positive.  In discussing it with my boyfriend, one of the things I said was basically, "Well of course it's kind of crappy.  It's a first draft.  People get that, don't they?  That by commiting to getting a new piece up every week, I'm really commiting to getting a first draft done each week, right?"

To which Kevin responded, alarmingly, no.  He very sweetly pointed out that not everyone in the world is a writer and therefore not everyone in the world knows that all things done quickly are, by default, probably done none too well.

Beyond feeling that I have confirmed my earlier opinion that rushing breeds bad work, I just hate doing things quickly.  What on earth are we all rushing towards?  Death?  I assume it will come whenever it's good and ready.  I could rush to get more work done, but then I'd just have more work to do, and as I already have plenty of that right now...it seems obvious.

And the second part of my explanation for my tardiness bears intriguing implications for my understanding of liturgy.  For a few of the Sundays that have elapsed since I started this project, I have not been able to go to church.  The first two times it happened, I wrote something anyway, responding simply to the readings.  But those two pieces (which will remain unnamed) were, by my standards, poorly conceived.  Not bad through and through, but very...one-dimensional.  That's the only way I can put it.  The readings alone seemed to prompt a particular line of sight which I found it difficult to shake myself out of without the help of the music, incense, homily, and simply the presence of other people participating in the Eucharist.  So one of these past Sundays I wasn't able to go to church, my third missed mass since I started the project, and I decided to just let that one go.  I would rather not write at all then write something just to say I did it.

Which is a little bit what the essay I'm about to post is saying.  It's a much longer piece than I've created yet for this blog, and it was a bit of a challenge for me.  Long pieces of prose are difficult for me to write.  But it's a direction I'm trying to work towards, and so I would welcome any comments - either in encouragement or critique - that you might have.

à chao ku/water tower

la lune est donnée

or withheld

at the whim of clouds

bassinet

do you see do you remember when you saw your baby brother dead in the bassinet saw the quiet mouth of white lace freeze around him saw the mother approaching smiling then seeing then shaking then the movement towards panic and the hospital oh see oh remember the cat's body frozen in the night still and with his mouth wide open and you suddenly knew everyone everyone was leaving you going to some unseeable place everyone everyone is leaving you your cat your baby brother your father your mother your lover your dog yes someday he too with his happy eyes and bad breath and you see it more clearly now than ever bending over ben the cat that there really is hardly a believable reason to keep waking up every morning your baby brother just seems to have figured it out a little sooner than you


This was written in response to the mass on September 4th.  I'm not sure that I'll be getting something written for this past week, but I will make every effort to keep up as best I can.  Thanks for reading, and as always, feel free to respond to posts old or new.

golden age or churning of the waters

the peach            sliced in half            fell open
gladiolas            stuck out their tiny            purple tongues
and strawberry blossoms            by magic            became strawberries

still your doubts hover            swoop in and out of your brain
following an unknown will            behind me
behind me            behind me
where oh where
                                 did the fruits with
their sugar and petals go?

it was that spring            the one people talk about
but it's gone            and somehow you know
you were never there for it

up under the mind            come floodwaters in the night
dark            and rotting what they touch

get behind me
i see it coming            and suspect
i am less necessary than you

behind me            where
shall we wait            for the boats that won't come
for the turtles            lumbering and snapping their mouths
to float us            towards a different death            one followed
by a spring            we may never see

Passing through Common Time

He thought the worst was past
the day the doctors removed the bandages.
He could remember the look of the bones
having bit through from the inside,
sliding their way free of his borders.
Now that they seemed again
safely swaddled in his own skin,
progress was being made.

He imagined healing to be a hill,
with a sweaty and painful ascent,
followed by lunch and
a cooling walk down to the waiting car.

But the muscles screamed their refusal
everyday.  The red and bumpy skin
stretched over hip, thigh, and knee
asserted its own unhurried interest in change, and
his leg seemed unconcerned with the whole
ugly and pathetic process.

Eventually,
after years of strange stretching and pulling
and daily rituals of twists and reaches,
after day after day after day
of salves and massages,
the worst of the pain subsided.

But still his skin looked red and waxy;
his gait, uneven.

His doctor simply said,
"Welcome to your new body.
There is nothing wrong with it.
You just don't like it as much
as you think you liked your old body,
but which I happen to remember
you also complained about."

The next day he woke up
at peace with his body:
isn't that what we want to say?

