Philosophy/Religion – Page 20

December 23, 2008 by Dave Bonta

When the world goes plunk

You’ve heard about bolts from heaven. This was a lug nut. It pierced the windshield of my parents’ Nissan Pathfinder and slammed into the passenger seat where my mother had been sitting a short time before. Dad pulled over to the side of the road and looked back — there’d been no overpass. The only other vehicle on his side of the freeway was a Winnebago a quarter-mile ahead.

The guy at the shop said sure, that could’ve spun off the wheel of an RV. Just bad luck that it happened to come down right where you were. No — I said when I heard about it — it’s good luck, excellent luck! If Mom had still been sitting there, she could’ve been killed.

This is the kind of logic by which a sailor who loses his leg to a shark gets nicknamed Lucky Pete. It might mark me as an optimist, were it not for the fact that my dour realist side tends to get the last word: Luck had nothing to do with it. There’s no way Mom could’ve been there, since the purpose of the drive had been to deliver her to a conference, which Dad had already done when the incident occurred. And in any case the whole notion of luck represents an absurd attempt to project consistent, self-centered narratives onto chaotic, impersonal events. Unless, of course, you believe some kind of divine conductor is running the show, in which case the language of luck would be even more inappropriate, and you’d better get right with Jesus/Allah/whoever right now if you don’t want to be S.O.L. come Judgement Day.

That happened several years ago. The lug nut from heaven may have missed my mom by a mile — several miles, in fact — but as a fervent environmentalist her faith in the apocalypse remains unshaken. Just last night, in fact, we were talking about the old manual typewriter I keep under my writing table Just In Case. Mom said she thought that was an excellent idea. “At least when the world goes plunk,” she said, “we’ll be able to keep writing!”

“Wait. What? When the world goes plunk? Are you telling us that the sound the apocalyse makes is PLUNK?” My brother and I cracked up. “Yeah, you know — plunk!”

O.K., maybe it was more of a descriptive thing than straight onomatopoeia, but I like it either way. There’s such finality in it. It’s a quarter hitting the wall, dice hitting the table, a poker hand being laid down. It’s the sound of the clock running out on the game, or the numbers sliding into place on an old, pre-digital scoreboard at the ball park. It’s the sound of something small and ordinary landing in a totally unexpected place.

And when the world does finally go plunk, that machine-gun sound you’ll hear next, punctuated by bell-like dings? That’s my mom, continuing to type.

Don’t forget to check out qarrtsiluni’s Journaling the Apocalypse issue, now in its last ten days of publication. We won’t be posting anything tomorrow or Thursday, so this might be a good time to catch up.

December 8, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Scriptorium

Megan Fox tattoo

Out there, where the cold
gives your lungs a taste of sky,
a whole canon might be had
for a fraction of the cost
of these gothic letters
on a desert-pale parchment.
Life sentences.
Stones burning holes
up through the snow.

November 29, 2008 by Dave Bonta

From the Down Side

in response to Jean’s great slideshow

In the wet paving-stones
of Trafalgar Square
we are blue & blurry with distance
among the sunlit facades
every step we take
is met by the sole
of a shoe from another world
like lotuses materializing
under the infant Buddha’s
toddling feet.

November 23, 2008May 30, 2016 by Todd Davis

November Sabbath

This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series Ridge and Valley: an exchange of poems

Villagers attending church, by Walter Sanders

Dear Dave,

Lamar sits in his wheelchair
at the back of the church: Parkinson’s

propped in his lap like a toddler, bad baby
who crawls on this old man’s chest, pulls

his tired white head to the side
and whispers in his ear about lungs

falling in on themselves. Our minister reads
the words of the Psalmist, who assures us

about the place of the righteous and the wicked.
Lamar’s labored breathing lingers, rests

like a shawl on the shoulders of those of us
who sit in the next to last row. We can’t help

but wonder where the breath of God is, and why
a good man is treated so wickedly.

—Todd Davis

October 28, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The oak goddess

The Goddess has many manifestations, and some of them are arboreal.

