Fifteen

 Now, as the children fell, mesmerized by the incessant rhythm of his storytelling, he rushed into a room somewhere down from where the children were, and again poured over the many dozens of journals and notebooks (But what, he quickly thought, was the difference? Perhaps the one was addressed to someone; and the other, written by yourself, for yourself, with yourself—totally transcendent, but falling away from yourself into another self all of your own? A notebook just says, declares, questions—talking to yourself, or to nobody at all, which doesn’t matter. Though, he thought further, can you escape yourself ever? In the journal, at least you have the consolation that you are, in fact, addressing someone—yourself. Maybe not as yourself, but the hand that presses itself down into the book, the paper, the keys (the whatever-it-is that mediates the whole thing) is your hand and, try as you might, like that Evil Genius invented long ago in that ancient philosophic treatise on self-certainty, you cannot escape the fact that it is your hand, that you are the progenitor, the holy Demiurgos. As singular as you are—that singularity is inescapable, as inescapable as the snare the Genius sets for himself when he wants to seduce you into total deception: there must be a there there in order to be deceived. Sly as the fox is, he cannot escape all snares….)

Finally, there appeared to him one notebook, which became its opposite, the journal. (Both sequestered in his youthful sorrows, and therefore tediously earnest, yearning, still full of the last flickering hope for recognition, a message-in-a-bottle received on the other end of time, and actually replied to.) He randomly opened it, and found several pages upon which his glance fell, causing him to linger, and to fall into abyssal reverie. But then, his idea—brilliant—was that in these pages he would find the secret to the place he was seeking with the assistance of the children, the place wherein the hermit dwelled, the place wherein all tales held their conclusions in abeyance, waiting for the singular moment, rarest of all, when that hermit himself rises from his soup—rises again!—and concludes all syllogisms, finalizes all agreements (all pledges of faith, all obedience to law), and speaks, in reverse … where the thought chases the word, the tongue and lips seem mute, and the gasp for air enough to speak comes after the speech.

In the journal, it said…

On the 20^th of May. Marooned.

1

I take from C.—that cynic, the Romanian Dog who has lived inside an ever so slightly silvered barrel, living off the fumes of a civilization he so well has pronounced dead—I take from him a single truth, perhaps the only one he himself had truly discovered (for himself, an utterly alone truth, standing in itself, waiting for confirmation in the bitter sorrows of another): what quietude the desolation of a civilization affords the thinker (in order that he might think against himself), to wander and reflect (ah what dancing grace of Platonic movements would we have known these thousands of years before great cataclysm!)—to dance upon the landscape of decrepitude, the past magnificence that burned itself out on the excesses of its own brilliance (its progress the excessive Real of its own self-annihilation, an orgiastic consummation of its own burning Love of existence, triumphant in its infinite repetition; would this be a schlect Unendlichkeit?), the coming silence that promises to grow into a grand chorus of voiceless whispers, legends and fables indecipherable upon the breath of the Leviathan that burrows into the windswept sands for a moment’s shelter from the tumult obscuring any way out across this desolated land…. Yet! C. can wander along the unending shores of that dying world (where he can enjoy the cool breezes that still manage to waft ashore, challenging the inland inferno); he can wander and carefully observe, or amplify and clarify the observations of so many thousands of tortured and bruised and scarred souls that had come before him. What a pity. It is true that he saw the future taking its brilliance from the rising sun and waxing moon of the suburbs of civilization (and what utter provincialism we find here, from a one nestled within the cradle of cosmopolitanism!)—but does he hope that the suburb grows into a city? Who will then be the St. A.— (to write our future Civita Dei), the evangel of the schools in our eventual St. T.—, sealing our theologic fate in a Summa, written with rags of polyester (rarest of fabrics)—who will be our philosophers after a long slumberous darkness? Will the lights return in the suburbs—surely not to those lands where the death so profoundly overtook it? In a dogged, cynical way, we are given hope, is it not hope, brethren? A hope so profoundly overturned and emptied that its mere husk stands forth as a crumbling monument to a history that could not come about? An impossible history, the foundering of the embryo of freedom—“freedom”—, that rush of fresh air in the Age of Reason. Whereupon this newborn soon found himself loitering in the quicksand of Progress; there he found himself staring at the dialectical horrors of the yearning Voices of the philosophers who had forgotten their theologic past, the need for Other-dependence, the weakness of their own souls, the requisite leaps of fides. Most important of all the theologic theorems: one’s utter aloneness, thrown not into a history, but into an ongoing catastrophe, the quicksand of existence (should we elevate it in philosophic terms—elevate a lowly suburban term to a tarnished brilliance). And thereupon that false surface they discovered the flat plane of truth, one with no depth, no interior, no circularity—only pure enfoldment, pure encompassing.

