Panim 

A daystruck sea, 
curled lip and foam,
teeth born and bared 
to the watery haze 
of the afterlight.

The tide slurs its words
and sands grow cold
in the valley of so many footprints. 

Something feeds, 
dark,becoming, 
too far away 
to distinguish. 

We gather our own,
and in the back of our throats,
taste the bread gone stone
that will be one day soon
be used to keep down the dead.  

Through dregs of sky
where haze clots
to horizon, arm or eye
afloat upon lashed bulk
glints a mirror 
but we drop our gaze, enthralled 
by shadow's greatness 
stretching across the emptying shore.

Tomorrow, we will wake,
East in expectation.
What there will shine?

"Nothing remains in its proper place. Everything is somewhere else.” 

Last night I dreamed of Aliyah, my face set East toward Jerusalem. But Jerusalem had slipped the center, set adrift with a red string around her neck, a caesura like a changeling in Her place. Jephthah, the one who, by dream, is assigned to walk me in, comes to me in the borderlands. We speak of homeland, belonging and regret. I tell him of a hundred desertions. He shows me the empty sheath of the knife with which he cut his daughter’s hands to fulfill a vow to the Devil.

She is, he confesses, a promise born in the land over and over again. “Each time she comes,” he says, “there is a different Devil but the vow is the same.” Last week he was told she had been seen in Rafah.

No matter how long we walk, we never reach the gate. 

“There is no place for you here after all”, he explains. And no place for him elsewhere. He will rejoin his unit on their way to drink the Sea. He thanks me for listening. One of us promises the other to weep as he fires. 

I woke remembering a dusk earlier this season, just after the trees had begun to leaf. Watching the waters of the larger beaver pond to our east,  I heard a lone goose sing out, its plaint coming from a patch of woods off and away from the flock settling in among the rising lush. Benjamin1 spoke of type of word that was a Vestige of the beginning Word, more akin to Naming that meaning, that was carried like a divine signature on the form of the language itself, whoever was speaking–stork to stone. This is a secondary speech beneath what is being said that lifts the inexpressible muteness of that particular color of creation into the realm of the audible and resolves it in something akin to music. From this bird-cry came a blue-bit cut from a fugue of exile and husk, one note bowed out dark between the trees and,over the waters and shaking the air I breathed. I knew a six smart reasons to believe that the communique was written within me rather than her. They all sounded well fabricated but they all rang false. 

Tens of thousands of years before Chauvet, on a wall in Bhimbetka, someone upright and handed traveled in the wake of Ein Sof. Engravings were engraved. Left as a sign for whoever would find it, two words (if you will) are placed in relation. Cut into the rock face, in the morning of the human mind, a cistern-like depression and a rivulet of a line. The cupule and the meander.

It is said (Harrod 2007) that the cupule is the point of presence, where being meets the “jolt” of pain, where, in the dash of tool on rock, silence meets speech. 2It is the basin where we begin and where we return to. The meander, on the other hand, is the going-out-before-us or another-way-home. It is snake writhe, bird flight,the mutable undulating onward, ascending and descending yet incomplete. I wonder if I can be forgiven here a re-naming, something closer to the lexicon at hand. Rather than Meander and Cupule, I read them as the River and the Sea.

When you look at that River and that Sea cut into that stone wall in Madyah Pradesh, you notice that the living space between them is narrow. Here, they almost but don’t quite touch. The Holy Land is thin place, threshold rich, between the Sea that retains and the River which adds. The Holy Land is thin time.  Between body and bread, blood and wine, between Israel and Palestine, there is always two doorposts, dawn or dusk, where both I-am-not and I-am-not-not can be touched at once. Or to let the hunchback beneath the table speak, between the River and the Sea is where G-d is born into the animal-gone-man and dies with arms spread, the ancient of days and the ruined new a palm-opened  kingdom in our midst—taking-in, crossing-over—a few breaths long while Rome rights the hammer to drive the nail.  

I know I am bending wrist and rule here to reach something through the bars of context and strata. But the consistent and the cohered is too often the midwife to violence. I have seen enough posts these past months to know that as a world ends and its promises begin to default en masse, certain consistencies, though having long ago lost their ability to light a future, keep their utility to underwrite murder. Without you, Rafiqa, say that Jerusalem isn’t.

