Let No Man Put Asunder

                                                       image from the Hubble Telescope

          Sonnet: To Science
               by the young Edgar Allan Poe

          Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
          Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
          Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
          Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
          How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
          Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
          To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
          Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
          Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
          And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
          To seek a shelter in some happier star?
          Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
          The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
          The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

          Sonnet: To Poe et. al.
               by me

          Right fully do you shun the deadsome eye
          Which rips the veil to stare and bleed heart dry.
          But with what knowledge do you thus accuse
          And broad-brand Science killer of the Muse?
          Ye Poets, too, can sin against the flame:
          Who speaks the real world “dull” becomes the same,
          And makes the lives of both a drowsing hell
          Who holds Marie and dreams of Jezebel.
          Give me the maid with endless depths and selves,
          Who draws at once her own and mermaid’s comb
          Through locks and seas of light the more I delve
          To drown my heart both liquid in and foam,
          To soar my soul with galaxies and elves
          And never leave the blood and wine of home.

Turn Again and Rise (I)

“What was God to do, in the face of this dehumanizing of mankind?”

            Saint Athanasius, whose very name praises Christ’s vanquishing of death, reaches out across the ages to us with the beautiful philosophical poetry of On the Incarnation.  It’s magical to read at Christmastide – I am slowly rereading it after receiving a shared copy as a Christmas present – and stirring at the beginning of Lent.  Lent, coming as it does in the dregs of winter, when our hearts are heavy with sleep and desperately need to be stirred.  Dante knew his stuff.  We need a journey, first down through the darkness that has assailed us and brought us to grief, then up and up the steep and glorious road to Love.  Athanasius gives us that journey – I have selected particular quotations and added my own numbers to help trace its trajectory - starting in Chapter 11, the beginning of the section entitled, almost whimsically, “The Divine Dilemma and its Solution in the Incarnation.”

I

            The last paragraph of Chapter 11 traces out a particularly striking picture of that path down through rings of Hell on Earth – a set of dominoes crashing down, one after the other, inevitably.  But that idolatry and blatant sinfulness we come to expect are found in the middle of that path.  They are neither the first causes nor the final effects, but rather the inglorious unfolding of a tragedy whose root is ingratitude and whose fruit is ignorance.  How painful that is to admit for those of us who go along living a “good” life as the professed enemies of the ancient villain enshrined in so many corners of our world, only to do him homage with each complaint that passes our lips.  Hymns to the destroyer are sung in whines, and his is the iconography of blindness.

            Athanasius tells us that the descent of men into hell began when they, “foolish as they are, (1) thought little of the grace they had received.”  We see again, we see in ourselves, the damnable foolishness of Adam and Eve: they had everything and didn’t really care.  They “thought little of the grace they had received, and (2) turned away from God.”  That’s what happens when we refuse to see our blessings with thankful eyes.  We reject the gifts and in so doing reject the Giver.  We turn away, aversio, almost without meaning to.  I love you, Lord, but…

           Because we are made in the image of God, because our souls are made for passionate union with Him, in this act of turning away men “(3) defiled their own soul so completely that they not only (4) lost their apprehension of God, but (5) invented for themselves other gods of various kinds.”  Idolatry, this worship of other lesser things, is not what starts the chain reaction.  It’s an effect, a symptom.  It’s the sign of a bigger problem.  It begins already in the grave, and digs it deeper.  We have turned from God, and in the heartbrokenness of our mutilated souls we reach out to lesser beauties to save us.  Desperate for the Home we have turned our backs on, we throw ourselves down before the memories and dreams of heroes who bear His image, before the grandeur of His falcon and the steadfastness of his cattle, before the magic of His woods.

            Yet because we have turned from the greater One whom all these things in their very being sing and worship, we find no rest with them.  Their beauty sours.  Hera cannot heal our homes; Heracles cannot stave off the enemy, be it our neighbor or death itself.  The falcon drips with blood and will not hear us.  The cattle blister and die.  The music of the woods falls silent.  And we, racked with mourning asour dreams die, grasp in desperation.  If we cannot hear the songs of the living trees, take an axe to them!  Let the forest ring with a new drumbeat – chop them down, master them, carve their bones, make the image we desire.  We fell a living tree to make a dead image of one, thinking that will stay death and save us.  “(6) They transferred the honor which is due to God to material objects such as wood and stone” … but hardy as their skeletons were, these images, too, were dumb.

