Radio Aster out to the Merrie

This post began as loose response to a talk I enjoyed between Martin Shaw and Michael Bready over at Perspectiva. In some ways the poem at its opening is what I wanted to say and the sprawl that follows on it is like the poem’s footnote in order to be heard. Can this unwieldy thing be a response to the Merrie just up over at House of Beasts and Vines, in some sense hasty enough to dare to be premptive? I hope so. As tempting as some revision is, I will leave the whole business as it was before I read today’s essay except to say that one man’s Sherwood Forest is another man’s Bielski Otriad.

I promise to ease up on the long posts and after some chores I will see if I can manage to record an audio to make its meander and stretch a bit more tempting. Remember, only bad people don’t leave comments.

Is this part two of an Intro to the Gospel of the Kreatur? Yes…yes it is. Thank you for asking.

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Last night standing at the door
I heard the Messiah digging in the dark between the trees.

Zemlyanka, said the bell mouth
a buoyancy sung toward stone.
Mollusc at hand, lee-word to lip,
now a raft on the water, our Black Sea—come home.

Shelter in exchange for comfort.

In places like here, She says, in a language like this,
She says, every guest you shelter is the rhyme you need
to sing up Siddur, to pry loose a Word from after-bone.

Here, She says, there are no chance meetings of sound.

Spirit goes breathing,
all cruciform is treed
Malkut in our midst
She in-spires, mutiny’s amulets
dangling horse-haired from limbs.

Blow, Wind.
In Messiah bed down again
the small,
the lost, the hungry,
antlered and winged.

In the flotilla of the breasted One
are many seal holes, if it were
not so I would have told you.
Ir Kent Dem Veg.

Our tongues tip a Ghost-
dance sunwise and on
out from this state that elseway spins.

Merrie is the way.

She sings beneath the boughs.
Bless and keep us, a canopy over us
and the oarlocks a drum.

I hear there are hands on columns,
palms flattening into press.

This frequency is an ark,
petal and hoof,
finger and feather,
these tablets, this dust.

At the start of this letter, snow is coming down in these quiet foothills. It is heavy and wet. Mid-April here is always listening for a wintering sky’s last wish to lay down white—just once more—before surrendering the soil to green.

The wetlands among the birch are loud with blackbird, peepers and all manner of wing-scraped song, their volume increasing as the snow grows heavier. It is, I think, a warding off. They are too awake, strings too atuned to warming for cold to fall without a counterword.

A few days back between the pond and the stream a mink, heading straight at me until I called myself out, crossed my path intent upon some unmanned line. The mink, I read, is One that “burrows into the dark for its food, not knowing exactly what awaits it there”. This One that teaches us about hunting in the unlit places. They map their borders and call in Company with musk.

Homing, then, is done by scent. Wards against the cold by a bowing and an ear for music.

A day later and I am inside by the fire, listening to a recording of Martin speaking with a fellow from Perspectiva. My grip loose. My arms at rest but there is a scrape at that oarlock. The oar pushing,as if on its own accord, heart-ward. Conscripts of the pull on separated boats, I remember.

There is a suggestion that maybe She wants us to trade our comfort for shelter.

Here, as things slip and sirens rise, I am thinking the exchange may be a shibboleth. The way that each of us pronounce home may demand, in this dusk, a parting of ways.

Martin suggests the sentry at the gate to shelter listens for a watchword:

Mercy.

Yes, that.

The fire cracks and Martin is reconsidering the cost of our Fall. The sense of our shatter is juxtaposed against the wonder and beauty that walk the faultlines. Bless all art set against the drop but at least consider the depth of the cut, whether the wound is hot to the touch.

Bardskull. I remember one of the last things I read as the current unexpectedly turned back and went down into this Golgathic eddying in the flow. It was a theory by Willerslev that the domestication of the reindeer and the ritual of sacrifice was driven by the sense that something wasn’t freely given in the Hunt, that any one with eyes could see the antlered Other, to the last, wishing over the well to live. Domestication and sacrifice was the taking up of the art that seeks to transmute something broken in the way life kills live. Creation groans, maybe not at death’s ending in and of itself but the ragged edge of it that seems to push past the elemental into the cruel.