I don't know that it isn't possible, only
that it seems improbable,
given that I do not love
my body, and I am not convinced
that you love yours.

virgin saint

when virginity meant an intact hymen
and i wanted to be on swim team
(which entailed tampons),
i supposed that i had lost
my perfection
at fourteen
in a pool bathroom with wet
concrete floors and blue
stalls.

when virginity meant no penises
having passed inside a vagina,
i supposed that i had lost
a childlike stupidity
in bed,
(ostensibly) in love,
at eighteen.

i am thirty-one now, and can't tell you
what virginity means.
only that i am glad saints
ursula and winifride
and lucia and mary
seem to have known something about it,
which might mean virginity
can be known something about.

On Fugues and Ayres

If I remember correctly, the old runes from Northern Europe weren't only letters in the way we've come to know them.  Letters, to us, do little more than denote phonetic sounds.  Runes were believed to have healing properties in some way that was both physical and spiritual.  A specific rune might be carved out for you when you were suffering from a certain ailment.  The rune - a letter, a spoken frequency, and a piece of a word - was a cure in itself.

Sometimes I come to church with a settled mind.  Not so today.  My thoughts feel chaotic and unsure of their mooring.  And as church often has a way of taking my head and setting it back in its proper place, of even occasionally giving rise to a small epiphany, of answering some enormous question that all too often contributes to the chaos, I am here today with solemn expectations.

Solemn somehow means heavy, even somber.

Please, Please, I seem to beg of the mass - give me something, help me somehow.  Fix me.

But then the bird called Bach comes swooping into the room, everything about him insisting on a kind of solemn joy.  There is no heaviness, no brooding question.  The fugue glitters, makes no lasting promises, and is gone.  Little if anything of the mass seems to stick today except the music.

And then the mass is ended with Purcell.  Even as Dido is dying, Purcell can't seem to be somber, and he is no different here in his "Ayre in C."  All light and moving shadows, water gliding to and fro.

Before we started taking ourselves so seriously, European Christians seemed to understand that pleasure and pain were passing - that we were passing through this world - and music and art helped keep the momentum going.

I find today that momentum is all I was looking for.

Some air, room to breathe, for my brain to disencumber itself, rather than forming any more supposedly brilliant thoughts.  The mind seems to crave its own disturbance with this constant accumulation of thoughts: images, fantasies, plans, memories.  For all of these, the Church has its own rune:

'tis the name that whoso preacheth
speaks like music to the ear:
who in prayer this name beseecheth
sweetest comfort findeth near.


Note:  I apologize for the late date on this posting.  This was written in response to the mass on August 7, the eighth Sunday after Pentecost.  I was slightly delayed through my own distraction, but further delayed by my desire to locate the names of the composers of the pieces that struck me.  The piece by Bach was his Prelude and Fugue in F major.  Purcell's Ayre in C was also mentioned, and the lyrics printed at the end were translated, in 1861, from a 15th century Latin hymn.

According to the Flesh

Washing blueberries this morning, I piled
a few ripe pints into one bowl. There they waited
until lunch, when we discovered that the bottom-most berries
had burst open.

The body of matter fails somehow,
it is not strong enough to bear its own weight. The hip
slips, the branch snaps under a fresh snowfall.
And the names

shift, tilt at a new angle, confusing us in
their seeming familiarity. Washing
a dead man or gutting a fish,
their names might return for a moment.
But for now,

we have just eaten our lunch,
and are now eating vanilla ice cream. My stomach,
you see, also revolts at those darker moments.
But the proper names,

the grunt of your enemy's voice in your ear,
telling you who you are -
I could wish for
the courage to ask for that.

this one

and the daughter of creation, of creator,

of the name her begrudging husband prayed to,

became a coin exchanged for labor.

this one,

her father said.

leah wanted

to be loved by her husband, probably

wanted her father to give a shit, too.

the tent closed itself around her

and she was held and loved

for the one night she

was mistaken for another.

leah wanted

to be loved, and became

instead a punishment. became a mother

to lesser children, lesser because hers.

finish with

this one, her father said.

When I was in college I spent a quarter defending what seemed to me the right of men to exist at all. It was a feminist theory class, and as the only outspoken and happily hetero woman there, I took a beating. I should mention that I am well aware of the great many lesbians who do not hate men. However, my introduction to their world was blatantly anti-male. I am and always have been exuberantly pro-male (perhaps too exuberantly at times), and the inability of anyone to not find men perfectly, heart-breakingly beautiful struck me at the time as willful and in defiance of the evidence.

Which is all to say, I came from a somewhat naively loving attitude towards men.

