Pierce

did Christ just go out for a walk
or was he looking for a sign?

I became a wave
circling still

I would like to be a sharpened quiver
in my place cutting unbelief and self-disapproval

when he turned back did He look to see who was watching?
on a sea of torrent and black

His path became an unseen shadow on the sea floor
shining bright as the day-lit stars
(can you perceive them?)
With seven divisions
between earth
beneath the ocean & the expanse star spread overhead

I collect light & burn

I realized that I became a moving wave circling still beneath His feet

I strive to be a sharpened arrow in this place
piercing self loathing & divorce of unity with humanity

Did He Know they'd be watching?
Did Peter expect His invitation?

An unaddressed letter of experiment

Imagine an image of a horse saddled up, bit in mouth, reins over neck, and blinders over eyes. Now imagine that same image, but with those elements removed. What do you see? Your mind is lying to you. You do not see a bare back unsaddled horse with bit and reigns removed, and you able to look deeply into its milky colourful iris. Those things do not exist in an image, and therefore cannot exist when certain parts of an image are taken away. What you see is a representation of an animal with a hole in its spine, missing eyes, and parts of its body dismembered by all the removed straps that belong to these tools of restraint.[a]

Which begs the question, what are you seeing? Are you seeing a whole animal anymore? Those pieces were never in the image to begin with; your brain just logically placed those missing pieces there so you wouldn’t die of a heart attack upon realizing such an animal would never be able to exist. Without those implements of restraint of modern man the horse becomes freakish, disturbing, and un-lifelike. Without those missing pieces filled in by the psyche the horse doesn’t make sense, all logic is lost and understanding falls apart. Your rules of logic do not exist in the world of vision and action. How far does the world of vision reach? How far reaching is action?

To the horse in the image it makes no difference if the reigns are there or not, because it still lives the same. To the horse, they are an external substance, which only visually connects the parts, because it really doesn’t live off real substance it can survive off none at all.

Is the horse even aware that the visual restrains have been removed? Would it act the same as if it had them, or would it come to some visual realization that it is now free, although it posses no eyes. Remember: the blinders are gone.

If the world were presented with the parts of a man, how would the members of the world react? Depends on which parts of the man, and how you define a man. What if it were only a half? Does a half imply a mere incision between the navel and the spine, drawn horizontally or vertically, or does it imply half of the mass, no matter which parts were presented? I can predict with almost certainty what the reaction would be to a half a man based upon his mass presented in random parts, and I can almost certainly predict which of those parts would have to be left out to decrease that reaction. There would be a degree of measure upon who he is based on what was given, if it were a hand, a leg, a penis, or a head with eyes still in their sockets. A torso would give a fair amount of information to an observer, the approximate height and weight of the man, what his habits were in life and how satisfied he was with the physical interaction he had with others. It could also tell you a great deal about the personality and psychology of the man as well, informing us of his common preferences for food, physical upkeep as far as strength and building of that physique he once owned.

What if this man was still whole, but his face was horrifically scarred by war? His youth and beauty stripped away by the duty fulfilled for his country. His pride reduced to an unimaginable disconnect with others, because of their inability to deal with his dehumanizing scars. Can he survive with out a face? Does it matter to him if his face is there or not? What would you say to his wide eyed compassionate bride, who married him upon his return? That single act of her marrying a man that she loves despite his physical appearance, no matter how macabre, is more courageous than most things you’ll do in life. She understands that there is something greater to a man than his appearance. I just hope she keeps that understanding always within view, planted and growing within her being.[b]

What if you changed your dismembered focus of this horse and man within your head to a woman? Remove her fabric restraints and her breasts disappear, vulva gone; those things that make her a woman disappear as instantly as the horse’s imagined spine and eyes, as quickly as a soldiers’ features melt under the heat of a bomb.

What makes a woman? Dismember her and see what parts you would pick out to determine her sex. You wouldn’t need to go far; a woman’s womanhood is stained within every cell of her body. Would you sever her brain open to determine how much of which hormones were running through her psyche to judge whether or not she was of much value in life? What if you discovered she was a drug addict? What would you think then? What if she were addicted to something far more discreet, like the internet, talking on chat rooms? Perhaps that is why she’s is in the predicament she is in, dismembered and dead. Perhaps she was enticed by what seemed to be a gentleman, perhaps the devil himself.

They say the devil is a gentleman. I believe that. How would he otherwise be able to woo so many into believing that shredding the tiniest and largest amounts of human dignity, by any and all means, to be right and correct?