            Finding our own strength insufficient to chain this slipping enchantment of the world, we hear, in the deadness, the voices of our parched desires raised louder and louder.  The Godless hunger is unbearable.  We little tyrants fall under the curse of our own tyranny and seek more powerful tyrants to fill the widening void.  “Indeed, so impious were they that (7) they worshipped evil spirits as gods in satisfaction of their lusts.”  Poor nature could not save us and would often destroy us, but at least it had a kind of innocence in its mindless chaos.  Demons are another matter.  They are not merely violent but exacting, lovers of destruction.  Those who worship them must offer up to waste more than stone and wood.  “(8) They sacrificed brute beasts,” the poor cattle they once loved, and the next ominous link in the chain became clear.  The image of God Himself, their very brothers, their very selves, must be thrown on the fire:  “They sacrificed brute beasts and (9) immolated men, as the just due of these deities.”  The just due.  A horrifying phrase.  The White Witch makes her claim, and her claim is valid.  We have sought out the demons, we have learned to pay their blood prices, and through our own fault we have brought ourselves “more and more under their insane control.”

            The last rings of our descent are as surprising as the first, not the least because of a certain suggestiveness: Athanasius seems to unfold history centuries beyond himself.  He puts forth a dynamic that plays out on the world stage as well as in miniature.  Yet it still startles us.  The worship of demons begets (10) trust in “magic arts” – that old tree-hewing power trip, now with a diabolical force behind it.  But that trust also fails.  Reliance on blood oracles “led men astray” – it simply didn’t work.  After all this work, the race was still miserable.  And so “(11) the cause of everything in human life was traced to the stars.”  Stronger even than demons, those persons forever wrecked, is the impersonal framework of Fate.  Over and above all forms of life, we see a Great Machine working away with its pitiless mechanical tick; no small flickering life can speak to it.  Where can this leave us but with a universe that is dumb?  Man brought himself, Athanasius tells us, to the point where he lived “(12) as though nothing existed but that which could be seen.”  Our tragedy ends in materialism.  Having abandoned centuries of paganism and witchcraft as impractical, we come to a soulless and empty world, call it enlightenment, and despair.  “In a word, (13) impiety and lawlessness were everywhere, and neither God nor His Word was known.”

            These are the bookends of sin – in the grand sweep of history, in every failed society, in every human life, again and again: we scorn the Love offerings of God, and we wonder why we feel so alone.

            Thank God it doesn’t end there.

Sidereus Nuncius

One million Earths, they say, could fit inside the Sun.  Take the radius of the Sun, multiply it by about 775, and you get Antares: the red heart of the Scorpion, an orb of gas so hot it has become plasma, blazing in the darkness, unimaginably massive.

“What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

The same hand that holds Antares effortlessly in being, the same eye that beheld the star before it was born, took hand and eye on today’s anniversary.  Not on a star, but on a tiny wet rock that shines only in a smallish star’s reflected glory.  Not in full splendor of manhood, but as life so small as to be invisible even on the scale of human eyes: not a constellation of tissues even, but a tiny wet cell dependent on another’s life, waiting for time to give His eyes form and His immortal heart rhythm and unfold the hand that holds creation into fingers.

Naming the Clouds

“Did you count the stars or something?”
“We don’t have to count them,” Meg said.
“They just need to be known by Name.”
~from A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle

So you ask me, What use is there in learning the names of clouds?  What use have we for Luke Howard and his Latin name game?  After all, we aren’t meteorologists, and life is short.  Isn’t it better just to gaze on clouds in wonder?  Isn’t it better to simply witness the dance of angel tresses and dresses, or perhaps to catch Hagia Sophia shifting into a mer-rhinoceros?  Doesn’t science only conjure away elfland?

I challenge you this: stand with your face in the wind that races before a dark and towering stormcloud, stare at the sky and say cumulonimbus, and see if lightning doesn’t strike your soul.

