Death is Just Around the Corner

The Only Antidote to Death is Life

2008-09-09T08:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in the New York Times, a Pennsylvania oncology nurse wrote about her first experience with "Condition A" death. Condition A is not one of the "'good deaths,' the ones where the family is present and knows what to expect." Condition A is a fast and unanticipated cardiac arrest.

When George Clooney and Juliana Margulies went through these routines on “E.R.,” it seemed exciting and glamorous. In real life the experience is profoundly sad. In the lay vernacular of Hollywood, asystole is known as “flatlining.” But my patient never had the easy narrative of the normal heartbeat that suddenly turns straight and horizontal. Her heartbeat line was wobbly and unformed, occasionally spiked in a brief run of unsynchronized beats, and at times looked regular, because chest compressions from CPR can create what looks like a real cardiac rhythm even though the patient is dead.

. . .

What can one do? Go home, love your children, try not to bicker, eat well, walk in the rain, feel the sun on your face and laugh loud and often, as much as possible, and especially at yourself. Because the only antidote to death is not poetry, or drama, or miracle drugs, or a roomful of technical expertise and good intentions. The antidote to death is life. [Read the entire article here.]

"...Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."

The Growing Cut to Greener Climb

2007-07-14T13:30:00.000-07:00

Bone of Eve and flesh of man, a dying seed—Oh God!
Hold the shell with gentle ease and make a feeble stalk.
Squinting petals piquing to a crayon-color nod:
And flowers toward an early fall in whisp’ring handed talk.
Bring the photos, lay them out, and pine the broken seed—
The incandescent countenance, the towel-wearing walk,
The face of varied providence in teary peering need.
The ironies would weave a door for unbelief to knock.

The growing cut in greenest climb to unabated GONE.
To what? A colder falling night or higher rising dawn?
Well, tarry for a moment at the tearing jagged loss—
And trace the broken universe to workings of a cross.

See the seed, its glory all relying on the flower
To grow and say “now you can know the colors I contain.
The seed knew all my glory ‘til the breaking blooming hour
When all my petals spiraled out of dirt and sun and rain.
But glory of the seed was rightly dimmer then, before
A shell was shorn and (leaving only pictures in the earth)
A life was lifted rising to the unexpected shore
Of spreading green and sloping blue and heavy-hearted mirth.”

The growing GONE in flow’ring youth—“To what?!,” the earthen plead.
“To glory!,” shout the glorified, “the flower was a seed.”
The pining hopeful voices sing, “What glories will be there
When breakings of the present seed are dim beyond compare?”

_____________________________

“For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”
—The Apostle Paul

“You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
—The Apostle Paul

fear, sans fear

2007-07-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

fear not
fear not
for i am I AM
fear not
fear not
for i am God

listen coast lands
listen people
renew your strength

i have chosen
i have purposed
you for this

fear not
fear not
for i am I AM
fear not
fear not
for i am God

strength from me
held by my hand
your hand fumbles
my hand says

fear not
fear not
for i am I AM
fear not
fear not
for i am God

Now Cross Your Eyes

2007-07-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

Eternity in time:
"that thought cannot think."
The potter is the clay is the potter.
A lion, a lamb; both and one.

Why is this just?
To say the killer is not,
But more—
To call him the prince instead.

One
Takes
one's
Place.
One death to solve many—
Fully, forever, entire and sure.

You cross this line
To a dimension (re)new(ed).
You look and see but cannot look and cannot see.
You are empty,
So ask.
Ask.
Ask him.

Lift up the cup of salvation—and where does your help come from?

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us

2007-07-03T13:01:00.000-07:00

I stepped over a grave—the long square was bordered with darkforesting grass; the inner square was a bed of crumbish upturned earth. Like the feebly sprouting hairs on a patch of grafted tissue, several dozen yellow blades were curling out, crooked and worm-like. Someone said, “Hey, a fresh one!”

I coughed a few laughs out of my torquing stomach. It was a fresh one.

Another voice says, "Cry out."

And I said, "What shall I cry?"

“All flesh is grass,

And all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers,

The flower fades,
When the breath of Yahweh blows upon it;

Surely the people are grass.

The grass withers,

The flower fades,

But the word of our God stands forever.”

