it is clear, is it
not
that humanity
is an overripe peach
we cannot taste until we
have thoroughly razed it
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
Asceticism
If Life and Love are art, then
Death is ArtA Bleak Celestial Art
(Aesthetic Art
Athletic
Art)
When pinched and pluffed until
It looks like Life
(And lo, we slowly sip what looks like
Life
What is only Death Disfigured
What is simply Life Dismembered).
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
26 May
Secretly, I think that if I could arrive even close to the brink of comprehension (or perhaps only misunderstand a little less completely) the enormity of the Opportunity with which I have been blessed, I would pass out in wonder and horror. For although with Opportunity comes, well, opportunity, there is also the shrinking: do not expect this from me. Resist success and she shall flee from you. But that has been banished: we are meant to be free from such restrictions, to live buoyantly under our enormous awning of love. And all shall be well and all manner of things will be well.
It
It is my great Tap Root,
This place I am trying to get to.
Strung up way above
Love,
And clenched into itself like
A muscle.
It is only the Hand because I
Am the Clock, biting time into
Ticks with my great static sword.
It is a Holocaust, this garden
To whom I am Lioness.
I stand still; and it crucifies, crucifies.
This place I am trying to get to.
Strung up way above
Love,
And clenched into itself like
A muscle.
It is only the Hand because I
Am the Clock, biting time into
Ticks with my great static sword.
It is a Holocaust, this garden
To whom I am Lioness.
I stand still; and it crucifies, crucifies.
And it is I
Who must pass and repass It
Parasitic, mercenary liquid,
Solidity only to spaces.
Who must pass and repass It
Parasitic, mercenary liquid,
Solidity only to spaces.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: A Grief Observed
Fate delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven went deaf. By our standards a mean joke.
-CSL
You tell me, 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle, touching my circle on the plain of nature.
-CSL
Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?
-CSL
It this last note a sign that I'm incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I'm doing now?
-CSL
What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?
-CSL
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumption so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them-- never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
-CSL
For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives... a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
-CSL
-CSL
You tell me, 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle, touching my circle on the plain of nature.
-CSL
Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?
-CSL
It this last note a sign that I'm incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I'm doing now?
-CSL
What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?
-CSL
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumption so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them-- never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
-CSL
For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives... a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
-CSL
Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: The Problem of Pain
(Our) race is doomed. Every race that comes into being in any part of the universe is doomed; for the universe, they tell us, is running down, and will sometime be a unifrom infinity of homogenous matter at a low temperature. All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter.
-CSL
All men stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt. the second element in religion is the consciousness not merely of a moral law, but of a moral law at once approved and disobeyed. This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find it there. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
-CSL
There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be 'one with', the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking-- a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly-- that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.
-CSL
If any message from the core of reality ever were to reach us, we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness, that wilful, dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the Christian faith. It has the master touch-- the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.
-CSL
Love can forbear, and Love can forgive... but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object... He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored.
- Traherne
The Divine 'goodness' differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.
-CSL
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much as a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven-- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'A good time was had by all.'... I should very much like to live in a universe which was goverened on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.
-CSL
Kindness, merely as such, cares ot whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering... If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
-CSL
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something which He will not be satisfied with until it has a certain character... In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed us for a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then are wishing not for more love but for less.
-CSL
-CSL
All men stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt. the second element in religion is the consciousness not merely of a moral law, but of a moral law at once approved and disobeyed. This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find it there. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
-CSL
There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be 'one with', the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking-- a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly-- that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.
-CSL
If any message from the core of reality ever were to reach us, we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness, that wilful, dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the Christian faith. It has the master touch-- the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.
-CSL
Love can forbear, and Love can forgive... but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object... He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored.
- Traherne
The Divine 'goodness' differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.
-CSL
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much as a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven-- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'A good time was had by all.'... I should very much like to live in a universe which was goverened on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.
-CSL
Kindness, merely as such, cares ot whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering... If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
-CSL
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something which He will not be satisfied with until it has a certain character... In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed us for a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then are wishing not for more love but for less.
-CSL
Israel is the pauper bride, the waif whom her Lover found abandoned by the wayside, 'Adulteresses' St James calls us, because we turn aside to the 'friendship of the world', while God 'jealously longs for the spirit He has implanted in us'. The Church is the Lord's bride whom He so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasise is that love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love.
-CSL
When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested', because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one.
-CSL
We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'. To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable.
-CSL
God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty-- of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God's love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability.
-CSL
God is goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive.
