The Qualia of Grief

Emotions, like any category of perception, are not unitary things. Let’s hold up grief. We use the word “grief” to describe a state that has a range of causes and functions. Discombobulated tears might accompany the death of a loved one, or appear for a parent during a child’s wedding. They might occur when one is alone, or they might occur only when surrounded by others. And a psychologist would use these differences to suss out the causes and functions of grief. Is it a behavior that strengthens social relationships? Does it prune painful memories via an associative process? Is it a by-product of a homeostatic process? Does it follow a regular time course. Does it follow culturally bound display rules?

This is the science of grief where there is no single “grief” in the same way that vision does not exist to perceive a single object. There are depths, shapes and colors — all actively working away within the nest of vision. So it is with emotions. They are collectives, not singular things, to which the buzzing of science (itself a collective) applies iteself, bending the universe towards a place of prediction and control. The logical. The rational. The process-oriented.

But is that all there is? Does that miss anything of value?

There is a reason why the logical, rational, and process-oriented approach of science feels so alien in relation to our emotions. To feel is to live, after all. “Are you a robot or a human being?” Emotions are just processes. Emotions are just functional states. True. …And? Isn’t there more to be said? Are they not also something felt? Don’t they possess a qualia? They are how we know we breathe, these feelings. They are how we know we are awake, are headed towards purpose. So, what would death be, but an absenting of all feeling?

Again, let’s hold up grief, because if anything stands in opposition to the void, it is grief — that assertion of the unique living moment, or friend, or future, or loved one, or self, in the face of loss. It is the bulwark against the contaminating encroachment of dissipation and mere time. There is a reason why it shares so many qualities with disgust, another emotion centered on the purging of poisons. Grief purges, but within a different digestive realm, the realm of the historically accumulated, subjective self, the subjective identity layered as an associative thicket.

With that in mind, I’m going to take a slightly different approach with this post. To try and consider grief on its own terms. Not pinned down in a scrapbook. Not to make a point, or rather yes, to make a point, but in the same way that the emotions that reside within us make their points: indirectly, lyrically, and laid out like the tesserae of a mosaic. It is ironic that I am going to use words to do this, because the language of emotions is not that of words. There is a reason why emotions and music reside conceptually together rather than emotions and language. But we use the tools we have.

***

So, what does grief tell us — that feeling of convulsions and dry heaves when the world sleeps, and a voice (your voice) blurts out, “No! No, no, no, no, no, …” It is as if identity itself were a corporal force intent on the impossible — an expulsion of absence. The self again and again convulsed and emptied. Emptied yet again. Gasps and then being crumpled into a respite, only to be convulsed and drawn fetally to the floor once more. It is a feeling more complete than any after-party black out. Except here it isn’t a stomach’s attempt to empty out poison, but the body coming to the rescue of mind — it’s the body’s hand reaching into the mind’s darkness to pull out that which is missing. Grabbing and clenching it scrapes away for a thing that can’t be found, shuddering as the breaches appear again, and again.

When I was younger I thought that there was only one way to turn grief into meaning — that grief had but one act. The solution was to cordon it off from language and lock it down. To express trauma was to belittle it. To express grief would be to dissect “it” (that necessary “it”) from the body, and wound’t this just compound loss with but another loss? Unspoken, at the very least, the necessary presence could remain, in the same way that the ink of an etching carries in it the impression of the now-absent wood. It is the room left unchanged when the children go off to college. It is Iago at the end of Othello declaring that from this point forward he will say nothing. A defiant flag planted as an ode to darkness — that shadowed landscape in which motivations and their contingent wreckage have no comprehension or sense within the breath of living. The burned images left behind after the bombs took away the living. There is that. At least there is that. A preserved totem pointing to an empty chair. To speak would be to share, and to share would be to re-experience loss by handing it over to others who can only nod, and mm-hmm, and then eerily go about their own busy lives. As eerily as robots. Here, at least, kept within the shadows they remain, ever pointing to that which was lost.

Within that refusal there is a type of purity, or a solitary imprint of purity crystalized against the tides of convenience. That is is the purpose of each convulsion. The loss will stay within, and to carry those remains, space must be made. All must be jettisoned, hollowed, and extracted. To do otherwise is to lose even more, and to lose is to no longer be. Holding on to the emptied space within is existential. As the mind laments, the body comes to the fore.