The voice rolled on in whispered claps.

"O!,—" I said.

"Truly, truly. Make it your title."

(Read Isaiah 40 and read John's Gospel.)

see a tree right now

2007-05-13T21:44:00.000-07:00

. . .

see a tree right now (if you can) and behold! the old politics of motion and space because it isn't still as you think

that branch looks like it's reaching

you think maybe it's a mid-reach and a mid-curve and a mid-tree but see a tree and it'll be tethering off in a finger dance like all the octopi you've ever seen and the green and black will spur and flowers spray off and into black and green the stalk of it will rock so smooth, so tending to a sun’s wobbling arc alive and it will thrive and thrust and die and there would be a reach and a curve and a tree

that city looks like it’s rising

maybe you think it’s a thought and a world and a city but see a city and it’ll be little and big, often off and into eclectic light games of steaming blues and white and greenish hues alight like orange window’s dusky pains and daylight blues of burning white see a city poke in fingers out of dirt and strangle out a town and—fatter—jumping proud deflating down to New Hoovervilles and towns cities again: ever reaching never rising

see a man right now (if you can) and behold the old politics of motion and space

. . .

“He has made everything beautiful in it’s time.

“Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

—Ecclesiastes

Railroad

2007-05-13T21:35:00.000-07:00

And so there came to be a man, sitting atop a mushroomed stump, framed by weed-trees and vines that spun and contorted to put him at the center of a shatter-cracked stained glass window.

The skin on his face was notably opaque, porcelain-like—dirt and dust masking away eyebrows and pigment-glow. It was at that exact moment, several miles away, that a bird, delicately cutting through the dense noon blue, nearing the simple and unpretentious apex of its simple and unpretentious arch, thwacked! fast and hard into the mirrored wall of an unambiguously pretentious tower—a tower that stretched its fat head just high enough to crush the skull of an arching finch. The bird dropped forty-two stories to stop dead at the apex of a nylon awning—which is where the bird would cough and flinch for the last time, then lay stiff, dead, and thin for several weeks.

Also, it must be noted, that several states away, during the exact moment at which the man sat and the bird thwacked, a very daring and fearless teenaged girl accidentally cart-wheeled herself into the Grand Canyon; and a very daring and fearless teenaged boy, within the borders of yet another state, suddenly passed out and dropped face-first onto the kitchen floor—with two front teeth pinning his lower lip to the unmopped linoleum.

It is also quite relevant that, at this same moment, a homeless clown made himself a home in the attic of an unwitting family of four, and a car exploded, and a light bulb broke, and a prime minister was shot in the head, and a dog tore open a cat, and a hundred people starved to death, and a thousand people wanted fries with that, and a birthday boy kept the twenty but threw out the card, and some kid may have intentionally slammed the door on the fingers of some other kid, and some country might have blown some other country to hell, and every country might have blown every country to hell, or maybe it was just one of those giant asteroids. Yeah, it was definitely a giant asteroid; it was definitely aliens. It couldn’t have been us.

And it definitely wasn’t us because it never really happened anyway.

And so there came to be a man sitting atop the mushroomed stump of an old good Tree that someone chopped down. He stood up and saw the poem engraved on it’s surface. It said: You were here. And he finally started to think about crying.

Parker's First Whistle

2006-03-10T08:10:00.000-08:00

A Children’s Story Adapted by Cliff Lewis

And as she lay dying, the wind howled a steady, droning tune. Entirely bereft of tension, resolution, variation, it sang of something indifferent. Alone in her apartment, she had fallen under the vanity . . .

School bus yellow was his radiator. It hunched beneath the thrice-painted windowsill. And along its hidden flank ran the Crayola trails of green and blue and red. Blimped from iron hot innards, a curry-crayon odor pressed forth and enveloped all the bedroom’s resident forms—the laundry, the mattress, the bedding, the boy. This earthen aroma, which spread far better than did the heat, was indeed the best and most distinguished feature in his night-light-lit little room.

Parker was eight years old.