-CSL
If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.
-CSL
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunitic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. But God will sour good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces.
-CSL
We are biddden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
-CSL
God gives us what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God-- to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response-- to be miserable-- these are the only three alternatives. If we will n ot learn to eat the only food that the universe grows-- the only food that any possible universe can ever grow-- than we must starve eternally.
-CSL
The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place'... though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste or humble.
-CSL
Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are adressed.
-CSL
A God who did not regard (our sin) with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God-- it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink.
-CSL
If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance or inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.
-William Law
Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his 'faith in human nature' who is really sad.
-CSL
From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.... It is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it.
-CSL
They wanted, as we say, to 'call their souls their own'. But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, 'This is our business, not yours.' But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.
-CSL
In the world as we now know it, the problem is how to recover the self-surrender. We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are rebels who must lay down our arms.
-CSL
...I call (God using pain as a 'megaphone to a deaf world') a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.
-CSL
Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansiuons. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you-- you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith.
-CSL
The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken'.
-CSL
From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever.
-CSL
22 may
when people leave, they get lopped out of you, like organs. i wonder how much lopping can a human endure? lopped off clean, all those little roots we worked so hard to web together, and i bleeding uselessly all over them. the gaps grow back, but there's that sometimes-ache of the dead bits that now and then make themselves known. blood, blood and always blood: why is every imagery of blood, of being lopped into bits? is this really all we know? there is so much joy and i speak of being lopped to bits. but you made me who i am, every one of you, and take chunks of muscle with you when you go.
there is trouble, there is always trouble; but there is peace. it is no deadener of madness-- rather its deliverer. in contentedness madness can be beautiful. i can even watch myself be lopped into bits with a strange content serenity, for i have a Father who lives just to sew up the lopped off bits. and he takes care of the dangerous incorrigibleness which is my savior and my vice. how muddled we've made things; how terribly irrevocably muddled.
there is trouble, there is always trouble; but there is peace. it is no deadener of madness-- rather its deliverer. in contentedness madness can be beautiful. i can even watch myself be lopped into bits with a strange content serenity, for i have a Father who lives just to sew up the lopped off bits. and he takes care of the dangerous incorrigibleness which is my savior and my vice. how muddled we've made things; how terribly irrevocably muddled.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: The Great Divorce
No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it-- no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.
-George MacDonald
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.
-CSL
Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
-CSL
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their resue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.
-CSL
Don't you remember on Earth-- there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it-- if you will drink the cup to the bottom-- you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.
-CSL
Every one of us lives only to journey further and further....And it would be no use to come (closer to the one whom you would try to save) even if it were possible. The sane would do not good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
-CSL
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell.
-CSL
Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer (to heaven) than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.
-CSL
There's something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil.
-CSL
'Get back! You're burning me. How can I tell you to kill (my particular pet sin)? You'd kill me if you did.'
'It is not so.'
'Why, you're hurting me now.'
'I never said it wouldn't hurt you. I said it wouldn't kill you.'
-CSL
Overcome us that, so overcome, we may be ourselves: we desire the beginning of your reign as we desire dawn and dew, wetness at the birth of light.
-CSL
What needs could I have (said she) now that I have all? I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. You shall be the same. Come and see. We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.
-CSL
Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenceless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know tha tnow. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?
-CSL
If it would help you and if it were possible I would go down with you into Hell: but you cannot bring Hell into me.... I cannot love a lie. I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love, and out of it I will not go.
-CSL
It must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.
-CSL
'I see,' said I at last. 'She couldn't fit into Hell.'
He nodded. 'There's not room for her,' he said. 'Hell could not open its mouth wide enough.'
'And she couldn't make herself smaller?-- like Alice, you know.'
'Nothing like small enough For a damned soul is nearly n othing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.'
-CSL
Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom.
-CSL
The Lord said we were gods. How long could ye bear to look (without Time's lens) on the greatness of your own soul and the eternal reality of her choice?
-CSL
'It comes, it comes!' they sang. 'Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.' One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed-- not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the fold of my Teacher's robe. 'The morning! The morning!' I cried, 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.' But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head.
-CSL
-George MacDonald
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.
-CSL
Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
-CSL
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their resue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.
-CSL
Don't you remember on Earth-- there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it-- if you will drink the cup to the bottom-- you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.
-CSL
Every one of us lives only to journey further and further....And it would be no use to come (closer to the one whom you would try to save) even if it were possible. The sane would do not good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
-CSL
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell.
-CSL
Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer (to heaven) than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.
