-dedicated to all those souls caught in the violence of this world

 

Hatred rests on the trigger

as I dissolve my love into the hand of a man

aiming his pain at the head of a helpless child

 

Rain falls

pouring tears into the wounds of our mother’s body

One more soul captured

By the wrath of the dropping bomb

 

I open to the breath of a hundred hearts weaving into an invisible shall

and wrapping themselves around her fear like silk soothing the skin

 

I choose to hold the violence of an anger stricken heart

As I lay beside the child caught in the crossfire of its ignorance

 

Here I find no boundaries

In the eyes of formless compassion

 

I see no divisions of good and evil

Fear and desire

The Devil and God

 

Here even hatred is in a constant search for the Divine

And the Devil holds the key to our infinity

 

 

I was looking through some old files the other day and found this one page piece I'd written a little over a year ago. It was interesting to read it again as it came out during a time when my writing spirit had just begun to take its "possession" ... I was writing about four to five hours a day at the time on top of full time school. 

I remember the pain that I felt in my need to unleash each moment through words and to find some way to personally engage with the divine yearning for aesthetic offering. And then I remember the pain of having to face my inevitable inadequacies in the face of the ineffable beauty that I was attempting to describe through language. I thought I would post it as I felt it spoke to the struggle and the beauty that all beings feel when they first become "posessed" by the call for artistic expression, whatever form that may take for each of us.

Wishing you all blessings for the holiday...
 




Holding close my struggle with words, the expansion of infinity continued to trace itself in circles across the water below my feet. The crisp autumn air grabbed hold of a slender yellow leaf that had released itself from overhead and was now making its way down towards me. The leaf lifted and swept back and forth like a swinging hammock tied between two giant pine trees, rocking playfully through the gentle forces of the wind’s morning current. After a time of enjoying its cradled swim through space the leaf’s movement came to a rest with its smooth landing on the comforting bed of the pond.

Instead of sinking to the bottom, the thick layer of tension covering the water’s surface cushioned and held the leaf afloat as the pond willingly received the force of the impact, diffusing the small shock of pressure through translucent circular rings that extended outward from beneath. The ripples caught the reflection of the sun in their movement outward and grew wider as they reached toward the pull of their attraction, drawn to touch themselves against the yellow and white flowers that lined the surrounding grass. Eventually the circles began to fade as their movement fell back into the deeper rhythm of the pond, leaving behind no trace of the exuberant ripples of life that had just recently danced upon it.

The leaves continued their play; autumn colors of rich red and vibrant orange followed the swirl of yellow and brown that had already begun their wild hammock swing through space. As they all made their way along the flowing streams of gravity the pond soon began to jump and dance with hundreds of expanding circles, reaching past and into one another and blending their momentary existence with the energy of the circles that surrounded them. They were all rings of unique intention, set to send their impact out as far reaching as possible, but never once making a lasting dent on the overall stillness of the pond.

I had to smile at the parallels of this ill-fated activity to my own writing process. I suppose I chose to write because I’d hoped to assert my own unique ripple on the pond even though I carried a continual awareness of the ultimate futility inherent in such an act. But there was an open invitation in my heart to the pain and struggle that accompanied my attempts at writing because I carried the deepest desire to have that one meaningful dance over the waters of infinity.

I look to the circles that enfold and fall all around me, the writers who have created tidal waves, and then look at myself, a ripple, a small vein running alongside. The waves no longer intimidate my writing spirit because in the end it all falls back to the same stillness, to the one rhythm of the pond. In the end there was only one writer reaching for a thousand pens and I can no longer seem to distinguish between the waves and the ripples.

I’d never chosen to write because I was naturally gifted, I wasn’t one of those genius kids who started writing their first prose at two. The truth was that I had been an extremely slow learner as a child and hadn’t even learned to read or write until I was in the fourth grade. My passion to write for hours on end had not been because I was a brilliant writer or even a good writer; rather, I continued to write ceaselessly in an attempt to wear myself out. I’d learned that if I did this enough my hand had the ability to fall into momentary currents of spontaneous beauty. When I realized my passion for life resided in those moments of pointless creativity I knew that I was cursed to endure endless hours of terrible writing just so I could watch for that one rich sentence that would flow out from beyond the will of my fingertips and effortlessly grace itself in dark ink across my page.

I wanted to post a poem I wrote a little over a month ago called "Final Theophany", but also felt the desire to preface it for some important reasons as it has come to spur a deeper intrigue and interest for me and my academic writing. The poem was originally written as a reflection on some strong feelings I'd carried for the last year around a specific woman in my life and how I had come to "interpret" or understand love in the face of my own illusions as well as the infinite/finite paradox that is inherent to our existence.

But the topic of love has become recently more interesting to me as I've been doing research in preparation for a paper I'm writing for my Christian History studies course next semester on Soren Kierkegaard.  I've become really impacted by Kierkegaard and his very profound understanding of the human experience. I've decided to focus specifically on his philosophy of Ethics and Love for this particular paper and wanted to briefly touch on his thought with you for the purpose of the favor I'm going to ask down below.