“Breathe taking.” We use the phrase to describe an encounter with that which defies language — those bones thrown out as augury when the stars and darkness impose their weight. Maybe it is the way her form once weighted itself next to you. Maybe it was the bump of shoulders on a walk in the woods. Maybe it was the furniture to be assembled and placed within the living room of a future. Maybe it was a voice — that voice — her voice — doing a silly sing-song over the telephone. “Breath taking.”

Maybe this why you gasp and shudder. A body plunging into the dark water where all else is silenced in the long sub-surface swim. The body holds its breath in the only pontomine of living that remains. At least it is something. Words? They are not breath taking. The are breath giving. A camera set back in motion. The house sold to a new family. The furniture replaced. Bulldozers brought in to build a subdivision where the orchard once spread. The large trucks arriving to cart off the detritus to time’s indiscriminate heap.

Words? They are slippery, changeable things. Breath held? This is grief’s first act. Give me silence of such weight that the record skips and the earth ceases its turning. Time grinds to a halt to a point where loss can have no meaning. The images remain. The voices remain. They will remain.

***

When I was in my 20’s the book The English Patient made an impression on me. The title character was burnt beyond recognition – his only identity held within the echoes of Herodotus’ Histories. Its pages interleaved by his own clipped and glued additions and added observations. In the book, his is the negated vortex — an intensity existing solely within its essential absence.

Give me a map and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall. Always the desert was among us. But… our room never appears in the detailed reports which chartered every knoll and every incident of history. (p. 145)

The English Patient is a “breath taking” book. That is its gravitational center – the collapsed weight of a grief so total that nothing now remains but the husk of this patient now restricted and compartmentalized to a hospital bed while the battle lines of WW 2 pass forward and into the distance. Detritus, that is the English Patient. A book centered on the unpacking of a loss — which is grief — but it is also a book of the singular individual still there, alive in a hospital bed — a tangle of words that leave behind the dewed webs of morning and no spider found. Because grief is not for the generic, but the particular. And how can we account for the particular but through words?

You used to be like those artists who painted only at night, a single light on in their street. Like the worm-pickers with their old coffee cans strapped to their ankles and the helmet of light shooting down into the grass (English Patient, p. 55).

Yes, it is a dilemma. There is indeed a noble purity in grief’s first act. There is a beautiful rebellion. A refusal to give in to the “decay” and the loss of the valued particular — that single entity made possible by her, by him, by this. There is a courageous refusal in grief to bend to the universe’s authority by letting go of the now-gone. Grief is Hamlet’s declaration that he will hold on to that which is more than, purer than, and more essential than the “windy suspiration of forced breath.”

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly. these indeed seem. …But I have that which passes show. (Act 1, Scene 2)

To hold on to that purity, Hamlet will famously refuse to act. And that is the endpoint of grief’s first act.

***

Here is “Hamlet” contacting the real estate agent weeks after being told that the woman he had built his life around needed another man. She wants Hamlet, she tells him, but needs to do this for herself. So, why then is he visiting the real estate agent? What delusion is he holding on to?

Here is “Hamlet” making a picnic – crackers, cheeses, frois gras, and cold drinks to take on a hike that is the agreed upon first-time-in-a-month. They have been practicing distance and limiting calls — being friends. So why the picnic? Because the next day is the Qixi Festival. He won’t say that he knows, and in their chatting… their perfectly friendly chatting, it is never mentioned, neither by him, nor by her. He doesn’t want to ask if she knows. He doesn’t want to hear that she might not.

Here is “Hamlet” purchasing two tickets to see a show in a month. He is alone at home now, and she lets him know that she is seeing another. She tells him that she’s sorry. Again, and again she uses that word. And he does hear it, and he does understand. She means what she says. There is no malice. But it is a form of grief that makes him buy those two tickets — the phantom limb still felt when the eyes alight on absence. Except, how can it still be grief when grief was once his act of defiance — the dark grip tightened against dissolution?

Now it begins to sink in to poor “Hamlet” that his acts of defiance are less an assertion, and more a dissipation. The held-on-absence now eating at the holder. A Polaroid slowly bleaching itself back into a void. His acts have now become an emptying of self, not a protection of the other’s purity.

“Wasn’t grief’s gold,” he asks no one, “to hold on defiantly to the unique against contingency’s encroachment? Wasn’t it that heroic insistence that denoted me truly?”

