An Intro to The Gospel of the Kreatur

Do not think that I have come to leave the Law in ruin, I have not come to leave the Law, but to raise Her from a death-like sleep. ¹

Mathew 5 :17 (PDV)

Years before he was taken by a workers bullet, Gumilev listened to Mandelstam recite a new work. “This is an excellent poem, Osip Emilyvech. But when it is finished none of these words will remain.”

The home-coming of our consequences, a harvest of centuries, arrives regardless of our wholeness or our readiness for the turn. By that I mean that radio silence between the fracture of the world and the level of craft in my own splints have reminded me that the faultlines now spreading around will be mapped through the glass of our own shatter. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is the intimacy with impairment, according to the Yehsua of John, that allows the listener to finally hear and the looker to finally see.

The Day past, standing at the Door

I saw the Messiah.
A small girl, no more than six,
she lay on her belly in the witch grass;
a pill bug had rolled its segmented carapace
around the bit of matter
which held the controls
that ordered the constants of the universe.

The Messiah whispered gently
"Roly poly, roly poly..."
coaxing it to open its clasp, that she might
finally reach the controls
and make a slight adjustment.

Just then she was called in for supper.

She sighed, placed a cup over the kreatur
and promised to come back soon.
She brushed off the bits of earth from her palms
and, without glancing back, headed home.

Hours later as the sun sank behind the houses
a single firefly flashed an eye glint
of beacon fire against the darkening sky

And the answering calls came.

In the flash of those recognitions,
at the edge of my vision
on a road to Emmaus
I saw through that luciferin fire
and the wingbeat, beneath the hover
She had circled back,
before me the whole time

I held the cup
from which I had released her charge
and turned it in my hands:
Spear-tip and swallows,
dendrite and dream,
hearth hinge war
cheek to hip to heel
and every pigment in between sang
from beneath the blood tinge of the curves.

Aware of the hour
I lit the candles.
The dark between the stars
would to come to stay.

The door now open
to the salvaging night,
my eyes adjusted,
I saw the blood of all the others
on the lintel and post.
I carried the cup back out,
myself walking now
upon the edge of its great rim,
cobalt vespering me over.

I lay myself down upon the black earth.

Grail on grail, word upon word,
the end of all things.

I asked, this time,
to try to remain awake
listening for the wingtip
of whatever strange Angel
might come to pour.

I recognize a kinship—mother tongue—with those close to me who are able to enter tradition through the Eastern Gate and find its authority still upright and standing. They say this is the gate the Messiah uses on such visits. But it is a gate I find I cannot pass. Like particles entangled across the abyss, siblings, we pull on the same oar but are conscripted to different boats.

I am not alone with this Bund/Divide. This work is just one minor firefly flash among many who, finding that gate barred, yet mother-tongue still calling, and have decided to go around another way.

All that to say, I have heard of this One that They have other folds.

Studies of bee culture have found that when the waggle dancers come back to the hive and dance out the way to new nectar, the young bees head off along those coordinates. The older and more worn-down gatherers however, carrier-bags tuned toward the ancestral, can be seen heading, not to new flowers, but to re-membered fields of pollen-past.

There is such a field in me, from before, where I remember first waking to a beauty tangled with justice. It is a coming of age place, between the devil and the deep blue sea, before the hardening of certainties and the connecting of the stars with straight clean lines. It is a clearing, circled by trees. The dark beneath the canopy is flush with people, only some human. With Them I touch lips to new wine and new skin. But the same dark is also shot through with the shadows cast by a still moving Galilean peasant Rabbi. Some accuse him of being G-d Them-self come to earth, fully Animal, to live and to die as one of us. Since I first heard those rumors, I have known that, after Auschwitz and every other way like it, only a G-d who would—in love and in need, mothered and mattered—come and walk to the end this terrible night in person could be home to me. With this Story, sun slipped to starlight, I touch tongue to pollen-past.

But, it is a place I come back to, as the poet Paul Celan describes, walking on my head, the sky an abyss at my feet. Gaze earth-kept and Kreaturely.

Once I knew a word, and winced from it, with the opposite polarity. One that lifted the eyes of the animal up and away from earth. It went like this:

In my father’s house there are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you.

Martin Shaw told me of a bishop and scholar of ancient languages who taught that there were no mansions in the sky in the aramaic of the first century. Closer to the truth (or rather to the beauty) of the sayings re-membered in John 14 would be this:

In my Father’s caravan are many resting places, if it were not so I would have told you.

Do you feel your eyes go up to earth, to the horizon of the animal you are?

These posts are wishing over the well to imagine a Gospel of the Kreatur that squares with both Who I find circling me in that field and the discovery that heaven has gone to an abyss at our feet by all that has been done in its name.

This is more like chasing a wasp in flight than an introduction. I want to step back a bit from the wisp of it and remember the here and the now I find myself in.

