December 28, 2006 --- HOLY INNOCENTS

We celebrate today the slaughter of innocents, a Christmas story, aware that the promise is that these innocents are held in the womb of God and suckled in eternity with a divine milk. It is a day of Isaian tenderness and will effect a meditation on cozy spaces…a nest, an egg: (Noah’s rain was 40 days, the period of time we are taught by Rashi that it takes from conception to the formation of a fetus).
So I put down the book of birds (The Bedside Book of Birds) and pick up one describing a search for 6 lost forebears (The Lost), lost to the Nazis, 6 lives of Bolechow (amongst the 6 million), a generation ago in an historical slaughter of innocents. Bolechow was violated; it should have been a nest, rather it was an instance of annihilation: the creation of nothing out of something: that which was became not the wonder of that which might not be, but the anti-reality of that which is no longer…needlessly.
Then the outlandish, tragic correspondence: Those were boxes, too. Those, too, were arks! (like those of Noah … Moses, boxes of salvation caused to float atop the waters of destruction). This a description of the gashouses of Belzec to which the Jews of Bolechow were brought in other boxes, the stifling cattle cars absent air and filled with the foul stench of human offal where urine might be the only slake for thirst. And so the cozy of nests is demythologized and the story of Holy Innocents moves beyond saga to fact. And what of the promise? What becomes of the meditation? At least one of these stories relies upon the homing of birds, the dovecote, the return of the olive leaf, but this is folk tale.

The influx of Z & A, N & M, A & P, and J & K onto Kailua-Kona stretched out over 3 days beginning Friday November 17 and ending Sunday the 19th. (The Ks’ arrival from Japan extended later into the week.) Upon disembarking everyone was affected in some way by the long flights: by the bad air in the airliners’ cabins, by jet lag, by bugs we may have brought along internally like Captain Cook and his tars so long ago and then so tragically. Though we were never confused with being returning gods, the ominous start had no bearing upon the quality of the stay, and our fortunes fared far better than those of Cook and his seafarers for we all survived to revisit our continental domiciles.

Consistent with the protocols of romance and travel narrative (exaggeration) the trip has been entitled by some who were there The Perfect Vacation. The captain of the Bite Me II in accord with the convention of all good fish stories could have named it You Should Have Been Here Yesterday: then there were marlin. (We did experience giant manta rays to snorkel and dive with.) Yet the beauty of each day surpassed the one before until, that is, we got to Sunday November 26, a morning that began, as a prelude of sorrow, with a tear: we all had to prepare to depart for our homes.

However it would be a minimalist faux pas to state the days were beautiful and leave it at that. It is true that they were beautiful, the days, meaning: the climate; the water; the sunsets of persimmon and mango; the stark, primordial time-defying charm of Kilauea Caldera; the rain forest filled with the birdsong; the waves breaking over the basalt shore; the thousands of multi-colored fish feeding in the coral bays; the seamless skies; the grandeur of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea each like a Sinai in divine occluded mystery poised to disclose some absolute moral truth blown inland by the Trade Winds off the far shore; the green turtles; the sea horses; the sight of Maui from the Mona Kea Golf Resort; the wild donkeys in the lava; the spinning dolphin like a Sufi at rest alongside the sea kayak; the bottle nose dolphins frolicking in the wake of the Bite Me II; the food and spectacle of the luau. But the world is chock-full of gorgeous landscapes and it is, after all, the Caribbean that lays claim to the most beautiful sunsets. There was present another sect of beauty … two other sects. There was the sheer physical beauty and feminine mystique of our women most especially the bride, but all the women: mothers, aunts, friends, instilling in some that primal urge to caress that which is round … to cherish; there was along with this the more Apollonian beauty of the men, the sculpted, towering beauty of the groom, but all the men variously lean, variously honed, variously aged. But most, there was the beauty of the event, the magnificent Gestalt of it, The Week. There was simply no thing or moment that was not uplifting from the arrivals at the award winning Kona International Airport, to the women from 2 continents gathered in the kitchen on Thanksgiving preparing an Italian dinner (to nurture), through the dénouement of the wedding itself in that most beautiful setting of Christ Church Episcopal 1500 feet above the Pacific. It was a perfect vacation to which we would all like to return … tomorrow and anon.

DAWN

December 10, 2006

In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us….

Never have I been so struck by these words … recited how many hundreds of times … the overarching structure of love, the regime of tenderness, infused into the beginning of things, the mythic beginning that has no historical starting point except this very instant … every instant can be heard the one ravishing note.

It has been said less well: I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved, the departures that begin at birth. Well, maybe. That’s the pain of loss, not annihilation, not a life of failure, of scabies and poverty absent the romantic felicity that conflates poverty with simplicity, in the assertion of the greatest poverty: to not be for the dawn from on high in tender compassion …. On earth, as it is in heaven, if only.

I recite the words in a room at dawn the color of an Hawaiian sunset, an enormous privilege, protected from the winter (When the house is sure, how good is the storm! in the phenomenology of the nest … the hut … all intimate space.) But the assertion from privilege that all space was to be so intimate and with it then the accompanying ethic: Wisdom is known by her children.