Yes.

A simple whisper now, grief.

Yes.

But that was only the beginning, dear Hamlet.

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile
and in this harsh world draw thy
breath in pain to tell my story. (Act 5, Scene 2)

Here we see “breath taking” giving way to “breath giving.” The importation from grief (Hamlet) to speak. The graved object granted a new living. Awkwardly at first. Breath held for so long must begin with gasps — the faces of the audience perplexed. But the attempt must be made or else that which has been lost, will only sink with the swimmer.

Read him slowly dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did… Think about tithe speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old paragraph its is otherwise (English Patient, p 94).

Yes.

In the suspirations of weeping one will find grief’s second act. The curtain slowly rising to reveal the actor returning to account. A calling of the nightingale against the eternal slumber.

***

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time from outside the window, far below the cricket players set up their pitch. And the commuter train rattled out its clockwork. She was this. To him she was this; as well as birds in the wood and water that spilled over moss-covered rocks next to a hiked path. She was the dusk view from the fire tower and the scramble back to a car as darkness settled. She was breath taking and breath giving. Words. And words, and words, and words passed back and forth between them, sitting on the carpeted floor with a spread of dishes, and faces inches away, and in the passenger seat of a road trip, and disembodied while carried over the Pacific ocean, bouncing between satellites.

Once a blizzard thickened over the highway, and they slowly retreated their increasingly helpless car to a small parking lot. And there they sat. A thickening of specked white on the windshield and windows. The flashing light of bulldozers clearing the lots of the nearby stores. Until they decided to risk it, together, white knuckled and attuned to every slip, every utterance, every turn and dip. From her phone she declared, “We just need to make it another mile, and then it should clear.” And later, hours later, while walking the bricks of a city street, they would feel connected and impressed by what they had come through together.

So it was. It was always a hunt with these two. Returning to a neighborhood to look for the black cat with white paint it its fur. Entering a phone booth in search of the secret entrance of a speakeasy. Once the correct number was dialed, a back door opened to reveal bookcases stacked high up to a ceiling, cushioned chairs, and candles. And there were ciphers and scavenger hunts that began with Tarot cards and ended with a gifted pair of socks hidden in a lab’s operant chamber. And maybe that, indeed, is a story worth telling. A ridiculous, wonderful story.

For, once upon a time…

It was her birthday, and they traveled into the nearby city. She wore a new dress that sparkled and he wore a tie. And through a window, the stacked lights of the buildings stood like trees. And later in the nighttime they hurried across the city to catch the last train, running through throngs in the station, holding hands and laughing. And when the train’s doors closed, and seated, they weighted against one another as the compartment rocked and clacked the two of them, and, the other tired revelers, who when the station arrived, dispersed themselves breathless and breath-filled into a summer evening.

An Easter Mosaic

Ringing the bells in Prague after 9/11. I grabbed the photo in 2001, and I am not sure of the source.

I’ll get back to the psychology of “feelings” soon. In the meantime, here is an Easter interlude.

When the Trade Center Towers came down in 2001, I was living in Konstanz, Germany. I was up at the lab at Uni Konstanz. A sunny afternoon, and I was checking the New York Times site like I did most afternoons. There it was: a breaking story of a plane that had accidentally collided with one of the towers. I remember it as just a headline, but after a refresh there was a photo with a hole and smoke. Then the site slowed to a crawl, and apprehension set in, followed by the reveal of a photo showing that the second tower had been hit. That’s when I left the lab and rode my bike back home to be with my then wife and my daughters. There we huddled to watch the news on the television. The images of falling bodies. The gaping holes vomiting smoke. Another sudden jet crashing into the Pentagon in D.C., a scramble of reports about additional attacks, additional planes, firefighters rushing up stairwells, and the scrambling of military jets. And then, one after another, the two towers fell.

As much as I remember the vulnerability, shock, and fear for my young daughters, what I also remember is the immediate solidarity in the days that followed of ordinary strangers. German colleagues and students who checked in on me and my family. The city-wide moment of silence. The flowers left at embassies. The candle-light vigils. The tolling of bells.

Munich, Germany after 9/11 2001. Also an unknown source.

