The Book Of Splendor
I
live in a world getting noisier and noisier by the decade. Electronics hum on
my desk and the few remaining non-digital clocks in my house mark the passing
seconds with tiny ticks. A
refrigerator and dishwasher thrum in the kitchen and the oven timer chirrups when the perfect temperature is reached for the
doughy loaves of honey wheat bread I am making. The air-conditioner kicks
itself loudly into compliance with the thermostat I set last night; next
season, the heater will do the same. Pots simmer on the stove this morning and
the tea kettle screeches. Morning radio fills me in on the news of the day: a
truce is broken between Israelis and Hamas and, elsewhere, Islamic militants
surround a mountaintop where refugees huddle in terror. When I turn on the
television, news arrives of a young man shot down in Missouri and the room
erupts with that community's outrage and the violence in its streets.
In
the basement, a water heater chugs along and the sump pump rumbles. Outside the
neighborhood, traffic rushes by on the highway that runs the length of this
island, drivers adding their bit to the already-unbearable road noise with
horns and music blaring. On the
outskirts of town, an amplified calliope brightly accompanies the
merry-go-round for children and a hawker invites everyone on the fairgrounds to
pay their small fee and enter the tent "where marvelous things will be
revealed."
In
the middle of it all, I sit on a pile of old concrete patio blocks under the
trees, scribbling down what I almost cannot-hear for all the noise of the
afternoon. The birds seem far away and the chittering squirrels. Likewise the dogs scruffing and playing
about in the pine straw nearby. It
is a hot day and steamy in the way a day becomes steamy and miserable in the
South when it has rained for many days in a row. I am becoming a swamp – sweat-streaked and sticky – but I
have to stay where I am just now: something is trying to be heard, trying to
arrive, despite my personal misery or the ordinary day's loud ruckus. I am forging again my relationship to
language, to words.
My
friend Derick, who is a writer, carries around a hefty black sketchbook filled
with perfect-bound, blank pages: a book of substantial weight. At almost any time, you can happen upon
him on campus and he will be nursing his cup of lukewarm coffee and writing
things there in his large, cursive hand, or drawing fabulous pictures, loops
and coils, in the pages' margins.
My
friend, Craig, who is a journalist, is always on the move. He too likes this
kind of notebook – one which, as he says, ". . .will not come apart when
sand gets into it." A durable notebook. For durable words. Words that will
last. Words to be read. Important words. Words that can make things happen.
And
then there is my notebook: a flimsy little book with maybe a month's worth of
thin, blue-lined pages, bound together by string or staples or, sometimes, by
glue because I have a deep affection for glue, for how hard it works to hold
everything together.
My
kind of notebook is one that is forever coming apart at the seams. Mine is a notebook almost wrecked by
sand and dew, by rainwater and ferny matter, Now it also smells of wood-smoke
after I laid it open in front of a beach fire one night to dry its damp
pages. Between the things I've
written in these pages, I've tucked bright blooms – black-throated poppies or
blue forget-me-nots – and the printed scraps from sweet fortune cookies they
give me at the corner Chinese restaurant. On more than a few pages, the blooms
I've tucked inside have stained the writing pages and, overlying my pages of
writing, is the watercolor ghost of some flower that has already crumbled and
fallen away. I like opening the little book of pages and seeing its apparitions
or getting a fragrance of wood-smoke or rich loam, that up-rush of where I have
lately been.
What
I have begun to understand about my writings here, even in the moments in which
something profound may surface in them, is how rightfully they belong on paper
that tatters and frays and wears thin at the edges. On something that falls apart. Something that will not be preserved; something falling,
under the stern hand of time, back to its most basic matter.
All
things, or so it is said, have lives and half-lives; all things are nuclear at their center, and I believe that too, don't I? So
what harm or good does it do if I put all the words I cannot speak aloud into
tattered little books like these? What harm to let them live out their lives
and half-lives and then let them fall back again into the earth, into the dust
and ash from which they came?