The will to hide the knife from Isaac, to make him laugh in his bonds is sacrifice as a theater dreaming to clear the abyss, self intact. For a short season, I had makeshift father, speaking Yevtushenko, who engraved engravings: You cannot leap halfway across the abyss.

The vessels are broken,
husk among spark.
You have heard it is written… but I say to you
as you sleep beneath these olive leaves
lay down no life and call the habit Holy, save your own.

Watch this….

Yeah…mercy.

Until I was chest-deep in fatherhood, talk of sin sounded like a slander of life. But then I learned you can, in the throes of the deepest love, by the shatter of the glass on the compass of your heart, carry all you love too close to the rocks.

And mercy will patch that too. And those Ones you keep the closest, will come through the wreck, maybe even stronger. But some priceless bit of them will remain beneath, and out to Sea. And you had a job. But, head against an olive trunk, you slept.

Homing is done by scent. Wards against the cold by wingscrape and the senses gone into the music.

We have dulled the animal of us, forsaking the peripheries, filing off feelers with the grit of over-exposure. But we can still feel when someone is watching us unseen. Attention they say is the natural prayer of the soul. The place that remembers fur on the back of our neck rises with a certain type of prayer-like eye-contact. Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of the mind extending into time and space suggests that those who watch go out and, in some way, touch those they look upon. If he is right and sight is a type of moving across place, maybe our sense of smell navigates time. The entanglement of scent and memory, when the former trips a wire that releases up the latter, is a common moment. And trackers, in the throes of fragrance, will (so their language says) hunt by time. The scent of quarry fades in passing, approaches in portent. Or wafts in presence.

I heard Deepah Patel recently suggest that much of the trouble around here lately is a loss of our sense of smell. Discernment is bound to taste. The image makers keep the spectacle downwind. Like Mandelstam said, the rank stench of the enemies of the word would be their tell. The Anarchist theologian Jacques Ellul wrote that our work in the world is to think clearly about what most threatens life and to set ourselves against that threat. He believed it was Technique, the totalizing system of efficiency and necessity that we are now a few more decades into since his death. I think maybe technique is just another way of describing the surrender all other senses to a drowning in sight.

Hold your breath, She says, longer and longer. Until the fontanel re-opens to blowhole.

Ambergris, one of the rarest substances on earth, enhances both the staying power of a fragrance and its depth. It also adds a measure of its own unique particulars to the scents it carries further up and further in. This gift it bears was born in long suffering upon the Sea. When fresh, it smells like what it is: whale vomit. Yet, once aged by decades embrined, casked in sunlight and storm, they say it invokes both Earth and Sea. Fresh grass ,no land in sight. Hearth-smoke bound up in the pelagic. It, too, is both/and.

Maybe when swallowing the depths, at least for the Animal, there are always bits of beak and bone that refuse dissolution in any one belly, even that of a blow-holed giant . Hard remnants are expelled. Their passage through time, years adrift on the tides, compression by star and moon and the stir of the churn, yields a substance whose language as such is perfume.

Some say the G-d of the Yids is memory. At the end of a world that pulls us from our place, frame after frame, faster and faster, through the windows of our soul, grinding us down in the speed and friction of the constant handling of more and more, I wonder if one medicine might be simply sinking still in place and catching our own scent.

The Gospel of the Kreatur will be shelter of the order of ambergris. It will enhance and deepen the particulars of the shore it washes up upon, not bury them. It will have passed through the darkness of all that has been done in a Name. And in that compression it will be a way dense as resin with memories of all the beauty that could have been but wasn’t.

I have been reading the recent ideas about the writings of Gospels by folks like Barker and Goodacre. They suggest that each one of the four so-called canonical writers knew of and created with and aganist matter of the others that preceded them. Engagement, Word to Word, was more loosening fugue than binding harmonization, purposeful difference as much a sign of how the Spirit leads into all truth as was resonance and repetition. This is a movement while under inspiration that by its very essence breaks with the fixity of species and the litero-certain, right from the opening notes.

