Nothing is anonymous. Everything has its own character, and I think it no mistake that such a phenomenon pervades the universe. The most mass-produced toy: the units so fashioned to be identical, one to the next: physics will decree that each has its own little quirks, each of a little mystery unique. What we try to make as manufactures without personality, God, in His infinite detail, undermines our trivial consistencies with a diversity that transcends the limits of our control. I think that even were we to create things that were atom by atom the exact same, even then we could not remove the nature of what is distinct between them! For it is written that the very hairs on our heads are counted. And it may go even further than what we ever dreamed, and I do not think it beyond Him: that each and every atom has its own name!
28 Jan 2011
23 Jan 2011
Jesus Christ, make me a second time
for from the formless you shaped my soul
into the child of my mother and father
now make of me a child of God, of this
malformed try at being a human being
create one who is in the image of the love
that is your spirit, the only true infinite
make me worthily a servant of the highest
19 Jan 2011
Setting aside the scandal caused by His Messianic claims and His reputation as a political firebrand, only two accusations of personal depravity seem to have been brought against Jesus of Nazareth. First, that He was a Sabbath-breaker. Secondly, that He was “a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners” — or (to draw aside the veil of Elizabethan English that makes it all sound so much more respectable) that He ate too heartily, drank too freely, and kept very disreputable company, including grafters of the lowest type and ladies who were no better than they should be. For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian Churches have laboured, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master. They have hustled the Magdalens from the Communion-table, founded Total Abstinence Societies in the name of Him who made the water wine, and added improvements of their own, such as various bans and anathemas upon dancing and theatre-going. They have transferred the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and, feeling that the original commandment “Thou shalt not work” was rather half-hearted, have added to it a new commandment, “Thou shalt not play.”
16 Jan 2011
I am a strange wire by which the dreaming flows into the world of solidities. Sometimes merely to scrawl symbols in the medium of light, sometimes more substantial workings of the hands in construction. As to feel like destiny merely uses me as a convenient vessel, as like to think that what moves through me is larger than I’ll ever be. The world is a strange place, and we will never parcel out the pieces of it in complete understanding of what goes into even the smallest sliver. But it is a life well lived that has partaken of the ambrosia of creativity, that which makes us images of the One who created us. Of Him it is sure that the idea came from within His light, but for myself, it may be that the best things that come from these fingertips are not human at all. To wonder at some marvelous made thing if angels whispered its design to me. To think myself part of the grand scheme of it all.
13 Jan 2011
answers
the mystery is how meaning will hide in pain
or why we remember things as we do
we look deep for answers, the deep looks back
(this is the place where monsters live)
we mistake love for a glue to hold things together
or hope as an end product, to stop there
as the work to be done rusts, with once eager eyes
(and we wonder what we have forgotten)
and the truth of it all we claim beyond understanding
when i know that in a few certain kisses
i found some answers i could never have read about
(to believe things will happen anyway)
because it is irrelevant why it is your world turns
if you let the pain be what turns you
or if you are defiant merely for the lack of option
(really? you’d rather reign in hell?)
one day you may grow up, and see a strange thing
that mystery your parents kept from you
we keep going. that’s it. you have more important things?
(keep it to yourself. we have stuff to do)
9 Jan 2011
transition
life to live, light to walk
to watch a moment as it turns
i am alone, this is to wonder
time will alter the scenery
i imagine things, often to happen
sometimes to forget
why it is the circumstance of me
that i believe, and why not?
time will leave me behind
one day, as i drift free
worlds before me
as i become a memory
hope to claim the soul of a soul
the mystery free of doubt
the reflection free of knowledge
one with destiny’s rain
6 Jan 2011
The Wise Man
There was a man who wrote a book of wisdom. “If you follow every word,” he said, “you will be very happy. I know because I follow none of it, and I am very sad.” It sold very well, and the man became very famous.
Many people tried to talk to him; reporters followed him wherever he went. “Why are you following me?” he asked the reporters.
They replied, “Because you are a very wise man. We want to know what you have to say about everything.”
He thought for a moment, rubbing his chin, then said, “Everything is rubbish, if you look at it in a certain way. Everything is precious, if you look at it in another way. I look at the world in both ways—everything is precious rubbish, the garbage of God. Now, stop following me.”
The reporters jotted this down, but they did not stop following him. Moreover, there was a crowd gathered around his house who would not leave.
He asked them, “Why don’t you go home?”
“Because you are a very wise man,” they said. “We want to know how to live life.”
He paused, thinking, rubbing his chin again, then said, “Many before me have already told you how to live life. If you won’t listen to them, you won’t listen to me. Now, go home.”
The people nodded, yes, yes, but they stayed where they were.
Then the man realized his mistake—he had believed them when they said that he was a very wise man. He would show them how stupid he really was. It happened to be winter, and it was bitterly cold outside, so he took off all his clothes and walked out of his home naked.
“It is a sign!” the people shouted. “We must all be naked, like he is!” And they all took off their clothes and stood shivering in the cold.
He stared at all of them for a little while, then as he turned his back to them to go back inside, he told them all, “Put your clothes back on. You’ll all catch a cold.”
He realized from this that no matter what he did, the people would think him wise, and they would do what he did, no matter how stupid it was. He was sorry that he had ever written the book, of which he followed nothing anyway. He just happened to know the heart well enough to know what was good for it, even if it was advice he’d never follow himself.
Then, he knew what he had to do; he began writing another book. This time, he told people to do exactly what he always did, which was the complete opposite of the first book. The publisher was confused, but the man was famous now, so the publisher published it. The people were confused, but they believed everything that came from the man, so they did what the book told them to do.
Reporters began to ask him, “Why did you contradict yourself in your second book?”
“Because,” he said, “the first book made me famous, so I wrote the opposite to take that fame away.”
The people outside his home were unhappy, since they did everything the second book told them to do. They cried, “Why did you do this to us? We did everything the second book told us to do, and now we are very sad.”
He answered them, “Now you are just like me, because I do all those things, and so you all must now be very wise. So if you have any questions about life or anything, ask yourself.”
He went inside his house, and eventually, all the reporters and other people went away. For the first time in his life, the man was happy. But he didn’t try to figure out why—that was how the trouble had started in the first place.
4 Jan 2011
Poetics of Programming
I build structures of electricity, which exist for fractions of a second, then become something else. I make statues made of change itself. They are stable enough when I write them into being, but when they do what they are supposed to, they are more ephemeral than the slightest passing notion. And yet they are real, sometimes to represent what exists outside the matrix, but sometimes to exist as most genuine by the arrangement of photons that the eye perceives. It is a beautiful science, a mysterious one. Like crafting a dream, in a dream world, with its own exotic laws, which reaches into waking life through pathways of electrons. Sometimes to think only in terms of that dreaming, detached from this world of solidities. Wandering through the gates of logic, weaving through its threads of operation.
1 Jan 2011
The fool for Christ holds a prophetic role in Christianity, from the early church to Russian Orthodox “pilgrims” and such later fools as Luther, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, who were seekers after the true, the good, the holy, the beautiful. They were insane — not in a clinical sense, but in the madness of the Holy, an insanity which ordinary sanity refuses to admit.
she returns to me at twilight’s break
when light is inhaled by the horizon
she returns to me tomorrow
and ever does that day slip into the future
she is a spirit that is near
a reality beyond my most earnest grasp
she is everywhere and nowhere
specifically, she is not here
while the heart in me is some kind of numb
stolen years ago, i forget why…
she returns to me, and too, i forget why…
like dawn, where light is exhaled
and somehow, night is as if it never were