Chapter Six: My Dreams and the Sea (Part Three)

[Again, this is just a rough--rough--draft. At this point its mostly just me throwing random ideas on the page.  But, for what its worth, enjoy!  Links for the previous are here]

The whole world is a shadow, a way, the trace of a footprint, and is a book that is written from the outside.  For in each and every creature there is a gleam of the divine exemplar, even though this gleam is thoroughly intermingled with darkness.  Wherefore it is just like a patch of shade, as it were, mixed with light.

                                                   --St. Bonaventure, In Hexameron, collatio 13, n.14

All nature is an infinitely vast and diverse symbol across which the face of God is mysteriously reflected.  A man is religious to the very degree that he recognizes everywhere the reflections of the divine Face, that is [he recognizes] he lives in a sacred atmosphere.

                                                --Henri de Lubac

It is the nature of all greatness to be inexact. 

And so: how often is love exalted as the greatness of mankind?  That great indefinable quantity, that great haunted gesture, patient of no index. Great at solving problems after its created the problem.  The thing everyone knows until you ask them to explain it.  For how, in exactness, could one be great? It would be at the mercy of whatever observer took time to describe it.  Too specific.  Too colloquial.  Will not the artist say greatness is the intersection of beauty and culture?  Or the mechanic, the engineer, will greatness not be efficiency, power, will it not be the intertwining carapace of the ingenious device, a heart humming as microcosmos, whose parts wind like the stars in effortless vacuum?  Will not the philosopher say greatness is truth?  And the scholastic who believes the transcendentals are convertible say that which is great is true, that which is true is beautiful, that which is beautiful is good?  But greatness is no instrument, cannot be domesticated.

Thus greatness is more like the edge of the sea; it ebbs and flows, furrows and vaults to and fro on granules of impressionable sand.  It is nothing but its vast and mobile pressure; when one wants to stop and define it, the sea has already egressed or convulsed, surged, retreated. It remains mobile.  It remains obscure.

Love is a face drawn on the edge of the sea.

Is that what love is?

And do we draw it over and over again as nature erases it?  Over and over again. 

And is this why we write love songs?  Watch romantic comedies?  Is this why even the atheist names love as a virtue?  Because we so desperately want to believe it transcendent?  But how can one tell the dancer from the dance?  How can one tell the lover from the love?  Can love ever rise above us, or is it only ever the trace of our feints and gesture; is it exhausted as we feign it in the motions of our flesh?  Does love work only because we believe in it?  Is it but a kingdom cycling about an empty throne, thought to be occupied and so obeyed?

Or is it perhaps merely genetics?  And love but a digital surface, a phantom glamour hovering over a thoughtless deep; and are our sonnets but cells and organs fluttering?

And so has anyone ever truly loved anything?

Or is love merely its own simulacra; a narrative, a folktale, a contagion.

And how many times is a story told before it becomes true?

_______________________________________

I still couldn’t believe I found the southern stranger, here amongst all the infinite coasts.  God sure has a sense of humor.  In the long shadows of sunset he seemed less a man than the memory of one; his bones just a shuttering wheeze beneath the flesh,  a cantankerous engine without the good sense to die.  And with that little last spark of life, he pulled wine in draughts to his lips; like he drank in, not spirits, but soul.  

"Are you ever scared of hell?" I asked as we sat on your porch. You laughed at me. Not as if I said something funny, but something tragic.

"Scared of hell? No. Not of hell." It was so matter of fact, so terse. You must have seen the question on my face, though.

"I don't fear hell. If it's even real it's your Gods way of telling us we can't escape what makes us tragic. Everyone wants to save themselves but that phantom of yours he had it right. We can't save ourselves and we can't save each other. There ain't no messiahs here." You took a long drink of wine as the sun hid it's face. "Thats the funny thing too. This life is a misery, so violent and strange. And were locked in you know. That's what hell is. This life is what you call hell. We want to be free but we can only force our will on everything that's thrown in our faces. We have to exist like this. The box of the world is locked shut. Our free will is a pleasant fiction we talk about, kind of like love. But in telling this story its like we want to come to the defense of lightning. To explain its sudden bursting, its randomness, the great shearing blare of its light, the sheer ebullition of its existence, which seems to defy law and the set, given order. To defend it is to not comprehend it. To defend and explain the unexplainable is to codify and domesticate it by the mundane. One cannot defend spontaneity. The story we tell of how we can and do have freedom here is a fool’s tale. One cannot live freedom in this plane of the world, for to live life is to exist within the given, but to be free is to be spontaneous and unhindered by limited possibilities. Are then not life and freedom contradictions? But that Mad Russian was right when he wrote about it in his stories. If freedom is what we will, and unfreedom is that which just is and isn't willed by us--well then the only truest freedom is suicide. If you take your life, he said, you tell the universe your will is higher than that mere given of your existence. You are free like lightning and in your very freedom you disappear.  Burst like light, and vanish. What did he write in that book of his? Only he who dares to commit suicide becomes a god? What a strange truth."