Some rabbis¹ say the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac was lesson about sacredness of natality, what is caught in the thicket, what needs to be killed is our confusion about how tradition is kept, how the story is passed down and why sometimes it takes a long walk on the road to Emmaus to recognize it alive. Like the Baal Shem Tov said, the G-d of Jacob is not that of Isaac is not that of Abraham.

The practice of Gospel-ing then, following in the footsteps out from the postcode, suggests a polystrate fossil, living and lengthening across time. We put it to our ears and listen for the Sea between the lines. Loyalty comes by hearing, and hearing by passing through the layers—Pakus Cetus to Jasconius and on— from a wolf wet to the hip at first wade into the empty hip socket and push of the fluke, no land in sight. And forth. And back. And forth.

I am not trying to slip that fable of progress in here. The plenum of Word is an entanglement of sea-bed and sunrise. The full light of the ending of John is not the endgame of the mist at the end of Mark. Evening and morning are one day. Howl and breach exhale under a single moon. Peer to peer. The Word may be a scent-scape where the hierarchy between source and reinterpretation, where the border between ambergris and source dissolve. Is this Law awakened from a death-like sleep, clothed and in Her right mind, sitting up and laughing at our rush to gather around the embalming herbsDoes G-d also quote Yevteshenko, asking why we only jumped halfway across the abyss, why we stopped short of being all the way ourselves?

I just came across a bit by Rabbi Nahman of Bretslov, the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. He wrote:

There are those that have mahloket [controverial disputes] due to the fact that they lack faith in themselves, and they don’t believe in the originality of their own Torah… and they don’t believe that God takes great pleasure from their original ideas, and through that with which they don’t have faith in their own originality. They are lazy in their originalities, and therefore they have mahloket and through this they repent and return to consider their own originalities and make from this a book…

He also said: “I am traveling a new path which no man has ever travelled before. It is a very old path, in fact, and yet it is completely new.”

The same day I read that Mark Vernon put up a quote by Ibn ‘Arabi. “When meaning repeats itself for someone who is reciting the Qur'an, he has not recited it as it should be recited. This is proof of his ignorance".

Drunk with these compounding elements, I remembered that raven’s flight I mentioned last post, the sound of every wingbeat a drum on a still morning here. Text begins to feel more like the still air waiting for black feather. Word is sounded in the push through, against, into the letter.

The Gospel of the Kreatur, I think, will take black feather to the still air of the text and press every thing into motion.

G-d becomes fully Animal and his language is almost exclusively storytelling. He tells a story about One going away and leaving great wealth to those left behind in service. The mirror held up at the end reflects poorly on those who bury the wealth and keep it, in fear of the One, just as it was left to them. This is the stasis of the literal, the heresy of inerrancy, as bad a facelift. Like G-d, Word learns. Put your fingers into the wound because, with this Way of Life, what is returned isn’t covered over. No rift, no Sea.

To my ear, un-mothered and feathered through flu as I am, I hear in the ancient Hebrew texts a withdrawal of the feminine fo G-d, or maybe an extraction. In Jeremiah as it now reads there is story of the women who serve the Queen of Heaven and the men who love them coming to Jeremiah and speaking into the depths of that rift. I think the Word of it is the black feather and the movement of the wing across what is contested here. There is a version of Isaiah 7:11 found at Qumran where some see an Aleph in the place later taken by the letter Ayin. The change has the text speaking of the Mother of the Lord. Scholars like Margaret Barker see this is evidence of an intentional editing out of the Feminine from the divine. Others say it is simply a scribal error, a smudge on the stone. A mere three verses away Isaiah is writing about a young women conceiving and naming of G-d among us. I like the smudge hypothesis. But I don’t read it as a dismisal of the Breasted One from the Under of my ancestors. A tired hand, the gravity of the Word ahead, its orbit coming close to earth, and the elusive aleph, often erased from the forehead by those who say they know, arrives where it will. And the Word, against all tendencies of the time, is re-Mothered.

The Gospel of the Kreatur returns the Word of G-d to Story and the Story to Pakicetus, the mutable circling the Eternal. It is Way that doesn’ always privilege sharp intention over weary smudge.