*
It
is a noisy, noisy world. Let my gift to it be silence.
*
There
was a time, though, when I wanted nothing more than to finish a sentence – just
one – before someone started talking over me. It seemed such a small thing to ask – that I be allowed to
speak my piece uninterrupted – and yet it seemed such a great imposition for
those around me.
Thus,
in due time, I brought silence to the table, to the conversation, the
conference, the meeting, the party.
Why wreck further a half-wrecked heart? The sorrow could do me in.
*
Early
on, I created a country for myself, a homeland of silence in which I could pitch
my little tent in peace. I became
that country's sea and its vessels, the rich cargo in every dark hold. I became its mist-shrouded mountain and
its gray valley of fog. I became
its meadow of children playing and its moon's littlest white fang, the prodigal
and the return, the squandered inheritance and the fatted calf being readied
for slaughter.
Most
mornings now, I sit on a sunny stoop.
What must passersby think of that quiet woman in her flour-dusted apron,
eyes closed, taking in the sun?
Assuming
they even see her at all.
I
worry some days that living in a kingdom of silence, I might also have become
invisible. It's starting to seem
that way. Still,
is it reasonable to be this startled when some stranger nods, Good morning, or a kind friend writes, "a sweet and cunning
smile" as he listens to you and takes down the spill of your words?
*
In
this kingdom, there is a library and a kitchen, a garden and stone ruins, a
school and a playground, a wise woman and a fool, but a fool like the Fool in
the Tarot: a Querent, a Watcher, a One-Whose-Number-Is-Naught. When Fool shows up, it is always to be a silent
provocateur, to be the question
posed. And then to vanish again.
So
what is Fool's question today? And
to whom?
*
What tongue is spoken at the river's mouth?
On what muddy bank does the ferryman wait and how many
coins for the passage?
Who holds the map to the lost world?
Who folded time and put it in its deep closet of stars?
In whose book is my name written?
From what book is it being erased?
Is silence a sin or a virtue?
Who will hold God accountable for His silence?
*
The
Book of Life is God's book. In it are written the names of those
who belong to Him. It is said God
commanded the angels to write down their names before they were named, before
they even were. A name is either there or it
isn't. If your name is there, you
enter glory. If your name is
absent, you are cast into a lake of fire, into Outer Darkness, into the place
of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
*
The
Book of the Dead is Man's book. It is a book of spells which will carry
the dead one into the afterlife. The first spells in the book are said by
family or loved ones as funerary rites.
Spell 25 ensures that the dead man will remember his own name, for a
name itself exerts power, even in the afterlife. The Book of the Dead also equips its owner with the mystical names of the grotesque
monsters he will encounter in his journey and it names their names. To know their names is to have power
over them.
Thus
the dead man is entombed and he descends to the underworld where the body
regains its powers of movement and speech, after which he must pass those gates
guarded by those grotesque, dangerous spirits, spirits with names like Blood-Drinker-who-comes-from-the-Slaughterhouse and One-who-eats-the-excrement-of-his-hindquarters.
Once
the dead man has successfully passed the guardian spirits, he must endure a
final ritual, the Weighing of the Heart, for the ancient Egyptians believed the heart was the part which
represented the whole man, and it included both intelligence and memory. Thus comes every man before Anubis and
her feather, her feather which signifies truth and justice. Any heart heavier
or lighter than that feather is rejected and that man is immediately eaten by The
Devourer of Souls.
*
Friend, today I am writing The Book of Splendor. In it,
we go on living, as we must, in splendor, for what is splendor if
not the way we go on - you and I - trying to be, each moment, merciful and kind in the face
of certain and inevitable annihilation? In this book, we are weighed only
against love, that brief and fragile feather.
I
have written my name in this book. You are also there in its brief pages. The chapters and verses of you. The body and blood. The smallest hosannah of you.