The Valley Below

I need to get more comfortable before I write an “about me” page. That’s a little neurotic but sometimes it’s the simple things that are hardest to do. I feel two equal but contrary impulses. One is, for the “about me” page, to get autobiographical and long-winded. The other is to say something somewhat aphoristic but basically true, such as “My main interest is in God.”

The most fun I ever had writing on the internet was on tumblr back around 2008. It let me do any of those things, depending on my mood, write something short or long or poetic or historical or whatever words could do. I don’t remember the platform nudging me toward a pre-conceived purpose, which tacitly encouraged a style of hypothesis and experimentation, which (about me:) I guess is what my writing style is.

Also back then, there wasn’t the backdrop of incentivized mob behavior, the viral compulsions and hair-trigger pile-ons, that make social media such a manipulative and ugly “place”. Which reminds me, I think there needs to be a different word for the internet than “places”, because that metaphor is really misleading.

Writing an “about me” page is problematic because the basic things “about me” are complicated. There are things about me that don’t require explanation, but the basic things definitely do. It’s hard to leave them in writing on an “about me” page when I know it isn’t enough. So maybe that’s one thing “about me”, that you can’t touch the surface without going deep. Or at least, I will try not to let you.

(About me: I am cancer sun, pisces moon, and scorpio ascendant. This is a journey of water.)

Another thing about me is that I’m skeptical of online “community”. I’d like to be proven wrong. But my feeling is, something about being physically together—in-person visits and conversations, touching, the nearness of family, sharing tea or coffee or booze or snacks or food or smoke or a guitar—is a foundation of community. I have that. Writing is not that. Writing is something different than that, let alone posting a blog (or microblog, or photoblog, or newsletter, or whatever it is they do on facebook).

So I’m not looking for community, maybe more like correspondence, but also neither of those. I hereby take pressure off of anybody who reads this to ever reply or communicate in any way. Maybe blogging (for me) is like when little coral polyps release their eggs into the ocean, how they could have some wobbly idea what outcome they hope for, but also have no idea at all. Potential is promising but also surprising. Like tiny spherical offerings to the moon. To the moon, they are perfect as-is.

Something wonderful about writing (including on the internet) is how you can devote yourself to the silence of it.

Anyway, one other thing about me is, and I’m as certain about this as I am about anything, that God can be found inside my own navel, ha-ha. There are however many easier places to look.

I like to follow hurricanes.

I lose myself in it as the pressure system builds, as if from nowhere and everywhere at once. It draws water and fire from the overheated ocean, winds gather strength in organization, and a spiral emerges from splotches on the radar. There is a sense of something solid being born as the hurricane becomes self-centered and self-contained, an expression of elemental personhood. The spinning eye looks back at me, alive, with a similar sense of recognition.

Until it loses its atmospheric support and breaks, crashing into land or riven by another aerial dynamic. The eye falters, dissipates, dismantles, like Lear losing his mind, a principle of power expressing its final emptiness, wings of conflict without a body to bind them.

Into the same it passes away: earth clean, sky blue, sea silent.

I wonder if human wars are like this, as I follow the news of Israel and Palestine. The news is not good. A divine gift, a holy land for a blessed people, has become, through stiffening necks and hardening hearts, children of Abraham strangling the sacred names in rage against a broken covenent. Proportionality is chimaera, on this scorched earth, where we are tethered by finite commitments to the infinite burden of divine injustice. Rhetoric builds and forces spill over; violence gives birth to violence bloodier and broader still; as presidents, ministers, and kings fly jagged spirals around Jerusalem, there is something solid being born, with a similar sense of recognition.

It is a thing that cannot be stopped.

I too have fought, ever since I was born. I demanded care, crying like a babe when it didn’t come. I rejected injustice, spit it out like spoilt milk. I did my homework, knew multiplication tables by heart. I read books and learned from them, too. I conversed in the public square. I worked to save children from the maw of death. (Yes, I corrupted the youth.) I tried, over and over, to serve, to negotiate, to draft a treaty. (Okay, I was a bad servant, still—) I fell in love. I dreamed of walking without shame through the garden, on this, my beautiful earth.

But I also have fought myself. I have euphemistically declared myself a question, have orchestrated pogroms and nakbas and crucifixions against myself, have perpetrated crimes against humanity against myself. I buried myself deep in the dark of a labyrinth, my face was so ugly. I cursed my city, rejected so-called help from so-called friends, and drank the hemlock provided me. Then I was dead, but that wasn’t enough, so I put holes in the tendons of my ankles and, with a chariot, I dragged my dead body around and around the grave of my other dead body, through the dirt. Again and again, as it rotted, we rotted. I became anti-earth, black hole, a self-centered and self-contained thing, an unbroken expression of brokenness. Other Greeks watched, alien to me, as my rage drew time itself in the vortex. For eternity, if for forty-two years, that is what I did.

All as punishment for the following crime: that I am a similar sense of recognition. I am the eye of the daemonic storm. I know myself now, I am the war. I am the catastrophic energeia that reveals itself, destroyer of worlds, with so many mouths and so many voices. I am who cannot be stopped.

It is deeply and terribly hard, to let go. The earth is lost. Exhale the body and let it be lost. As everything sacred has ever been lost, in a similar sense of recognition.

Whence, this: Truth not in silence, but in singing.

Having become beautiful and young, Elizabeth writes blogs.