Poems are paradoxes. Paradoxical is the rhyme, that gathers sense and sense, sense and countersense: a chance meeting at a place in language-time nobody can foresee, it lets this word coincide with that other one — for how long? For a limited time: the poet, who wants to stay true to that principle of freedom that announces itself in the rhyme, now has to turn his back to the rhyme. Away from the border — or across it, off into the borderless! Paul Celan from the translations of Joris in Microliths.

In The Gesture of Sight, Renaud Ego suggests that the earliest human works of art came from an intense longing to see something, “a thing they could not settle for looking at because it was not visible, but within them”. This is an imaginal geography of the order of ambergris. Here all matter is potentially Company and time is kept by the olfactory passages, a calendar of presence, portent and trace.

Inside the Holy of Holies, they say, was the ark where, alongside the tablets of the Law brought down intact from above by Moses, were also the broken tablets of something that could have been but was reduced to dust by divergence and rage. Watching over these remnants in the sacred keep of these people, who (they say) refused all images of their G-d, were curved forms–winged and woman-ed–golden as any calf that preceded them. And in the cracks and crevasses round about this veiled center, dusts of other purged symbols and ashed trees accrued, the multitude of shibboleths incompatible with the sibilance of the sentries. When I face East, this is trace.

Someone, living near a large kibbutz in the area of Bethlehem, sent me a note detailing the struggle to modernize the architecture of the bomb sheIter. There were photos, mostly of various attempts to add armor to the air passages. In a world beset by murder in the name of home, breath must ask leave of concrete and steel to pass. It is part of the sacraments of safety, the order of necessity as opposed to that of relation. The bombshelter, alongside its sister –the rubble of the Other’s once-home now-grave–is the architectural endgame of any of the theologies of homeland that refuse the metabolic and cling to the individual and the collective. When I face East, this is presence.

And what of portent?  Sometimes you are born into a world’s end (Campagna/Hine) where what was once a future no longer carries.3 With psychopathy cheered as resistance and judgment given over to the trajectory of shrapnel the mind of the masses begin to dream of being both victim and executioner. Again, Rafiqa, say that Jerusalem isn’t.  

Brecht famously asked if in the dark time there will still be song. Etty Hillesum’s answer from the ruins, a postcard flung from the train on the way to Auschwitz, is unflinching. We left the camp singing. This music, fleshed out in her journal and letters over the months before gives a glimpse of this Siddur. She holds out an inversion of the hackneyed tale of footprints in the sand. In the dark times when the prints in the sand go from two walking side by side to One walking alone, this, according to the wisdom of this woman, is where She carried G-d. 

“New thoughts will have to radiate outward from the camps themselves, new insights, spreading lucidity, will have to cross the barbed wire enclosing us and join with the insights that people outside will have to earn just as bloodily, in circumstances that are slowly becoming almost as difficult. And perhaps, on the common basis of an honest search for some way to understand these dark events, wrecked lives may yet take a tentative step forward.”  Etty Hillesum 

When the blackflies aren’t on the wing I sit on some stones beneath an old snag and the edge of the beaver pond and wish over the well. Beavers. A keystone species they say. Meaning, I guess, that they are makers of worlds. Like the Lamed Vav who uphold each sky in its turn,they are masters of right relation. And just so, this year both to the North and to the West they have set to work. Close to our house a small vernal pool has been deepened and enriched by their midrash. They have re-membered a world. The wet song of it, amphibian and other, presses into our dreams, so loud the gathering, so enthralling the trill. And a bit of a walk through the woods, to the other corner of the land and a much larger dam has been started in the low point where two streams meet. We watch, stick by stick, as the mutable weir-ing lifts the level of water and life slowly enough to allow the many to weave in to the making. We think of our own concretization of flow unto power. And loneliness.  I see that there are dams and there are dams, and the distance between the drowning of multiplicity on one hand and the anabranching fecundity on the other is the distance between a sun-bleached silencing and starlight’s unregimented eddying toward music. Beavers  work mostly from dusk til dawn. The night is coming when no man can work. The tail-slap of an answer: Behold, I am no man.