Over the years, Easter for me has come to signify an acknowledgment of sacrifice in the service of healing and renewal. It’s the doctors, nurses and healthcare workers who have thrown themselves into the breach of the COVID-19 pandemic. The parents and grandparents who cared for us when we were children, washing our clothes, wiping our noses, and massaging tightened calves in the middle of the night. Friends who have helped in moves. The ordinary workers in Konstanz, Germany who took a moment to stand quietly at noon in solidarity with those hurt and killed an ocean away in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Easter celebrates these behaviors: small, often betrayed, but load bearing. This after all was the soil of Christ’s ministry: the peacemakers, the persecuted outcasts, the mourners, the ordinary. And the lesson of Easter is that despite the mocking humiliations of the powerful — the taunts of “Freedom Fries” and “Old Europe” or the resistance to covering the medical bills of first responders — despite these attempts to silence and punish and deaden, the spring soil will continue to answer the sun’s call.

This particular poem I wrote as a sort of Easter mosaic, and it is dedicated to a couple, Juan and Ute Delius, who showed my family tremendous kindness when we lived in Germany.

Lazarus

(For Juan and Ute)

Draw thread through skin

numb & engraved in winter.

The grief-sung vertebrae

of wind chimes at night,

the ululations of church bells

over field and orchard — once

pear, plum, wheat and apple.

Come, then, senescence and hum your metal.

That sing-song gestern caught gaunt and callow

like moths circling the harbinger of heaven,

like constellations sirened numbly forward —

a music of nets in which the dolphins thrash

when the lines are drawn in, anchored, and pulled tight.

This heft of enwrapped waters,

draw upon convenient draw,

caught trumpet of consciousness

liquored like a dog at its wounds

or the way the white wake

of a plane, far above,

silently streams, spreads and splays.

A depth that contains the scattered flurry of vision,

arranged like pastels haphazard in the box.

The cargo of a former life carried elsewhere,

memories resting like water in the pitted roads

where birth gives way to the night-time swarms,

the jazz of corruption begat from reflected heaven’s breeding.

Each moment tapped,

pregnant and fitted,

as if laying stone

to make a road.

So many eyes staring

like a peacock’s bloom,

an exchange of wild flowers for a

a sunset spread red as wine

Produce in the church square

Potatoes Carrots and Apples

Kilo weights, raw and cold

Flesh from the butcher

sliced and jointed, jointed and drawn.

Too sweet for some,

Like a custard’s breath –

hard in learning,

awkward in fact.

Unbecoming’s active pursuit

like a pole to the shadow cast —

an anchored still to the sun’s pass,

that cloth that wipes over and over.

Over the ever-opportune weeds that burst,

yes, burst forth into their calling –

a pack of girls keen to see

upon whom the glance will fall.

Yes, with bracken

grows nettle. Wrappers

and peels. The plastic cups.

Gravy, puddings, ketchup.

Cars and trucks,

and cars and trucks,

and trucks and trucks.

24 7, death she moans this rush,

planted heavily and sucking breath,

while the three ladies, their buttocks sway

the gospel of fate, a necessity bellowed out,

rough ropes in hand, with each pull and release –

thus, they frog-grunt their imprints of industry.

Tongue-tasted,

coins swallowed

and the candle lit.

Night ember, social safe

and tucked in bed.

Now cargoed purpose sleeps,

The tethered morning chorus

guarded and groomed, mulched and clipped.

String of fate and string of rescue, spooled

and strung to where the delivery trucks come,

to where the workers call at the dock —

those many voices of dying, calling and calling

in their approach to the maze’s bloated point.

This, night’s new year.

A cast of sparks —

And then, percussive born.

And the bells beat.

And the bells beat

more flares of midnight

crackling out light

Roosted buildings, cobbled street.

Hollowed. Inverted.

Explosive moments.

Distant reports

For a city that wrestles drunkenly forth

in answer to the fireworks from across the water.

Red among yellow.

Red among green.

Sailboats laid upon the lake

hot air balloons above

the distant mountains

roaring fire and straining at ascent.

How loss becomes heartbeat

swaddled in such feminine hands.

How familiar dawn, stray thread comes

with the strangled raucous of crows,

hop-hopping, and lifted up

into the trees that buckle the graveyard’s fence.

Your eyes have been pocketed across an ocean of desire

bilk and seepage with the risen. Again, Lazarus, rise.

Rise frogs of spring.

Each season a thought —

patterned Nature’s pull.

Rise gravestones. Rise stars.

Constellations of dirt,

mausoleums of heaven,

risen ferment and fallen flame.