-CSL
There's something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil.
-CSL
'Get back! You're burning me. How can I tell you to kill (my particular pet sin)? You'd kill me if you did.'
'It is not so.'
'Why, you're hurting me now.'
'I never said it wouldn't hurt you. I said it wouldn't kill you.'
-CSL
Overcome us that, so overcome, we may be ourselves: we desire the beginning of your reign as we desire dawn and dew, wetness at the birth of light.
-CSL
What needs could I have (said she) now that I have all? I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. You shall be the same. Come and see. We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.
-CSL
Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenceless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know tha tnow. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?
-CSL
If it would help you and if it were possible I would go down with you into Hell: but you cannot bring Hell into me.... I cannot love a lie. I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love, and out of it I will not go.
-CSL
It must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.
-CSL
'I see,' said I at last. 'She couldn't fit into Hell.'
He nodded. 'There's not room for her,' he said. 'Hell could not open its mouth wide enough.'
'And she couldn't make herself smaller?-- like Alice, you know.'
'Nothing like small enough For a damned soul is nearly n othing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.'
-CSL
Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom.
-CSL
The Lord said we were gods. How long could ye bear to look (without Time's lens) on the greatness of your own soul and the eternal reality of her choice?
-CSL
'It comes, it comes!' they sang. 'Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.' One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed-- not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the fold of my Teacher's robe. 'The morning! The morning!' I cried, 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.' But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head.
-CSL
Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: Miracles
This troublesomeness does not of course prove (Christianity) to be true; but if it were true it would be bound to have this troublesomeness. The real musician is similarly troublesome to a man who wishes to indulge in untaught 'musical appreciation'; the real historian is similarly a nuisance when we want to romance about 'the old days' or 'the ancient Greeks and Romans'. The ascertained nature of any real thing is always at first a nuisance to our natural fantasies-- a wretched, pedantic, logic-chopping intruder upon a conversation which was getting on famously without it.
-CSL
Laws give us only a universe of 'Ifs and Ands': not this universe which actually exists. What we know through laws and general principles is a series of connections. But in order for there to be a real universe the connections must be given something to connect; a torrent of opaque actualities must be fed into the pattern. If God created the world, then He is precisely the source of this torrent, and it alone gives our truest principles anything to be true about.
-CSL
Unless the origin of all other things were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality. Bookkeeping, continued to all eternity, could never produce one farthing. Metre, of itself, could never produce a poem.
-CSL
It is clear that there was never a time when nothing existed; otherwise nothing would exist now. But to exist means to be a positive SOmething, to have (metaphorically) a certain shape or structure, to be this and not that. The Thing which always existed, namely God, has therefore always had His own positive character... We know that He invents, acts, creates. After that there can be no ground for assuming in advance that He does not do miracles.
-CSL
At each step we have to strip off from our idea of God some human attribute. But the only real reason for strippin goff the human attribute is to make room for putting in some positive divine attribute. In St Paul's language, the purpose of all this unclothing is not that our idea of God should reach nakedness but that it should be reclothed.
-CSL
Silences in the physical world occur in empty places: but the ultimate Peace is silent through very density of life. Saying is swallowed up in being. There is no movement because His action (which is Himself) is timeless. You might, if you wished, call it movement at an infinite speed, which is the same thing as rest, but reached by a different-- perhaps a less misleading-- way of approach.
-CSL
There is certainly a state of war. But not a war of mutual destruction. (Human) Nature by dominating spirit wrecks all spiritual activities: spirit by dominating Nature confirms and improves natural activities.
-CSL
Spirit and Nature have quarrelled in us; that is our disease. Nothing we can yet to enables us to imagine its complete healing.
-CSL
...That we should see a miracle is even less likely. Nor, if we understand, shall we be anxious to do so. 'Nothing almost sees miracles but misery.' Miracles and martyrdoms tend to bunch about the same areas of history-- areas we have naturally no wish to frequent. Do not, I earnestly advise you, demand an ocular proof unless you are already perfectly certain that it is not forthcoming.
-CSL
All creatures of course live from God in the sense that HE made them and at every moment maintains them in existance. But there is a further and higher kind of 'life from God' which can be given only to a creature who voluntarily surrenders himself to it. This life the good angels have and the bad angels have not: and it is absolutely Supernatural because no creature in any world can have it by the mere fact of being the sort of creature it is.
-CSL
The regenerate man will find his soul eventually harmonised with his spirit by the life of Christ that is in him.