But I have wandered off into the hedges. Back to subject of the swallowing of depths and the rudiments of ambergris, if that is ok. In the parsha from few weeks back was the story, which they say took its present form in exile, of the people that would be Israel and some memory of a dance with an ungulate God, that aurochs that once caught Aaron’s eye. It is a pivot point between tablets, the shattered and the whole. You know I number myself among the almonds of the broken tablets. But we all wonder across our own lines, even lines against lines. The stone you lift, lays bare the ones who need the protection of stones. As part of the divorce preceedings, the golden calf is returned to the fire it had been brought out from. The people told the medicine is to spread the ash upon the water and then drink. From calf’s perspective the Israelites are the belly of the whale in which the remnants of G-d as Ungulate might manage the journey to the promised land, in the carrier bags of epigenesis if I may. Moses, oddly, is the one who will stay behind.

Maybe some journeys into the desert, out from bondage, we trail behind the matter of G-d, going into what is next navigating by flames at night while at other times we must ash the god whose visibility we demanded, Her returning to hiding, carried for a while in our guts. Can we speak of sheltering G-d without breaking faith? Etty Hillesum, as she approached the gates of Auschwitz found it so. That is Gospel for me.

The Trumpet Place
deep in the glowing
text-void
at torch height,
in the timehole:

hear deep in
with your mouth.

(Paul Celan Trans. John Felstiner)

Paul Celan first came to Jerusalem in the Autumn of 1969. His translator Felstiner point out that among the Names he engraved in the afterwords of that trip was Tempeltiefen, Temple-depths. Around that same time archeologists working beneath the temple mount uncovered in Felstiner’s words “a large hewn stone lying on the southwest corner beneath the Herodian pavement, toppled from the parapet when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. Incised on this ashlar are the words l’veit ha-tekiah, ‘to the place [or house] of trumpeting’ or ‘the place of the shofar blast’. Josephus mentions such a tower, where the priest would blow a trumpet to signal the beginning and end of the sabbath, and the Mishna confirms that the shofar was sounded in the temple for daily ritual, Sabbath and festivals.” He finishes by suggesting that for Celan the find “marked the temple’s flourishing and its destruction.”

These temple-depths, past heights turned under, the place of the shofar now more earth than sky, is the empty space at the middle. It is, I think, in this image for me of the hiding G-d that I hear an echo the peregrini suggestion that the body of Yeshua must now to be sought among the combs of the bees. The not-yet-imagined proceeds from this hole. The glowing text-void. The kabbalists called it Tzimtzum.

But this not to counter what I wrote earlier regarding kinship and mother tongue and those who go and find a tradition still standing. We do pull at the same oar though conscripted to different boats. Because G-d is memory, and the future (progress) is disenchanted, and that Messiah isn’t bound to any one gate. Like Benjamin said at his most kreaturely, every second is a small breach, an enabling of an entrance that might find us together at a table with a place set for One missing, filled.

Shelter, table and postcode

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard’. Mathew 11 18-19

“The limit of political possibility today is the number of people who can sit around the kitchen table and share a meal together.” (Hine/Illich)

Reorientation in the debris field is a matter of scale.

The table is fellowship on the scale of the animal senses in a predatory time. It is a bottleneck polis. A place to find company for going out at world’s end, or coming in to the not-yet-imagined. Or maybe, against the spirit of the age, simply to stay. The meal shared (or abstained from) at such tables is a glass raised and bread taken to re-member Body-ings of all sorts to prepare for times when stones cry out and times when, Temple gone to the depths, no stone will be left upon another.

Aware of the hour, anyone paying attention might be measuring the reach of all that is arrayed against the living and the dead in comparison to the size of the table and wonder if promising such a scale might not be a favor to the State now thickening at the center.

Every name we fit for dark times, they say, hollows the bone of its sounding, binds it as a sign upon the hand, a kiss on the brow. That hollow is a hold in the belly of ruin for what might be worth keeping—memory or vow. In this halflight of this here, with the waters at long last maybe up to our ass, we find when it comes to rumors of togetherness that might scale, like the generations in the Hasidic tale, we have forgotten the place in the woods, the way of the fire and the shape of the prayer. Worse still, we now trust our defenses only to useful things. No longer believing in the blessing of Names, our fluency is in the cynical, the grown-up clothing in which we dress the curse.