Just before discovering that there wasn’t a small genie meditating Indian-style on his pile of clothes, Parker found his tongue and lips arranged in haphazard accordance with a great ancient pattern. His lungs air-bent . . . Briefly doused in a UFO searchlight (scouring apartment windows for black orphan boys), Parker could distinguish a green raincoat, half collapsed and perched atop the tangled hill of overalls and sweatshirts. Parker whistled in relief—a high arching hallow chirp, produced apart from any parcel of the whistler’s conscious intent. A first whistle for Parker: It arrived like an unplanned pregnancy, a virgin birth—just pop! there it is, all high and mild, real beyond every living genie, every alien. He didn’t mean to do it; he never could before. And it was much more of a surprise to Parker than it was to the dozing Italian foster-man who lay in the living room, locked in a dream of wine and whistles. Parker breathed and blew a second. Granted, these were thin whistles, windy and sloshing, but they resonated with warmth and substance, nevertheless. He could whistle: It fast became a guarded reality, as Parker rode the second blow with militant persistence; he sat up, and straitened his diaphragm, which dragged the whistle to a smooth and slender pitch; he inhaled quickly, hastily, between wide intervals of whistling-breath. By repetition and endurance, Parker would exterminate every dangling prospect of forgetfulness; he resolved to remain a whistler for life.

There was something to this. Typically, for him, there was nothing to anything—there was only Parker most of the time. His ontology was gentle in its indifference. Being Parker was composed of two wooden blocks: “Being” and “Parker”—and at the end of the day, all this ever really meant was being Parker. Essence had never been worth extracting; but this elusive whistling-appendage had long stood removed from Parker’s general presence, flaunting its dim glint of possibility, flirting like a phantom leg. And now the prospect of its disappearance posed, for Parker, an inexpressible terror of estrangement, of loneliness and lack—a bouquet of dissonance long forestalled by his poverty and orphanhood.

There was once an inky Fourth of July, and Parker, racing about the alleys, cornered plumes of sulfuric smoke to jump through them, imagining the crisp silhouette that he must have been leaving. Now the streets were stamped with his likeness. Parker cleared a trashcan. Spinning without destination, he bolted and crawled and shot bazookas aimlessly into the exploding night. Suddenly, a fat purple firework blasted apart. Sharp-lined and close overhead, it bloomed open and—just as quickly—dissolved into the stars. The bazooka faded. Parker, half-expecting to see another, stood dumbfounded in the middle of the street, gazing upward. He blew air at the sky, feeling that something of such impressive magnitude called for a whistle; but he couldn’t whistle, so he only blew.

A fire hydrant busted open one rippling June afternoon. A seven-year-old Parker plodded toward the mouth of a storeside alley; a dripping oversized t-shirt hung to his knees and made it look as if he wore no pants. There were three white kids coloring the wall with a vivid arsenal of shimmering spray-cans. The cans stood clustered on the ground, beside a deflated backpack. Dark oversized jeans muddled the separation of legs and made it look as if they wore no pants—skirts, maybe. One danced a little circular jig around his bouncing hacky sack. Another stood sweeping his can-handed arm before the brick wall, swiftly tending to the craft; he wore his hair in a tight stubbish pony tail, the sides of his head shaved. He appeared to be the leader.

Parker smiled and watched a pant-leg topple one of the cans. It sideways rolled and rolled to stop at Parker’s bare wrinkled toes. But they didn’t see Parker, and couldn’t hear past their cloudy din of aerosol blasts and profane lyrical misquotations. Silently, he hovered near to join; with a glassy smile he murmured something like “hey” and immediately proceeded to graffiti the dumpster-side with the baddest obscenities he had managed to acquire. The F-word went over well. It wasn’t until the fourth inscription that Parker’s illiterate youth began to poke through with a backwards letter:

“2hit.”

Two of the boys took their cue to cackle—in rolling torrents of exotic cusswork. The third stared out with a calculated sneer as a hot ferocity amassed beneath his skull, showing his pony-tail tighter and stiffer and sharper than Parker had previously observed. He lunged forth with a flailing of the arms; not a skilled fighter, nor particularly experienced—only malicious. Had Parker not been soaked, the kid would most certainly have sat on him; but his beater was white and thin, so he managed, rather, to evasively lock his right arm around Parker’s neck, into his ear screaming, “my stuff! my stuff! mine my stuff your mom 2hit?! you f—” Trashing all coherence for its sluggish weight, he eventually dropped into a swinging exercise of injurious free-association. In closing: “You need to learn how to spell,” the kid chided with mock-paternalism, holding a yellow spray-can over Parker’s buzz-cut scalp. “Here,” he sprayed it out, letter by letter, in bold capital clarity, “Now you’ll remember.”