There is poetry in the whimsy of “locks of hair” cirrus and in the simple directness of “layer” stratus.  There’s a game in naming altostratus, stratocumulus, cirrostratus.  William Tyndale, in his love of English, was blind to the beauty of Latin (or so I am told).  But J.K. Rowling and the Latin Mass crowd know, alongside centuries of science, what power there is in this language both mysterious and universal.  Call it “raincloud” — call it “nimbus” — has it lost, or gained, by being doubly named?  The cloud and the world are made richer when, common names and lore and poetry, daydreams and child of five not excluded, it gains another title.  Another facet of the diamond glints, tying this “heap” of cumulus to all others, whether in Spain or last summer, placing it in relation to the others of its race as well as to all creation, contributing somehow to a lastingness beyond the life of the cloud itself.

Learning this language helps us to appreciate, and it’s as simple as starting with three words.  I learned them in school at about age 6 and haven’t forgotten them yet:

cirrus – the mares’ tails
cumulus – the cauliflower clouds
stratus – “flat-us”

We see clouds better when we know they come in kinds (and know by naming).  Third graders run to the window, stand on tiptoe wide-eyed and vie for volume, puzzling out a springtime sky patterned in white and gray, high and low, fast and slow, thick and wispy.  I wonder to myself, Is that army of flat-based puffs stratocumulus or altocumulus?  How high are they? and belatedly realize I am gazing differently.  Not that imagination is dead or in any way dampened.  Rather, looking out the car window – or looking at a picture of a lake - I see clouds rise to be noticed.  Beg to be appreciated.  Tease to be better understood.

Classification, like true dominion, is not a violent conquest that leaves things desiccated.  It certainly cannot be with clouds, for they cannot be clutched, they delight in shifting, and in drying out they cease to be.  True classification is part of this wondrous human task of naming.  It is both acknowledgement and invitation … not to mention, blessed fun.

The Darkness Shatters

These thoughts follow the latest video in Live Action’s “Mona Lisa Project” exposure of Planned Parenthood abuses, which may be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJt3OVIdhUk.

images from ‘Pieta,’ El Greco

Laws.  Why do laws exist?  There is no single reason, or perhaps no single way of looking at the complex reason for laws.  They are there because we are contingent and fallen — that is, because we make mistakes out of ignorance or malice or, often, some psychologically exhausting combination of the two.  Laws are there to teach, to witness to truth in a society, and to uphold that truth.  Laws are to protect us from ourselves, from one another, from the various dangers which exist in this world.  Laws are to make a space wherein persons can relate to one another in freedom, in truth, in love.  There are good laws, poor laws, evil laws, for-a-time laws and work-in-progress laws.  But laws are for the wellbeing of the citizens of a nation.

The lawbreaking in this video is heartbreaking.  (These videos, I should say, because they are a series … as are the abuses revealed therein.)  It is not simply a violation of valid laws themselves and the rule of law in our nation.  It is part of a larger violation and sundering of persons.  The undercover operation shows a dynamic that goes on in at least some of these clinics across the nation: responsibility towards a minor is abdicated.  The young woman, whose vulnerability is expressed in her legal status, is failed by those whose duty of care is to protect her.  Failed, because they help her to break the very laws designed to protect her.  Failed, because they encourage her to enable the father of her child to continue this relationship which is (a) illegal and (b) has led to a crisis pregnancy — which is damaging at least on these two points, and may be in more ways, and which our nation has deemed “statutory rape” for a reason.  Failed, because they sollicitously get her the “paperwork” which is her ticket to sidestep the law and avoid notifying the very people who are responsible, legally and morally, for being the girl’s first protection — and they do this, not because there is any indication of abuse, but to deliver a handy solution to a girl who is, not surprisingly, afraid.  This is the lawbreaking side of the larger personbreaking at work here.