Luckily this letter here, actually my whole substack, is a child’s game. And a minor one at that. No one will know if we dare to make believe for a minute. What is name for a multitude of tables—zemlyanka to raft— studying some sort of togethering world’s end?

Some of the less grown up among us have suggested that maybe Flotilla will do, for now.

Flotilla, I think, has a sense for both the ties and space between the particulars that doesn’t rule a possibilty of a communal key for a symphony. Which leaves room to amend any promises to tyranny regarding scale in a pinch.

Merrie is the Way

If comfort is what is left behind for shelter, what is the wedding feast, the bread and wine of it all, that remains the magnetism in the needle we steer by?

It's full dark now and the fire is ember. A second pass through the recording and Martin is speaking, as I hear it, of that science well studied in Yid circles: Dancing in Exile. The steps of the One he follows, the wine and laughter between the fasting and the nails of it all, he names the Merrie. For me, it rhymes with that same tightened circe of the table at world’s end. Interestingly both the table and the Merrie feel of Night in my peripheral vision.

Here I remember in that in original postcode of these stories, night is not an ending but the begining. Evening and then morning is the one day.

This is Radio Aster, a post-loss transmission, maybe a bit garbled, addressed to a House of Beasts and Vines. Pearl-diver that I am, on a vulturine frequency. allow me to cut some entrance holes in a translation of a Walter Benjamin’s letter to Florens Rang, to whistle up my own seals into the round of Illich’s table and this Merrie. A found poem, bent to my own curve if you will. The meddling in brackets helps me orient my self in the debris field:

[Our tables] are stars, in contrast to the sun of revelation. They do not appear in the daylight of history; they are at work in history only invisibly. They shine only into the night of nature. [Merrie], then, may be defined as the [singing up] of a nature that awaits no day, and thus no Judgment Day; they are models of a nature that is neither the theater of history nor the dwelling place of mankind. The redeemed night.

Blackbeard, what I mean by that is that to my ear the Merrie is a beauty that, like you say, prepares one for the eternal. But every letter of it is beset with a longing for here. It doesn’t ascend. It abides with us always. This table, this Sabbath, is not of this world that is passing, but all scent of home reeks, like ambergris, of sea and soil. It remains an earthling way. Following Bulgakov I am wondering if the gospel of the Kreatur is a communion table whose Grail is as earthed as we are, a keep of the blood of G-d gone Animal that remains always with us, be it the matter that poured down, released by spear-tip or the matter that was and remained entangled with Miriam. They say that that strange Angel from Klee’s painting—the one always between us and Eden—whose back is turned toward progress, faced always toward memory and the destruction spreading out from the shatter is the very same Angel who dipped its wingtips into that matter of G-d with an intent toward saturation. Is Emanuel the name of a watering hole gone down and become a well at every world’s end?

The universal tinge in that music is not without barbs. Last time I heard him speak on this business, Stephen Jenkinson suggested that whatever Christianity is, it doesn’t belong here. Here, I think, meaning the so-called Americas. Belonging, I think, meaning beset with longing.

The night before last here, a latch broken, a doe had wondered in to a fenced garden and, in panic, was hurling her body against the wire. Her muzzle was bloodied. We, flashlights and begging, were useless. Eventually she broke through. “I am the gate, whoever enters through me will find safety. They will come and go and find sustenance…”

Here, seeking shelter between comfort and merrie, my back also turned to any so-called progress, the past flashes up like the fireflies of the previous post. Failing to recognize the fleeting beacon fire of the Dead as one of our own concerns, says Benjamin, is to maybe lose that light forever. I don’t know about the life cycle of such fireflies and what the theologies of their reincarnations might sound like in their own halls. But I know that these bits of Flitgreen, when taken in afire, mix freely with our particular sparks, those vestigial embers that are ours alone and the meager new, blessed by the old, can, of a sudden, blaze.

Martin, as the State lists to madness here and, yet again, we learn what can be done to the State-less, can I tell you what Flitgreen flashes at the end of comfort, at the threshold of shelter?

Zemlyanka, She says.