The sky burst orange and red that evening. Parker sat topless on the unbroken bench, a damp turban spun over the top of his head. He was playing with the plastic remnants of a push-pop he had just finished, tapping the plastic disk like a tiny percussional instrument. Parker wasn’t easily embarrassed. But he thought it would have been nice to whistle “the Flintstones” along with his lonely little drum. But he couldn’t whistle. Parker got up and ran down the orange sidewalk, skipping away like a fugitive genie.

One night, while he lived with the Italian, Parker started whistling without any effort whatsoever. It was the only way it would ever have happened.

He was sitting up, whistling, holding the whistle—relentlessly, like a headlock, Parker held the whistle. When he felt it was planted deep, too deep to slip off, Parker paused to open his smile and sit with the whistle tucked inside, so readily at his disposal. He climbed out of bed and stood to whistle again; and he did—he whistled—head bobbing and hands folded. Parker opened the window. Into the January city air his head emerged, preceded by the wailing whistle that charged forth with heat and timbre. He tweeted hard at the apartments and houses and windows and cars and hookers and bums and mountains and stars, knowing the icy truth of it all—that he would not whistle again tomorrow morning. He would forget. But all the stone and glass was whistling back now, the single-tone song bouncing from wall to wall and back to Parker. He whistled again. And then he smiled—all eyes and teeth—at the popping obscenities of citizens below. They twinkled and flashed like Christmas lights strung about the alleyways and gutters. Parker whistled.

. . . And that should have tipped her off, but it didn’t. Pearl was sixty eight years old. An insulin attack and a fall would spell her end—this was well understood. But neither she nor anyone else could decipher what was spelled in that whistling of the wind. She looked at her watch: It was 11:58. Okay.

“I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

—Solomon

M&R

2005-10-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

(Photos: Dave Martin/Associated Press and Vincent Laforet/The New York Times, Respectively.)

{Par[en(Theos)]}

2005-10-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

{Par[en(theos)]}

By Cliff Lewis

{[A transcription:] I am a contingent being. [My ability to scrape together a considerable collection of words—nouns, adjectives, verbs; anything—for self description is non-contingent and essentially nonexistent.] Whatever the case, I have merely found myself to be a living parenthesis, or a life within a parenthesis. [I am a male. I write (or am written by) absurd epistemo-physical meanderings. I exist in philosophy alone(?)] [The inarticulable parenthesis in which we are.] As for universal significance—the quenching of our endless signifying; the confirmation of Sign—I must say that hope has not been lost. But to find significance balled up somewhere in the cosmos—hopeless. (Senseless, really.) [This entire passage, including the previous line referring to a balled-up mass of cosmic meaning, was originally written on half a piece of tissue. The fragile plane would sporadically tear by pen-point as these very words were slashed (out) into existence. (This, I say, this is simply yet another parenthesis.) Sharp, sloppy letters mashed together in an entirely uncivilized manner. Stabbed between the rising, dipping jumble, were sporadic footnotes that led to the head of the tissue (depending on how you hold it). At the head (foot, side) was an aggressive concentration of fully interchangeable parentheses, each containing a phrase (of marginal importance). These words are (both) essential (and utterly meaningless). The tissue was later set aflame by another piece of burning experimental prosetry. The edges quickly—in a flash—contracted inward, curling about themselves and joining at the center. The ink was incinerated; the letters merged and the words converged to form the conclusion of such a passage. It withered into a feeble ashen clump—a ball of consummated text.] I am [or might as well be] the universe entire[ly I, Myself, and Me].}:

“All who fashion idols are nothing.”