Fragmentation.  My overall response to what the video shows is, “This is diabolical.”  What is the diabolical?  What is the nature of this darkness, and how is it at work here?  I had a good reminder recently, listening to a discussion on Boethius.  Evil, like darkness, is privation.  Darkness is an apt metaphor – and it is only a metaphor, albeit a very powerful one, because mystery too can be darkness – because it is the absence of light.  Evil is not itself something, but at the same time, in this sublunary world, it is a force to be reckoned with.  “A metaphysical parasite,” our discussion leader called it.  Or as I tell my students, “The devil doesn’t create; he just goes around smashing things.”  This smashing is real, real as the Blood poured out on Calvary (but love is realer), and when we encounter the diabolical we are justly angered and afraid, because what it can do to people is terrible to behold.  The diabolical destroys the beautiful, perverts the good, negates the truth, and would sunder into fragments that which is designed to rest in wholeness.

What this video shows is sundering, sundering, sundering.  The employees have been sundered from their true calling — they have been trained, somehow, somewhere, to turn their backs and call it helping, like the parents who give a child poison because he seems to want it so.  They aren’t comfortable with this.  The nervous giggling of the young women, which should be read as a plea for guidance, is echoed in the nervous giggles of the employees who are eager to provide simple cures.  Abortion by chemicals?  Just a pill.  That’ll be so simple… except she is too far along.  Abortion by instruments?  It won’t hurt.  A bit of discomfort… we won’t go into detail.  We won’t speak of the sundering that goes on in the womb — sundering of mother and child, sundering of the child itself.  It’s okay, really, brush it under the rug, don’t speak of it and it doesn’t really exist, like the girl’s very problems and fear.  Statutory rape?  Oh, well, don’t bring him into this, then.  We won’t speak about it.  I didn’t hear it.  Parental involvement?  That’s the law, true, but we can sidestep that.  You don’t want them to know?  Here, have some paperwork.  With one sweep of forms and pen, we can set up the court between you and your parents in case anything should come up.  Easy, easy.  Service with a smile.

Fragmented, too, is the very vision of sexuality.  Is anyone else unsettled by the way employees speak of sexual anatomy & physiology?  On the one hand, nervous giggling about these things is as old as comedy’s acknowledgement of human struggles.  There is some true homage paid to bodily awkwardness, sensitivity, even sacredness in those ums and giggles.  On the other hand, the employees work to convey that matter-of-factness which helps deal with awkward facts.  But it rings false, ominous even.  If you are truly addressing women’s health (a woman’s health) in a delicate situation, what is needed is delicacy, gentleness, respect for bodies and so for persons.  There is nothing so tasteless as trying to be matter-of-fact about shoving an instrument inside a woman to kill and extract her child by comparing it to sexual union.  Or rather, to the isolated part of a man involved in it.  Tasteless, heartless, disrespectful, blasphemous.  Blind.

Relationships.  And what of the girl’s relationships, so critical at a time when she’s so vulnerable?  We witness how her relationship to the health care workers is a failure.  Her relationship to the child within her is not even addressed.  Except… that they do acknowledge this is a difficult time.  It would be good for her boyfriend – that father whose child within her speaks of their union – it would be good for him to be there when she has the procedure.  Well, hell yeah.  It’s a horrific thing.  He should be there, to stop it!  They don’t believe that, of course.  But there is, somewhere in this, a recognition of the unspoken agony, because they do think it would be a good thing for the man to be there with her.  Until they discover he’s already committed a crime by sleeping with her.  Then he’s best kept out of things.  He is not called on to be accountable, though that is the only healthy way to serve the couple’s relationship as well as each of them.  The workers only become additional accomplices in helping him to evade responsibility, and ones who don’t have any kind of emotional entanglement to cloud their judgment.  Nor do they give the girl’s parents a chance to look out for her.  That relationship, too, is treated lightly and legal structures interposed, offhandedly, which would sever the parent-child bond when most it is needed.  The girl obviously cares about her relationship with them, otherwise she wouldn’t be worried about them knowing.  But now, when she is most vulnerable and most in need of the support which it is their role to offer, she is helped – without question, with reassurance - to distance herself from them.  The parents are swept under the rug (illegally), the man is swept under the rug (illegally), and their responsibilities are assumed – at least partially - by these employees who show themselves to be the last people on earth who should be in the position of looking out for the girl.

