For Wittgenstein Days are like grass the wind moves over: first the wind & then the silence— what cannot be said we must pass over in silence, or play some music over in our heads. Silently, a wind goes over (we know from the motion of the grass). Days are like grass the wind goes over: first the wind & then the silence. -- Air and Angels It is a langorous evening in Eden. Light fades from the quilted river and the first persons' sense of self fades like that ancient light. How well they know their minds are empty! That's the price God exacts for walking with him in the evening. The air cools and a fine dew appears on the leaves. The closer He comes--strolling fluently among the million trees of the garden--the less they know: His is a voice that turns out in the end to be utterly intolerable. It is a langorous evening in Eden. Yes. The flickering celestial swords come later, writing their refusals in the air of the garden by main force. Those angels' job was to carve heaven from the firmament: the first Rational Act in the world, slicing the innocent ecosystem pulsing through the garden where nothing ever happened into parts, called knowledge. That was the price of being God's sad, wild, disobedient children. Sin was strange and new, a first act of imagination. So there is a lyric silence everywhere, like God, or his first absence. Or that perfect fold of late sunlight coruscating the surface of the Tigris. The tongue is a devil. Name the animals, God said, and after that there was science everywhere, and faith's niggling curlicues. Now I begin to understand my father, an engineer who designed golden screws tightened inside the lathed ceramic nosecones latched atop ballistic missels in the 1950s. Everything looked the same to him, and he believed in a God who wanted him, each Saturday of my early adolescence, to humble himself by volunteering to janitor Grace Brethren Church. At evening he'd come get me from the pool of our apartment block, where I'd have slid my hand inside a girlfriend's suit, our slippage broken by the troubled surface and mottled light of the blue chlorinated water (stirred by healing angels?) where we treaded water. Adam and Eve would have been so happy until that moment of anguish in which they learned to work. We worked like hell in God's house, polishing linoleum in the Sanctuary (which looked for all the world like an expanded version of our split- level living room). The old Romans were astonished--having pushed their way, swords flashing, past the priests, to find the Holy of Holies dead empty. Grace depends, then, on sin's richness. I'd take along my radio--Ali had stopped Liston--and listen through cement static to rock stations applying solvents to the fixtures in the house of God. Certain Christians show devotion by dancing with rattlesnakes deep in the pines, their piety proving itself by risking a wild metaphor rooted deep in Eden. We did not believe in anything as wild as metaphor--the only language we trusted was the inerrant KJV translation printed on onionskin that rustled each Sunday like summer leaves in a light wind. Mostly engineers and programmers with brittle spirits in need of beautiful sentences, our church accepted only the glossolalia of ionized particles whining through space, insisting this was God's voice whispering in the garden. Interested, I watched the trees of high summer waver through the sanctuary's frosted windows. Presented the choice between science and faith, I chose faith in physical science. Saturday before, I'd discoverd objective evidence of the World's Body--cleaning the toilet in the Ladies Room I found a blond pubic hair, making me forever an Empiricist. Grace finds multiple expression here in the world--my father's fervent baritone-- now I can say it--rising above the mumble of the congregation, and/or the inadequate sign language my hands might make shaped by breasts, my fingers curled into an alphabet that names something sacred, or make themselves otherwise useful in this world. (from Static, published by Owl Creek Press (1996) c. Joseph Duemer 1996)
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