Octagonal

We are all parts of each other. We are all octagons created by the sides of other octagons. In patterns, we move out. A guttural depth – not soundless – but a deep hum, drops like a well down the shaft of the word: self. I see it punctured – that word – as if a harpoon had struck it, but the harpoon snags and drags it down until it dimensionalizes, deepens. That’s where I find the hum. 

Temporal matter has a word to say, a pitch to add. We are not only self with the selves around us; we are self with the selves before us, and self to the selves after us. In unremitting waves of octagonal pulses, we gather and spread, bunch and disperse. In formation, we move out and on. Every shape touching another shape touching another shape has great-grandaddies of sustenance. No two lines meeting ever leave the pattern but become integral positions to the next and next and next.  

In terms of impact (that word sounds like a car crash, and liability) – in terms of touch, hands touch hands, slip, waffle, inside fingers; fingers are separate but delineated by touch creating touch. Skin is both barrier and communication. “Human difference,” an author I read recently said, “is both the thing that makes communication valuable, and communication’s greatest obstacle”. Human difference – the taut, bounded surfaces of our skin.  

Eliot calls the time before and after “waste”. Only the unattended moment “in and out of time” is wanted. I wonder if the Now pins every moment into itself – if the present moment is always all moments in one. But no – unless we redefine. Moment as self. Moment as inexplicable from self. Self as the expression of Now, of every moment in one, and we – sucking breath to breath, are just that breath and nothing more – in the moment; but the whole self, as arises in the imagination, outside the moment, and gives us substance, is the relegating of every moment in one. Because this self is the renunciation of time, not with vehemence, but with mild surprise, as if it assumed time knew the self is not infinite (time without end), but eternal (the ending of time). The moment is always the self expressed in time, but it is never the whole self. It takes a full life of living to bring that into being, a Being.  

Several questions. I wonder what it looks like to find a greater care in the idea of myself as a part (a line) in the shapes which are other people? Does it matter that I am doing well or not doing well on the basis of my individual happiness? That has never been enough to motivate me effectively in the past anyways. Perhaps I begin to see why. I can’t care for myself in this way. That has never been myself – that mythical creature that exists unfed, ungroomed, undefined, floating spectrally in the chambers of my imagination – that is the unsubstantialized self, the ghost who never got issued clothes or a food ration in the real world. The one who never had to pay rent and get in fights with its parents. The ghost who never poked his head out into the land of the living to see what all the fuss was about. I want to fuss, too, now. I want to join the fuss. When I join, I find that the fuss is intoxicating, and I want to live for it, and even though it is a din, it is worth weeping over. Ghosts can’t weep, or cry out with voices that aren’t yet formed.  

I wonder by what curious round-aboutness Christ was saving us when he said, “Lose your life that you might find it”. I’ve been looking for myself in all the wrong places – inside myself, for instance. Now I’ll find it by happenstance, in utter surprise, on the side of the road as I go on walking in the way I should walk. That’s the beauty of religion, freed by grace. I love, I go on loving, haphazardly, awfully, clumsily. And I find suddenly that all along the things I thought I had I never had at all until I gave them away and found them looking at me out of the eyes of someone else. A line in my octagon. A man at the grocery store. A student in my office. A friend across the coffeeshop table. And I am a line in theirs. Excellent. To store the self of myself in the homes of other people, then to go looking there and find myself, deliciously, wonderfully, a thousand times all over again, in the utter hospitality of their eyes.  

What, then, I am wondering, does sacrifice mean (losing life) for people trying to walk in Christ’s footsteps, who are not God? I hear the hint in my mind – the first letter of the riddle: it means walking with careful awareness of the Holy Spirit. That’s hard. That takes so much time. Slowness. Is it worth it? The losing of self is terrible; unsubstantial things seem like they would go more easily. But they’re delicate. The tearing feels endless.

But there is no other way to live – to not give up all of this, every shard of it, every clinging strand, is to give up myself. Anything possible dies like a stillborn child when I wrap my arms around my knees and submit to the fetal position. I will die if I never emerge into life. There are no other options. I must live, terrifying as that is.

You, God, have made the world in such a way that its essence is hidden, until we love, and then we find it immediately. Again, a hint – because, child, in the secret movement of Love, life is found, and in that flood and in that sap, life is born. Typically, it doesn’t feel like anything huge – that birth. It is a simple entrance into the simplicities of life, from which things which do not have life are barred.  

It feels like sunlight and bricks at my back on a Sunday afternoon. Care that my teeth split the skin of a red apple with white flesh. It means mattering. Feeling weighty. Catching the substantiality of the yellow-brown concrete floor splintered by my boots. It is a constant shattering and refiguring of a world of noises, light, and chaos – of reds, blues, greens, oranges, plum. It is an opening of the window and the wind rushing through – that’s Love. It is breath that makes dust motes dance.  

How shall we become who we are? Swirling as we do in the sun on the kitchen floor. Not understanding, just being. How shall we become who we are? Who we are has already been spoken. It is for us to look and watch. To do the hard job of living. And in all that living, we shall in the end become, the fully dimensionalized octagon, the dancing mote, which has as its crumbling, beautiful sides the extraordinary laughter and tears of a thousand ordinary days with a thousand ordinary people, lived as deeply, as richly, as achingly as they could, on this dust mote that swirls and swirls around a burning sun.

Epilogue, from an everyday: I have to pull back so often these days to rematerialize. Or perhaps I am getting better at noticing when my skin begins to fray. Then, long times of sitting, silent, head hung, by my bed, or kneeling with my arms flung over its blue and yellow quilt patches, with the small blush flowers. In the white light that seeps over me through the window, I lie there like an animal playing dead, sometimes into long spaces of darkness as the sun goes down, or before it comes up. I have nothing to say about those times themselves. I do not know what happens. Only that there comes a point, when, strengthened, I rise to do my work, love, and play, and I find (initially to my astonishment, now to my quieter joy) that I can.