The darkness shatters.  The situation which the video shows - through the meeting of pretense and reality – is a sphere of culture which divides persons from persons in as many ways as there are relationships.  Divides, shatters, and leaves everyone sundered.  From one another in society, by disregarding laws.  From one another in health care, by turning backs on a long tradition of nonviolence and blind eyes to the true needs at hand.  From one another as mother-to-child, woman-to-man, child-to-parent.  And not only sundered from others but sundered within their very selves.  The wounded left and led to further fragmentation.

What we have seen, so far, is a situation without hope.  That does not mean things are hopeless.  Far from it.  There is one more division, already overcome if only we say yes, whose healing heals all others.  That reunification is where the hope is, that is what Hope is, and all smaller hopes flow from it and into it and serve its healing cause, whether they know it or no.

 

Hope there is.  But Planned Parenthood, alas, fails to offer it.  And therein lies the tragedy.

Original Solitude

“It is not good that man should be alone…”  ( Genesis 2:18 )

The phrase “original solitude” is taken from the October 10, 1979 general audience of Pope John Paul II, in the series of lectures which became known as The Theology of the Body.  It describes the state of Adam (‘adam) prior to the creation of Eve – prior to the time he became a male human (‘ish) vis-a-vis her female (‘ishshah).  It also describes a primary human experience which the Biblical text helps to reveal.

The late Holy Father’s reading of Genesis is that it is theology, philosophy, poetry, psychology… as such, it is so much more than a story about this fellow Adam who wandered around naming animals and being lonely before God made him another human being in the form of a pretty girl.  Adam, standing as mysterious first representative of us all, is on a path to self discovery that is both beautiful and painful.  “Self-knowledge develops at the same rate as knowledge of the world, of all the visible creatures, of all the living beings to which man has given a name to affirm his own dissimilarity with regard to them.”  (10/10/79 audience)

His relationship to solitude is one we all go through.  It is the experience of discovery as you gaze out from within your own interiority and encounter the world in all its unity and diversity.  It is also the loneliness that comes from being in a crowd – in this case, gophers and elephants and salamanders – but not really feeling as though you belong.  It is the isolation that comes from calling out “Is anybody there???” and not hearing another human voice.  It is the stark holy ground where “created man finds himself before God as if in search of his own entity” (10/10/79 – italics mine).

Is it good for man - that is, an individual human being - to be alone?  Well, no.  But this is almost a moot point.  The beauty of Trinitarian theology is that there never was a time of ultimate loneliness, not even before Time, not even before Creation, because God Himself is Trinity-in-Unity.  And every man, when he stands alone, stands alone before God.  In the time between fallen Adam and Christ, in the time between every fallen ‘adam and the time he or she meets Christ, even in that excruciating separation, the Father stands watching and waiting (and not just that, either).  The only place of ultimate loneliness is Hell, and that is, by definition, horrifically, chosen.  This is what the pain of loneliness teaches us; that’s what it has taught me.  Loneliness is my greatest fear, and I can thank God for this, because it is at root the fear of Hell.

And so in some strange way, it is good for man to be alone … in ways, at times.  It can also be very bad to be alone, but I will save that till some future reflection on “original unity.”  Yet even those times when we find ourselves “too alone,” when we endure the solitude that saps or stabs us, have a mysterious grace.  My mother told me about a day when she was in South America and felt so far from home, so far from friends, that she felt utterly brutally alone.  She went into a church and fell on her knees before the only One who was there.  This is not a rosy soft consolation, but an encounter with the Crucified.  That’s what these seasons of isolation do to us.  We don’t stand before God.  We throw ourselves down before Him and clutch the foot of the Cross and meet the kind of love you can only meet when you are beaten and alone.

Original solitude is the space where we find God and find ourselves and find the world outside of us.  It speaks to that good solitude which some of us take to naturally; a healthy love of it is required for anyone to live a full life.  It also primes us for love, by giving birth to that longing.  I can’t help thinking of that Pascal quotation, which I pilfer here with a double-edged meaning:

“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

To be truly human, we must be able to sit in that room – we must have both the opportunity and the capacity.  We must experience original solitude, not merely as an event, but as part of our being.  At the same time, to be truly human, we cannot sit in a quiet room alone, not for good.  It kills us.  It is in our nature to be driven mad by solitary confinement, because we are made for communion.  And that is why original solitude – Adam’s, Everyman’s – is a preparation for love.