 

2

In my loneliness and despair (oh, and I do not mean, yet, a dialectical despair), as my memory fades along with the Universal memory loss (wasn’t it supposed to be called ‘Progress’?), taking refuge in our illiterate masters of letters (where are they?—send out a paean for them, sing of their eventual arrival, these Desert Fathers and their tattered theologies of the spirit, of pain, of the body...we long for a pre-Columbian forgetfulness, a clarity and emptiness to rival the waters of the Antilles which, as emptiness does, carries always with it creative destruction), —here I am nothing that forgets with the pen in order to find a hidden constellation, a fragment visible only to the blind, audible only to the deaf, speakable only by the mute, a campaign of immobile musicians in search of starry spheres (the instrumental astronomers—brethren I call upon you!), spheres which have only revolved for the ignoble among us (St. Paul’s echoing missives recompense our waywardness), savage, forgotten men...women who languish in desperate hope of waking up home (afar), found, lost to a thousand years of hopeless toil and commanded enjoyment (scratched upon metallic slabs and emblazoned in plasma for the people). We have found that place, and we have found those people, dear ones (my brethren), but their eyes, filled with oceans of despair, are blurry to the half-silvered mirror of the partial reflection of their self-misery (fulfilled, verily, as self-mastery, self-triumph). We have been the lost, the desolated, the despairing, the forgotten; we have been, for so long! It was a joyful storm that was to have devastated us; it was the debris flung free by their catastrophes, which took our eyes and ears and speech from us—and we rejoice at the new visions, speeches and musics! The density of their world—has it not become so much sand underneath our feet? We press it down only so that the wind does not blow it away; we do not investigate each grain (and if we do, do we not fail to notice it as such—as a grain upon an unending shore, a study in futility, and the self-satisfaction of a mere semblance of a whole that in any case simply will not exist?). Only the birds, insects, roving feral creatures of the land—only they roam over the sand as the true Philosopher, the true Scientist, to pick through its grains for a morsel to eat, a twig for shelter, a hovel for the night (they are cold, indefatigably adventuresome).

3

The sand anchors the palms, is later fired (sometime later, perhaps in the coming cataclysm of the sun, the Form of our light and life, my liege)—it has its uses! But the palm and the glass (the transformed sand) defy the sand itself; they do not comfort it, and they do not comport with it: the one derives sustenance from the other without reducing its being (the sand is not consumed itself), and the other is a transformation, a fiery movement of the sand into the different (a reversal of fortunes, a display of amor fati).