I wasn't sure what to make of what you said, but you didn't give me much time to process it. You shook your head at me.

"Dont give me that surprised look like this is so new to you. Or don't you ever think about what you believe? Your Gods sayin' the same thing. He's telling you if you try to free yourself you become nothing. Ain't that the whole thing of grace like your preachers say? You free yourself without that big man in the sky of yours and you jump from the given into the void. The only true freedom, he was saying, comes from elsewhere, and isnt locked in. Its a flash that remains a flash, that remains free from what is, and what has been. No we’re locked in without him. But if he does exist then that hell that’s caused so much spit to fly frothed from bible thumpin preachers mouths as they thresh and tremble from the pulpit is empty. If your God exists I heard he harrowed it, he raised some hell in hell, he threw the gates open--or haven't you heard? Don't you know your own damn stories? Hells not the problem."

You wiped wine off your lips before taking another deep draught of it. Crickets chimed and the opaline palor of the moon fell ragged to the ground and upon our faces, cut to shreds by the branches of intervening trees.  Oceans moaned in the vast midnight; and its spray was light on our noses as we breathed in its elegance, that fragile fragrance. You looked quietly at me with a look heavy with secrets. But wine had unlocked your mouth.

"Ill tell you something though. I don't believe but sometimes in my weaker moments I do and I fear that heaven that's comin'." Now I knew you were crazy. I laughed quietly at you since you had made so light a thing of hell--now you say you fear heaven?

"I think you're a little misinformed in your priorities." My chuckle was muted behind the crickets and the new rain pricking the porch roof in tiny dashes. But the sting of my laugh was not lost on you and Ill never forget that dirty look you shot at me.

"My priorities might be a mess but not the ways you be thinkin'. All you Christians talk about heaven but I don't think you take it seriously for what it would mean here and now."

"Whats that supposed to mean?"

"Ive seen it, all you Christians who have your fancy theologies and books the size of cars, you talk about that health and wealth nonsense and kick it to the curb like the Antichrist it is but you don't see it in yourselves. You all speak with its idiom. You say god gotta great plan for your life, that great things are gonna happen. Maybe. But don't you see the negative aspects of that heaven of yours? Paul talked about it and for Christs sake! He said he considered the whole world shit compared to Christ! Don't you realize my words? Or are you so hung up I said shit? Don't you know your Greek, boy? Paul used that very word! Heaven means that in this life we can become martyrs, that you can become a fool for Christ’s sake. It means that this life very well might be shit. All of it for Christ’s sake. THAT is what I fear of your truth.

“Know that I am no fool. That I am aware of what unthinkable splendor might await. But the unthinkable makes the mind reel. That's where my priorities are a mess. I can't think of heaven! It's unimaginable by definition! If I can think of it it's not heaven. If I can think of it, its not me who’s thinking! So let me ask you, who goes to heaven? It's not me because who I am, am finite and I cannot grasp it's rivers of infinite splendor. So someone else--someone better--must go for me. Some facsimile of me, a perfect me who is not me. That doppleganger, he'll lounge in paradise as me. Getting a mighty fine tan in the radiance of the divine. But he's not me! And where does the me that is me but can't comprehend paradise go? They don't speak of it. I can't be saved my boy. I'm the very thing that cannot be saved! And so I want my happiness now, I crave lesser hopes for the sake of the me who cannot bear heaven.  If I become infinite, I disappear; I who am this one here, this crag of flesh, riven by history, fixated by it.  And if I do not become infinite?  Then heaven itself will but ignite fire in my bones; its light will scrape me out from these little spaces of the air my flesh has claimed as its own; how will I stand such a blaze?  Such a God who is a Consuming Fire? But what is the truth I spoke of to you? Ain't it the most horrible paradox? I who cannot bare heaven also by the thought of your heaven face the shit of the world which that prophet Paul spoke of! I am damned twice by heaven because now this life has no guarantee of happiness for me, and yet I myself cannot be promised to a heaven too great for me!"

"You know it to be true! Isnt this why it is only after the whole world has drunk darkness and been raped by that whore death that the brightness of the light of New Jerusalem can shine? And isnt the New Jerusalem's light totalitarian, a panoptical field of total visibility to the Absolute? The utter light is the mortification of sleep, and the death of the dream to the violence of the One Real. Tell your gods, O’ Man, that I want to speak to their fathers! But there are no higher gods. They lie dead, slain by that lamb with a sword between its teeth. This is the great image of salvation. We die and we rise again, but in our death the we who rise is extricated from the we who fell. And all our dreams are exposed and purged by the light.  In the great light we will not dream.  And all the dreams we have dreamt will have fallen away."