Genesis begins by weaving together love stories, including the first human romance.  I have my own imaginative rendering of this scene, casting it in the light of evolutionary biology, and I hope it does not prove heretical.  I put it forth as it stands in my imagination, speculative and vague, a sort of anthropological impressionist painting.  There is Adam, rather hairy and bent, surrounded by other apes of similar form, growing up looking.  Looking and looking at the world around him, all the animals and plants and fungi and rocks and clouds, and engaging in some sort of prefallen communion with God, a large part of which is exclaiming in grateful delight over everything which had never before been truly appreciated by a flesh-creature.  But with this growing knowledge is a growing unease.  He sees the animals, and he sees that in some fundamental way they are not like him.  They can’t know this way.  Oh, God, they’re not like You and I, they don’t understand.  I mean they can’t understand!  Adam looks into his mother’s eyes and thinks, She’s an animal, too.  She cares about him, deeply, but in an animal way only.  She has that strange dignity found in ape-mothers, but her eyes are opaque.  She looks back at her son but not into him; her eyes are not windows to a personal soul.  It’s the same for all his kin.  And this strikes Adam to the heart.  It’s not quite an ache – after all, they are themselves and that is not a bad thing – but it’s a longing for more.

And then there is Eve.  He sees her, after his mysterious sleep, and in her eyes at last he encounters that light of personhood he’s been dying for.  That is what first and ultimately captivates his heart.  Whatever his historical exclamation, its heartfelt meaning, which we receive rendered in English translation of an inspired poetic work, is

This at last is bone of my bones
     and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman (‘ishshah),
     because she was taken out of Man (‘ish).  (Gen 2:23)

Adam looks at her and finds he can look into her eyes … and she’s looking back!  It’s significant that he begins with the realization that he is no longer alone: My God, she’s like me, person-in-flesh.  He does not cry out, “Duuuuude, she’s got breasts!”  There must have been plenty of ape females about, but as much as he might feel a kind of affection for them, he could never mate with them because of the gross inequality – a chasm uncrossable – yuck!  Adam’s not just looking about for a female.  He does of course respond to the beauty of Eve’s form, but in perfect unity with her.  In JPII language, “the body expresses the person.”  This man ”leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife” (Gen 2:24) because she is another person… and female.  That is why the story seems to me to be so centered around eyes. 

Just as the “fundamental anthropological problem of solitude,” and the vision of humanity it reveals, has a kind of priority over the question of sexual difference (10/10/79), Adam’s moving love song starts with the common personhood they share, and only from there does it move to the realm of complementary-in-differences.  Both are part of the song.  It cannot be otherwise.  We are witnessing the birth of a natural reality, gestated in animal life, destined for sacrament.  The sexual difference here is beautiful, it is inexcisable and profoundly meaningful.  Yet there is a reality even more primary: these are two human beings who encounter one another and stand before God as persons.  And so as equals.  Just ask Thomas Aquinas.  The sacrament, and the love song, is at its heart the revelation of friendship.

There is nothing more precious than friendship, understood in its deepest sense as communion.  That is what original solitude in so many ways reveals.

Resolving 2009

New Year’s Resolution.

Is it about having resolve in the new year?  Is it about solving again those problems which return to plague us?  Is it the new degree of focus which crossing this threshold brings to us?

On that last note – but all of them really – I have gone to the telescope in the hopes of glimpsing shafts of light, but from the future instead of the past.  We can only ever meet them in the present, of course.  But as the present resolves more clearly, I can learn something about the dense darkness of the as-yet-unknown from the trajectory it commands from my life.  The gravity of the pull is real.  The time is coming for deeper thought, for thought to turn toward action, for reflection and integration to bear witness someway.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Make me a channel of Your peace, Your light.

Trinity-in-Unity, stand me secure, direct my lens for polishing, hold me up to the stars.