I remain convinced of the need all humans have of one another, regardless of sexual specifics, and I probably also remain somewhat willful myself in my persistent adoration of men. But the story of Leah and Jacob only grows worse in my eyes as I get older. The very thought of a woman spending the majority of her life longing and praying for her own goddamn husband to love her, and being denied the gratification of such a simple wish, is gut-wrenching to me. And make no mistake: Leah's story in the chapters skipped over by the liturgy is nothing short of tragic.

I have no concrete reason for thinking that the creators of the lectionary skipped over the most painful parts of Leah's story intentionally. I do, however, find it somewhat disgusting that the next we hear of Jacob in the mass is from his glamorous "wrestling with God" moment. I might ask for a similar "begging of God" story for Leah. It is a plea which Jacob never deigns to answer.

I sometimes try harder to find some redemption in a woman's story - a glimmer of hope, a perspective that shows she was not as powerless as she might appear at first glance - but in Leah's case, I would be lying to my own heart. Jacob and Laban behave reprehensibly towards a woman who was placed by God into their care. I can only pray that I never treat any one of God's creatures in such a manner.

Whidbey

When your head hurt and you laid it down on the spring-smelling dirt, I thought you might be Jacob, or Rachel, or Leah.  The wind washed over the tall grass and it waved - all golden-ocean-like - as though we were in some impossibly romantic movie.  You told me it looked like where you grew up in Ohio.  We agreed it was the most beautiful thing we'd ever seen, and you told me that you never want to go back to Ohio.

I sat down beside you on one of the paths through the tall grass, and from there I could barely see over the top of it.  The dog didn't stick to the well-cut paths.  He bounded like some enormous rabbit through and over it.  Up he went, then down.  Up, down.  He came to the paths occasionally, and then only to check on us before continuing on after the songbirds and the garter snakes.  And I thought what a lovely Dante he would make, or Beatrice.

When we spotted a pine tree a little ways away, we decided to move into its shade.  Gradually your head cooled and stopped hurting so much, and again your dog rushed over to make sure we weren't leaving him.  As the day wore on we both spoke less and less, each for our separate reasons.

And then we went to the beach just before leaving, and listened to the tiny and smoothed-over stones, their bodies all shell, all gray skin prickling against each other with a hushed clatter.  The island itself seemed to quiet down as the sun moved lower, when one huge and out-of-place wave rushed up and soaked us through with icy water.  You yelped - a beautiful cry of fear, I thought.  And the wave slid out, pulling with it stones shivering like stars.

In the Garden

In the dream, you feel your body fall apart into muck and clay.
It goes down to the beetles and the worms and the black sounds.
The roots, all hunger and patience, plunge holes in your skin,
And suddenly you notice that you feel also gratitude.

In the dream, your mind begins to lose its tether.
Your bones gape into the shapelessness which the roots transform
Into new bodies; nausea sets in, and you are unsure of its cause:
The mind's departure from reasonable thought, or the body's dissolving.

In the dream, rain seeps down to what is left of you through the soil.
It is summer, and warm, and the worms continue their sure wounding. 

Rebekah

Let her be the woman

whom the LORD has appointed;

and she came,

drawing water from the well.

In place of fathers, O king,

you shall have sons.

Something which was not there before

tries to exist, though

of course it cannot,

and cannot try.

She bears it.

Gets herself a new nose ring, 

some gold bracelets, veils

her face and walks out into the desert.

She takes him who was

and makes to-come.

Let her be the woman

whom the LORD has appointed

for him.

It is so easy for me to identify with this reckless woman who agrees to a marriage site-unseen.  She just crosses her fingers and jumps in feet first.  And it is beautiful to me that she is a comfort to Isaac.  But I cannot ever be allowed to forget that this isn't really Rebekah's story.  I cannot feel that her story is told quite right when the blessing for Abraham and Isaac is a future, and the women are always only the means to that blessing; not a part of the blessing.  And they don't seem to qualify for much blessing themselves other than the shared glory of making a baby boy.  This is a Rebekah chapter in Isaac's story.

But the sons in place of fathers still seem so important.  I don't want to let them go.  We need to be reminded that the future doesn't have to look like the past.

We compel our children to repeat our mistakes so we don't have to face the fact that, no, that was not the only way we could have gone.  We want them enslaved to consumerism and lust and sexual shame and xenophobia because we are desperate to not have to confront the child in us who could have been something new, who maybe still can, but dear God, what would it look like?

And what of Rebekah?  What of the woman foolish and brave enough to do the work, and then to fail in her own ways?  I want to be so foolish and brave, but how do I continue to ask her to bear up under this burden, a burden of secondariness, even if she is strong enough to carry it?