Gravity

 

My life is informed by gravity.  This is as much an aesthetic observation as it is a deep and infinitely rich source of inspiration and soulfulness for me. In other words, it is a need.  I refuse to live without the weight of past ages carrying me along with them on their sweeping tides like a single golden leaf upon a river at midnight. For lightness of being I care little, and the spacious present draws me not at all, nor does it speak to me as directly and as intimately as does my awareness of eternity and my own insignificance in light of its dark majesty.  To die into life then, to surrender to the mystery of existence and unknowing is at once a need and a compensation, for it is hardly lost to me that I only feel safe at night, alone in my bed and with a book. For need I tell you…that we live out our lives within paradox and self-contradiction?

In alchemy there is an image. An eagle chained. An eagle with a serpent in its talons. I would drink of the blood of the eagle, but I do not trust it. I would force myself against its desire to fly high above the earth; would drag it down into the depth of the earth, there to fructify the life of that which makes room. I would force the Spirit to empty itself--to exist in subservience to the soul.  The descent of spirit into matter so as to sanctify it…the image of the inverse pentagram. Ironic, is it not? Christ came down to take on flesh and we seek ever to reject our own reification.

The notion of free will appalls me, and yet, and yet, through the power of my will do I hold life at a safe distance.  Truly.  My sanctuary is knowledge. I flee to knowledge like a child to its mother. In books, in scholarship, in study, in contemplation, do I find all that which makes life bearable. To put the life of the mind before all else--this is at once my profoundest and most intimate act of reverence and the very wellspring of my spiritual strength.  Within the subtle beauty of philosophical abstraction do I find sanctuary from the nightmare of surfaces and appearance.  Thus distanced from the demands placed upon me by my existence within matter I take comfort in the presence of the angel of death.  My precious friend! Indeed, there is nothing like the presence of death to reconcile one to anything and everything--including to life. Death puts life in perspective, you know.  In the presence of death appearances take on depth and complexity, and life looses the terror of its merciless immediacy and insistence.