I think the most important thing about Kierkegaard was that he was first and foremost a Christian and his existential philosophy was always grounded in the fundamental responsibility of the individual and his/her relationship to God/Love. He also had a very detailed understanding of ethical/religious development and the different stages of life including the struggles of individuation (existential fear and trembling), and on toward the process of transcending the self (Leap of Faith) that was necessary to reach the highest levels of Love's expression.

The reason I'm so interested in his work on Love is because he is a master at exposing in detail all the traps and illusions that humans face in relationship to thier experience of love as well as how we relate to our objects of love (the beloved). He sees most love relationships leading only to existential despair because we tend to try and make our beloved into the image of our ideal that only God can fulfill. And because of this we will always judge, compare and calculate the level of our partner's ability to love us. He argues that only the individual who has taken the Leap of Faith will be able to see that all calculations of how much we love compared to others is useless, for in the face of God we see that we are always in infinite debt to His Grace and that all He asks is that we love others unconditionally for Him (Yes I'm aware of the Judeo-Christian slant, but still important stuff!)

He goes on to speak of the Command of Love and our own commitment to absolute telos (our God relationship) as ultimately higher than any other familial relationship or moral duty. He argues that the command of Love offers a momentary "suspension of the ethical" in order that we might align our will with Gods. He uses the example of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac as a call to Absolute Love, a metaphor for the need to step beyond the love we have committed to as friends and parents etc etc. Not that that  love  does not return but it must be suspended in order to ground oneself in Faith so that all interactions become first and foremost relationships between us and God, every human must become God in our eyes before any other role, or God must become the ground of all our relationships.

I continue to feel Kierkegaard's philosophy to be extremely beneficial for illuminating different experiences and expressions of love at different levels of human development. My own interest as of late and why I'm posting all of this is because I would like to try to write an article using Kierkegaard and French feminist philosopher Luce Irigiray as grounds a for new interpretation of feminist ethics, rooted in the command of Love.  I think love is something that women especially struggle with at the level of relationships and how that Love translates and transforms at the level of Faith. Mainly I think this is because our personal relationships are so immediately present and are a big part of how we form our sense of identity. I realize this is not necessarily a new insight but I think the idea and discussion could be more thoroughly fleshed out.  I also think it's harder for women to make the existential transition and ground ourselves in the Command of Love because it looks very different from how we normally conceive care and compassion.

I'm hoping to generate some conversation on this topic here on Zaadz by posting different ideas in relation to this academic paper I would like to write. I mainly want to see if there is any interest to explore integral ethics and feminist conceptions of love in order to expand the scope of our approach to the issue of Love.  Kierkegaard himself seemed to believe that you could distinguish ones level of development based on the way that they Love. I realize this is somewhat simplistic in the face of an integral awareness that takes in the complexity of lines and types etc. but I still find the simple statement to carry a lot of beauty and truth and perhaps something I often feel left behind in many of the discussions I have  with others about second tier. 

My idea for the title is "A New Ethical Horizon for Feminism: Kierkegaard, Irigiray and the Command to Love."
I do hope this generates some discussion to keep me on this extra work as I also enter into full time courses next semester. If not... than it will also tell me that perhaps the topic is not grabbing people. Either way it will be useful information for me.

So here's the poem, again any reflections on what it brings up in relation to Love feel free to share.

 

Final Theophany

 

A gaping abyss once opened in my heart.

 

It illuminated my cushioned cave of pulsating heat
with every curvature designed to the shape of your feet.

A crafted Home for Love’s respite
that only Sappho came to tend at night.

 She laid herself against the cliff of my deepest yearning
and blinded any hopes for the skills of wise discerning.

It was in this private dwelling place that I would often dream of you.
The intensity of your touch scorching the secrets of my skin
a caress that always left me undressed
to a rain of butterflies descending deep within.

I would wake to feel the pleasure
of my inability to grasp the tastes of eternity.

and I would wake to feel the sadness
of this love that longed to apprehend itself through the particulars of a face.

It was in my waking that I held the paradox of pain
an emptiness that always reached out to form in vain.
My heart was clinging now to wisps of air
that I had come to mistake for the weight of my despair.

 It was this pain that was destined to enfold in on itself
before offering its cool breeze through the surrendered passageways of my broken heart.
It sang no homilie as it traveled through these sacred caverns and draped itself across the resting place I’d kept so long in secret
just for you.

It is this imprint of grief that always traces our radiance.

You see it was your soft curves that had marked the lost temples of my divine
the remembrance that had once flowed forth from you fingertips to mine.
This was my final Theophany.
A symphony so profound that it shattered sound
and rebuilt this temple on empty ground.

It was the dangerously close proximity I’d grown to Love’s possession
that had finally dissolved the walls between me and its forms of obsession.

So now I understand this gift of separation
this hallowing of heart that was my preparation
my purification.

Given new eyes no longer encased
I knew I would have to replace
the image of your face
with empty space.

And now I wake every morning only to Die
so that Love Alone might live.

 A life already given,
a heart so full that it is forever poverty stricken.

 

 -November 18 2006