Tangents and Circles

Or “The Transcendental of Unity Strikes Again!”  A rough rendering of five minutes’ worth of biology lecture today:

“So you methylate genes that are going to be turned off.  You slap methyls on them.  Because remember, in a multicellular organism – like you – just about all of your cells have the same DNA.  Your nerve cells have genes for being ‘muscle-y’, and your muscle cells have genes for being ‘nerve-y’.  But somewhere in development, we have to turn them off.  Nerve cells have to express those for nerve cells and only for nerve cells genes, and they can’t express the for muscle cells only genes.  They can’t express all their DNA and still be nerve cells.  It’s like… Aristotle!  Potentiality and actuality.  Or something like that.  You have lots of potential to do all sorts of things, but if you want to ever be anything, you have to make choices, and you have to give up on doing other stuff.  It’s like your life.  (It’s like my life.)  It’s like…  It’s like that Richard Wilbur poem.  Hang on, let me find it online.  We’ll meet this again next semester when we talk about cotyledons.  I’m gonna read it to you.  Close your eyes.

Seed Leaves, by Richard Wilbur

Here something stubborn comes,
Dislodging the earth crumbs
And making crusty rubble.
It comes up bending double,
And looks like a green staple.
It could be seedling maple,
Or artichoke, or bean.
That remains to be seen.

Forced to make choice of ends,
The stalk in time unbends,
Shakes off the seed-case, heaves
Aloft, and spreads two leaves
Which still display no sure
And special signature.
Toothless and fat, they keep
The oval form of sleep.

This plant would like to grow
And yet be embryo;
Increase, and yet escape
The doom of taking shape;
Be vaguely vast, and climb
To the tip end of time
With all of space to fill,
Like boundless Igdrasil
That has the stars for fruit.

But something at the root
More urgent than that urge
Bids two true leaves emerge,
And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.

This is how life works!  Living things, your own life.  And your own biology, which is … your … life, in another way.  You have to have all your different kinds of cells doing their own jobs, what they’re made for, and they have to be changed - chemically, physically altered - to not be other things in order to be what they need to be for things to work.  It’s like those verses in Paul’s Epistles, shoot, I wish I knew it 
[1 Corinthians 12].  Where the foot’s like ‘I don’t want to be a foot, I want to be a hand,’ or whatever.  Everything has to unfold and be what it’s made to be and do what it’s made to do, and then it all comes together and it all… works.”

Natural Bridges

pie pellicane - a humble icon, every day and unselfconsciously enacting a poetic fancy born of yesterscience, an Adoro echoing through the vaults of Dante’s cosmos and our own

Sabbath Love Letter

 

My dear children,

“The Sabbath was made for man.”  You can feel this in the warmth of the sun radiant between the parting rainclouds, in its sparkles like daylight stars on wet leaves of green and gold and crimson, and on bare dark branches dripping in the breeze.  You hear it sung in the tentative twitterings of the birds in the stillness of the morning.  You can breathe it out of the depths of the love-gift in the heart of every flower, bold hues in delicate petals’ unfurling.  You breathe and feel it fill your heart, infuse your blood and soul.  You who are out jogging with your dogs in the peace of this Sunday morning, you can hear its harmony of splendid symphony and it draws you out into it.

What need for indoors on a morning like this, new as Eden?  What need for stricture, stand and sit, and songs spoilt by human disharmonies?  My children, it is a gift, this beauty of autumn which you feast on in blessed relief from the autumn in your own soul, sick and struggle-dying.  You drink the resonance of beauty, because it frees you, for a few moments at least, from the snakes that gnaw within you and in the hearts of all you dearly love, which writhe in the wider world around, in the brush as it is in the halls of highest human order.

This gift is promise of a gift far greater, and yet not other, but source and summit of all you cherish.  Come in, come to Me, through the aisles of the majestic and distasteful, through your own dark woods and trimmers and hell beasts and ice and the blazing fire which after the long haul would yet blind and maim and tear you apart – through all you hate and yet cling to.  I Am here, the Beauty beyond sounding depth, and all these lesser lovelies are drawing you to Me.  Come further up and further in, for this is your Sabbath.  Give heed to the desires of your heart and throw yourself down, on your knees, and let my flood pour over you.  I Am the Agony in the Garden, Whose world is My icon.  Come, let My bloody rain sear and wash you clean.