Rise the ants to work their mounds.

Rise the teller to auger her grounds.

Rise the children on their ways to school,

Lent back and hand-less, coasting bikes

before the rain that will spackle the lake.

Shutters shut. Eyes open. Rise Lazarus. Rise.

My daughter, Delphi, chasing a soap bubble when she was little.

A Declaration of Hope

A post in honor of the Christmas season. If all goes to plan, I’ll have more to say in the coming year about “declarations.” I encourage any readers to come up with their own. Principles to reflect upon and hold up as a compass or perhaps a challenge. Hope can be a habit, an emotion, a value, or even a perception. In other words — a belief. Too often, perhaps, it borders on fatalism. The hope of my own believing is more active and defiant than that. What’s more punk than hope? Not much.

Habits learned in darkness

Took this photo at Beacon Dia. For the life of me, I can’t recall the artist (and the Dia website isn’t any help). Isn’t it amazing how the spray of white paint on black is all you need to see curves and shape?

The problem with being –“etre” — is that you are lots of things you don’t want to “etre.” Passive, often afraid, insecure, a little bit lazy, and more than a little bit angry. Avoiding. That’s what you are doing. Like a beach that fools itself into thinking it is building something by letting the tide repeatedly wash over it. You can point to many instances in your life when you ran away from what was possible or watched yourself inhibit what was possible. Maybe you were waiting for salvation and simultaneously hoping it would go away: hoping for a message, a sign, that would clarify, absolve and unify your life, thinking, “I can’t do anything now, but I will be able to accomplish something grand as soon as it comes,” that thing which is an answer.

While you wait for it to come, you stay in the dark. But you’ve been in the dark so long, waiting, that your eyes have had time to adjust and you realize that it is possible, in fact, to see in the dark: the darkness is not as absolute and unqualified as you thought at first. At that point, you say, “This isn’t so bad, I can see my way through this cave while waiting for the light,” the answer, which may or may not be at the entrance/exit. But how much do you have to believe in the light to keep waiting for it when you can see well enough to survive where you are?

And what is the dark, anyway? It’s all of your habits and fears and weaknesses: I just wasn’t meant tos; faith predicated upon things not working out; wishing for external, effortless, even inherited legitimacy — all the while knowing deep down that true paths to self-value aren’t simply given.

Living in the dark one can’t avoid fantasies of escape. They spring up like dreams, both beautiful and nightmarish. Thoughts about suicide… coming in waves, but never do you think in terms of what might be missed (after all, why would you miss the dark?), more along the lines of release, a way out, a well-reasoned evasion strategy. And then there are addictions: Hoping that another person can lead you to the light, or show you the escape hatch, or become the escape hatch. Writing words and words in order to avoid, taking walks in order to escape, chalking up “accomplishments” all in an effort to crow-bar yourself away from the reality of darkness. Addictions that are seductive and frantic and desperate and “passionate:” despair instead of sadness, enduring suffering instead of acting bravely, collapsing inward instead being resolute. Like buying a cup of coffee from the departmental coffee machine and drinking it on the way to class instead of taking the time to acquire good beans, make an espresso and pour warmed milk into it.

The worst part about the cave is sensing the light, but not feeling capable of moving towards it. Maybe sometimes you even feel you’re on the verge of making a change (or at least that’s the story) and then something happens to show you how, frankly, impossible change is for you. And maybe you wonder, “Who am I kidding by doing the math — counting years, reworking the budget, making the checklists? This is it, man. This is who I am. If I haven’t done it by now, what are the chances?” It’s like that horrible feeling of the clock ticking down and ticking down while you remain in a situation that is being dictated by someone else. Or maybe you can’t even sense the light, but you can remember it. You know it existed once. Is the darkness payment for once being in the light? You say, “Everything has a price: the going price of beauty is health; satisfaction costs exactly one life.”

So maybe this explains why you can’t quite believe in the light. Could it be that waiting for all these years, desiring an “ultimate answer,” is really just a trick to convince yourself to stay put, to maintain the life of darkness and shadows in which fantasy can still be believed in and regret over past decisions can sap all available energy?