Lately I have been listening to John Vervaeke and his mob speak about a new Philosophical Silk Road. I like Vervaeke. He has a keen mind but better still a beautiful heart he wears when close to his skin. I also like the idea of this open way East. I once wrote out that post-apocalyptic places must be re-storied unsainted and unkinged, that everything that once was would have to pass through that Shakespearean sea-change that Hannah Arendt drew from in her speech on Humanity in Dark Times. The pearls we dive for, what once were our fathers’ eyes, will not be brought up by priests or warriors but by scavengers.

Silk is made by the keeping of silkworms and feeding them on mulberry leaves. The worms make their cocoons, each out of a single thread. To keep that thread intact, to unwind the place of metamorphosis and make fabric, the worms are killed before they come to wings. Scavengers, I suspect, tend to come through a world that leaves them with an understanding of the ecology of such exchanges. This understanding, born in the body, allows them to treasure scraps of the silk already made even as they utter oaths to other ways of being clothed. Any philosophical or theological way makings need prescribers of such oaths to avoid the murder that ideological tradeways often facilitate. Just ask Heidegger. Silkroads, like all biomes, need scavengers.

Someone must re-member the moths.

Anson Rabinbach once said of the Jewish wellsprings beneath Benjamin’s thought that though such a lens the world is “dispersed in fragments, and in these fragments, the fragments of the world that God has now turned his back on, reside certain presences, which attest to the former existence of their divine character. You cannot actively go about to discover these divine presences, but they can be revealed.”4 My people do not soar through life. If souls were wheels, ours would be the kind missing spokes. The shawl around us is tattered and threadbare in the dear places. Ours is a nightbloom beauty.  This talk of ruin, the bird cry at every dusk, is less a theory for us than a sense that the biome might be caught in the gravitational fields of our own minor histories. That whatever is in us is also now loose out there, and we are not totally free of responsibility. Like Anson said, we aren’t discoverers of divine presence, we are revealers.

I imagine my people will be the ones with blankets spread on the Silk Roadside where those more inclined to system and rigour move past. The stars of that spread will indeed be fragments, dregs of spark and chattered illuminations panned out from the sluice. Things heard with ears pressed to other-than-human tracks. Hillesum observed in her journal that “like circumstances do not yet produce like people.” Through this diversity of form—be it syntax, bauplan or siddur—midrash musters to the imaginal a handful of new names to people every niche engendered in the shatter.  This tilt toward innovation—natality—is the balm we are given after Eden. It is the threshold from which everything that upholds the world proceeds: pigment, antler, neologism. It is the meristem of the Lamed Vav.

Deluded maybe, I want to imagine the Just (human and other) upon this worm-bought moth-bare Road through Ruin playing catch, without sums or scoreboard, infinite sacred game as a sign to any and all of worlds not yet imagined (Machado de Oliveira). At world’s end maybe making good ruins (Hine) means cobbling together a We in the twilight that might pass together, relatively intact, into that not yet imagined and maybe even come to some prayer speakable in unison. I understand the skepticism. Again, vessels shatter. The sparks that we are and the sparks that sustain us tend toward flotsam more so than roads home. But on the other hand like the seals whispered into the black by our Mother, we are born (even those weakened by privilege) with a portion of subcutaneous buoyancy and a will toward holding our breath beneath the ice and between the air holes. At world’s end, we swim.

WIth a changing key 
You unlock the house where
the snow of what’s silenced drifts. 
Bound by the blood that swells in 
your eye or mouth or ear,
so your key changes.

Changing your key changes the word
that may drift with the flakes. 
Bound by the wind that refuses you,
balled around your word is the snow.

Paul Celan trans. by John Felstiner

Martin Shaw tells a Peregrini story of such key change.5 A holy wanderer carries the body of the Yeshua through the world. One day upon the path, he is surrounded by a swarm of bees. Enthralled by their presence, lost in the murmur and the symphony of this hive on wing,  the Peregrini is covered over in wonder. When he comes to, the body of the Lord is gone. He has lost both the G-d and the humanity he was carrying. He wanders from there in grief and a dimness of mind for many months, the world gone grey. One night, after a long season of mourning, an angel approaches and tells him that the body of the Christ is now safe and has been safe in the care and keep of the bees, that he should cease his mourning and celebrate this shift, this exchange of custody. From that day, the story suggests, faithfulness is not a clutching close but moving out to seek Yeshua, beyond the camp (again and again) if you will, among Kreatur. 