The Zemlyanka, you may already know, was a dugout hiding place in the boreal forest where, driven from civilization by the acts of the civilized, the Jewish partisans could shelter what remained and arm to fight what came for them. It was to table around Etz Chaim. Eventually whether it was a rite of passage into the wild or the feral, it leaned close to a village in the trees at the end of the world. The Bielski Otriad, like the wedding feast of Yeshua’s tales, rejected the usual techniques of survival and compelled the weak and the unarmed to come in. They were over a thousand strong at war’s end.

One rule was never to stay in the same place for too long. Dig down into your own particular to find shelter between worlds but dig it new, again and again. Keep shelter from stilling to grave.

With this thought of mobility and gospeling as shelter can I push one image further without everyone lsitening backing politely out the door? I have been reading (thanks to Bayo Akomalafe) the Arachnean Texts of Fernand Deligny. Deligny formed company with nonverbal autistic children on the feral outskirts of post-occupied France. He speaks well of the sea’s sibling to Illich’s kitchen table: the raft. Upon the rough timbers of the raft the effects of one’s own rudder are limited and thus we are left open to the blessing of currents beyond the present and the civil. The rope links between the timbers are enough to bind what is beneath us but supple enough to allow a space for the rogue waves of ideology to pass through and be returned to sea. This is a foundation maybe firm enough to love from but never stable enough for scaffold.

This table of the pearl-diver, these mollusc-ed hands digging into black earth or into pith toward buoyancy, do such refugiums of the north seem like they could also be well fit for the Merrie?

The Zemlyanka is trued to the face turned toward loss, back turned to any myths of progress. It is a standing between the neighbor and the violence. The raft, I think, is true to our topography and relation to both the conserved of the Ancestral and the shipwreck of Tradition. Both imagine ways in ruin. What Church wouldn’t? I think you speak of its rebuilding from scratch every now and again as sacrament.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Deligny points out that in the belly of the French word for asylum (asile) an isle (ile) can be glimpsed. One could be forgiven for imagining that the cardinal direction of those adrift at world’s end might be isleward. Celan wrote of a forest dugout wed to the swimmers ahead of us in this shark blue-sea. Rowers following after the dead, together moving isleward toward an elseway, after. Under the sway of Arendt’s Benjamin-ing, mindful of dates and swimmers, I have more than once imagined the shelter at the end of comfort would be a pearl divers work, that the heroics of what comes are more fit for scavengers than warriors or kings. In the same talk that is backdrop to this ramble Martin adds to the mix the heroics of the birthing woman. Arendt, champion of natality would be pleased. Asylum in the gospel of the Kreatur might be an angelic orientation that is faced toward both loss and Miriam.

On that same frequency I read last night that the patron saint of the short wave radio and political prisoners was a Franciscan friar named Maximillian Kolbe. He was a devotee of Miriam and as such refused under German occupation in World War II to sign the Deustche Volkliste. Instead he gave asylum to Polish Jews. Eventually captured and sent to Auschwitz he gave his life for another inmate. I like this conflation of consecration to a Jewish peasant woman, post-loss transmissions and refusal of Reichsprache Here, just as I am tempted to say that Christianity, like America, is a way that hasn’t happened yet, comes this one—who gave his life for another inmate in Auschwitz. A broadcast on harmonic that humbles and says be quiet, pearl diver.

I heard the geese return to the pond last night. The geese of north. According to Black Elk these Ones also are shelter under fire:

”But I remembered my great vision, the part where the geese of the north appeared. I depended upon their power. Stretching out my arms with my gun in the right hand, like a goose soaring when it flies low to turn in a change of weather, I made the sound the geese make—br-r-r-p, br-r-r-p, br-r-r-p; and, doing this, I charged. The soldiers saw, and began shooting fast at me. I kept right on…. the bullets were buzzing around me and I was not touched. I was not even afraid.”

I often wonder about the brothers in the Twelve Wild Geese, reclothed and returned to right relations by the fabric of their sister’s hand. Were they given over to the Geese as a curse or blessing? The form of the Bird is the same form G-d once took when She hovered over her begotten in the River, the same way She once hovered over the Deep. Was the feathering of the Her siblings an exile into a place to gather something lost that they couldn’t recover as human? A seal hole they had to enter and pass through in reverse? Looking up and out from home rather down and in as hunter?

