Christian
Art
Saint Paul, who is often painted balding
and
glum, told us, "If there be
any
virtue, if there be any praise,
think
on these things."
Christine who's an idiot and not really
my
friend called "L'Eglise de Jeanne d'Arc"
the
"Jeannie Dark Church"
which
is cool actually
in
its own particular way.
The theme is particular vices: strands
of
beads and heavy brass earrings, skulls,
roses
wilted in a vase, pomegranates
oozing
red juice, a map of the world
with
America a yellow bar surrounded
by
blue, your reflection
in
a mirror because
Saint Paul also wanted all of us dressed
in
the armour of light which Jeanne d'Arc
put
on in the end and perhaps it protected
her
and perhaps it only hurt.
It has to be enough to make you feverish
and
ill but in a good way, really,
in a way that your cheeks are always flushed
and
nothing ever tastes good enough
to
eat so you forget how to
swallow and remember only
to
sing and that's how you generate
your own astonishment
at
the tangled way life funnels down
to
a dark painful source
of
envy and praise.
Well that's that! Somewhere some people
are
singing Gregorian chants a capella
in
monkish tenor voices and if I
could
find anything to envy I'd envy
it
with anxious deliberation,
I'd
praise light so busy and abundant
its
surplus breeds wonder and
pleasure
and over-indulgence
and
ends in a sudden flash of blindness
that
never goes away
Dynamics
The manuscript illuminating the fall of
the rebel angels
reveals that things must cease to be what
they are
for the angels are no longer graceful or
clean;
they lack wings to lift themselves from
hell
which yawns below them: the mouth of a mongrel
dog.
The rebel angels asked, "Why
should God be always
God? Even Music Television has at least
the appearance
of change," and so were damned. If the imagination
is anything it is a prism, and hell is life
without it: A place where things turn into
what they already are: chairs become chairs,
music
is always Mozart.
In the miracle of birth what
should be one becomes two.
In the tragedy of stasis what should be
one becomes
nothing worth saving. If the imagination
is a prism,
pain coats it with sticky grime, any light
refracted
as gray and unwavering as suffering in hell,
where travel is always at
night and by train,
the windows too grimy to reveal to the demons,
angels
and bored listless humans whose heads rest
against them
the damp rocky landscape. So passengers
ransack
their minds for curses they have never been
taught.
Passengers have as well no word for dissatisfaction
or even lack; their own names remain
for them
as ineffable as even God declared his name,
the language of need a dark angry stain
on the flat sky
pressing itself wetly to the train.
Surrender
Futile, gazing at the sand-colored rocks
of some holy city and the loopy signature
of a friend who says she loves you from
there.
You need to go look at something large,
the Grand Canyon perhaps. Stand right
next to the edge. Make someone hold onto
you if
you're scared. You should be scared.
From the rim of the Grand
Canyon there is much
you cannot see. Still you will find
mud and donkey shit all mixed up with
intolerable beauty and the conviction
that we live in a universe more stark, discrete
and varied than five weak senses can know.
Your own body, for instance.
You know its odors,
its curves and hollows. But you'll never
see
blood cells in your brain clustered in collages
so beautiful they terrify. And sometimes
your heart
beats so loud you ask yourself When's
this racket
gonna quit? As if another noise, more
persistent still, might not take its place.
After all we are citizens
of paradox, as morose
as statues of husky Christians and more
perplexed
than a shaft of light making its twisted
way
through the streets of Bologna. While
at a lake in China it's morning, everything
bathed
in shadow. And always the stars, remote
and
non-threatening, make you feel small
but not afraid. You need to feel afraid.
You need to be shocked by
something large.
You need to see it and surrender. You need
to make your surrender an act of defiance.
In that peculiar nation of wonder, listen
as something tolls out the hours of the
morning:
A distant fugue, scarce and compelling.
From that place love no one. Come home
and love us all.
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