Words&Dirt

“I gave Anse the children.  I did not ask for them.  I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not-Anse.  That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled.  I would be I; I would let him be the shape and echo of his word.  That was more than he asked, because he could not have asked for that and been Anse, using himself so with a word.

And then he died.  He did not know he was dead.  I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the dark land talking of God’s love and His beauty and His sin; hearing the dark voicelessness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people’s lack, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights, fumbling at the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is your father, your mother.

I believed that I had found it.  I believed that the reason was the duty to the alive, to the terrible blood, the red bitter flood boiling through the land.  I would think of sin as I would think of the clothes we both wore in the world’s face, of the circumspection necessary because he was he and I was I; the sin the more utter and terrible since he was the instrument ordained by God who created the sin, to sanctify that sin He had created.  While I waited for him in the woods, waiting for him before he saw me, I would think of him as dressed in sin.  I would think of him as thinking of me as dressed also in sin, he the more beautiful since the garment which he had exchanged for sin was sanctified.  I would think of the sin as garments which we would remove in order to shape and coerce the terrible blood to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air.  Then I would lay with Anse again––I did not lie to him: I just refused, just as I refused my breast to Cash and Darl after their time was up––hearing the dark land talking the voiceless speech.

I hid nothing.  I tried to deceive no one.  I would not have cared.  I merely took the precautions that he thought necessary for his sake, not for my safety, but just as I wore clothes in the world’s face.  And I would think then when Cora talked to me, of how the high dead words in time seemed to lose even the significance of their dead sound.

Then it was over.  Over in the sense that he was gone and I knew that, see him again though I would, I would never again see him coming swift and secret to me in the woods dressed in sin like a gallant garment already blowing aside with the speed of his secret coming.

But for me it was not over.  I mean, over in the sense of beginning and ending, because to me there was no beginning nor ending to anything then.  I even held Anse refraining still, not that I was holding him recessional, but as though nothing else had ever been.  My children were of me alone, of the wild blood boiling along the earth, of me and of all that lived; of none and of all.  Then I found that I had Jewel.  When I walked to remember to discover it, he was two months gone.

My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead.  I knew at last what he meant and that he could not have known what he meant himself, because a man cannot know anything about cleaning up the house afterward.  And so I have cleaned my house.  With Jewel––I lay by the lamp, holding up my own head, watching him cap and suture it before he breathed––the wild blood boiled away and the sound of it ceased.  Then there was only the milk, warm and calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence, getting ready to clean my house.

I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel.  Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of.  And now he has three children that are his and not mine.  And then I could get ready to die.”

––As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, pg. 174-6

“What is ultimately important is one’s understanding of the ultimate reality and humanity’s place in the universe, not specific religious inclinations or a particular cultural background.  It is tranquility of mind that can give us transcendental bliss free of instinctual constraints, whether it is Lao Tzu heading out of the city gate on the back of an ox, Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree, a Christian martyr calmly facing prosecution, or the quantum physicist Heinz Pagels making peace with the danger of falling into the abyss on a mountain climb.  Pagels wrote shortly before his death in 1988:

I often dream about falling.  Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains.  Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it could not hold.  Gravel gave way.  I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss.  Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end.  A feeling of pleasure overcame me.  I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed.  It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe.  As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.”

––Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution, by Ted Chu, pg. 333