4

Has it not been that civilization (shall we not gather them all, shall we not assemble?) has so far (despite, it is true, the contrary and opposed tendency) emphasized the confrontational, the oppositional? But, in a reversal of values, its logics have pronounced upon not difference but rather identity, unity over differences, convergences over (and against) divergences. The doctrine of civilization is not one of nomadism—this is the evil, the barbaric threat to its own self-coherence—but one of unitary sedentarism. Is not the suburb—much maligned in the high Courts of philosophic wisdom—the bastion of the nomad, the barbaric enclave of pure divergences? Is it not a direct threat to the cohesion of civilization? The philosophy of the suburb is movement, dispersal, dissipation (the boredom of the people the price they pay for their nomadic freedom, the freedom to disperse as a gas leaves its confines). No civilization that affirmed this doctrine of pure Difference (difference-in-itself, the nomadic disintegration)—a suburban doctrine—has been able to take a decisive hold world-historically. There were—yes indeed—divergent philosophies, philosophies of the shadows, of emptiness, of chaotic spontaneous assemblages of “harmony” (I dare mention Buddha, Laozi—silly wanderers amidst great civilizations, offering in the former case a philosophy of divergent quiescence, and in the latter a clever active non-doing, non-accomplishment, a programmatics of absence or departure), but theirs was one of perpetual conflict with the urbanisms of the State (Brahmanism, Confucianism—oh but for the nomadism of their founders, we wonder...). But one of them—the undeniably alien one to that great Han assemblage—was to achieve something of a philosophy of pure Difference, in a profound affirmative modality. Finally, the naked simplicity of the stone and water alone, as an all wholly configured to the individual in itself (thus becoming the loss of the “all” as such); death here finally stands out as death and only death, life as only life, birth as only birth (a gift of spontaneity, zirán), time as only the new, not an infinite Now that contains the All, but a naked moment upon which the schizophrenic frenzy of being goes in search of its play-masks, a now that is nothing ever more...

5

C.—and here he stands with all of them from that dying world—wants the Beyond, wants beyond in its various guises, as beyond the novel, beyond the philosopher, ... the essayist, the critic, the poet, the expatriate (marooned in an alien environ, only to be too easily blessed with that gift of muted tongues—existential alienation, metaphysical desolation, sniffed as the decay of countless invisible sea-creatures that rise continually from the ocean in moments of still, warm air); but that was the discovery of our New World. Was it not so, brethren? That cartography of alienation was the discovery of our A., should we doom it with a name as violent as that (you can hear our ‘A...’ in the wave-runners, slicing their way into the flesh of the sea, in joyous abandon to Progress, desecrating her only gift—infinite silence, to be consummated only by the thunderous storms of cataclysmic newness, lightning both metaphor and thing-in-itself). These compendious volumes of erudition, of deep study, deceitful praise, eroticism, blessedness, earnestness, patient hopefulness, poetic abandon (a poetry that only comes from the music of falling fragments), philosophical incisiveness—all of this, dear ones, has died a thousand deaths upon the shores of this New World; it has died as self-mastery foundering upon its own brilliance, self-affirmation in defiance of defeat, as desolate exuberance of poetry upon their parched and longing lips. I have seen new erotic becomings, brethren, formations intense, dancing upon the glowing orbs of P.’s Mayan Body—does he not manage a firmament for organs, a sky for skin, a symphony for breath, suns for concepts? A thousand lighting storms have raged since the cosmopolitan furies shot decisively across that lake of conquest blood-lust (a red carpet of royal awakening, a shallow pool for human avarice, a false depth—the typical configuration of the sedentary, the urban). We, brethren, have become they, and the palm and the glass have separated from the shore. We are already beyond. Our forgetting is triumphant renewal. Is it that fabled knowing without knowing, the irreducible discovery of the Zi, those masters underneath the Heal of the State, a discovery finally given to a resoundingly un-self-concerned land those many centuries ago, a land of deserts and of tropics, and of planar aridity and of temperate humidity ... is it so?

6

If the future belongs to the suburbs of civilization, then does the past no longer yearn for its urban life? Could it finally come to be that our culture (ours not theirs) thrives not in densities, existential hovels of centering, blissful remembrance of things past (ah the sweet intoxication of nostalgia), nor in civilized ghettoes, salvific refinements of place (the salon, the café), but amidst the aridity of the wide open plane, the deserted bone canyons of howling coyotes, the humid triumph of crystal shores, the lost forests of the tropic, the blankness of ocean gulls carrying dead prey back to the brink of the sea, the definition where sand and sea meet, eternally questioning boundaries (was this not also their philosophic, and their poetic, cradle?) ...

