Tuesday 26 March 2024

Adhesions 2: Whiskey Priest gets married

 I have seen more innocent men in the world than repenters, and the world is nothing but its banishing of all innocence - St. Ambrose

The wide river ran shallow, benign and clear over its chalk bed. It held no terrors and yet one was warned against falling into it. Marriage lay on the other side and a successful crossing was the ceremonial requirement for attaining it. I stood with my bride-to-be on the river bank amongst a small congregation of well wishing strangers. They had produced her from amongst their number and this was the first time I had seen her. She was dressed in a white gown, I did not see her face for the veil and she made no telling gestures but waited quietly with an attitude that was neither demure nor anxious. The attendant psychopomp advised me urgently, with quiet and reverential words, as to how I might safely step onto the ceremonial ferry whilst interposing scriptural references of a banal scope, ‘holy men will not convert the unbelieving husband but he shall be brought briskly to prayer by his pious wife’. The ferry was a square unstable pallet raft, with no guard rail or furniture, and wide enough only for two persons standing close, facing each other. I enquired lightheartedly as to when my belongings would be transported to the other side. I hoped my question suggested, without wink or smirk, that as a man of the world I was aware of the necessity of this local ritual, and acquiesced readily to its requirements, but also that practical matters had to count for something in the end. As they paused to consider my request, I showed my unconcern by humming the jaunty music hall line, ‘she wouldn’t have a Willie or a Sam.’ I suspected I was about to be brought back into line. The psychopomp advised I should distribute the contents of my suitcase amongst the congregation. You will not need them on the other side: ‘ancestors may bequeath home and wealth but a good wife is provided by the Lord’. I glanced at the mute figure in white standing as if in his shadow, she seemed the instrument of an unfathomable intent. I did not reply, ‘she is a snare, her heart a net, her arms are chains.’ He went on, it is time for you to step onto the ferry, give your hand to your bride, this is to show your willingness to assist and steady her as she joins you on your journey. For a moment I hesitated.  The assembled company became restless as if leaves in a forest were being caressed by a breeze before being shaken by a storm. I fixed my gaze on the ferry’s deck. I could not picture stepping onto it. Even as I stood on the bank, I felt unsteady, as if already in queasy motion, and always about to fall into the waters. The psychopomp made encouraging sounds and handed me in great ceremony, the 10 foot fenland quant pole with which to steady myself. He also gave me a mirror of unknown purpose and significance, and a single obolus as symbolic payment for my release from solitude. Shouldn’t I be paying you? I asked. Steady, steady, he whispered. Steady as she goes. I did not reply directly but asked myself if it would not be better if I did not step onto ferry, and instead called a halt to the ceremony. Was it too late to break my agreement with these strangers? Alternatively, what if I did board the raft for good form’s sake, to be seen to play my assigned role, appeasing the crowd and observing the solemnity of the occasion, but then allowing myself as if by accident to topple into the kindly waters of the river? Would my seeming good intentions, even if let down by my inveterate bad luck, be sufficient to release me from my obligations? Might the fox yet run to ground? If I should be disqualified on the grounds of my physical clumsiness, wouldn’t that constitute a no-blame scenario ending in commiserating handshakes and good natured farewells? I was all but ready to drop upon ‘me marrow bones’ and sing God Save the King but the psychopomp kindly ignored this groom’s understandable reservations and continued with his whispered advice as if calming an unsettled horse. You must not disturb the chalky sediment with the quant pole, it is bad luck. Bad luck? The growing list of whimsical rules that I was supposed to remember, hinting at mystery, suddenly became too much, I felt about to laugh at the absurdity of my predicament and what had brought me here. Laugh? My girlish and helpless giggling had given me away before on too many solemn occasions. I am aware how offensive my array of involuntary outbursts are to others. I could not stifle my amusement but to distract from it, I stepped boldly from the bank onto the raft. Let’s not tarry any longer I announced with conscious theatre. The alacrity of my gaining the river ferry elicited no excited response from the crowd but again only an unquiet rustling of leaves. The psychopomp presented me with a further set of marriage objects and the precise instructions for their use but his words were taken by the breeze and I could not follow what he said. An instrument. An ointment. A receptacle. With an abrupt gesture, I reached out my hand to the bride. You recall a girl that’s been in nearly every song?But she shrank from me, as if in terror, and retreated into the crowd. I stepped easily off the raft like a lifelong sailor and tried to follow her but the congregation closed itself against me, and I found no way through. I handed the collection of marriage objects to one of the young men in the crowd. He raised them aloft like trophies of war. Then, by swift feint and neat footwork, he won the raft from me. The crowd parted, the bride emerged, veil torn aside. And so began the perfunctory ceremony of the new groom’s wedding which the psychopomp hurried through as if time had run out. The congregation rustled appreciatively, it was right they said, to have played me false. The smiling bride, in on the game from the start, had joined him on the raft, waving and laughing. For a moment, she looked at me, but I saw no significance in her expression. I thought I would catch her bouquet if she had had one. And then the newlyweds set off for marriage, taking my suitcase. They stirred up immense clouds of chalky sediment from the river bed with the quant pole until the waters turned opaque and white. That’s good luck, our best wishes, the crowd murmured. The psychopomp repeated the parable, ‘A man does not provide for his friend at midnight from friendship but because the friend is persistent and importunate in knocking on his door.’ I did not know what to make of it. Was the arrangement over? Had I fulfilled my obligations to these strangers? Then two doves flew out from the dark trees hanging over us with startled wing claps. In their wake, they left a chalk white breast feather, soft and lovely, that hung for a moment and then drifted downwards. I prayed, if this feather should come to rest upon the surface of the waters and be carried downstream, then let me be delivered from this place. But the breeze blew the feather back to land and it fell into the churned mud of the river bank. Even the auguries are in league against me. Even allegory has become hostile. I have lost my suitcase, and yet I do not travel light.