“Or another fable: the Lord has lent you reprieve from death’s fear, has He not?  In the great abyssal cacophony of history, has not humankind dreamt of death as mere extension; life otherwise; by other means?  Is this not that glorious sadness which pervaded the mythic colloquium of the ancients?  Death is inevitable and final; but its threnody is but the inflection of a song repeated ever anew.  Like the seasons; like when summer gives away to fall and winter; only to burst again into spring.  Our deaths, they were like the ocean tide; ebbing, flowing.  Ending only to allow others to begin.  History will continue; we are grist upon its infinite mill.  But there was that Christian revolution, that impertinent interruption.  When the wall, when death, became the window to the other side.  Where death was now no longer natural but an enemy; where the vultures, once no affront to the world, now stood as figures of its mutilation.  So Christ rose; and Paul wrote: so shall the believers rise.  So.  Will you not now walk about in resurrection?  Your dry bones in the valley, will they not in the end ascend to Zion’s high peaks? And is this not the great and efflorescent Word of consolation: the Gospel; the evangelion which leaves its great crater upon history?”

“But look!  Behold the man!  What great trickery.  Such great reversal!  What good is man when his greatest impulse of spirit—that uttermost fear of death—is annulled?  Oh irony.  Oh torment!  That grossest sentiment is not that God should have died, but that man should not!  Or, that he should no longer.  Here now we face the test.  Here now the void shows itself in the uttermost of our redeemed hearts.  For what are we when deprived of this fear of death?  God again tricked us; redemption was a feint.  He stole death from us.  Redemption and our damnation are one.  Don’t look at me like that!  You know it to be true.  God stole death from us!  How can we now fight longer, push harder, give more, when the everlasting awaits us beyond every urge and amplitude earned by the prowess of flesh?  Salvation denudes.  Salvation bereaves.  What are we when that most powerful impulse of spirit—the fear of death—becomes convalescent?  When Christ took our fear in the garden—and then was raised—the boundary was destroyed. In our redemption we became absolutely nothing.  To save us, God threw out the last shreds of our truest humanity.

You paused again, sipping wine and losing yourself deep in thought.

"When I got divorced--you remember that?--when I got divorced my hope was to be loved again. And so my only hope is to bury heaven in that love, to bury it deep and languish here a little longer, I who cannot bear lofty transcendence. I want to be loved now, for how great an abyss it is to not be loved. But that security I had, hoping that I would find love again--oh how your heaven has robbed me of it! Dont you understand that this is heavens deepest truth? Dont you understand that your salvation is not your security here? It is the opposite! What did your lord say? Those who give up their lives save them? And those who save them lose them? Can you not see this is the mechanism of heaven moving on earth, that when you speak of God providing or God's great plans for you that you do not understand the gravity of those words for your life? Are not the martyrs, the twisted and horrible figures upon crosses and hewn on the ground with the birds making sport of their entrails, can they not too be the quintessence and culmination of service to God in this life? Are they not in their mortification and weakness God's great plan? You speak of heaven too lightly, like some bourgeois, like it was the guarantor of your inner hopes. But if heaven-the true glory!--is unimaginable, everything you imagine and want for your life is nothing, it is nothingness compared to heaven. And precisely because it is your hope! It is nothingness because it is my hope. You and I who are too small to comprehend the breadth and limits of the upper tiers—for us heaven is nothing.  And its no-thingness is disguised by a voice of supernal excess. This is a great truth! And I fear this above all. I am torn between two nothings. If your God is not, then nothing. If your God is, and heaven is, then I am naught.  That which I breathe, which I see, which I hope, which I await—is nothing; for heaven is the unthinkable, and so is unthought.  A blinding place, a binding place, a high life which will forget me.”

You gave out a long and mirthless laugh.  “Hell.  You ask me of hell.  All of those elaborate paintings with demons devouring and poking with their pitchforks and teeth; hellmouths devouring and the damned marching labrynthine.  They miss it.  The truth.  The true picture.  Hell is spoken of as fire, as heat, as blinding torrent.  But your God; that God of yours is described as a consuming fire.  A consuming fire.  Can’t you make that connection?  Your God IS Hell.  He is Hell to those unelect; His presence is a blinding presence and an absolute flame.  There is a long dark of innumerable nights before me, my son."

You spat on the ground and again were driven back to the bottle for another long draught. The night grew cold and I shivered under the frozen stars and the weeping rivulets of rain. But you again caught me off guard with a question of your own.