-CSL
-CSL
Laws give us only a universe of 'Ifs and Ands': not this universe which actually exists. What we know through laws and general principles is a series of connections. But in order for there to be a real universe the connections must be given something to connect; a torrent of opaque actualities must be fed into the pattern. If God created the world, then He is precisely the source of this torrent, and it alone gives our truest principles anything to be true about.
-CSL
Unless the origin of all other things were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality. Bookkeeping, continued to all eternity, could never produce one farthing. Metre, of itself, could never produce a poem.
-CSL
It is clear that there was never a time when nothing existed; otherwise nothing would exist now. But to exist means to be a positive SOmething, to have (metaphorically) a certain shape or structure, to be this and not that. The Thing which always existed, namely God, has therefore always had His own positive character... We know that He invents, acts, creates. After that there can be no ground for assuming in advance that He does not do miracles.
-CSL
At each step we have to strip off from our idea of God some human attribute. But the only real reason for strippin goff the human attribute is to make room for putting in some positive divine attribute. In St Paul's language, the purpose of all this unclothing is not that our idea of God should reach nakedness but that it should be reclothed.
-CSL
Silences in the physical world occur in empty places: but the ultimate Peace is silent through very density of life. Saying is swallowed up in being. There is no movement because His action (which is Himself) is timeless. You might, if you wished, call it movement at an infinite speed, which is the same thing as rest, but reached by a different-- perhaps a less misleading-- way of approach.
-CSL
There is certainly a state of war. But not a war of mutual destruction. (Human) Nature by dominating spirit wrecks all spiritual activities: spirit by dominating Nature confirms and improves natural activities.
-CSL
Spirit and Nature have quarrelled in us; that is our disease. Nothing we can yet to enables us to imagine its complete healing.
-CSL
...That we should see a miracle is even less likely. Nor, if we understand, shall we be anxious to do so. 'Nothing almost sees miracles but misery.' Miracles and martyrdoms tend to bunch about the same areas of history-- areas we have naturally no wish to frequent. Do not, I earnestly advise you, demand an ocular proof unless you are already perfectly certain that it is not forthcoming.
-CSL
All creatures of course live from God in the sense that HE made them and at every moment maintains them in existance. But there is a further and higher kind of 'life from God' which can be given only to a creature who voluntarily surrenders himself to it. This life the good angels have and the bad angels have not: and it is absolutely Supernatural because no creature in any world can have it by the mere fact of being the sort of creature it is.
-CSL
The regenerate man will find his soul eventually harmonised with his spirit by the life of Christ that is in him.
-CSL
spring song
spring hums
its one great obscenity,
that dead things
are not healed
but hidden
(eden's only lie
my lie:
my stance the
sword-swallowers stance)
it is clear now, is it
not that snow is
only
surrogate happiness
its one great obscenity,
that dead things
are not healed
but hidden
(eden's only lie
my lie:
my stance the
sword-swallowers stance)
it is clear now, is it
not that snow is
only
surrogate happiness
Friday, May 15, 2009
another VGP (Very Good Poem)
If I stand (by Inger Christensen)
If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock
how else would eternity
find its way around
If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock
how else would eternity
find its way around
You're
Frictionless, the smooth brass ticking
In God's stitches;
Morpheus, my benign crow.
Squashed in all directions like a
Firework. Placid, one moot clock point
On which immortality wobbles and sways.
Down-Feathered: Greening at the edges.
O Suture; everything you touch
Begins to Bleed.
Exiled son of Eden,
Branded onto yourself like an embryo.
Unbroken Emigrant seeking no home:
O my love,
O my great
Mercurial idiot, for whom
I have swallowed my own kingdom
like a star.
In God's stitches;
Morpheus, my benign crow.
Squashed in all directions like a
Firework. Placid, one moot clock point
On which immortality wobbles and sways.
Down-Feathered: Greening at the edges.
O Suture; everything you touch
Begins to Bleed.
Exiled son of Eden,
Branded onto yourself like an embryo.
Unbroken Emigrant seeking no home:
O my love,
O my great
Mercurial idiot, for whom
I have swallowed my own kingdom
like a star.
Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: The Screwtape Letters
How much better for (the cause of hell) if all humans died... amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick an his true condition! And how disastrous for (hell) is the continual rememberance of death which war enforces.
-CSL
(Hell) want(s) cattle who can finally become food; (Christ) wants servants who can finally become sons.
-CSL
You must have often wondered why (Christ) does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistable and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.
-CSL
(Hell's) cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do (God's) will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
-CSL
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
-CSL
...active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
-CSL
...And all the time the joke is that the word 'Mine' in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either our Father or the Enemy will say 'Mine' of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong-- certainly not to them, whatever happens.
