Please-Tame Me!
The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
“Please–tame me!” he said.
“I want to, very much,” the prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore. If you want a friend, tame me…”
“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.
“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me–like that–in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day…”- The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Words have been my source of exhaustion more than I’d like to admit, words read in the leaves of a book, spoken by me or you, by he or she. There is a key to closeness that you cannot hold in your pocket but comes only with your eyes or the proximity of your being. Is the missing word your or my?
It is the exhaustion that destroys me most. The places a soul goes to discover what other surroundings cannot bring have become so crowded, so loud. Such a place can be only lonely, and with such awareness, I sit a little further every day…
Me– the dog who bites his own stitches, the soldier preferring the medal to the trench, if only I were honest. Don’t be mistaken, don’t even be taken. I’m not clear, I’m not tame, I’m only wanting. Were you sitting a little closer you would know that.
But if I were asked what I really want, which pathology or awareness to return to sender, which experience to undo, which control to regain, it would be none of these. It would only be to finally be worth it– worth the silence, worth the words, worth a look from the center of your eye. Only in silence can contradiction make sense.
And so far this just isn’t making sense. I must have mistaken our roles, because I’m either directionally challenged, or the closer I sit every day brings me closer to far away. So maybe it should be you taming me.
The Mirage
Within two weeks even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller. Sanford called it geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the the sun compass and the odometer mileage and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.
- The English Patient, pg246
The Desert
The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis. The places water came to and touched… Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.
- The English Patient, p138
On Beauty
And a poet said, “Speak to us of Beauty.”
…
The tired and the weary say, “beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”
But the restless say, “We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.”
…
All these things have you said of beauty.
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.
…
[B]eauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, Beauty (abridged)
The Final Harbor, The Repose of Mutual If
The mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? in what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter CXIV
Dustin and I spoke tonight of progression. By the time two Horse Brass beers apiece had fogged our proverbial mirrors, we’d referred in repetition to the journeys traveled and the search for the great peace of the soul that we may perhaps find glimpses of, but will effectively face countless books and conversations with the same ifs until we too find it in the grave. I suppose it doesn’t prevent us from scratching around in the dirt on the way down that road, hoping it could be found there among the ruts.
I told my roommate Michal last night that among my theology is included the shrug. I didn’t use that actual term but its one that had escaped me when I needed it most. (shrugs are so passive, just when you need them most..) But really, the shrug. Why demand an answer who’s availability died that same moment humanity’s innocence became a question?
I have a willingness to leave questions unanswered. Yes, theological questions. Many of the same questions on which are spent books of writing and thought, the same questions that drive communities into separate churches, the same questions that build walls between friends, the same questions that drove men like Kierkegaard into social exile.
I have a gloomy mind at times, seeing first the negative aspects in progression. But among the reasons I am ok with a shrug answer is that I believe others are reacting just the same. Dustin is an ally in this. So is Michal. The social and technological progressions we have waltzed through have left us more room to consider the steps. More room to peacefully see each others’ shrugs and to notice the silly off-color dance it creates when the collective can be ok with itself in being a little off-color, because after all, the dusty ruts are no place to find answered ifs. But they are the place to find the best we have to work with: the repose of mutual if.
The Death of Isaac Babel
I’ve just finished reading one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. The book was not a life-saver but definitely a peace-giver. What else does one need in concerned times but to read about an old man, a great unrecognized author, who lost his only love as a young man and now performs silly acts of disruption just so people will notice him as he expects to die at any time, and a young detective of a girl named Alma after every girl in a rare book her father gave her mother when they first met?
The novel, in certain respects, is a story woven around a novel of the same name, written by a boy who’d loved a girl since age 10, only to lose her when she left Poland for the United States during World War 2.The novel contains snippets from the “internal” novel as well as other writings by the same fictitious author. The only writings more breathtaking than Krauss’s words in The History of Love are the writings by her fictitious authors within that novel, which of course, are also written by Krauss.
One particular string of articles included were a set of obituaries, written by a young character about the time he himself was also attempting to flea Poland. A few particularly stood out to me, and I’ll include one here, entitled The Death of Isaac Babel. (read about the real Isaac Babel here.)
Only after they charged him with the crime of silence did [Issac] Babel discover how many kinds of silences existed. When he heard music he no longer listened to the notes, but the silences in between. When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, not only intuition. And no one could accuse him of not being prolific in his chosen métier. Daily, he turned out whole epics of silence. In the beginning it had been difficult. Imagine the burden of keeping silent when your child asks you whether God exists, or the woman you love asks if you love her back. At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.
Even after they arrested him and burned all of his manuscripts, which were all blank pages, he refused to speak. Not even a groan when they gave him a blow to the head, a boot tip in the groin. Only at the last possible moment, as he faced the firing squad, did the writer Babel suddenly sense the possibility of his error. As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: There’s no match for the silence of God.
How does one see anything but slow motion or hear anything but distant echos after reading these two paragraphs? Such a powerful page leaves me in the same state as after I’d read for the first time, Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor: somewhere between staring in a mirror, asking if its really myself looking back, and weeping, silently or not, internally or not.
That is where it put me. A week later I’m finally writing about it. A week later I’m finally writing the first post containing more than one paragraph that I’ve written in a month. A week later I’m celebrating life with my Portland family and sharing the light and dark of my recent weeks. Josh Ritter said that only a full house will have a chance. Only a full house can bring the exponential meaning to both the silence and the sound. Chuck Cooper says we fly high and we fall hard. I want it no other way, because I have faith in the verses we’ve sung and the chorus to come.
Love Is Not Really One Of Man’s Powers
Notice this: that love is not really one of man’s powers. Man cannot achieve love, generate love, wield love, as he does his powers of destruction and creation. When I love someone, it is not something that I have achieved, but something that is happening through me, something that is happening to me as well as to him. To use the old soap-opera cliché seriously, it is something bigger than both of us, infinitely bigger, because wherever love enters this world, God enters.
- Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat
Take Heart, O Bulkington!
Herman Melville begins the unreasonably short chapter 23 of Moby Dick by mentioning Bulkington, a man who had landed just a few months ago from a previous four-year whaling voyage, and was already back at sea with the launching of the current expedition. As though land scorches his feet, Bulkington avoids the safety and comfort of port like the plague.
Melville calls the land pitiful to the seaman. Safety, warmth, supper, “all thats kind to our mortalities,” all that brings a man back to port after such a journey. But he goes on,
In the gale, [land] is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
And he soon continues:
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
The howling, infinite sea is the same fury of truth, the God, all that one cannot comprehend and one of the right mind would avoid. Yet it be not the mind that push one out to sea..
Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing – straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
Methinks
Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.
I’ve decided to reread Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick, because it been quite a few years. Probably something like ten. In many ways rereading well-written pieces of literature, fiction as well as non-fiction, is like reading them for the first time. The ideological and cognative distances I’ve traveled, at least to me, feel like oceans of both space and time. The passage above comes from the end of chapter seven, and of course I don’t remember a bit of it. I’m enjoying, and probably better understanding than the first time around, the King James style vernacular employed by Melville and the deluge of topical analogy that so compliments a first person narrative. Being one who always finds at least a smirk for the simple spiritual analogies, particularly those offered by simpler minds or characters such as Ishmael, I just had to share it. Lees, by the way, is the sediment of wine in the bottom of a curing barrel.
RSS Feed
RSS by Email
2 comments