morethanenoughtruth

It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise

(George Santayana, 1863)

I have long prayed, since when my pajamas had feet, to become a wise woman.  Every selfish entreaty with the Divine that began with passionate requests for intervention and salvation ended with the quiet whimper of acceptance: nevertheless Thy will, not mine, be done.  I begged only to become a wise woman.  Prayer after all consists mostly of positioning our lives to catch the holy wind.  Setting sails with love’s pure light will surely take us home.

He who seeks for Heaven alone to save his soul
May find the path but surely miss the goal,
While he who walks in love may wander  far
But God will lead him where the blessed are.

(Henry Van Dyke, 1852-1933)

I wonder in retrospect if I was harboring a suspicion that God will not answer prayer.  Maybe I’m only a cynic at heart.  What if I were to speak to the God of all creation expecting to be heard, to be answered, to receive bread… not a stone?  What if I made room for a simple faith?  It might be a life-changer.

“The feeling of done-and-done-and-done is so much fun.”  Binge-watching Fixer-Upper has planted a bug that plays on endless loop in my head.  Wayfair and HGTV have no idea how pervasive is their contribution to the collective consciousness.  The only cure seems to be replacing it with something more grounded.  I have found a rendition of the Mozart Requiem that is made to order.  Arsys Bourgogne is a French choral group that is everything a choir group should be.  They are pitch-perfect, and express their music with a lovely integrity that reaches into my very soul.  Their soloists embody the composer’s pure intent.  Always tuned to the soprano line, I appreciate her pure vowels, crisp consonants, tonal clarity, and sure sweet arch of phrase as melody becomes meaning.  European vowel production promises and delivers choral singing at its best.  I am enthralled, and hope my Wayfair bug will be extirpated and expunged.

My plan is to watch the Arsys Bourgogne Mozart every night before bed in hopes of getting some sleep.  It’d better work.  I am tired of lying in an attitude of sleep, counting ceiling tiles, and listening to Wayfair’s jingle play in my head.  God help me.  Clarity of insight is cool, but I really need to cut some zzz’s.

If that works maybe I can carry it a step farther.  Sleep knitting up the tattered sleeve of care is a must.  Shakespeare knew that.  With some restorative sleep I might actually dare to pray for a good death rather than lying abed and worrying, glassy eyed, about a slow and painful one.  Am I wise yet?  Just asking.

I am a certifiable genius in one specific area.  If there is a way to alienate a group of people, I will find a way to tap into that knowledge and make it happen.  I do this because?  If I don’t do that, they will beat me to it.  They will do it first.  Better that I should pre-empt the inevitable and leave me to the gratification of being the prime mover.

Chugging along in a quiet contentment is something I can do, but it is not basic to my nature.  It feels like something contrived, like something undertaken as stasis between significant events, a balance achieved but precarious at best, and waiting for chaos to assert dominion.  Being overstimulated always brings fluidity to the balance.  Stimulation, whether for good or ill, can bring down a house of cards, a suspension of Junga blocks, or a period of insightful self-control.

Stimulants are legion.  Positive ones include music, poetry, writing, conversation, human touch, happy faces, good food, warm mittens, cool breezes.  But any of these can be turned on their heads to yield inverses.  Consider hard rock, cop killer rap, political propaganda,  hateful diatribes, beatings, smiling rictii, lip-smacking gluttony,  global warming to extinction, a jet stream gone amok yielding violent weather events that ultimately usher in global dystopia.  Point made: stimulation is wonderful until it isn’t.  But good or bad, stimulation tips balance.

I need people but do best socializing one person at a time.  Two generates a triad with the inherent tension of the construct.  Who gets attention?  This one or that?  Him or me?  More than two is a group, and all bets are off.  If I am a different person depending on whom I am addressing, who am I in a group?  A problem.  Just sitting in a room with multiple persons is a potent stimulant.  I will never be whole in a group with every aspect of myself engaging disparate faces.  In a choir, singers all face the director, a benevolent autocracy.  One of my mother’s favorite questions was, “What will people think?”  Corollary to that was, “If you act like that, they’ll think you’re not quite right.”

My typical reply: “Good.  I don’t care what they think.  What people think of me is none of my business.”  Of course that is a lie.  I do care.  I worry that I will say the wrong thing and offend.  A nice old woman would remain silent.  I resent that I must be silent when I want, even need, to be known.  Anger builds.  If I am addressed I will say the very thing that will be sure to offend, even alienate.  Better to reject you before you can reject me.  Proof that it is I, not you, who is in control.  Lose control and die.  All this before anybody even says a word.

We have come full circle.

Now where must I roll?

Chugging down the track,

again I ride the rails,

I can do it.

Yes I can.

I can do it if I think I can.

I think I can.

I think I can.

Will I do it?

I know I can.

I will!

Life is so much better now that I have embraced the reality of poverty.  My struggle to survive gives my days meaning.  When I had more than enough money, I typically felt maudlin.  It was such a nuisance to have to find an even newer and more exciting place to go for dinner each night.  Kenneth, my dear and ever predictable husband didn’t care where we ate.  He just wanted to please me, but his lack of personal preference only infuriated me.  He didn’t understand the energy of desire.  When you can have anything you want, nothing has value. You are permanently unsatisfied in a hell of your own making.  Bankruptcy and divorce solved that quandary.  Now I feel rich because the little that I have has worth and actually gives me pleasure.