-CSL
The World and the Flesh have failed us; a third power remains.
-CSL
As a result, while their minds are buzzing in the vacuum, (hell) ha(s) the vetter chance to slip in and bend them to the action (it) has decided on... (Hell) has trained (us) to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain-- not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
-CSL
This, indeed, is probably one of (God's) motives for creating a dangerous world-- a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
-CSL
-CSL
(Hell) want(s) cattle who can finally become food; (Christ) wants servants who can finally become sons.
-CSL
You must have often wondered why (Christ) does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistable and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.
-CSL
(Hell's) cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do (God's) will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
-CSL
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
-CSL
...active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
-CSL
...And all the time the joke is that the word 'Mine' in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either our Father or the Enemy will say 'Mine' of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong-- certainly not to them, whatever happens.
-CSL
The World and the Flesh have failed us; a third power remains.
-CSL
As a result, while their minds are buzzing in the vacuum, (hell) ha(s) the vetter chance to slip in and bend them to the action (it) has decided on... (Hell) has trained (us) to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain-- not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
-CSL
This, indeed, is probably one of (God's) motives for creating a dangerous world-- a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
-CSL
Monday, May 11, 2009
Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: Mere Christianity
Mere Christianity
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that is has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.
-CSL
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.
-CSL
I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.... Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled... Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.
-CSL
Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
-CSL
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will-- that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings-- then we may take it it is worth paying.
-CSL
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could 'be like gods'-- could set up their own as if they had created themselves-- be their own masters-- invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside of God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history-- money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-- the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
-CSL
You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
-CSL
The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death were not only easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He was God. But surely that is a very odd reason for not accepting them?... That advantage-- call it 'unfair' if you like-- is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
-CSL
God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He created it.
-CSL
We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw materials.
-CSL
Another notion we get from novels and plays is that 'falling in love' is something quite irresistable; something that just happens to one, like measles.
-CSL
Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently 'Love your neighbor' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'.... of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying...
I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sun ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then got to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that this is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things we call selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco...
-CSL
It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
-CSL
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-- and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-- you do not know God at all.
-CSL
(God) and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble-- delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.
-CSL
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
-CSL
But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
-CSL
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists... If i find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
-CSL
To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.
-CSL
...This is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
-CSL
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
-CSL
The Christian way is different: harder, easier. Christ says 'Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good... I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out... I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own shall become yours.'
-CSL
We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinately being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
-CSL (that's my favorite :])
A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-- and might even be more difficult to save.
-CSL
I wonder what an ordinary baby would do if it had the choice. It might prefer to stay in the dark and warmth and safety of the womb. For of course it would think that the womb meant safety. That would be just where it was wrong; for if it stays there it will die.
-CSL
The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop.
-CSL
Keep back nothing... Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for Christ and you will find him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
-CSL
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that is has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.
-CSL
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.
-CSL
I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.... Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled... Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.
-CSL
Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
-CSL
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will-- that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings-- then we may take it it is worth paying.
-CSL
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could 'be like gods'-- could set up their own as if they had created themselves-- be their own masters-- invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside of God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history-- money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-- the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
-CSL
You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
-CSL
The perfect submission, the perfect suffering, the perfect death were not only easier to Jesus because He was God, but were possible only because He was God. But surely that is a very odd reason for not accepting them?... That advantage-- call it 'unfair' if you like-- is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
-CSL
God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He created it.
-CSL
We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw materials.
-CSL
Another notion we get from novels and plays is that 'falling in love' is something quite irresistable; something that just happens to one, like measles.
-CSL
Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently 'Love your neighbor' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'.... of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying...
I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sun ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then got to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that this is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things we call selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco...
-CSL
It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
-CSL
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-- and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-- you do not know God at all.
-CSL
(God) and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble-- delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.
-CSL
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
-CSL
But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
-CSL
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists... If i find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
-CSL
To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.
-CSL
...This is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
-CSL
If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
-CSL
The Christian way is different: harder, easier. Christ says 'Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good... I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out... I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own shall become yours.'
-CSL
We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinately being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
-CSL (that's my favorite :])
A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-- and might even be more difficult to save.
-CSL
I wonder what an ordinary baby would do if it had the choice. It might prefer to stay in the dark and warmth and safety of the womb. For of course it would think that the womb meant safety. That would be just where it was wrong; for if it stays there it will die.
-CSL
The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop.