 

7

You must forget to truly know—again. Would that we never remember. Forgetting as active force—creation in itself.

 

On the 8^th of March. Enclosed.

 

1

Where can I begin another failure? At the point where my gaze terminates, at the end of my heart’s longing, at the edge of my catastrophic melancholy—the other side of a terrible anxiety, outside the waiting-room of my private hell. I have always looked outside the moment, looked at my own looking, while, in the meantime, waiting. Neither hope nor despair can console me; only the promise of the concentration camp, the forced labor of my depths. The walls could be paper thin, or feet of concrete, yet they would all the same contain me and concentrate my pain. A prison break would merely bring an obverse suffering, the chaos of openness (agoraphobia stultifying the stratified logic of the curious Socratic museum of dianoia), the frenzy of here-and-there that daily encloses the atomic mass-transmission of humanity (the philosophy of the City-State, urban urbanity, vainly wandering under the starry sky, searching for the Law, vanquishing all doubt, only to yield to the source of being, in Ignorance).

 

2

It is possible to have neither an interior, nor an exterior—is it not? Some want to banish interiority, or the pull of inwardness, but is this not because it suggests a real movement, a being taken, spirited, away? For others, exteriority is the sin, outwardness the danger. But one condemned to the forced labor of depths has neither, or can in any case be said to swing from one end to the other of this ridiculous spectrum (this fantastic spectrum of false depths). In an instant, one may swing from one to the other—but only confusedly, unknowingly. It may be a flight of freedom, a haphazard freedom, the freedom of liquid. In this too-easy slippage, ah, here brethren, do we see the pure form of the movement. Liquid. To the liquid, fighting inwardness or exteriority is no use. A true fool’s errand...

3

Another failure begins here, as the continuity and consistency of thought accepts itself and truly displays itself through the written word (as pure conceptual painting, the formless drives yielding to the informed word, the letter of chaos balanced upon the prose of the Designer, the Demiurgos fashioning for himself a play-thing of a universe, a paean to Dionysius). This process produces the failure as absorption within itself (the gesture, the failure aptitude, of interiority), with neither, in truth, an interior nor an exterior to contain it, and to give it shape (Form). You are left with seeping, a liquid that finds the breaks and the fissures in the solid and finds a quick escape. Yet the insistence of the form, the verity, of writing compels, by sheer contiguity, a single flow. This in turn eventuates a canvass splashed with paint, and this, in its turn becomes that against which one works, the work of the mind on the canvass of the word (I use the old-fashioned tone here). If there is no interior, the flow has no origin, and if there is no exterior, it has no destination. Nothing. Neither a from nothing nor a towards nothing. Ah, the philosophers should here be stripped of their favored terminology of the sacred, the lips of the metaphysician momentarily reduced to a bleeding thirst. We cannot even say that it is encompassed (though I personally am given to use that terminology—should I be hanged for my apostasy). Nor encircling, even less circling, and certainly we cannot say of it that it is linear; but if it is, it is the linearity of eternal divergence, a field of divergence with nor center (everywhere is the point from which anything diverges; thus is it right to consider a field of vectors). The text is the topographical illusion of depths, the double-vision of the lines of divergence (lines of force, in vectoral form), hiding an abyssal depth which abolishes inwardness, engulfs space—freeing on towards the purity of space (one called it the spatium, perhaps rightly so), infinite (divergent) movement. No inside, no outside—this is space, this is pure immanent movement. What we call ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’ is access to this secret. With no interior, there is no center; with no exterior, there is no point of reference, and no relation. Absolute freedom is then a performance of space and movement in itself. To demonstrate this (but in the manner of the ancient geometricians, whose “proofs” involved the description, an exacting description, of the precise movements that a single hand—the real of the absolutely individual—drew across a stable surface), it should be possible to enter thought in the way that a musician or dancer enters into the art, by means of a performance (interpretation simply being what we call the past movements). Play-performance—is our experimentation with space and movement. But text resists this play as it insists on the topographical illusion of depth (the governance of the totality—truth, but often too, probability). It could be literally a dance: take up instruments and play the text as a score. The instruments require a player—this is the human element. But if we are not to return the text to the topographical illusion of depths, then we must also supply the instruments—found objects through which the text may be performed. The text and interpretation are thereby freed.

