Tidewater

“Why be tempted by anything,” I journaled once, “when it is so easy to move into silence and taste its cold sweetness?” So I guess at some time I was feeling pretty bullish about my meditative practice. Nowadays I’m not so sold on it: if this is the interior castle I hear about, it could use a lot of redecorating. The first room is full of sad ideas for philosophy papers; the next with nonsensical snatches of speech occurring and vanishing; in the next I recently found the image of a giraffe with fulsome red lips like those of a cartoon sexpot.

Didn’t see You there, by the way.

~

When depression lifts I climb into a stoical humor and make some good resolutions to myself. The air is clear and calm, and the mind feels itself to be something special, free. Draw up plans for new regimens of peace. Sketch an outline for that didactic poem, your life. You are after all spirit, are you not, and no mean crawling thing?

Maybe the tide likewise resolves, in passing optimistic moods, that it will not go out again. Maybe the spark determines to glow on. Sparks die all the same; and when the moon swings away, seawater follows. The mind, too, we find, is made of ash and turbid water.

~

What remains of all the fuss of Christendom now, after these centuries? Somewhere perhaps a stone three feet displaced from where it else had crumbled; some vacant cave a little emptier than otherwise—space held open, disintegrated linens with nothing to wrap. On some Roman’s undiscovered ledger, three hours of darkness registered without their cause; lives holding their breath; uncertainty carried without a permit.

~

I answer the bell to find two women standing at the door, Jehovah’s Witnesses. They ask, “Do you believe it’s possible to be happy forever?” I tell them I’m a borderline case. One reads from a psalm: The righteous shall inherit the earth, and live in it forever. “How does that make you feel?” she asks. I say, “I hope it’s true.” They wrap it up, thank me for talking with them, and head back down the front steps. They can see, I guess, that fire has already been set to this place, and has burned out. Whatever fuel was here has been consumed.

But then, what would seem true, if I weren’t already trying to believe something else, and if no other light ever fell on me? I am persuaded that it is not a meaningless bump in time’s wheel, this seeing in color and swimming and learning mathematics—that love is no spandrel. We have been brought to it. Why? There persuasion ends. Hope, given its leash, will run on ahead.

~

Nothing is worth doing for my own sake, since all futures are equally gray for me. But someone else, with a soul more transparent to the light, may later come to take my place and bear my name. As long as I can, I will keep things in order for him here.

Some behold the promised land only from far off, standing for an hour on a high mountain, and never enter it. I shall let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there. Their bondage ended, some still fall in the desert. But these the Lord has not discarded. He himself administers their burial rites (Deut. 34:6).

What happens to the mulberry tree that, by the command of faith, is uprooted and transferred to the sea? It floats with the tides at first, naturally, swelling with seawater, dying. But it was ordered not only to be moved, but to be planted; and so, if it obeys, it puts out roots there, many fathoms over any soil. Its fruits grow ripe past human harvesting.

~

I lie in bed, sinking further into the mattress’s depression, trying to become silent, trying to bat away bitter images and invocations. Suddenly something small changes. Wind finds a crack in the mind. A curtain flutters; a load shifts. I test a word—it feels okay. I say it. “Thank you.”

In my dream I am given a useless and impossible errand; maybe it is to retrieve a feather from the mountain a thousand miles distant. The task comes with this promise, though: that I will accept it.