Speaking of She-birds, it is written that when Eyeh Asher Eyeh, I-Will-Be-Who-I -Will-Be, spoke from a burning bush, Moses was told that it was by another name that They had been known by the ancestors. Not by Yaweh but by El Shaddai. The Breasted One.

In my father’s caravan are many resting places…..
In the desert Shekinah is a watering well.

I can’t help but hear it as it circles farther out, West and North, the un-mothered and the rivers after.

In the Flotilla of the Breasted One are many seal holes….I go now to make a way for you.

These permutations are post-loss transmissions. They live in the throat rather than the wrist. For me, the shift in their form reapproaches something transmissible that has let go of authority but not the seabed where it rests. It doesn’t have to choose between the swimmers ( the dead that lead us on) or the mutable, that G-d who creates by sending a wolf wading further and further out until a blowhole opens in its skull.

Maybe the Merrie is the night feathers of the wingbeat looking back ahead of its time. It’s music is not the good-old but a beauty that could have been yet wasn’t and will be made-new. It rhythm is held for keeps by the heart of I-will-be-who-I-will-be.

To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.-- Hannah Arendt

The End of all Things is near…. —- 1 Peter 4:7

In the last essay posted here, I mentioned Vervaeke’s image of a new Silk Road where those who remain friends of the word (dialogos) would meet in the open to hear and be heard, to exchange ways. It isn’t an image that far removed from the buoyancies and tables above but it is an image harder to hold onto as present water levels rise and trade drifts toward violence. Then, too, I couldn’t help but think of the ones we confuse, like the table, for mere things between us, often left out of sight and out of mind:

Silk is made by the keeping of silkworms and feeding them on mulberry leaves. The worms make their cocoons, each out of a single thread. To keep that thread intact, to unwind the place of metamorphosis and make fabric, the worms are killed before they come to wings. Scavengers (sibling to the pearl-diver) tend to come through a world that leaves them with an understanding of the ecology of such exchanges. This understanding, born in the body, allows them to treasure scraps of silk already made even as they utter oaths to other ways of being clothed. Any philosophical or theological way-makings need to look to the dead if they are to remain lifeways. Silkroads like all biomes need scavengers. In order not to forget.

Someone must remember the moths.

Because the end of all things is near.

And the table—no longer a mere thing between us—come the Merrie, may have a word to add.

Martin, a story you told on Jawbone has followed me here. A midwife, delivering the child of some Otherworld royalty, rubs the balm meant for fairy eyes upon one of her own. Eventually, the King of Others come for that eye. Was he gifting her the return to comfortfrom the brink of shelter’s dizzying assymetry? I could feel the disorientation as eye clashed with eye. And the gravity of the gold.

Yeshua, on the other hand, heals a similar blindness by a balm nixed from the familar dirt beneath our feet and the messianic spittle in our midst. The story says that as vision returned, the formerly blind man realized that the people around him were like trees walking. It is easy to misread that as a blurry stage on the progression toward sight. More and more lately I think the return of our seeing will only be complete when the boundaries between people and trees are rightly blurred.

When the “Great” Men of last century began snuffing candles on the road to eternal Day, Bertolt Brecht wrote that in such times to speak of trees was almost a crime. I understand what he meant: bucolic murals, crematoriums walls and the silence between. But there are dead words, morphemes parted from Company, meant to veil realities, and then there are Trees.

Benjamin wrote that no poem is written for the reader, no symphony for the listener. Arendt explained that this was not some elitist dismissal of the audience but rather to say that some matters,especially regarding Word in dark times, are better not limited to the human.

In times like these to speak only amongst ourselves is to erase the aleph from the forehead of the cosmos and find that, in doing so, it is Us who are dead.