 

On the 9^th of March. One year out. Lost, Meso—.

What power does this place still have? The gale forbids absolute quietude, the heat exorcises all frost and freezing (absolute foreclosure); the deserts annihilate yet preserve; the sun allows the shade, a respite from intensity, a calming-down. Upon finally landing, the frozen scholasticism—which in any case preserves (in the manner of a preserve) the last burst of ferocious intellectual intensity, merely and yet patiently worked upon from the Desert Fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite, to Eriugena and finally Eckhart. They inhabited, and constituted a cathedral; but in its center, its sanctum sanctorum, its sacral core, beat a heart so hot with love that it was to burn the soul into utter darkness. Thus, paradox abounds, the power of suns concentrated—one cannot help think of the Holy Eucharist. But upon reason one of the brightest in the Mexican firmament—I mention him as only P.—the effect upon the scholastic mysticism of the Old World is nothing short of explosive, dynamic, epochal. The “West” showered the true “New World” with their hubristic power struggle, their avarice, greed, lust; but now, as we surpass the fifth century hence, the Old World thought seems (finally) to melt into lava: to yield up its elemental secrets. Liquefied, it may take the form of a new mold, a new clime in which to harden, a new adventure seems to await us upon far away shores... Reading P is like watching the shards of the fractured glass of the cathedral of history finally meld, fired into molten liquid, and finally, cooled, broken into shards of a future catastrophe (somewhere to lay these fragments yet awaits us). And his way, the way of a poet (lost now), is only a living apochraphy: a testament to the solitude of the singular itinerary, a course both wandering and fully determined, a kind of telos inside-out—the very end itself finding a way out of eternity’s refuse bin of possibility. To read P is to watch a fragment launched from the rubble, like the return of a meteor to its former triumph as an itinerary in the sky, a trajectory of love in the starry firmament. And the image of the arc of meteoric return is at the same time the generation of a heat that melts all the frozen glory of the time past, freeing it for future generations.

But all of this is of one piece: the return of Homer’s blind truthfulness, the itinerary of the journey homeward. We have found home. The heart echoes in the sanctuary. My blood flows to the earth, and the sky is blown open for you—to arrive, but then to begin anew. Which is to say—forget.

 

On the 10^th of March. Remains.

An iguana wanders along the short sandy coast, foraging for the fallen fruits of a tree-bush, clinging to a rocky wall, dropping both blossoms and fruit with ageless indifference. The coast, a niche of pebbles, broken shells, filaments of seaweed, dried starfish, blossoms withered, and people drunk with an ideational vacation, submerging, and then submerged, glaring through the crystalline March seawater, punctuated by rays of sunlight allowed to escape the overcast gloom overhead, for a lightning moment—and they search yet without itinerary before them, as chaotic and listless in time as the catastrophe of fragments upon this beach in space. They grasp time, as the waves, sand, shells, pebbles and iguana grab space. Our mobility locked in time, their stability an eternal space, and both dance to eternity (ah—but wherefore space, the spatium?).

A stray fruit rolls under the grove-ordained shade, with no pursuant iguana—and I wonder where his journey has taken him. Each step for this creature is new—a now eternally companion along his itinerary, never too much, never too little, all for now with no “when”, nor any “then”. Perhaps not even a “from”, the path a trace of forgetful abandon to one unending, infinite space.

In the chaos of restful abandon, a measured abandon is apparent. A great tapestry of pattern, without coherence of an idea, elicits a relaxation of form whence the beauty of formless form arises. But as I begin to ascend with my mind, I am humbled by the arrangement, spread upon the beach rhizomatically, a chaos restfully collected in time from its cradle in space.