In the world of food, yo-yo dieting has taught me a lot about differentiating brain hunger and belly hunger.  Real belly hunger sharpens appreciation of food, while eating when you aren’t really hungry is the hollowness that no amount of food can fill.   I thought a lot about this and decided to experiment with cookies.

Keebler Pecan Sandies presented themselves as the perfect medium for my study.  Curling up with a good book or in front of the television set with a virgin package of Keeblers portended the yearned for satisfaction of earthly desire. It’s odd how I needed the anesthetic of book or Television to make this cameo replete.  Conversely, eating with awareness, i.e. addressing my full attention to incising, masticating, savoring, and swallowing the cookies one after the other, made me nervous and derailed the engine of self delusion.  Having to face the truth of my mindless eating spoiled the effect.

So, I modified the protocol, titrating my intake and observing the result.  Four cookies on a saucer is an ample but marginally realistic dosage of Pecan Sandie for a grown woman.  More is ridiculous.  Trying to eat slowly, I worked to enjoy each bite, the satisfying crunch, the grinding of jaws that chew, not only the pastry but the slippery nut of repressed rage.  Equally enjoyable but less orally athletic was the subtle sweetness neither overpowered by  runaway gratification of chocolate or caramel, nor the lush emolument of fat, the prize ingredient that makes shortbread short and food stand in for love.  Better than sex?  Well, that’s another question, titillation for another day’s conjecture.

My human brain, so easily distracted, allowed me to slip into a reverie of evaluation, observing rather than enjoying the ingestion of my kuchen.  Before I knew what had happened, three of the four were gone.  One remained but did not appeal.  I reached for it but stopped.  Why eat what I don’t want?  I put it back in the bag.

I had really started something when I began to observe my cookie addiction at work and at play.  Every bite was different depending on order of ingestion.  The first bite was glorious, taste buds snapping to full attention, nerves that activate the sphincters controlling salivary gland outflow struck by the lightning of bio-electric discharge.  The second one was gratifying, mostly because of the chewing and grinding.  The third one spoke to the “mine all mine” reflex but had little of taste to recommend it.

I remember the arousal called forth by the shiny colorful pristine bag, the attractive association of interesting cookie shapes with past gustatory delight, the triumph of the conquering bite, the satisfying rumination of chewing, the final denouement of the swallow.  All those I recall, but I can’t summon nor even begin to recreate the divine joy, anticipated, acknowledged,  then gone in less than an instant.

Mindless eating promises only a Pyrrhic victory over existential angst.  It’s not worth the blubber left behind as testament to gluttony.  We must eat mindfully and with joy, in the manner that we gracefully partake of every wonderful thing.  Indeed, must every moment be lived mindfully in order to enjoy the full measure of its happiness?

The Monday Morning Writers Group might appreciate knowing what is going on in my strange essay, “Gnarly Knowing”.  (Please see January 15, 2012 posting.)  That’s reasonable and understandable.  When I first presented this piece to the group, my last resounding words were met with a silence so dense I could have sliced it and served it on a plate.  I hadn’t intended for us to actually enter the Cave of Silence.  The group sat in shocked stillness, surreptitiously glancing around the table to share the question on their faces: Is this woman nuts?  Fair question.

Writers are familiar with the concept of “point of view”.  The writing flows from a defined vantage point: If “I” am telling the story it becomes much more intimate than if “He” is telling it.  An “Omniscient” viewpoint knows all and can tell all.  “Gnarly Knowing” postulates and demonstrates a new viewpoint wherein metaphor tells the story.

Inside the Cave of Silence, the metaphors assemble.  They wait for inevitable visits from the writer who in unguarded moments of dream or meditation or bouts of solitude come to visit and explore.  They exist for a single noble purpose: they express raw truth.

I can only describe my cave since it is impossible for me to enter any other, but it is reasonable to assume that what I experience is available to others.  My many years of asking “why” and “why not” have taught me that no feeling or idea is self proprietary.  Any insights I ever achieved had already been expressed by others quicker and smarter.  But what I am speaking of here is a personal cave, personal to me and what the flow of my conscious thought has carved out of the rock of my own reality.  See?  We have already entered the cave.  Every concept is quickened by metaphors that hang around waiting for some nascent thought to pass by and press them into service.

My cave itself is a homey place.  How could it be other, carved as it was in my own dark subterranean mystery, growing from ooze, to seep, to stream, to mighty river of expression.  As roiling torrent breaks out into light and air, both reader and writer take a shared breath.  We have come through this adventure together, buoyed by a joined trust, moved by a poet’s vision, affirmed by the resonance of reader and writer, embodied by the many metaphors lurking like bats hanging from the dripping arches of my cave.  Such a moist place breeds life.  Where there is life there is the capacity for thought, however rudimentary.  Even the lowly snail carries in its unique nerve cell array a microcosm of the mechanism that produced the Harvard Classics.

