January 25, 2020
I often don’t understand. I walk through books aware of meaning, the brush of shapes, the breath of a thing gone when I turn. It’s not blindness, but something near to, an acute myopia. I can see outlines of ideas, contours of intimations, the displaced energy as something large and mysterious moves beyond my understanding. I stumble across lines. I do not understand the ground was prepared this way. It’s my fault.
When I was in Greece two years ago, I visited Hydra, an island most famous in Canada for being where Leonard Cohen met Marianne and wrote the eponymous song. The island has 2,000 residents and approximately 300 churches (as well as a collection of monasteries and nunneries).
Embed from Getty ImagesOn my runs through the hills, I wondered if the ruins that crenelated the ridges counted towards this three-hundred? Or the roadside shrines the size of a generous birdhouse? What about the churches on the rocky outcrops offshore?
For whom had they been built? The ancestors of the fishermen who still show up every morning with octopus and other small fish to sell in Hydra’s harbor? How do you land? I can’t see a pier. The surrounding shoals seem dangerous.
What priest served this island? A hermit, a type of anchorite?
I imagine the spiritual life as one lived within doubt. Time marked by prayer, chants, study of the bible, periodic fasts, an ascetic grind probably closest to self-improvement culture these days: would the priests sometime wave back at the sailors?
All life is more or less alone. Both God and books alter our reflection and yet still reflect what we need, want to see. Their is cadence to many truths I can hear only alone. We remain faithful for ourselves.
We administer our own salvation (and suspect we have missed it all for a secret flaw in ourselves).
Reading: serried words immure . . . what? Where would I find my madness? (Pavese thought a person would find it in a reading of their lives).
What would my serious attention towards my happy or joyful feelings produce? Does this mean I write to escape? What does this mean for what I produce?
A sense of encountering a consciousness like myself: methodical, slow, plodding without moving, intransigent before the ineffable.