I want to read this catastrophe of form, which could have been an explosion or a gentle placement by the care of the infinite itself—the open care that eternity shows her children, pointing the way, finding a place (the placement achieved as a direction in an estuary of possible moments, centers hidden from the eye of discernment, but transparent to the blind truthfulness of the dazzle of the music of dark chords—listen, brethren, for the echo, and you, dear ones, shall hear that wide open sanctuary of your heart stand forth as a vibration upon your chest, a stillness in your eyes yet a motion within your ears). This place, with all its clamors of light, and its dazzle of reflection (the sea a great mirror encompassing a sandy shoal of fragments: people, iguana, fruit, blossom, seashell, scattered through the wind, singing into the gale)—this is not a place to read, it is not a place for the Eye. It is a place of the heart, for the ear, for your skin.

The eye is blinded for the ear and skin; the dazzle, the luminous reflection, darkens the vision so that the ear is prepared, the heart quickened—and finally the end of the itinerary of sight moves upon you like a rapid storm-front, pouring down, torrent of black rain, obscuring your surround, but elevating in a flash everything else besides. After the storm flash, at the moment the brilliance of the luminous sea is about to intoxicate the eye, a moment is preserved for the ear and the heart; thereafter, the companions can only be sensed through the gale that blows upon the northern shore in the dead of night, an eruption of hidden sound and mystical rhythm.

Ah, ... but my heart is confused, and this appears to me as not darkness searched for under a brilliant sun. We must look with the light.

I thought I could find the last place of philosophy—of all mere love of something that draws form from a truth out in a beyond of tearless joy and passion abated. But this place will not give me an end. This in my most sentimental and un-poetical folly; a mere semblance of the sophisticated play of words of masters long since departed. Even a film of irony could not contain your skepticism, brethren; and it is true. A failure here is found. This place would not give me an end, the decisive peras of the ancients... This would require a beginning, or the singular rupture of a first, the bursting through of a ‘why’ amidst this wind of hapless and indifferent eternity (the standpoint of infinite movement), the annihilating brilliance of this sun above my lonely head. I thought I could find, even, the philosophies of abandonment. There is abandon about me, but it does not stretch out into abandonment; and would this be a great benefit to us, dear ones? Would this refusal to stretch out beyond itself into an other-than-itself (this refusal at interpretation—for there is nothing to interpret, sayeth one of your numbers!), this singularity of fragments everywhere apparent—would this be the first, the elemental appearance of a new dawn for us homeless, cenobites and beggars, looking, forlorn, through the rubble of time’s great boon to the learned? I have renounced letters (is this not apparent, dear ones?), and my willful abandon is the penance of my learned refusal. I am of the wind; the rhythm beat out upon the rocks, quickened by this endless gale—this is upon my sail, and I, a ship without rudder, go searching. I do not look for Sophia, the sweet bride of Solomon, and I do not pursue with Love. I have love and “truth” upon my back (I dare not turn ‘round to see); I am ever turned to them. Now is the time to pursue with an itinerary of abandon (“as such”). The fragments fall into place of themselves, and the ‘why’ recedes into the now of chaos, the present of the Nothing ... the whale within whom the prophets found the other side of the Voice, before it could cry out in mystical explanation—before the cry of Law, the Covenant, before the breath of life given to mankind; —the teeth, the jaw, the ligaments, the warm saliva, the sanctuary of stomach, the obscurity of intestines, a glorious darkness anterior to the voice, a reclination behind the eye of the searcher, lost to the lighthouse of all knowing, all finding.

 

On the 13^th of March. At rest.