Celan also advised, remembering a January 20th of a different order, we keep in mind our dates. That is to say these are partisan woods.

I type this out, speaking it aloud as I do, in the shadow of an American state also making sounds. Sounds, to some ears, that begin to rhyme with a wailing in Danzig that the poet Robison Jeffers heard in 1939. He wrote that it was the sound of greatness cored to sick child’s soul.

It is, so far, only a near rhyme. Modulated by the hinge pin in a marionette mouth and the jerk of a showman’s knee, most days it is more hyena babble than hawk’s cry. But in the chair something viral and infantile surely taps the stones in the tower at Carmel. This isn’t Danzig (or Ossetia for that matter) but arms extend toward violence. Cowardice gives birth. And salutes chime.

No Pasaran.

Two weeks past, with my crew, I sat in a circle on site listening the fears of the Venezuelan workers who have become family. Though the stakes had mostly to do with the bodies of those new to the land, truths regarding the State and illusions of exceptionalism were dawning mostly upon the so-called residents. Rosie Whinray describes this experience, a commonplace now I think, as tower times, after the tarot card and its picture of people falling from a lightning struck citadel.

It seems a fair sketch. As these kind of cracks in the walls accumulate locally it becomes clear that this isn’t about siding with one of the aging binaries of a dying world. There is need to conserve and need to liberate in the ruins. We are passed that sort of demarcation and into a time of increasingly demanding invitations to dishonor, a moment where refusals necessary to not lose our soul begin to line up at the door.

In Word and Culture, Mandelstam wrote that “social differences and class oppositions pale before the division of people into friends and enemies of the word…Here, he said, the argument that ends any serious disagreement is quite appropriate: my opponent ‘has a rank stench’.

The other night we got word from a town just North of here similar to mine,where a neighbor, legally in country, has been disappeared from his wife and loved ones by masked thugs deputized by that cowardice mentioned earlier.

The Zohar says that Abraham is the first soul, the first appearance of neshama in the story it weaves because soul is not essence but a “particular state of activity” affecting us “like breath itself”². Why Abraham? Because his homeland and became the first Stranger. Deportation surrenders a the soul of a place.

Power, said Arendt, arises only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and where deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.

Speak the truth to Power they say.

The cadaver scent, the breaking of word into stammer meant to veil the abduction of humans, the betrayal of allies, the grinding of the poor, and the unending auto-idolatry is a vow that power has left the building leaving only a clutching strength listing toward a totalizing need.

Such a State, said Landauer, such a mode of behavior, is safely destroyed by people contracting other ways of relationship, other forms of behaving toward one another. This is to recognize, one, that toppling of the state in upon itself, with the living still inside is not power but murder and, two, that the State belonging to the world that is ending will not have on its map the infrastructures of world(s) not yet imagined (A School Called Home).

Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil suggests that it was a type of loneliness that formed the raw material for the murderous regime. If this carrier bag of a substack is anything, it is a gathering against such loneliness. It is about vessels of entanglement, the end of the human monologue, and (its truth be told) G-d in search of Company.

This is Radio Aster. It will not, I hope, be on a frequency often sketching Orc-ish potraits. I think the less said in that tongue the better. A simple vow of solidarity with every honorable mutiny and an unending distaste for the cadaver scent should be enough to leave any Gilbertian praise of the Devil, as much as is possible, outside the music here. There may be a terrible place coming for other strategies, but this work is about the love of the word as the hearth of endurance. Still, I have to say one more one thing plain before moving on.

I am a lover of midrash. It’s a gift in the ruins, especially useful when so much is lost because the magic of Midrash is that it is all knowing and all seeing. It was there, everywhere, and can always find the bits of the secret biographies, those new wineskins for old wine, in the Story that this Day needs to say it true, maybe even truer than it was never said before. Best of all, the litero-certain can't access it because, still hidden and running loose in the world, it hasn't laid down on the exam table for the instruments.

But the Devil does midrash as well. The Midrash of the Devil is of the opposite polarity. It skins fear in the old containers of hospitality. All the particulars of biography are replaced by the lulling certainties, smirking angels of incrimination. Of those taken away, by word or plane, all now behind bars, and all those soon to be: Be still and know that they are Other, and thus resource or guilty, whichever the moment demands. There are always things known, in the Midrash of the Devil, about them, that mix of nightmarish gravity and journalistic vaguely, to help bystanders put reservations aside.

Sacred Midrash populates the biome with a multiplicity of neighbors and wonder. The Midrash of the Devil empties the world of everyone but Me.