Thus, at any rate, the eco-feminist take. I lean more toward animism, myself. So let me rephrase that:

The Oak has many manifestations, and some of them are theomorphic. And clearly very sexy, at least to a relationship-challenged hermit.

The difference is not merely semantic. I’d personally feel much more comfortable making demands of a generalized, invisible deity with potentially unlimited powers. Petitionary prayer becomes more than a bit awkward when one is face-to-face with a living being who clearly has very different priorities from one’s own.

Of course, there are plenty of regular religious folks — the kind who didn’t make it into Bill Maher’s recent film — who limit their prayers to giving thanks and asking for greater closeness with the deity, and/or greater conformity with the deity’s ways. And that’s always kind of been my style too. So I beseeched the oak goddess for acorns.

“Well, Dave,” you’re probably thinking, “that was pretty droll of you.” But it was in fact a sincere and urgent request. As sometimes happens, a late, cold spring played hob with oak pollination here, and the acorn crop seems to have failed. The deer are almost all down in the valleys gleaning corn, but many other, less mobile wildlife species are probably going hungry. I don’t actually believe in miracles, because I don’t think we should encourage lawlessness in our deities — once they get a taste for making the sun stand still or water spring from the rock, pretty soon they’re running amok and smiting people like there’s no tomorrow.

So no miracles, please. Let the natural order prevail. But if some sort of alternate nutrient were to materialize, manna-like, who’s to say my intervention with the oak goddess didn’t have something to do with it?

I’m accepting submissions for the Nov. 1 edition of the Festival of the Trees blog carnival through Friday. Details here.

September 30, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Lines for the Jewish New Year

The dark of the moon. In my email inbox a series of photos, forwarded from someone in Texas, of a rattlesnake disappearing head-first into a black snake as if into a tailor-made Gehenna. It was, of course, dead, its molecules about to live again inside a new & sleeker skin, acquired in the opposite manner from the usual reductionism. It must’ve been a long, slow process. In the last snapshot the black snake is alone on the ground, as fat as a dirt-bike tire & unlikely to coil anytime soon.

The ceiling is better than the floor. I lie on the couch & gaze longingly at its immaculate meadow, trackless, free of dirt. White as a cloud that will never spill its snow. Good cover for disembodied spirits, which are, if anything, pale and fast-rising as steam. But this isn’t a fantasy about death, it’s a dream of stasis. Halfway to slumber, I watch a question assemble itself in my semi-conscious mind: Do elegance & purpose have anything in common? It startles me back to wakefulness. Of course, I want to say — but if it’s as obvious as that, where did this doubt come from? In Genesis, when things emerge from primordial vapor they are already “good” — the Creator has little or nothing to do with that, other than to see that it is so.

Sounds are muffled in the thick fog, & the autumn leaves seem to glow from within. A maple tree across the driveway supports two, competing narratives: the original, candelabra-shaped leaves, and the three-in-one leaves of the poison ivy that has parasitized it. They have turned an identical shade of orange. Fog swallows distance, and for some reason this makes time seem less pressing as well. You travel through it & your pool of awareness travels with you, like a reader through a scroll where every line gives rise to new reams of exegesis. But at some, seemingly arbitrary point, you can’t go on without dropping to your knees and begging forgiveness of the ground, which you have so thoroughly taken in stride. The fog says, you can only walk in circles. You are already home.

September 22, 2008 by Dave Bonta

The Animators

Sparked by Natalie’s postcard, “blinding light.”

The first time they outlined their hands with blown pigment, it was a holy thing. With the help of the sacrament they had shifted over, and placing their palms against the stone flank they felt warmth and movement, the charge of spirit. Through this thinnest of membranes they were making contact: the Others’ hands or forepaws were right there. Quick, get the paint!

Each time after that, though, it became a little more routine. The dried prints did not open into new passageways as they’d hoped. They made more prints, but it wasn’t quite the same. The rock began to feel like rock, instead of the living animal they knew it to be. Someone grew violent after ingesting the sacrament and split a boy’s head open before they could subdue him, so they decided to try the ceremony without it.