Wandering home along the windswept coast, you find a passageway into the town, and you have now come inside, protected from the fierce and unrelenting wind. Along a street, away from crowds, hecklers of commerce, stands ruins—of the future, fallen, it would seem, into the present, standing, as they must, for no one at all, no when about them, a place—pure in its naked standing alone, unmoored from the insistence of presence, time (a river waiting for none). Amidst the ruins, iguana sun—an eternity in itself, a monadic infinite concentrating eons in a moment, within a single glance—and they search, chow, stare, plod, scurry. Their movement could not be mine, a theater I could not enter.

The ruins seemed a quiet majesty. They stood alone, and altogether far away from the Mayan ruins, crumbling down from the past, blessed by winds of millennia, hurrying centuries like children into a schoolhouse for unending recitation, memorization, all with laughter, surprise, joking and crying (the heart is filled to the brim in the young, and in time prepared for the asceticism of death). The sentimental poet that lingers nearby might find the din of ancient crowds’ conversation upon the insistent winds and pressing sunbeams, or somewhere in the gloom of a joyously grey afternoon when the gulls undulate like a celestial sea laughing against the violent sway of the ocean below—gulls, frozen in the wind, then, in a moment, melting away for their occasional dive from the wind into the waves that reveal to them a fleeting summer’s repast, food of the sea.

But I could not find sentiment within the ruins, nor the sweet comfort of an imagined time shining forth from among their crumbling forms. A ruin of the future, having fallen into the present, has no past. It is a silence, like the eye of an iguana, a presence that annihilates all inquiry, all ‘why’ (a lesson for our lesson-book: learn to live without a why), and resounds in its own faltering glory without explanation. These ruins found time curated in a museum, housed within a cosmic space, the inside-out of the temples and pyramids and altars of our time (a dense and full time of years, of books, of historia). Yes, the Mayan possessed time, eternally renewing the fire of its sacrifice; but here, time is encompassed within a space, a nothingness of silence, a space forgetting itself, lost to time but found within the absolute quietude of the ruins of the future, felled by some cataclysmic beast of a forlorn present we shall never know, or see. Ruins of the immediate, ruins of the now of eternity, time devoured into majestic rubble, signs not of the times but what in space can be accomplished by an infinite encompassing—signs of the spaces of the Now, motion taking the gulf of eons behind you and yielding up their secrets: nothing, silence, fragments, sand-atoms of your present, before you, spread upon the shore—the time long past now littering the way forward, pieces to be gathered and brought alongside one another (no reconciliation, no redemption, simply: baptism, the dance of John in the lapping waters of a warm river). And you move from time to time, and your blesséd sentiment recedes, this poet’s voice silenced...

His hands clasped in prayer, the winds genuflect before the palms—and the benediction of the evening begins, shadows finding an escape from clouds dancing as the gulls’ ceiling, stretching existence between myself and the quiet chapel nearby, the Madonna keeping silent sight over her town, remote inside a seamless byway, from this Isla to ... where? How shall we tell this story? The renunciation of the wandering church seeking askesis and the abandon of spirit in faraway places, yielding up its sedentary soul to the crumbling ruins of profound diaspora, a resurrection of the flesh in reply to the denunciation of earth and change that laid to rest the old church of the State. Here I shall see God, in my flesh. Mixture of earth and flesh send up to the sky a music of burning incense, aflame with the myrrh of tradition, a scattering preservation while the rest subsides and dissipates into airy expanse of ocean and gloom of sun, fury of wind. The raiment was thrown down here long ago, the sword sliced down upon Her shoulders, and the body, vacant for an eon, writhed in joyful acceptation, and they, once two, became joined in a union that was never to be completed, as the brilliant light of the volcanic peninsula insisted upon a double cataclysm: first the great reptilian beasts, their whales swallowing whole prophets who joyously proclaimed “home!”, then the darkness of a future eviscerated by fullness of hope grown within a hothouse of technics. What was the verse that pressed now upon her back?—unfound, written into the lacunae of a gospel beat from the strenuous music of a failing heart, surviving on a filament of heat from a stellar point, crying voiceless tears into an icy vastness… Still, she stood, erect, present to an invisible crowd prostrate in adoration, even as she accepted, finally, the blade.