—Isaiah

Trash-Out

2005-09-21T06:32:00.000-07:00

So the parking lot is brown, and beyond it, the long, slight-sloping field of grass is crew cut down to appear hay-like and green with those topographic mower stripes lining every contour. It’s flatter down here in Lancaster; there’s more blue, more sky—which is far more of a dome than I’m used to. The light is 6:00, white and orange-tinted, chalking out the landscape, and it’s making everything sharp like broken stained glass. The cars, the poles, the buildings, the grass—they’re all cutting at each other with dark-hard shadows, all 9:00, at least. On the brown lot, I’m rolling a grocery cart toward the silver car, gleaming orange-white, and this is when I decide to write what I’d been planning to write for weeks. The plastic bags are bloated with colorful boxes and wrappers. If I don’t write it now, I know I’ll only rearrange letters, replace words, play that political game of good writing (what’s good writing?). The text would be revised and plasticized and eventually scrapped into one of the many garbage cans sadly lining the halls of my brain. The truth, of course, would probably be better off.

Our words are trash—just like language books and language itself. Happy will only be around a few more centuries; the same goes for Sad; Cool is in it’s death throes; Jesus is a fad; Talk and Write and Speak and Word will all be crumpled at some point in time. But everyone will still feel happy at birthday parties and sad at funerals; still, no one will be cool when you get to know them; Jesus will remain the Christ; and we’ll all continue to talk, write and speak words.

You can see how all of this is skirting around something motionless and still—there is a stillness; the 9:00 proves the 6. It’s really a glorious thing. Look:

My first day on the job, I found a couple of Polaroid photos wedged down behind a baseboard in a living room closet. They had been there for years. One framed a black teenage boy, kneeling down on the carpet with an awkward Christmas heap splayed out across his lap; wrapping paper spilled wider yet, wilting to the floor. I think it was a day-planner. A large, wood-paneled television hunched in the corner. Behind it stood a white wall with a window—curtains drawn, shades shut. Lifting the picture in the muddy light, I could see that, past the Polaroid square, there stood that same wall, with that same window—curtains loose, blinds bent. The TV was dead on its face.

I was told not do any serious cleaning—“it’ll only make it easier to see the broken stuff. ” My job was to descend upon a vacant foreclosure and empty out the trash; trash-out, we called it. Trash was everything that wasn’t part of the house: dressers, clothes, garbage bags, Polaroid pictures. Everything that wasn’t trash was house; we left the house. If a shelf or a banister was broken off the wall and thereby separate from the house, this item would be lumped in with the trash. And so it goes.

Most of the trash I remember is trash I kept: Seven action figures, a t-shirt, an old toy robot, a little blackboard, a pitiful picture drawn by a lonely man; I kept a couple of books, a box of records, a little guitar amp, and two Polaroid photos. Generally, our memories are trash, and vice versa.

One house had a carpeted basement. I trudged around through the garbage, soft and damp, picking around in the old waft of dust and mold. I was ankle deep in the colors of their trash, in their thoughts and memories. As the dump truck filled, I could see that so many disjointed articles of trash were meeting one another, piecing together and forming people. Kids. They had dozens of toys that vibrated in the pile; many spoke with distorted and time-bent voices, slow, with that crawling battery groan. And a stew of Batman Forever memorabilia: There was a Riddler mug from McDonalds and the official movie soundtrack and scores of action figures—all of this settled to the ground like ash.

I was ten years old in 1995—“the Year of Batman Forever,” as I assumed it would come to be known. I wanted to see it; I wanted to see it again and again and again, and I wanted to buy every toy related to it, and use those toys to make my world Batman’s world; and I wanted to make it, I wanted to be the one who made it, I wanted it to say A Cliff Lewis Film on every blessed commercial. O, what I’d kill for one of the Riddler’s brain-wave manipulators! I’d pop it on my forehead and sway headlong into the show, so that all I could see in the mirror was a small Val Kilmer, lips pursed: “I’ll get drive-thru.”

By ’96 I had a Riddler wallet. That was my collection. But my brain was totally rife, molded with imagined scenes, swirling in coveted mugs, soundtracks, action figures.

Our trash becomes us. It’s like a family and its house. Eventually, with enough years passed and candles blown, the two seem to merge. The house becomes the family, and the family the house. For a kid, it’s even worse: Your house, your family, your life—all the same crayon, as they say.