-CSL
Keep back nothing... Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for Christ and you will find him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
-CSL
11 May
I have come to realize that the same traits I fear in men, I fear in God. This is why it is so difficult to free myself to him: He is God, but he portrays Himself vaguely as a masculine force; and males are diseased with the terrible flaw of abandoning what they have tamed. If I let God tame me, will I likewise be abandoned? How curiously the subconscious works! I never knew myself until that moment!
But nevertheless, how awfully we long to be tamed. But this is the incompatible longing: we will not allow our longing to be lorded to destroy us. But God is God-- ? Can he prove himself incapable of abandonment? Until this occurs-- I shall never be able to trust. But that's faith, isn't it? Looking round a universe from which all trace of God seems to have vanished, and feeling quite small and quite alone, and obeying anyway. Until trust comes, faith must suffice: Obey.
Right now, God is showing me: I am not man. I am not going to abandon you the way your father and all those other men have abandoned you. I am God. Nature helps this-- the great green euphony of nature he has given us; has any man ever given me anything worth keeping?
But nevertheless, how awfully we long to be tamed. But this is the incompatible longing: we will not allow our longing to be lorded to destroy us. But God is God-- ? Can he prove himself incapable of abandonment? Until this occurs-- I shall never be able to trust. But that's faith, isn't it? Looking round a universe from which all trace of God seems to have vanished, and feeling quite small and quite alone, and obeying anyway. Until trust comes, faith must suffice: Obey.
Right now, God is showing me: I am not man. I am not going to abandon you the way your father and all those other men have abandoned you. I am God. Nature helps this-- the great green euphony of nature he has given us; has any man ever given me anything worth keeping?
Sunday, May 10, 2009
10 May
How close summer balloons! And how frightening! Not only exams, of course those are frightening; but all the people, wonderful people, who are seniors, and will graduate and dissipate into the world like shaker-salt into the Atlantic: and likely I will never see them again. Oh! I hope i do not forget them. What a frightening thing; to dissipate and be forgotten! In three years the high school will not remember them; in four years they won't remember me. And Glinda and Polly and Praise Band fly up in a smoky cremation. We will be replaced, but: is it not the nature of humans to forget and be forgotten? Will i not likewise replace them? We must not hang so tightly to the things we love, for humanity is cyclical by nature; and good will be replaced with good.
It is also more than slightly disconcerting that National Merit wants me to have my top two colleges in by May 26: I spend fifteen minutes deliberating between milk brands at the grocery store. I'm supposed to pick a college?? Good Lord! But yes, Good Lord: God knows what He's doing and will show me where to go. Belmont, Samford, Auburn, Covenant, UVA run their rabbit-footprints through and through my mind.... who shall i become at each? Should i become a different person, marry someone different; will the universe expand and contract as a result of my decision? How narcissistic we become when anxious! Of course God will work what is best for his children; of course He will do this for me.
Spring has arrived in a lump, and how it satisfies! I think God's favorite color must be green. It flabbergasts me, every little detail of tree trunks and flowers and weeds-- how few people notice them, and yet how much detail God has put into each of them! To surround us so completely with beauty: how He loves us! But now i am becoming sentimental, aren't I, and sounding rather middle-aged? But why should one wait until one has exhausted one's dreams to accept what Christ offers us? Why should one waste one's life in rot, and regret?
It is also more than slightly disconcerting that National Merit wants me to have my top two colleges in by May 26: I spend fifteen minutes deliberating between milk brands at the grocery store. I'm supposed to pick a college?? Good Lord! But yes, Good Lord: God knows what He's doing and will show me where to go. Belmont, Samford, Auburn, Covenant, UVA run their rabbit-footprints through and through my mind.... who shall i become at each? Should i become a different person, marry someone different; will the universe expand and contract as a result of my decision? How narcissistic we become when anxious! Of course God will work what is best for his children; of course He will do this for me.
Spring has arrived in a lump, and how it satisfies! I think God's favorite color must be green. It flabbergasts me, every little detail of tree trunks and flowers and weeds-- how few people notice them, and yet how much detail God has put into each of them! To surround us so completely with beauty: how He loves us! But now i am becoming sentimental, aren't I, and sounding rather middle-aged? But why should one wait until one has exhausted one's dreams to accept what Christ offers us? Why should one waste one's life in rot, and regret?
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Fear & Co.
I do not do, I shall not do
You service any longer: You
In whom I have lived
Like a Foot in a Shoe
With an immortal infant
That cankered and grew.
I've swallowed you, Father,
My core rots you smooth.