This woman, having been enticed by the greatest gentleman of all, is now brought to your imagination to be analyzed and measured, to be drawn and separated, to be abused and misunderstood by your preconceived notions of what is and should be. What if this imagined image were the woman who married the marred soldier? Do you judge her? Do you spite her manifestation of Grace? Do you abhor her existence for encumbering your blinders? Do you hate her for being? Are you angry with her for having compassion upon the evidence of the devil’s work, successful in his mission?

Would you do the devils work differently? If so, you are the same, the same as Lucifer himself. You are just another person watching from outside the ring, shouting obscenities, and jeering for more violence, while the fighters dance for survival. Or perhaps you have been enticed by that same gentleman, but you yourself have given in, being won over to his side to be restrained, to perceive that the gold plated saddle he’s set you in with blinders to boot is a luxury and a pleasure to wear. You don’t have to witness the ugly side of life because he’s given you the chance to see only what you want to see, unless you accidentally venture too far into experience and the pages of learning, exceeding the amount of ignorance he restrains you to. That is not about to happen, though, because the endless drugs and meaningless entertainment he has prescribed you to have set you in an all too familiar headspace of complacency and dull wits.

Can you escape his mists of illusion, or do you have the will to do so? Is there any need for escape? Would life improve or change with an escape, with a unification of the parts, the seeing of the whole? The spaces between filled in magnificently with God and Grace, spaces you could not fill in with your own logic; spaces only possibly filled with the unifying explanation of the profane, the divine, and the elegant. What room would your separation have place for then? What about your degradation and objectification? You could no longer fling around parts of a human being like pieces of meat to analyze for pleasure or for terror. The power of hell could not forego its segregating will; it would have to obliterate its mission in full surrender.

Or would it? Is it the absolute element of hell within us that thing which supports the absolute possibility of exercising Grace?

Does it take more than your individuality to realize that you alone are insignificant? That you alone, without other people, would degrade to a state where life would be pointless. That the only sense that can be made in existence is only created and accomplished by unification?

Why then do you think the writers of the bible call it the At-One-Ment? Why not the Christ-save-ment?

Because it wasn’t about Christ. It was about you. He died so you could live for more than this life, than this existence, so you could learn that faith will be found in existence upon his return, and that hell will obliterate in surrender.

God came down and created the world in seven days, but will you lose faith and believe that he has abandoned this place after that? That the creation of this earth was something to be put up on the shelf, forgotten about or to be returned to at a later date, if at all? If His abandonment were true, He would not have stayed the hand of Abraham, later killing His Son. Action is further reaching than you think.

Weigh that while you’re weighing the worth of a man, the grace of a woman, with the image of the dismembered horse in the background.

Are you worth as much as another man’s life? Are you worth joining together with all the other men and women that ever lived or ever will live to become something far more wretched and beautiful for a purpose greater than you could possibly conceive? Forget just human existence; are you worth unifying with every other fibre vibrating in the entirety of everything that is incomprehensible? See that while you imagine your imaginary horse.

Are you worth the single most unifying action through the single most degrading event in history?

This is not to say that any other sorrowful historical event that occurred is not important, rather it is to say that they all occurred within Him. He unified the profane within Himself, within the divine and within His Grace.

Show that to your imagined beast of burden with no spine or eyes.

Tell that to the bride who marries her love who has been scarred by a war that is inspired of the politics of economy.

Remind yourself of that when considering one of the first things you do is throw out the rules of the game. Consider, are the rules worth discarding? In some situations perhaps, as long as it applies to your actions. Love the higher law. Imagine the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire.[c] Don’t come into the temple and crawl. Stop thinking about the dismembered horse in your head, stop thinking about what judgements you have about another person, start doing something more than wander, start to see through the devil’s medicated mist.

---

[a] Josh Ritter, http://www.joshritter.com/ , Album Cover of “The Animal Years”.

[b] Nina Berman Photography http://www.ninaberman.com/ click on “Marine Wedding” to view image of Bride and Marine.

[c] Josh Ritter http://www.joshritter.com/album_animal.shtml Album “The Animal Years”, Song Girl in the War (mp3 available to listen to on this site.)

All footnote contents were originally read about on http://matthewgood.org/ in entries posted by Matthew Good dated and titled as follows: Monday, February 26^th, 2007 “There are no words necessary”; and Monday, February 19^th , 2007 “A rare endorsement”

Fine Art

Both in their own separate ways and timing, preservation and transformation acted upon my thoughts and feelings. They put in flux my concept of how this world displaces me. All structure of action, emotion, regularity, the ordinary, has ebbed into the dark facets of a small deficient stone. Experience has infused this light beaming facet with human sensibilities and meaning that were expected to be more than sufficient to carry thought and action into a single plane. Instead it became a struggle for a sense of existence and clout. It lacked the ability to support failure. We voyaged around the city in a tumultuous circle.