In one of those houses, I found a classic children’s book called Parker and the Clock. It was plastered down to the bathroom floor with a thick film of rotten water. The book was incredible. It told of a little orphan boy named Parker. Parker was 8 years old; Parker was an African American who lived in the city. One day, while Parker walked to the park, he found a little old clock, fashioned of bronze and leather. But this clock was no ordinary clock: It was a magic clock. Everything it ever touched would get older—faster! Parker was amazed. The story blasts off as Parker’s Italian foster dad steals the clock to open a makeshift winery on the roof of their apartment complex. But the clock works all too well: barrels crack, cork-screws rust, wine evaporates; skin decomposes prematurely. Everything in the building junks out. Metal turns to rust. Dollars turns to dust. Blankets of mold bubble out through drywall, and stagnant water worms through brittle pipes. I couldn’t tell you how this story ends, because the last few pages were completely illegible, so water-warped and rotten that my fingers passed through them like snot. Actually, the entire book was illegible, snot-like—I couldn’t read a word of it. But it was more than a story book; it was a science book, it was a beautiful book that showed me how the laws of entropy, enforced by the passage of time, will unflinchingly bring all matter to chaos, will separate particles, will erode the ground about all levies, and tear apart the apartments of man. It showed me that all freshness is youthful decay, and that time is truly a most terrible natural disaster.

The day I found the book was also the day I found the black bear. They must have tried to box up his head, but with too small a box. His face peered out with squinting eyes. The tongue was frozen white; it poked out stiff—smaller than you’d expect. The rest of the bear was dissected into Ziploc bags marked Steak - 11/02. Talking with the neighbor, and filtering through the trash, I accumulated a thin family history: There was a young husband, a young wife, a little school-aged girl, and a new-born son. I found a few parenting books—Choosing Your Child’s Retention, etc—and the kitchen cabinets were filled with jars of rotten baby food. There were a few thumb-sized socks and pacifiers. They must have taken a decent swing at things.

At some point, the father moved down south to find a job, preparing a better home for the rest of them—it must have been the same dream-streaked déjà-vou that brought his distant ancestors to come and kiss the American dirt. But before long, the Mr. made friends with a young Georgian waitress—shacked up with her, as the neighbor put it. And so the particles separated.

I imagine there must have been a cold November night when, before his grand exit, the father pulled in drunk, dragging the battered carcass of his great black bear. The baby would be asleep, the wife watching CSI; the little girl would be up in her bedroom reading about Parker and the Clock. It was a restful and tepid line of hours in which he worked into the bear with his hand-saw and butcher’s knife. There was no squeamishness. He knew how to do it, how to take it apart; he knew this. He knew all the pieces, the good cuts, he knew the steak; he knew the smell and the blood and the guts. He knew that the head would twist easy. Blood-soaked, he took his time, he focused it, channeling its dense flow toward the dripping mass; he took everything apart, tearing fibers, snapping tubes; he watched the bear spread out over and across the lawn. All of this took time—a brown moon smearing overhead. At dawn he squished each glistening piece into a plastic bag, sharpieing the date for freshness. And his head wouldn’t fit in the box. This house is where I read Parker and the Clock.

Even now, as I churn through what’s already been written— changing punctuation, eliminating sentences, installing fresh adjectives—the old rotten book which now, I’m sure, is spackled away as a filmy residue among the world’s banana peels and bear-heads, continues to raise its voice with prophetic urgency: It wasn’t the clock that did it. Time is a puppet, but you were always a leper.

And, though dissected and broken and distant and missing, we’re still enough here to watch it all happen, to see how our particles do indeed diverge, and how the whole of us is unwillingly compromised; and we’re still enough here to groan and wait for a day when this motion will settle, and the entropic veil will fall, and that face.

Night: There's the earth in its February freeze. A yawning low-contrast purple landscape, houses tiny and stitched along the threads of road, colorful throbbing intersections. At 1:00 in the morning, the motion is minimal, the lights are sparse; the lumpy floor of buying and selling is sedated from its daily vibration, it slows to a breath: The inhalation of icy winds; the frozen groan that follows. It was ten degrees below zero, and the knowledge of this non-number bred within me the fear that my eyes might freeze to their inner lids. The stars were so tiny in the sky—it was more than just the fat ones; you could see the transgalactic dust of planets and fire that quietly scrapes behind it all. But I only glanced while carving a garbage can across the restaurant’s back lot. It had been a sloppy and underpaid evening.