The revelations of vision

Maybe the cave would be enough. Maybe fantasy and endurance and the fetal position would suffice if the cave were only darkness; if reality were only, purely darkness; if you could convince yourself that the memories of light were not real, or even if they were real once, the light is gone now, irretrievable. Time to grow up and be responsible. But like an itch, there is a pinprick of light: turn away, or cover your eyes, it remains, interrupting sleep, ending fantasies, requiring active avoidance. The light refutes — no, actively changes — the darkness. Fantasy becomes cheap, and there, way off in the distance, there is the possibility of something different. The light is true, and it is demanding, so much so that you sometimes think you can’t take it anymore, that you want an easier and more convenient life. But at the same time there is a part of you that is excited because the light is there, and it is beautiful and it lets you, finally, see.

Vision brings with it the possibility that you can act and you can move — reach instead of hope for the lucky stumble. You see that, indeed, goals are external things not achieved by the internal states of dreams and fantasy. It’s like realizing after many years of college that the key is just to go to class, or realizing that the goal in a race is actually to cross the finish line as fast as possible. Simple realizations. Maybe obvious to some. And no doubt you’ll use these thoughts about how easy it is for others to stay in the dark. But the “damage” has been done. You can’t help but become suspicious of your sealed fate because now you can see that light is found and achieved and lost. That you’ve had to work to not notice the light, just as you have to work to see it. You know now that strength is more than passive endurance. What used to be hoarding “Good Things” to make the dark more bearable becomes a commitment to try to act in accord with that which is good. The light, you see, changes not only the external world, but the internal one, as well.

Of course, this is no Hollywood movie. All those habits, acquired over years, do not just fall away. And you are bound still to stumble — you are still in the dark, after all. Nonetheless, this first choice — to get up, to stand, to move forward — now that is a leap and it does terrify. “You’re in danger, you’re exposed, you’re weak!” is the voice of your mind. All you can answer is, “I trust the reality of the light.” And you realize that the light has engendered your body. You see now that you really are a woman; you see now that you are a man, not just in fantasy, but in fact. And in a way, all of this new information requires a new kind of acceptance, a different kind of passivity. You know by now that passivity is dangerous, that it is something you need to fight against so that it doesn’t take over, but this new passivity is wonderful because it’s only possible with trust. As a heart is the body of a soul, and around a heart beats a physical life, you begin to see that it is possible to be reformed from the inside out.

Right now your only goal is to move toward greater illumination. So, you set up schedules and come up with rules: Set money aside. Avoid dissipation of purpose whether that purpose involves exercising, staying in touch with friends, listening to music. Value the finish more than the initiation. Get through the drudge. Strength — that is what you want, and need, because the cavern still surrounds you, even as you walk. You know that to reach the entrance of the cave, you have to be resourceful. You can’t be wasteful. And this in itself is a new sensation. It is something to be grateful for. And only in this way is living in the dark neither bleak or doomed because it makes you attentive and sensitive to the light. For the first time you see the surrounding rock of the cavern for what it is so that when you do stumble you understand that good and bad things happen, but they really are independent — that living is experiencing/feeling both the good and bad things fully. This is also why it doesn’t make sense to go looking for signs. Being open to their possibility, though, is a different thing. Signs are not destiny or judgment or the word of God. They are more about the meaning that goes along with action or potential action, and that meaning can be accepted or rejected.

At first, the walking is difficult. How many years were you fetally curled? You don’t know. Yes, walking is difficult and you are not even sure if you remember how to do it: you try out anger, telling the world, “Fuck you, I’m doing exactly what I want, when I want it.” Or maybe instead you think in terms of sacrifice — that you will make your life a bit harder than it has to be and that will make you virtuous, where virtue means bringing yourself into the light. But then you see these mental tricks for what they are. It’s not about selfishness or sacrifice: it’s about feeling like you are enough so that you don’t have to mediate between yourself and how you act in the world. There’s no need to self-censor or to put up guards to protect yourself. It’s about chipping away at the middle conscientiously, in mind and in practice, all along, experiencing life healthy enough, safe enough, confident enough, trusting enough — so that living becomes automatic. It is like traveling alone in another country. Or going out with a friend, drinking just a little too much beer and talking about philosophical things. It is swimming in the lake in the summer, hiking in the mountains and skiing in the winter. Appreciating the food, and the way it is eaten, prepared and sold. You see that it is possible for your life in the light to be miraculously easy…easy not because the demands are easy, but because those demands are seen to be so clearly right in spite of their costs.