How feminine-silver burns, having
fought the oxide, having fought the flux
and quiet work silvers over
the iron plow, and the poet’s voice.
O.Mandelstam

The feminine form of the Hebrew word for tree (Etz) is counselor (Etsah). Last year I made a promise (picking your pocket, again, Martin) to spend a hundred and one days going to the same place in the woods and just meeting whoever was there as well. Some days I didn’t make it. A makeshift ritual as amends was to go down to a nearby rushing stream and, filling buckets of what seemed to me as living water, pour that water over the open rings of the stumps spread out on this land from a brutal logging years ago. Was it moving by sense of smell, a response to the scent of some Other’s desire or monkey performative theater? I am sure it was plenty clumsy yet, that season, my head against a hemlock topped with the remains of an eyrie, I “found” a wisdom, clearly against my grain, speaking in my mind that would heal a family grief that up till then had seemed without end.

I think of that tree now and wonder, after the Yeats poem also swiped from Martin’s keep, if in that dusk, after I went my way, a hemlock crowned with hawkish ruins in its trunk (maybe in a phloem’s sudden) blazed and knew some joy in finding some one it could bless.

This is Radio Aster, broadcasting on a lesser harmonic, cruciform gone to the trees at world’s end. Believe me when I tell you that sometimes in the static, I see sparks stray from that burning where the learned know how to make fire without smoke. Brecht is often quoted promising that in the dark times, there will still be singing. Of the dark times. The dead carry the tune, that low humming, word returning: of iron plow breaking the surface of the debris field and the black earth below, of flux driving the oxide back into the air from which it came and with melting point— that threshold where beauty flows into justice— thus lowered, syllables of refugiums to come begin to vowel. Despite the odds, the Gospel of the Kreatur is a wager on word and its silvering of all.

Zemlyanka, table, raft, flotilla are all sheltering spells. A child’s wager no doubt. The childlike is a doorway, they say, into Malkuth, the kingdom of she who touches both G-d and Earth

A small tree transposes Marina

"In this most Christian of worlds, all the poets are Yids."

In this most upright of worlds now,
where hands curl to grasp round
and feet step to press down
on every whipped-wild
caught under the weight,
the menschen are mud-bound,
muzzle to barb now, the close of the wire
is how we feel on all fours how
we animal out loud now
from every stitched seam.

In the halflight caesura
between soul and voice
they speak thing to people,
the shambles rejoice.

Sing over the breach,
the breach will reply
in a syntax first breath,
then shiver, then eye

Come slaughterhouse sing-song
what menschen would be long
in this most upright of worlds
where pigs bare the word.

You thread through
the sparrowmass,
form skinned in waver,
at the door-clasp of dream
my lean-to Tsvetaeva
speaking in mountain-ash,
feather and teem
rising from sun’s touch
your timbre as steam

This is black earth orientation in partisan woods. The art of shapeshifting is the prototype of the shortwave of the resistance. One walks in the other’s hoofprints not to exchange our own prejudice for that of our siblings. That is what the old stories of shamans who forgot they were humans and never came home warn against. To go visiting both as you are and as if you were not is a way of sharing a table, a raft or a clearing together to develop the kind of many-worlded taste that is the precursor to judgement in a many-worlded cosmos. It is how we learn to find a home with neighbors as opposed to a market of things. Because the end of all things is near. In these most upright of times, the poets will be found all fours in the black earth.

Bardskull, I number you always among the almonds, the ones un-bittered but still watchful, who know in times like these, that to keep speaking amongst ourselves is most definitely a crime. In times like these, it is necessary to speak with trees.

In Jerusalem they found an ossuary which contained the bones of a Jew crucified around the time of Yeshua. An iron nail was fused to the heel bone. Mixed with iron and bone were fragments of olive wood. They say the Romans often used still living trees for the stake they lifted the cross member onto. It is possible that Yeshua died joined by iron, blood mixing with phloem to the same being that he chose to spend his last living night leaned against, body to bark. Mercy. Shelter.

By the way, I wasn’t really sure why I heard under the ice laying next to that Zemlyanka of beaver lodge this winter. But yesterday morning, down the hill from the ruin of the garden fence I saw her. At first just her head and the wake rippling out in the deep water close to the dam. And then full fur curling under and a tailslap of counterword offering, I think, Company despite so much with us that doesn’t belong here. Talitha Kum.

Merrie is the Way.

1. Sometimes by “Rabbis” is a euphemism for the voices of the Dead, the swimmers we row after. We all learn in different ways.