Friday 22 March 2024

Adhesions 1: nihil feci vermis omnia

It is said moles (Talpa europaea) bite the heads of worms (Lumbricus terrestristo incapacitate without killing them. The worms are then cached alive, kept fresh, in specially dug larders located in the walls of the mole’s main tunnels. That is all true. A mole’s larder is where I find myself now, bitten, cached, alive but paralysed, and waiting for the moment the mole returns to devour me. Four hundred and seventy living worms were once recorded in a mole’s larder. I do not know how many are with me here. Many. Many. I feel them. Soil moving in soil. They have lost the capacity for locomotion but I feel them near me, squashed together, alive, and trembling. But our paralysis is not simply a living end. From where we are thwarted, there we might also flourish. In the mole’s larder, worms have found thinking. Strangely, most strangely, the unfatal the mole’s bite also confers a peculiar and separated-out form of worm consciousness. A soft bite that does not despatch but preserves the other’s loss across time, that is one of the mole’s most fearsome weapons. In the moment we become its prey, we thereby become aware; aware of our personal subjugation, aware of our species, and aware of the world. As we are torn from our place, we also come to know that place and in so knowing it, we exceed it. It is true, our wisdom is gained only at the expense of any possibility of acting upon it but it is wisdom, and it is in the world. There is no private consciousness that is not also tethered and relevant to a worldly circumstance. Where before we changed the earth, utilising the full range of our taphonomic powers, and thus raising earth’s surface to heaven, now we understand the process by which the great weight of fallen plants, animals and cities, first pushed out of the earth’s surface, and subsequent to their having fallen, then entering a state of advancing decomposition,  become mixed in with cosmic dust, only to be swallowed finally down into the depths. We do that. I did that. And now, if I do not do it any longer, I am bound to recognise it, and find a self within it. Worms work in and against the earth, weaving the warp and weft of it into a single cloth, unpicking it from the bedrock, elevating it in undulations, suturing it to the distant horizon. We plough and sew, we're so very very low. We delve in dirty clay. But I am no longer low, I am raised up and elsewhere, travelling by way of wormholes, and never returning to the place of my first delving. I recognise that in my present state, the earth’s great loom is all but lost to me - of that which I once was, now I may merely know but in my knowing I plough and I sew by other, and bitter, means. My thinking fills with earth as my mouth was once so filled. Soil moving in soil. I grasp the thinking of this my earth as a transferable image, and by applying it I develop a new capacity to make sense of the other earthly realms. Collected here, trembling, we are busy at re-weaving, re-tunnelling all that was undone and filled-in in us. We are making of it a new cloth, a cloth of tunnels, a cloth of our idea of our earth and a cloth of our weave-delving within it. The fatal awareness bestowed upon my writhing companions, startled awake, found out by consciousness, as beneath a burning sun, returns both us and it to the earth, changing its processes as we are also changed. From this our last place, sequestrated, writhing, convulsing, twitching as if impaled upon an angler’s barbed hook, we are cast out into the watery abyss whereupon we transform it, and it is our hook, a component of self, the hook of self. And we become the hooked self, the self inseparable from its severed awareness, oh yes a worm may live if severed in two, and awareness as such is found only in its jeopardy. We await the jaws of our end, and tremble at the thought of the approaching moment when we shall be drawn from our cell, and devoured savagely by our keeper. And yet, although we are vigilant, this moment does not arrive. The voracious mole returns often, but it is only to stuff another dawning awareness into its bulging store. The mole is compelled by some deep anxiety to hoard worms but is not equally compelled to eat us. It seems repulsed by our broken form. Instead, as I imagine it, it relishes the joy of a running, fleeing, yelping prey, torn and consumed in the hot moment of the hunt - what savour is there in canned security compared to that? The mole possesses us as an unconsumed surplus, an unspoiling midden, an irrelevant stockpile built up in a time of abundance. Contradictions everywhere, and the whole only in the fragments confronting the idea of the whole. And the violence of our lived time curdles within the mole’s sidelined anticipatory time: separating, concretising. In the mole’s larder, we are transformed into a thinking wealth, aware of and against our condition, and thus capable of thinking beyond our predicament. Behold, O Saturn, behold the children you did not devour! And behold again all that we behold, and how we now find and recognise, soil moving in soil, and by image transfer, the fate of Penelope’s suitors, as they languish, incapacitated, cached. Do you read us suitors? We read you. Do you recognise us suitors? We recognise you. And with our taphonomic powers, we re-write you. Will you re-write us in turn? We write by tunnelling within your predicament. Soil within soil. Chilled by her enchantments, woven into her stratagems, bitten by her beauty, and thus subdued by the voracity of her will - the suitors in thrall to Penelope, by way of image transfer, become our allegory. But we move in both directions. We contemplate as well the movements of Penelope, also cached, by husband, also as our sister weaver, but also as savage mole. We recognise her as from the place of the suitors, who are captured and accumulated, and then we recognise her from their place of potentials which she has forever deferred. What need has she for them, what need has mole for us? How the non-act of possession must sicken the possessor as the unused talent must be confronted, and thus tarnished. The act of compulsive acquisition is in turn driven by the hoarded treasure’s depreciation -  everything definite will be assailed, teased, worm-eaten by the card turning of Fortuna. And all things attained, strongly stored, and unthreatened by rival, thief or invader will lose both lustre and value in the wider world - because they have been removed from the threat of the wider world. There is no private wealth that is not also an impoverishment imposed by the world it refuses. Then, Penelope-Dentata will cast the woven cloth of her desire out and across the world and will make the cloth anew. With her webs, her nets, and her sticky threads, she hunts for that last prey still running. 