Then a strange thing happens. You have been moving toward the light, scrabbling over rocks, taking detours, all under the impression that to do so was a leap of faith. And it was. Like driving a car and focusing down the road versus looking at each painted line. The light is the answer. It is a demanding and overflowing thing that you want to experience as clearly and as often as possible. But now that you are moving, you realize that to move is no longer a leap, but a choice of one existence over another. And the choice is not between good and evil, between right and wrong; it’s not that simple: it’s more like choosing right over less right. Only in the light can you see the finer distinctions between things: justice is more right than beauty, the life of earth and of land is more right than the life of commerce, a community centered on healing is more important than one centered on consumption. You choose justice over beauty at every turn and earth over commerce in every act of living. And even though the choices are right, they don’t eliminate fear or pain. There is no way to get around the pain of any choice — either guilt and terror or sacrifice and terror and defeat and bitterness. But you trust your choice, just as you trust the light.

At the entrance: the life of sunlight

So, on you go. The light brightening more and more of the rock around you, revealing more and more of what a cavern is when shadows are pulled back. And maybe your steps begin to falter. Yes, you’ve become accustomed to light, but what is actually outside the cavern? What are you really moving towards? Might it not be best to camp out right here, the light pouring in from the entrance that is still a ways off? Isn’t it possible to live in the warmth of the light and the safety of the shadow? Just enough reality and just enough fantasy. Well, that’s the thing. You can only guess what the world is like outside the cavern. You can only hope. What comes next? Etre, strength and mystery. All “shoulds” fall away. All guilt and all shame. You will be compelled to incorporate without fear (which is different from “consideration”) of any other’s reaction. Become…What? That is the mystery. Being through faith. Those are the words, but there is no way of knowing if they are true or not, at least not while you are still here. What you do know is this: that part of you will be brought into the light of day, and that this is a choice, and you know, even, that you made this choice long ago. You chose light. You choose light. Every step is as preposterous as the last. Yet they happen. It was and is true. Maybe you can’t figure out what awaits. For certain you can’t. It is the stone thrown that never reports its landing. But that is true of every step taken. You might not have planned it or puzzled it all out — the possibilities were given to you by the confluence of darkness and light — but you were prepared, you did plan and you did choose to walk into the light.

Devil’s Shoals

I’m no fan of bad poetry, but I do understand the lyrical impulse — that attempt to connect pure sensation with something available to the declarative self. So, here’s something I wrote a while back, while living in the Northeast but thinking of my two grown-up daughters and reflecting on memories of growing up, myself, in southeastern Tennessee. Btw, as I continue to learn about HTML and the ins and outs of WordPress, I apologize for wonky layouts.

Devil’s Shoals

(for Delphi and Lydia)

Before the Hiwassee widens like a settled ribbon

of sunlight across the hills, husk yellow and green,

where the old train bridge passes overhead —

before the widening slow of the river

at the gravel lot filled with the church buses

that carry the tubes for the weekend faith groups,

lies the last rapids, the Devil’s shoals.

And when I was a kid canoes would eddy out there,

and pull up to the beaten path that stepped up

boulders and blackberry brambles.

Where the path leveled we’d follow

the tracks laid straight, blasted out of shale,

and then down the embankment to slip into the water

that sucked as smooth and as cold as any promise ever could.

Wading out into the current, we held hands like sentries,

through the rushed lashings, our breath catching

when the water hit the belly, until

we dropped, one-by-one, buoyed

by our life jackets past the shore’s retreat

as we floated down into the mouth of the shoals

desperate of breath and arms flailing.

Water slapped the face and pulled – pulled us below

to where darker flows reversed and crossed

under the heavy waves and sunlight.

Our sneakered feet kicked out and fought,

our lungs ached in their insistence, until hands

joined the pull of preservers to heave us heavenward

where eye-blinking vision washed up like fish.

Once upon a time a boy lost his strength in the shoals,

and crying out to his father for help,

was carried past the hitched boats.

Another time a boy who had lost his father

and seen his mother remarry a Methodist minister

took to the tracks, and walked the mile to the parking lot,

each stubborn tie after each stubborn tie hammered firm.

Either way, the devil sought us all —

like a misguided gift to the homesick-buried

in a place where breath and Will battled for supremacy.

And ever when the day closed, tired and content,

the youth directors gathered up their charges

and bussed them back to their beds

still hearing the rush of the shoals in the dusk of mid-summer.