… for you know as well as I do that under certain circumstances, at a certain temperature, metaphorically speaking, words lose their substance, their content, their meaning, they simply deliquesce, so that in this vaporous state deeds alone, naked deeds, show any tendency to solidity, it is deeds alone that we can take in our hands, so to speak, and examine like a mute lump of mineral, like a crystal. -Imre Kertész (Nobel for literature, Auschwitz survivor)
Let Israel, let America, let us all, take this naked deed in hand, turn it this way and that, hold it to the light, let its hard crystalline presence pierce the darkest of hearts.
Let it mute the megaphone mouths, clear out the senate effluent, the podium sludge that hourly pours into living-rooms.
Let the vaporous words of “leaders”— their toxins so common we’ve turned immune— finally flame out and awaken in us, a re-spiriting of justice and right-ness.
Let the meaningless epistles of embassies, and the murderous euphemisms of Commanders -in-Chief, choke in their throats, at the wordless act of Aaron Bushnell.
And may the power of his deed re-form, re-true our tongue, speak its roar of enough!
Lord, lead him beside those still waters, those green pastures, for his dreams glare of florescent halls, and his thoughts are collections of knives.
An old charge, tedious for You: if You are all powerful, all merciful, whence my sweet son, who’s suffering is continual?
This is my immodest prayer, full of accusations, empty of understanding.
Should I pile on more praises, change my disposition, shall I kneel in the dark, shall I prostrate, can I offer a limb, give my life?
My heart is all will, my soul is all brain, my prayers are connivings and deals going down. And the more I pray …the further away.
You, Lord, who questions through hurricane, and answers by absence, arrow me a divine-thought, real as rock and quick as light, to unwill my heart, and re-mystify my prayer—to make of it, actual prayer.
Here’s what I know: despair and pain, like an epi-gene, can switch on faith, or just as soon kill it.
So lift me beyond my simmering transactions, my heaving sea of abject solutions, into the flickering light of fertile doubt, again to stand on the dark shore of an awe-full faith.
And I will pray to give up this praying. I will pray to You, to be free of You, the You of my making.
Yet this I plead, and will not cease: raise and release him, back to a regular life, like all lives, with our gales and hard weather, our graftings of awe and cuttings of joy.
With His mercy like an unclaimed mongrel, Following, still following. -Ronald Duncan
I’m ash in a respectable urn. I’m a rock rabbit blending in. I mimic the evasions of cicadas. I’ve learned the trick of cuttlefish—the quick camouflage. I’m faithless, so I’ve mastered octopi: confronted, I slip out under a cloud of ink.
But there’s a Love, like some hound at my heels, that I curse at, kick at, and I run as to outrun myself, and despite my rage, my scorn, he never leaves my side; runs through the day, looks up, his wet wounded eyes, terrible with tenderness.
On my bed, I watch through the night for an escape, he lies at my feet, dreamily awake. I inch to the edge, he turns to me, and in the quietness of his eyes, a sheer and wild mercy, slowly undoes my disguise.
Seventy years ago, when Ronald Duncan sat composing The Mongrel, in his stone hut, high on the Cornwall cliffs, he wasn’t thinking of hikers coming in from the trail reading his words and leaving changed, or at least momentarily arrested and marked for later. He was inscribing his own transformative arch; a time he was unmasked by, and he released himself to the love and mercy of Christ.
“Everything has a pulse,” he says. We’re having coffee, sitting in a small alcove high above Finlayson Arm, that lurid-blue limb of sea that narrows toward Gold Stream.
Below us, down a broad path, a recently built lookout tower is being readied for those who want the encompassing view.
“There are connecting points everywhere,” he says. I watch his mind at work, he’s traversing the paths of a lifelong preoccupation. “How would it be if humanity could rest together, in an open-minded, open-hearted, condition of presence? What if our hearts, our bodies, our selves, were in sync with the rhythm of earth, the universe itself?”
It’s a conversation, even at this dizzy elevation, that feels natural because of his many years of immersion.
Then we talk about the rabbit that breached his garden fence, his water catchment system, his modifications of a winch and wagon to haul dead-fall out of his back acres, his many lively inventions.
I could listen to him at length, but always, he asks about me.
Later, he says, “The thing to do is to have the experience, to see that it’s possible.” He’s reconfigured a biofeedback device: four sit in a circle, connected by leads to monitors. Screens display the independent beats of their hearts. They fall silent. Soon their waves will rhyme.
Many years ago, to further his search, he built a float tank, the first of its kind on the coast. (Later spawning float tank centres.) You step in, close the lid and lie in warm, salt-steeped water. Your body, fully suspended—freed of all conditioned senses. In darkness and naked silence, you detach—released to a preconscious, circadian calm.
He lives with a poet, herself, a believer in pulse and harmony, who knows intimately that the heart is a great muscle, that starves like a winter raven for connection, and thrives when surrounded by leaf and bloom, and friends with whom to share yam-almond soup.
Yesterday, the sun casually warming the glassed-in veranda, Rod spoke of their early times together. “Right here, where we’re sitting, 25-years-ago or so; I was Wendy’s chosen audience, and she read her poems to me, as naturally as breathing, and O,” the words catch in his throat, “she just killed me.”
Today, mesothelioma, will not release him. Years, working in oblivious mills, indiscriminate asbestos filling his lungs with micron-sized fishhooks. He fights for life, lives with acceptance. Puts things in order and hopes for time.
We visit, or call, and talk of the amount of rain, the whitecaps on Juan de Fuca, the squalls of pain surrounding his lungs, the potholes of medications, the sorrow of endings, the joy that’s leaked out of his model train room, and then, a lighter moment, a laugh before good-bye. And I see clearer how I should view my own time.
He lives in a house where the ocean is the horizon, the forest looms behind, trails he’s cut lead up to a lookout. And sloping west, there’s a garden, where fruit trees his age bloom in any weather, and everywhere and always, there’s a pulse.