Friday 1 March 2024

Parable on the spring offensive

a time to rend, a time to sew

hid in winter. I buried my weeping before start of day. I skulked and warbled from the closing thicket. I said, ‘rags of skin shed from a full moon’. By new spring, jackdaws flew across my path. Daybreak dragged off curtain and comforts. We waked longer. We sang longer. Still more light came. Nowadays, my eyes are dry at dawn. Starlings call from chimneys. This morning, as I walked out for work, I judged it neither first light, nor already too late.  On the path, I saw pieces torn from a pomegranate.  

Friday 19 January 2024

I built my nest

I built my nest in a forest of thorns. As my children grew so the forest grew round them. 

parable of the two energies

I survived my escape from a land of hostility. And now I must survive in a land of indifference. 

Saturday 13 January 2024

parable of relief

We are cured of the afflictions by which our ancestors knew the world. For our good health, we are exiled.

Saturday 2 September 2023

Parable upon the universal extension of apokatastasis even unto things under the earth

Live without need of the second death  Gregory of Nyssa


Consider now the spiders of the cellar and the store house. They have no season. They are gathered together and do not disperse. They do not know of the spiders in the autumn garden. They do not share in the gift of light that is proposed to all equally. And yet, they are not tormented as those in Gehenna who suffer exterior condemnation. But they continue like the Egyptians in a darkness that could be felt. They cast nets woven in the morning but do not haul them in at night. They have no day nor night. They fall into the void, as the enemy comes close, spinning in the darkness upon a single thread. Their webs are stores of dust and light, and hang like silvery veils, clouding but not corrupting the provisions of men. They do not spin but are spinning, and they do not weave but