January 18, 2006 : Thursday : The Hinduish prayer





…In you we live and move and have our being. The collect for Thursday, the Hinduish prayer, inside and outside the mouth of god; living in the river of God challenged by the spiritual assertion of deutero-Isaiah: there is nothing outside of the moral provenance of God along with the insistence, the absolute insistence, that overarching the universe and under girding it, justice and mercy, despite all appearances (an assertion the author of Night disputes whose soul as a child witnessed the death of God. All is grace, responds Mauriac. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him—the immutable, ever running river).


The tail wagging the dog (the Bible is not without its ethnocentrisms), or early experiments in chaos theory, that behind it all, the Strange Attractor…. This is a story of Marco Polo telling the Great Kahn of the Invisible Cities and the name of the city is Ersilia, a city of webs of intricate relationship seeking a form. (This, of course, is also the morning.)


And I have read from A Book of Luminous Things of a dragonfly, carnation, and of a butterfly as the cold near-ice rain falls sounding gutturals in the gullet of the downspout, a toll: all things with wings, all beautiful and delicate; all perishable things.

While reading about aboriginal forms of birds painted on a ceiling obsessively by a man who suddenly ignored all other responsibility and about whom it came to be known was suffering from Parkinson’s or some form of dementia, it came to me that before he died, Kingsley Amis had typed over and over again on a piece of writing paper while sitting before a window, seagull: the mystery of wings and spiritual entities, all things spiritual are represented with wings, all departures are flights. The dove of Pentecost, the dove and raven of Noahan lore, the Raven of the Koyukon people by whom the world was formed: Ponder the ravens for they neither sow nor reap.

All is grace: we are simply not the product of our own doing: we came to be in the womb of another. Though all conceptions are not immaculate, there is more than one immaculate conception.