“In particular, the dancing bee relies in complex and poorly understood ways upon dead reckoning and past exposure to landmarks.”

I have always mistrusted any script that one would be ashamed to speak aloud at Treblinka or Pine Ridge.  These days, when I whisper Yerushalayim I remember how the sibilance at the center of that sound takes form in Gaza. It is a litmus test of sorts to hear the coordinates of your holy city read aloud to those in the shadow of its walls. Especially those who have their own syllables for the place. This must be true of any theodicy or tradition we would revive mouth to mouth. The exchange of breath can go either way. We can bring life or we can inhale death. This is part of what it means that after all that has happened, we must walk upon our heads, heaven an abyss at our feet and the earth and all that abides there now as our sky. Moriarty speaks of the right-setting way of being in “religious collision with our Holy books. A reckoning with the dead is how such a symphony of wreckage and sacred might be conducted.

One night I was washing in the yard,
above me a sky of jostling stars –
like salt on an axe, each beam –
the barrel near-frozen to the brim.

The gates were shut and locked;
believe me, the earth is strict.
You won’t find a principle cleaner
than the truth there is in fresh linen.

A star dissolves like salt in the barrel.
The ice-cold water blackens.
A cleaner death, saltier troubles,
and the earth is more truthful and terrible.

Osip Mandelstam

In the gulag the most powerful prisoners were the non-political, the criminal gangs feared even by the guards. A physicist who survived the gulag and returned home carried with him  a memory of a poetry reading in the loft of the barracks of one of these gangs. In his recollection the poet sat before a candle lit upon a barrel top. He is fed for his word with the rare currencies of white bread and food from a tin. The witness, who is named in the account only as L. recognizes the poetry and with it the grey-stubble of the man speaking. It was Mandelstam and this is the last trustworthy account of him alive. He is wearing a yellow leather coat and the leader of the gang who has organized the reading bears the surname Arkangel. In dark times, at the Epimethean turn, the ark of  G-d will wear such a coat and poetics that dissolve stars will be loosed in heaven as they are on earth. Unexpected angels will mark the spot and  the table (round and made of staves shaped to hold spirits by coopers-now-dead) will be set by a faculty of taste that has regained its keenness in limit. This kind only comes out by siddur and fasting.

Such arks: these barrels, these mikvahs of dissolved stars. Such angels: the earth truthful and terrible. And a table for those who would wash a world to gather round, these are the landmarks, danced in the blue after sunset, a mosaic by multiplicity mapping us a home.

I wish this place of writing here, with all you washers briefly come around, might for the foreseeable future be a spread of fragments unto Siddur, a poetics dreaming toward some gatherable We at world’s end hanging on the Word of a Bogdown Messiah given over, in the Night coming on, to the Bees, to tailslap and antler. To the Just.

 With that I can hear Auden, smirk aloud over the body of Yeats. Poetry can make nothing happen. Pyrrha, daughter of Epimetheus and counterword to the Promethean line, stands on the other side of the deluge and laughs back. “The wish to make things happen. I see you there, Uncle. We both know fire but for me it is no thing with which to forge an iron world but rather a warmth called as witness as bits salvaged from the wreck are passed between stranger-friends against the cold.

Leave a comment

Share

Thanks for hanging in with me while I was working some stuff out in the quiet. The next weeks will be more short form stuff, fragments in fact, pretending toward maybe not Siddur but its anteroom. This writing remains free to all. Maybe share it if you would.

5

The House of Beasts & Vines

Sunday Stories: The Horned Women

Welcome friends. It’s been restorative to begin to get to know some of you. Sunday Stories is something I’m dreaming up for the weeks between essays. It could be an old fairy story, comments on books, initiation, wilderness poetics, a deepening into a Christian mythology that we have almost forgotten. The last is an enormous and exhilarating body of work I’m starting on. When you go out into the forest, sometimes the mandate you receive is the last thing you expect…

Listen now

3 years ago · 123 likes · 46 comments · Martin Shaw