This is a two part introduction to the work here. It was just too long to put up as one post. In general I am gonna keep it shorter and more often here, posting maybe one or two times a week. But I will put up the second half of this is a day or so. Let me end this section with a story from our land here that ties us back to the essay before, since its been awhile. Forgive a quick quote from past work:

“Beavers. A keystone species they say. Meaning, I guess, that they are makers of worlds. Like the Lamed Vav who uphold each sky in its turn,they are masters of right relation. And just so, this year both to the North and to the West they have set to work. Close to our house a small vernal pool has been deepened and enriched by a midrash that tells these re-makers to listen for running water. By listening and then coming close to weave in the holes, they re-member the world. The wet song of it, amphibian and other, presses into our dreams, so loud the gathering, so good the trill. We watch, stick by stick, as the soft weir-ing lifts the level of water and life slowly enough to allow the many to weave in to the making. We think of our own concretization of flow. And its loneliness. I see that there are dams and there are dams, and the distance between the drowning of multiplicity on one hand and the anabranching fertility on the other is the distance between a regime of silencing and unregimented eddying toward music. Beavers work mostly from dusk til dawn. The night is coming when no man can work. The tail-slap of an answer: Behold, I am no man.”

I wrote that in high summer. I was then, and remain, in thrall to the animal of this place but had lost the thread in a sadness. A couple months later, our town road manager decided, in the name of the primacy above all of human passage, to trap the group of beavers near our home. To extinction.

Even the trapper resisted, scenting karma in a time of drought, but eventually he went with it. Supposedly he took them all.

It was a bit of time before I connected my loss of word with the loss of my teachers. It was a kind note from Vanessa Chamberlain of the Tuning Fork about that tailslap, while wrestling with the blank page, that sent me back to the dam.

I took a walk to the pond to take that in. Every element but the winged was still. No wind. Ravens hung in the arches over the asphalt. Various little ones sang with and against each other. A hawk passed over the tips of the conifers and I could hear the air drummed by feather.The birds had the mastery of the morning and I felt like maybe in such company I could finally think straight. Or rather, by exchanging the tendency of the line for a fair curve, maybe come to the matter beneath the stammer.

It was Imbolc time and I had just read a really helpful bit, Brigid Beyond Belief by Seán O'Donoghue. It had a ritual template in its pocket that seemed right for this trouble and so the next evening Christin and I set a white cloth out in the open for the night. And in the morning, after she honeyed the wasps that live in our kitchen and fed the chicken in the living room healing from fox-bite, we lit three candles before three bowls of water. We spoke words to the land and to Shekinah/Sophia. Later as the candles burned amidst some offerings, we walked the frozen pond right up to the largest of the beaver lodges. The Zemlyanka of the Kreatur I think now as I remember it. These really are partisan woods. Five times we circled around the hill of sticks and mud beneath snow. On the way I had grabbed a mullein stalk still unbowed from a drift. We said a bit toward the life of beavers and wrote into the snow, “Talitha Kum”.

On the way back in the snow over ice there were footprints left the night before by a few deer. One them, under the moon, had circled sunwise, just as we had, and then bedded down there at the center of the pond. I wasn’ ready to leave, so Christin went on and I lay down in that bodyprint. The sun was warm. I was well wooled and comfortable in that deep way that warmth gives when close to the cold. Whisps of clouds moved east across the sky. All of them except one that, like a salmon going upstream, crossed weird into my vision, pushing west. You could feel the odd of it on the tip of the mind. I swear it stopped over me in the shape of a hare. Not sorta like a hare. This was the animal from edge to edge.

John Moriarty’s tells of his own laying down in a body print, a hare form at that. I am sure he was in the back of my mind at the moment. Later I learned that the day of thing, February second, was Moriarty’s birthday. .

The next day, I took the offerings from our table, whiskey and honey, out to the lodge to leave for any She that might be glad for it, Brigid to Miriam and back again. My dog and I lay on the ice again for a good while. There at the western wall of the lodge, ear an inch from the ice, twice I though I heard a body swoosh along the underside of the freeze. In my mind’s eye, it was fur not fin. Talitha Kum.

Clothed in that sound, in my right mind again, I reach out with my left hand and keep the moment as it was then. I don’t feel a need to invite the rational to sweep the field clear of Company. The master’s tools resist taking down the master’s house, they say.

All that to say that I think every array we suspect as the everyday familiar is shot through with post-loss transmsissions leaving word that the sytem isn’t closed and that despite the violences that rise in this dark, the places between the trees and under the ice and under the stars—the Salvaged Night—will never be completely surrendered.

Part Two on Zemlyankas, tables and rafts will be up in a night or two.

The image above is Papilla Estelar by Remedios Varo

1. One possibility of the original Aramaic of Yeshua here is kum. Along with arise, it can be used in a sense of fulfilling. It is not the word in that verse in the Peshitta or the Diatesseron. Yet it is used in that sense about Word in Isaiah and other works often alluded to by Yeshua. He, also, at times spoke of stasis and sepulcher regarding the Law. And kum is one of the few words we are told without reserve that crossed his lips. Talitha Kum.

2. From Dov Elbaum’s book of Kabbalah as autobiography, Into the Fullness of the Void