"Havent you seen for yourself, with those very same eyes looking at me now, that which I speak of? Didnt your aspirations and prayers come to nothing? Werent your hopes dashed? And you thought God was answering your prayers! I know how many times, in the long watches of the night, you prayed. So fervent, and reverent you were. On your knees petitioning that great One, ancient of days and nights. And then it happened, didnt it? You saw it unfolding, exactly as you had prayed! And love sprung back, and you were saved! Praise and hallelujah! First as tragedy, and then as hope! Or so you thought. And how specific you were with what you wanted, and how specific you thought you saw God's answer was: yes, yes to every little thing. Or so you thought.”

“And so when you were young did you not at times walk with someone whose legs looked like your fathers? And did you not look up much to your horror to see an enigmatic face peering back? How lost you were! But now you are more lost still for you thought you were walking with God. Looking up though it is an alien face and you have traveled a long road down into nowhere! Everything is as you never thought. And I know that you, even though you want to be pious, have that most insidious question like a splinter in the back of your mind: Does the Devil also hear my prayers, you ask ever so quiet. Does that great devouring lion hear my prayers and set a trap for me, masquerading as an angel of light, as the very Lord of Heaven? I told you that I believe in love like I believe in God. Such noble words! But the phrase is pitiable and can have two opposite meanings if uttered by either a pastor from the pulpit, or an atheist in the dregs of hell. I believe in love like I believe in God. But love is not here.

Where then is God?"

I looked down. It was an awful thing you were saying. And like always I was at a loss for words in the moment. I never knew the right thing to say when the moment came to say it. The very sky seemed to weep at your words, but I could only sit silent and rock in the old creaking chair. And you were quiet for a time too, sitting in your chair, attacking another bottle of wine.

"You drunk!" I said playfully, hoping to lighten the mood from this awful conversation and mask the fact that I had nothing substantial to add. But like a master helmsman you steered it back on dreary course.

"Don't call me a drunk!" You said, with some mock anger on your face, and another part of a sarcastic delight that the conversation took a turn to this topic. Something was brewing in your mind. Shadow poured down your face like liquid, and you looked at me, eyes meandering with the upheaval of spirits in your system.

"Havent you been listening?" you slurred at me "Did you not listen to what I said? To what the Lord Himself was saying?"

"Im pretty sure what you were saying has nothing to do with what the Lord said." I wasnt about to concede your point, you werent going to get the best of me again, especially now drunk.

"Oh but they do!" You replied, pointing your gnarled finger at me like a weapon. "Your God's blood is wine!" You almost yelled with a joy into the vast dark of the night.  “Let us now take Eucharist together!”  Another pull of wine, spirits into your spirit underneath the coastline lights. Some wine spilled on the floor as your gestures became more wild. "Your God's blood is wine, and so when I twist off the cork and turn my blood to wine do I not become God? Do I not now sit like God above the troubles of the world, unperturbed? Am I not a visage of how your messiah gives himself to the world after his ascension? With his blood? This is communion with His harmony, your Christ is inebriation."

You flung an empty bottle into a corner of the dark and stood up, looking at me with a resolute despair.

"Your Christ softens the void. Nothing more. He is a crutch. A blanket thrown over the real truth of oblivion. Didn't we kill him, saying we did not want him? And didnt he rise again, saying he did not want us? Oh, of course the gospel says otherwise. He died for us. He rose for us. Isnt this the greatest trick! One that God jests to Ezekiel, asking O son of man can these bones live? But how does a mortal live forever? Such is the sleight of hand. A mortal who becomes immortal becomes other than himself, and so in being raised after we killed him, is this not God's Yes to our No? Or the other way, is this not Gods agreeing No to our No to Christ? We reject Christ, and most sinister of all we are rejected by God by what appears at first as acceptance. But in rising Christ proceeds forever forward beyond us. And isnt his ascension into the sky not--as that anonymous author of the book of Hebrews so painstakingly put it--his movement toward God as our high priest but precisely the opposite? He ascends away from us, and this is the true movement of the resurrection. This is the final moment and perfection of the alienation your God affirms. My nihilism is the child of a two thousand year promise of an infinite return that never happened--that is now just the long stretch of times waste. How does that play end? Saying "surely Mr. Godot will arrive tomorrow." The greatest trick. The greatest trick indeed. He has given us infinite, endless hope! But such is the ruse! For what else is endless hope but madness, self perpetuating and fecund? And so his offering to us of himself as wine is the last vestige of a pity, of a pity knowing what damnation we have wrought for ourselves in this ultimate double rejection. There is no glory left but in drunkenness."