Fidelity crumbles
And blackens like berries in bloom.
Ach, as you do, I do not do
and shall not cleave myself for you.
O love; O my great fool: et tu?
You service any longer: You
In whom I have lived
Like a Foot in a Shoe
With an immortal infant
That cankered and grew.
I've swallowed you, Father,
My core rots you smooth.
Fidelity crumbles
And blackens like berries in bloom.
Ach, as you do, I do not do
and shall not cleave myself for you.
O love; O my great fool: et tu?
Friday, May 8, 2009
We Real (A Song for High School Girls)
(We're)
All Thin. We
Breathe Tin. We
Bribe Fate. We
Clear Late. We
Cream Sin. We
Leech Men. We
Still Souls. We
All Sold.
All Thin. We
Breathe Tin. We
Bribe Fate. We
Clear Late. We
Cream Sin. We
Leech Men. We
Still Souls. We
All Sold.
Monday, May 4, 2009
4 may
It is is this limbo, this mindless numbing limbo, that is the most difficult. it is that difficult thing of grinding one's way from Dreaming to Living. and becoming, always becoming. but becoming what? i wonder. i deaden and i come alive: becoming what?
this is the portion deadened with disillusionment. this is the part that says: why have i been cream-fed all this Spectacularity nonsense, when it is known that i am to grow up and bang my head on a wet impartial universe? there must be some sort of life outside this limbo, some sort of opaque wall i will work through; out of Lack and into Selfness. i am not prepared to flap about forever in this yellow bubble of identitylessness. i am ready: come quickly, paint me blue and white: matriculation. make me beautiful and world-eaten.
i am convinced that growing up is this: it is wondering how the beautiful world of my childhood evaporated into this merciless void, and yet marching always forward in hopes of finding something equally beautiful.
this is the portion deadened with disillusionment. this is the part that says: why have i been cream-fed all this Spectacularity nonsense, when it is known that i am to grow up and bang my head on a wet impartial universe? there must be some sort of life outside this limbo, some sort of opaque wall i will work through; out of Lack and into Selfness. i am not prepared to flap about forever in this yellow bubble of identitylessness. i am ready: come quickly, paint me blue and white: matriculation. make me beautiful and world-eaten.
i am convinced that growing up is this: it is wondering how the beautiful world of my childhood evaporated into this merciless void, and yet marching always forward in hopes of finding something equally beautiful.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
SAT: a test of reasoning; fortitude
7:45 AM. Government-approved SAT testing facility. The room is as silent as a chewed wad of mint gum; as though the teenagers therein are preparing their minds for the reason-based gymnastics ahead. The red-lettered index card labeling my desk says: Duck, C. My first name is Alyssa, I think with mild alarm, and that does not start with a C. I consider raising my hand and alerting the testing instructor to this discrepancy, but she has fallen asleep at the podium. Instead, alternate identities begin clicking through my head like quick insects: i could be any variety of new and fascinating names: I could be Catherine, Clara, Charlotte, Constance. My eyes drop to my legs, which currently inhabit Sperry's and pink gingham shorts. Perhaps Duck, C is a yuppie: Perhaps I am Cansley or Corbin or Cotton. A smudgy-eyed male in gelatinous basketball shorts slides into the seat next to me. Guthrie, P. Guthrie. What a fabulous last name, Guthrie; how fabulously incongruous. You do not deserve such a fabulous last name. I slide my name card inconspicuously into his line of vision and he bites; checks the bait out of the corner of his eye. Duck. Duck, C. Who is this girl in the pink gingham shorts? I bet tantalizing mystery seeps out of me; i bet he can taste it like pepper.
My eyes wander to the namecard on the desk in front of me. Choi, M. Alas! Who are you, Choi? Will you erupt from the shackles of Heaven to rescue, to love me, protect me? Will you do well on your critical reading? You must be wonderful: and from this dearth i fantasize: and suddenly, unexpectedly, the door swings open and glory erupts our banality: six feet of unadulterated Asiatic beauty appears in the doorway, sweeping a long thrush of black hair from his forehead. He walks in beauty to his chair. Of course i retreat demurely, to my pink gingham shorts and the infinite mystery of my namecard, when his eyes meet mine: and they are the color of the inside of a clam: "That grandiose colossus who/ Stood astride/ The envious assaults of sea/ (Essaying, wave by wave,/ Tide by tide, To undo him, perpetually),/ Has nothing on you,/ O my love, O my great idiot..... O my great borrower of light; be my leech and i will lord you." Such he remarks, Remarks my Choi; Choi, M--
Matthew? Maddox? Michael? Mathis? Mark?