In my cave, I am caught between microcosm and macrocosm, in my own personal chasm.  I can vision infinity in either direction, but I rail at being stuck in my spot in this hierarchy of fractal branching.  The universe isn’t fair; why must I be so imprisoned?  Why me?  I am put in my place by the limitations of my being.  Who am I?  A being called human crouched before a computer screen, on a planet circling a minor star, in a galaxy that spirals about a black hole somewhere in a roiling universe of suns; conversely and reflectively, I am a conglomeration of systems and organs and cells and molecules and the atoms, electrons, neutrons, quarks and bosons they comprise, in an ever-diminishing expression of the incipient reality we call energy.  I will be imprisoned here until some form of life discovers the answer to the ultimate questions: who, what, when, where, why are we?  Are there other dimensions, out of time, out of mind, or in a Twilight Zone inhabited only by metaphor?  Until that is clarified, perhaps poetry dreamed in the Silent Cave is the only consolation.

“Gnarly Knowing” was conceived in my cave out of raw passion impregnated by seeds of raw truth.  My description of what happens in that cave carries the use of metaphor to absurdity.  I’m hoping that exercise will clarify what I was trying to do.  If it still doesn’t make sense, it might be useful to switch viewpoints, to wit:

Dorothy J. Martin, aspiring writer, had a dream.  When her alarm went off, she pressed snooze, lay abed and thought it through.  It was fascinating and deserved to be recorded.  She rose, washed teeth, and showered.  Then she sat at the computer and realized she had forgotten the dream entire.  It was gone.

Then she decided that the wisdom carried by the symbolism of the dream must have already become part of her integrated matrix of understanding during REM processing.  This self-serving rationalization made her feel better, so she decided to write a poem about it, to have faith in her basic thought process, and to spend the rest of her life enjoying the craft of writing.

But hedging her bets, she resolved on future awakenings to write first and wash later.

As wishes turn into kisses

And longings turn softly to sighs,

The lust in me stirs and remembers

How tender, how sweet were our cries.

* * *

As our lips touch gently and linger,

While our eyes meet and shimmer and shine,

The earth stops and waits in its turning

                                         As our hands and our hearts intertwine.

This represents a dream entire, set down honestly and without augmentation or interpretation.  It amazes me to learn what passes through a nighttime brain quietly at peace in sleep.

* * *

The dream began as a large convocation of women.  There were seats enough for all, even one left for me.  I approached its hard emptiness with trepidation, not sure it could really be mine.  Several women beckoned, assuring me that it was for me and I was for it.  I felt much better.  A man urged me forward, pressing a round object into my hand.  I opened my fingers and gaped at a gold coin gleaming with a newly-minted shine.  It too was really for me, and I grasped it as if it meant absolutely everything.

No sooner had I taken my seat but the mass of women began to murmur among themselves.  The whispering assumed a life of its own, moving in waves throughout the assemblage.  It lulled and soothed me as I assumed it did everyone in the quiet crowd.  I breathed deeply, relaxed, and waited.  This must have been somewhere in Asia, for the women  were wrapped in loose flowing garments but they didn’t cover their faces and hair.  Interspersed among the nondescript patterned wraps, was an entire spectrum of pastel satins.  These were each decorated with complex patterns formed by stitched areas that enclosed subtle puffed strands of down, slightly elevated from the base surface of satin.  I appreciated the beauty and nuance of the designs.  They were non-representational though conceptual in the abstract, and they spoke to me, as they must have to any with eyes to see and admire them.  One by one, the satin attired women rose and progressed toward the exit doors.  One by one they passed through and out of sight.  They moved slowly, not looking back.  I watched and wondered what this meant to me, to each and to all of us.

The last woman moved toward the portal.  Unlike her sisters she sat, a graceful form riding a long square beam.  It appeared to be approximately 2” x 2” x 20 feet in length.  It was made of wood but responded to the woman’s weight as if demonstrating the rigidity of steel.  There was no bending, no sagging.  Two young males dressed only in loin wraps carried the beam bearing its load at each end.  The woman sat gracefully, one hip hitched over the beam, her ankles crossed modestly.  I tried to assess her age, but she had none, her bearing appearing ageless.  She sat, head up, shoulders back, each arm a graceful cascade flowing down to grasp the beam.  Her dress was a shimmer of white lace, the skirt drawn toward the ends of the beam so as to display the exquisite handiwork in unabashed splendor.  I looked at her face.  It was merely skull and translucent skin; a parchment overlay depicting all the expressions impressed on the face of a life completely lived.  This woman had fully inhabited the trail of her years.  She had lived each step in totality.  Even her raiment, once the same as her sisters, exquisite satin hieroglyphically textured, had been transformed into the living energy that moving relative to time universally creates.  Only essential structure remained, as lovely bones and the bare skeletal substrate of fabric, once satin, now preserved structurally as swaths of sentient lace.  The woman rode, proud and serene, and slowly passed from view to a place woven of her own desire and imagining.

I lifted my hand, a gesture of farewell and longing.