While most people just sat in the darkness feeling their bladders fill or resisting the urge to scratch certain itches, a couple of men claimed that it was better this way — they had a more direct access now, and if others did not, it must mean that they had violated some previously unknown taboo. Fortunately, their improved access privileged them with detailed knowledge of such things, and they began to speak the beginningless Law.

Now when they outlined a hand, it was to bear witness to one or another revelation. The steadiness of the rock was the whole point. Some things — perhaps most things — eluded contact, except in dreams. Those who knew could teach the rest how to become better dreamers, but it would come at a price, because don’t we have to kill in order to live? The Others were hungry for visions, so it was decided that the acolytes would stay underground and paint the pictures in their heads. They would give up sun- and moonlight for the welfare of the tribe.

The longer they stayed in the bowels of the earth-animal, the better and more vivid their visions became. Children were born down there and grew up by torchlight, clothed in thick pelts from the game they learned to draw without ever seeing it. Their parents marveled at their facility with the increasingly complex tools of animation, but grew alarmed at the obesity brought on by their sedentary habits. Come out into the other chambers, they pleaded. Explore the maze of passageways! That’s what we did when we were your age. But the kids wouldn’t listen.

The old shamans also felt lost. This new generation didn’t sit passively and wait for messages from the other side; they often began by sending messages of their own. The vision room became fully interactive. Those who lived aboveground only visited it four times a year, now, and the cavemen and -women regarded them with a condescension befitting their status as child-like primitives. You are living in a world of dreams, they would intone, eyes bulging, their corpse-white skin bared for effect. Be sure to keep bringing us fruit and game, so we can keep dreaming these dreams for you. A priest would lead them to the frieze of hand prints. Here are the ones who wouldn’t listen. See them reaching. See them trying to be born.

September 16, 2008May 30, 2016 by Teju Cole

Haruspex Blues

Another poem from Teju Cole, in response to this.

Living in the body of a seal,
diffident as a crippled hound
stealing some shut-eye in the belly,
night office of the soul.

Enfolding not the future,
no gland of hope or glory,
the lobes will only testify
in favor of the shadowed now.

Solemn a temple of deception
as bird flight or other sign:
staves scattered across desert,
dowsing through text-terrain.

Wolf call hints at augury,
unfurls like lifting fog,
antenna pitched at gods who
are much too fond of sleeping.

September 14, 2008May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Fitter selves

Brother Cole,

If I were to pray, I would start low
in the belly, among the slick viscera —
don’t call them tripe, those amulets,
that conjurer’s bag, the wine-dark

apotrope where I live, & a road
more convoluted than the tube of a tuba,
that’s where I’d start, there where medicine
(always the best laughter) bubbles up

like smoke through a hookah
into the vicinity of my underachieving heart
& the lungs’ bladderwrack, that’s
how I’d begin, letting the first note

climb of its own volition, gathering
strength in the chest before the voice box
warps it into sound & it joins the others,
which were also somehow there already

in the darkness just beyond the fire,
eyes aglint, our unfamiliar better natures,
so unlike the beast that once leapt for my throat
before its too-small owner — our neighbor–

could drag it away, & I walked into the house
holding my bloodied hand before me
like a waiter with a choice dish
(the zig-zag track of the stitches still marks

my ring-finger) but that was the savagery
of an untamed thing confined;
its muffled roars & strangled yelps
as it flung itself all night against the pen

were nothing like the call or response
of an untrammeled spirit, half-laugh, half-sob —
the way I would hope to sound
if ever I were to join the pack & pray.

Download the MP3
(N.B.: The audio is more important to this post than the text!)

September 4, 2008 by Dave Bonta

Confessions of an Invisible Penis

I’m here for you, baby — right
out of reach. I throb in sync
with the cycles of the moon.
When you wake in the night & hear
a faint dripping, that’s me,
marking territory in the linen closet.

Oh what a friend you have
in Penis: a faithful familiar,
easy to love despite my wet nose
& my habit of poking it in every
secret thing. Walk with me.
Can you feel it growing taut,
my invisible leash?

I am the jewel in your lotus,
the genie in your bottle,
waiting for just the right rub.
Still your heart, empty your mind
& I’ll come, granting all
your clearly superfluous wishes.