I reached the dumpster, just barely afoot on a slick of black ice. I could hear the distant screech of tires and, ever so faintly, a gentle smack. Stretching to tip the contents of this can into that big dumb mouth, I faltered momentarily and slipped the entire bin onto a steaming bed of Italian curdlings. I had to climb in.

The dumpster floor is an ever-shifting terrain of perpetual change—decaying pillars of waste frequently giving way, cardboard boxes rippling from firm to flop—and gravity, however present, is rendered almost completely arbitrary. And so, as I wrestled the hundred-pound slop can, I was brought to the feeble vulnerability of a paddleboat in the midst of a mighty tempest of trash. And then the plunge: Preparing to mount a new effort against the bin, I adjusted the placement of my left leg as it apathetically penetrated from foot to ankle to knee deep in the heat. It brought me down—all the way down; I was laying in it, cupped in a drooling hug, prostrate. I could see the stars—something had splashed onto my face.

In here it was hot and bustling, enzymes hard at work; particles were departing and mixing and moving ever closer to some nameless, soupy digestion. All the steam danced high toward the stars, to freeze into snow and then lay mournful in the hard pining frozenness of winter.

I knew this place. The pictures, the cups, the records, the toys—they were all there, and so was Parker, and the clock, and the Indian, and the Bear—them, too. And that snotty film was pasted over my skin; it was warm. So many of us were there, and it felt like an incredible, transtemporal family reunion, like a mass grave. I was still hungry after all this work—so hungry and so tired—and everyone was swallowing the slop, gnawing on the bare rinds; they’d been eating each other for so long, pulling themselves apart; and I could have done it, I could have continued with death as usual and eaten the garbage; I could have sunk deeper into the grave—burrowing, burrowing. I was dead, boys and girls, dead. But then I saw the stars.

Now, it wasn’t the stars, really, that did it. Up close, those stars are just as throbbing and wild as any American intersection. I knew that.

It was the stars, or rather, my seeing of the stars, that showed me the reason for all these words. We can see them flipping high, soaring up, reaching and stretching; eventually, they explode—pop!—into a flash of morphemes; prefixes, suffixes spiraling like shrapnel, dropping down, down, right down into the steaming landfill. It happens again and again and again and again. We send them off like fireworks on the fourth of July. Ooo… Ahh, we groan: The words will never yet stick.

There’s someone in our seeing of the stars. There’s a speaker, and there’s a word that our words are forever arching toward—peaking, dropping. Spread out across our bloody lawns, we can look into that sky and see one great eternal consolidation. He says, “i am.”

A sentence, a paragraph, an ocean of books.

There was nothing else. Nothing. I had to see that this dumpster, earth-spread as it was, had not been spilling over by accident. Such a mighty crescendo of dissonance and dread could hardly be haphazard while this unblinking face stares down in tranquil confidence. The entropic curtain quivers, and all creation cries, “We are waiting: it will fall!” And all around me is garbage, trash, snot encompassing my figure, it rises, compounding, higher, I could die with it; and I could because I should, and I weep and mourn and groan for this sentence—but only then can I see it: All above my frame, shooting like a star, like a Savior, it’s a column, as if someone had plunged down to so corrosive a depth, as if someone dove deeper yet, grazing the acid floor, absorbing all this moth and rust and wrath—becoming it. It’s as if someone swam to the bottom and shot back up, spiraling straight and high, carving out a perfect column, with joy pulsing at his core, glowing; he leaves a trail of pure and indiscriminate reversal, he pulls off the clock on hundreds of thousands—millions—of hopeless, dumpster-feeding lepers, and his joy is searing, unmarketable, he laughs out peals of thunder, and he cuts into the sky like a word—but not just like any word; he is the word—and so he carves out beyond the Universe, passing all those wild stars, further, further, further—He is GONE! Finally, he sits at his Father’s side, at home, in a house that will never fade. And only a column is left, extended straight above my frame. We are waiting: we will rise! Parker turns his face up from the pit, a clean glint in his eye; we can see Parker reach—finally reach away the groan—we can see him reach, and cry Father! with the soaring tenor of a happy question and a roaring answer. An orphan nevermore, he rises up—drawn—clear on through the mighty channel, he rises: Higher, higher, higher, Home!