A wave of noxious reality sees me clank into oblivion; McDonald, J has arrived, ceremoniously enveloped in a four-foot cloud of Axe. I align my spine straight with the back of the chair and arrange my three pencils alphabetically. I will be Charlotte, a gingham-wearing, love-drained Charlotte Lucas, and commence to let all stray emotion shrivel and drain at my feet. But Charlotte has too many memories; too much distraction in remembering that play where i was Miss Lucas and broke up with my stage-Mr.Collins the week before the show. No, I think smugly, smarting at my rebirth and recovery: today I shall be Chavi; chavi, Hebrew, life.
The door opens and fifteen pairs of eyes gallop to the front of the classroom; could it be: one of our elusive missing Twelve? It is not my Prince but a portly Aryan with a bad crew-cut. He slumps gelatinously into the seat in front of me; an efflorescent heaven deteriorates: Oh, Lord of Hosts: this is my Choi. He scratches unceremoniously at the fluff near the back of his neck. Choi, I think with dignity. And I have let you tamper with my dreams.
The test instructor has awakened from her slumber and commenced to gaze sternly about the room. She lowers her eyes ominously, in case someone was planning on bursting into something from Cats!. I think fondly back to yesterday's poetry-picnic with Lena, to first-period Calculus; to anywhere but this deoderant-saturated labarynth of viscous adolescents. I stare disenthralled in front of me. Choi is nervous; large beads of sweat begin to soak through the brown back of his shirt. I crane my neck and see Caroline through the doorway, in the M-Z room; she has folded her arms around her notebooks and is sleeping on her desk. I wonder if she is as disenchanted as I. The test instructor unenthusiastically distributes our answer booklets; and, disillusioned, I pick up my pencil.
My eyes wander to the namecard on the desk in front of me. Choi, M. Alas! Who are you, Choi? Will you erupt from the shackles of Heaven to rescue, to love me, protect me? Will you do well on your critical reading? You must be wonderful: and from this dearth i fantasize: and suddenly, unexpectedly, the door swings open and glory erupts our banality: six feet of unadulterated Asiatic beauty appears in the doorway, sweeping a long thrush of black hair from his forehead. He walks in beauty to his chair. Of course i retreat demurely, to my pink gingham shorts and the infinite mystery of my namecard, when his eyes meet mine: and they are the color of the inside of a clam: "That grandiose colossus who/ Stood astride/ The envious assaults of sea/ (Essaying, wave by wave,/ Tide by tide, To undo him, perpetually),/ Has nothing on you,/ O my love, O my great idiot..... O my great borrower of light; be my leech and i will lord you." Such he remarks, Remarks my Choi; Choi, M--
Matthew? Maddox? Michael? Mathis? Mark?
A wave of noxious reality sees me clank into oblivion; McDonald, J has arrived, ceremoniously enveloped in a four-foot cloud of Axe. I align my spine straight with the back of the chair and arrange my three pencils alphabetically. I will be Charlotte, a gingham-wearing, love-drained Charlotte Lucas, and commence to let all stray emotion shrivel and drain at my feet. But Charlotte has too many memories; too much distraction in remembering that play where i was Miss Lucas and broke up with my stage-Mr.Collins the week before the show. No, I think smugly, smarting at my rebirth and recovery: today I shall be Chavi; chavi, Hebrew, life.
The door opens and fifteen pairs of eyes gallop to the front of the classroom; could it be: one of our elusive missing Twelve? It is not my Prince but a portly Aryan with a bad crew-cut. He slumps gelatinously into the seat in front of me; an efflorescent heaven deteriorates: Oh, Lord of Hosts: this is my Choi. He scratches unceremoniously at the fluff near the back of his neck. Choi, I think with dignity. And I have let you tamper with my dreams.
The test instructor has awakened from her slumber and commenced to gaze sternly about the room. She lowers her eyes ominously, in case someone was planning on bursting into something from Cats!. I think fondly back to yesterday's poetry-picnic with Lena, to first-period Calculus; to anywhere but this deoderant-saturated labarynth of viscous adolescents. I stare disenthralled in front of me. Choi is nervous; large beads of sweat begin to soak through the brown back of his shirt. I crane my neck and see Caroline through the doorway, in the M-Z room; she has folded her arms around her notebooks and is sleeping on her desk. I wonder if she is as disenchanted as I. The test instructor unenthusiastically distributes our answer booklets; and, disillusioned, I pick up my pencil.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
