Frozen
Dear Eugene,
December, finally.
Things are iced up. The spilled garbage bin of my neighbor and its ugly contents lost their menace: whatever they were saying, no one is listening now. Home is the answer, and who cares how we get there. Let the world freeze itself with its own frozen logic. Human breath condensed, a shroud of mystery on window pane; let me contribute, be on the right side of December.
Last night I dreamed about a man who would come to my church once in a while, a street man who exhibited a varying degree of streetness and despair, at the mercy of factors I don't pretend to know. How are you? is about the only topic I can speak to him now, the most heartless thing a man like me can say to a man like that. He would always answer Good and nod his head like he meant it. Sometimes he would elaborate. Mostly I couldn't make out what he was elaborating.
What if there is another Christmas meal in my stomach? Would it nourish my interior and make my true self answerable to the frozen menace of street things?
Yours, Alex
Dear Eugene,
ReplyDelete“Let the world freeze itself with its own frozen logic. Human breath condensed, a shroud of mystery on window pane…”
On a cold night exhaling the last breaths of November into darkness, I drove on I-5 south through dense fog with my kid napping nearby & Chopin on piano from wireless speakers. My fingers curled on the steering wheel answerable only to my whim of trajectory on the road. Things iced up outside posed no menace to me on the inside of the car, the right side of space on a night too early to speak of Christmas frozen remotely in window displays & handwrapped packages.
Beyond my windshield the world froze in a womb of riddles, encased in time - thoughts - fog. Headlights & reflectors spilled rays of images ugly in content – tree trunks tilted in turmoil against will, cliffs free-falling in the solitude of a stillborn, my mind raped with the most heartless things unsaid to another in a varying degree of streetness & despair.
On the other lane at 70-80 mph a white SUV was cutting through the ribbon of translucent visibility in rhythm with me. For some time warped in this strange dance we paired our tracks & turns on the freeway, our fog lights forming a narrow wedge of communion in the barrenness of this hostile mountainous terrain frozen in longing for a breath deeply dangerous in longing deeper. But the driver I never saw & her interior I would not know.
Tonight the words of Rowan Williams in Being Human spoke a speck of truth visible in memory to that strange foggy night on I-5: “Like the saints before us, we tread a dangerous path - which is also the path to life. The path is both dangerous and life-giving… We are caught up in a great economy of giving and exchange. The solidarity that baptism brings us into, the solidarity with suffering, is a solidarity with one another as well.”
The frozen menace of street things belong to you & me in this December, breathing & heaving on our window panes of hearts sorrow & joy deeply dangerous & nourishing.
Yours, Kate