(Read Ecclesiastes; Read Paul's Letter to the Romans: Chapter 8; Read Paul's Letter to the Corinthians: Chapters 4 and 5; Read Peter's First Letter: Chapter 1; Read the Gospels)

YHWH

2005-03-15T06:32:00.001-08:00

The greatest and best man in the world must say, By the grace of God I am what I am; but God says absolutely, I AM.

—Matthew Henry (Paraphrased)

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This is What Happens

2005-03-04T08:16:00.000-08:00

Cars and trucks are charging quickly through my field of vision—a twenty-yard shot of a four-lane street, a busy street. They each weigh over a thousand pounds—metal, paint, gasoline, plastic, glass, thick glass—and they’re all barreling past, whipping by. I’ll see about fifty of them within a single minute. But they can go even faster. They spread out and pour into different channels—highways—and then they go faster and faster and faster, roaring and plowing through asphalt, they cut right past each other, and now the force of these vehicles is worth much more than the couple of tons that they normally weigh—ten-thousand pounds of sheer inertia now screams them onward. And while you sit in your broken-down Pontiac at the side of the Interstate, you'll stare into this wild blur as it rages onward, warping into a solid mass of speed, a dense sheet of pulverizing power with hundreds of colors melting into a muddy brown that races away sooner than you can see it. This hot acidic sludge, sliding at 1000 miles an hour, quivering and smoking and steaming and spraying up across the face of the sky, flicking through the blue and even spattering a bit onto the moon. And if you stepped into it, even touched it for a second, you would be instantly engulfed—a part of it. So this ever-stagnant graveyard-mudslide webs out across the surface of the entire planet, it rushes out from humanity’s core, bubbling up in the Enron office, and the Rwandan countryside, and the Neverland ranch. It rolls through the wave-pool. It’s a super-sized freeway of babble. It’s the sight of a billion middle fingers erected high, at whatever’s up beyond the sky. Welcome to the Autobahn.

(Paul's Letter to the Romans: Chapter I - Verses 18-28.)

Targét

2005-03-02T13:10:00.000-08:00

And we all look like a bunch of wet dogs here in this slow-running line, sapping through this lane. The lady in front of me is about thirty; she’s purchasing the following items: A triple blade Gillette razor, a pack of Playtex pantyhose, a can of Gillette shaving cream, and a DVD—“Something’s Gotta Give”—so now she faces the conveyor belt and reaches, fingers tickling the boxes of gum, she reaches reluctantly for a red pack of Orbitz. She eyes it resting in her palm for a brief moment, thinking she doesn’t really need the gum (probably has a few packs sitting on the kitchen counter) but she has to buy it, she really has to, she needs to buy it—and she knows it. But she changes her mind and puts it back. Doesn’t take the red, she takes the wintergreen instead. Triumph. She drops it into the child seat of her nearly empty cart. She’s thirty years old and probably single, judging by her purchases.

And I’m just watching; I’m just swimming in all this craziness. With the red pulsing heart of Target right under my nose, I’m dizzied by that thick smell of human blood because BULLSEYE! RIGHT IN THE HEART!—a direct hit. At this moment, I’m a part of it. I’ve got empty pockets but I’m dancing with a red shirt on and a red bottle of Tide and red pack of Skittles—and there’s a dark red background with a disco ball spinning and red candles, lined up, burning—and I keep on dancing with about four others and we’re just kickin’ it like the Backstreet Boys, wearing red shirts with white bullseyes right on the chest and we all freeze in poster-position and then BULLSEYE! A DIRECT HIT!—my heart’s blasted open, blasted empty, and I’m sopping with red blood that covers the wall behind me and we all start dancing again since it’s all Target-red and nothing’s changed. I’m a part of it. Here I am, sapping through this embarrassing line, realizing that this lady is a lot like me. We’re both dancing in the same commercial. I’ve spent 80 dollars today—which is enough wasted money for me to round 74 up to a discouraging 80 without thinking twice. That’s how pathetic I feel about it. Three pairs of pants that I did need and one CD that I didn’t. The CD was only about 15, but I feel stupid enough to round it up to 80 wasted dollars. 80 dollars for one CD. I reach for an 80-dollar pack of gum.

"But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Yeshua Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself."

—The Apostle Paul