“Give it back!” He demanded, “I want the thing that started it all.” He begged as he half concentrated on the road, and half waited for my response. In my refusal I realized the thought that ‘nothing will ever suffice’ has stripped away my willingness to give, to receive, to interact on an intimately allegorical plane with him. It has stripped away so much in my own awareness that nothing remains but the exposition of my longing, which has brought fullness to me.

I wanted to tell him that it was not that thing that started it all, but our own inevitable gravity which did. I lacked confidence that he would accept my answer, for he was already denying my denial to give. This lack of knowing his next reaction is that which hesitated my thought and action. It was also the knowledge of what this vestige couldn’t do for him that gave me the ability to deny his request. He still placed great expectations upon this anulus, as thought it would act as a shelter or defender, or that it would develop into a curative occurring outside of his being. What he could not perceive is what I saw in it, the wanting of destruction, separation, the end of things, but the vauntingly minor ability in which it could do this. He needed to find the closure from within himself.

I thunk to myself, whist sitting prisoner inside of his vehicle, I almost married a man who’s mental and emotional tumult overtook his efforts to control the material and his own will.

“I’ll have you know I drugged myself up quite thoroughly before coming to this moment,” he paused waiting for a reaction. I knew the drugs his words were indicative of, the ones that came in little orange yellow bottles, containing capsules of even smaller size to dispense the appropriate dosage of control or complacency, dispensed by the individuals who claimed to be caring healers, and corporate conglomerates to help aid the consumption of society while easing the anxiety that nearly everyone is addicted to, but few truly realize they are suffering from.

This statement didn’t elicit a strong response within me, a heavy twinge of disappointment and grief hung over the silence. We hurt each other in this opposition. All I wanted was to not hurt anymore. But we could not agree on how to do that for one another. I myself have found ways to compensate, accept, and fill my lonely existence. He claimed he did not have the same experience, and would not until I gave him what he wanted.

“I have everything to gain from this! What do you stand to gain from keeping it?”

“I gain nothing.” Is all that could escape from my thoughts, traveling the distance to my mouth. I also muttered something about how I am not responsible for his closure. What I wanted to say what much more amorous and admirable, but the abstract feelings of expressing to someone what an amazing and worth while creature they are is far from being explicable with words. For me this wasn’t about control, about ego, nor fault. For me this was a chance to spend a little more time with him, which in turn was with a past self, though it may be in the most conflicting of circumstances and desires. I wanted to express to him the magnitude of person and being sitting next to me in the car, and the difference between that and the state he perceived he was in. I wanted to express to him that regardless of what we believed was happening that there was something far more beautiful to be experienced, regardless of the physical presence, because our souls had already become one. Within that oneness we sensed an urgency to do something, but neither could agree on what.

So we continued to drive.

My physical body began to become weary with chaos of opposing will. Asking my soul for rest, he granted it and took me home.

The physical resolution is that the ring is now gone. The soulful resolution is an unspoken curiosity and understanding that separation will serve best our poignant passage within the duality of unification.

This pain and confinement will stand as our ultimate moral, offering a degree of hope to the anagogical sanctified coalition.

There will always exist inexplicable ties invested within myself ceaselessly distending outward of the memory, the experience, the love, the joy, the horrific fear, the deficiency to mesh desires, imposition of will, and the fine art of falling apart, spreading its hopeful abstract essence without the corporeal.

ditto to below, bottom right corner

who's to say it's wrong
&
who's to say it's right?

same paper as below, written diagonal across the top right corner

concealing the profane numinous

different jackets for appropriate weather?
different jackets felicitously expressing euphemisms.
these circumstances are only anointed opportunities to canopy nakedness
one exposes my vulnerable
one warms my weary
one parades my pride
one brings my comfort
one shines my felicity
one conserves my frugal
one preserves my youth
one asks my playful
one reminds me of you
to accessorize these jackets poses just as difficult selections
as choosing which jacket to exhibit over my naked.

for lack of a note pad; written on the front page of "in" paper magazine; around & over an image of an eye, a rooster, and a coat.

like unorganized children the snow follows through the erratic air currents
meets with the earth
having joined forces with gravity
in a pattern so elusive no mathematician could figure
god's self actualization
and the freedom of grace he releases