29A - HexaSatan

 So, this morning I dropped in on my blog to see whether anything useful was happening. I find this couple of times per week Via Crucis ritual of self-abuse as necessary to me as to the Church and for the same reason, i.e., to keep me from utterly forgetting the thing for months at a time and thereby losing my soul. As you all know, this forgetting and doing other things as if I have a life outside these pages has occurred more often than is comfortable to admit over the years.

So, I did a quick check of the stats (thank you to whichever one of you visits now and again), and the one number that popped out was this:

 

It seems my post from yesterday is number 666 on this platform. I don't need to tell you the import of this deeply mystical number, do I? Of course I don't, because some iconography is nearly universal in Western culture. But it's just a number. Someday I'll do the analysis for you and show you that John, or God writing through John, if that's how you ride, was talking about Nero.

But if it harshes your vibe or whatever, feel free to replace it with the Hexadecimal equivalent "29A", which totally denatures the entire thing. You could even use the binary form "1010011010", although that's really tough to write more than once without screwing it up, besides which it's gonna look pretty damned silly on that old pseudo-metal tshirt you picked up back in the 80s when you were dating that bitter little black-makeup nihilist freak.

In my case I suspect it (the 666, not the bitter nihilist) particularly caught my eye because for the last couple of weeks I've been steeped in "Holy the Firm", Annie Dillard's brutal meditation on God and the problem of evil and meaning in an essentially meaningless world. I've read Dillard off and on through most of my life, and been a huge fan. How I managed to miss this little book (only 80 pages, or maybe even less) is a complete mystery.

Now I don't read Dillard for insights into religion or philosophy (although I often find some — her prickly relationship with her Catholic faith shows up in practically all her work), but rather because this slim volume in particular has some of the most beautiful, often near-hallucinogenic writing in the English language, writing produced by a long-established genius at the absolute top of her game.

It took her two years in the early-mid 1970s, living in near-isolation on an island off the Washington coast in a room with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person" to distill this little droplet. It seems a one-afternoon read, and it is if you're just counting words. So far I'm on my fourth pass through it, and the other day realized I'd been deconstructing a single block of two short paragraphs, marveling and trying to learn, for nearly an hour.

“We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home."

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”

What's to say? I have nothing but open-mouthed admiring wonder and raging jealousy that I can't do that, too. And she just keeps on weaving the threads that make the deceptively simple cloth of this astounding work:

"Time is eternity’s pale interlinear, as the islands are the sea’s. We have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild."

"The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun—but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses."

"…night pooled wetly at my feet."

The entire — exercise(?) — is what I can only describe as "poetic prose". You've read these snippets to yourself. Now go back and read them aloud with breathing and pauses where the punctuation commands. Just — wow.

She said once in fact that it started as a long poem and morphed into it's current form as it was created. And, as with all really good writing (and this is, in spades) it reroutes wiring in one's head for a bit, and makes oddities like this morning's "666" glow a bit brighter against the background of life than it normally would.

So, having "(woken) to the deep shores of time uncreated" and banging back a couple of cups mahogany-dark coffee, I laughed at 666 for a moment and then wrote this in 10 minutes mostly to get it down before I forget to do it at all. And tonight, probably in the wee hours of silent morning that still counts as night, I'll re-read it and see if you get to see it, too.