The Whale Belly

Well, no story comes to mind. Time to move the fingers. It’s a pretty day. Cool outside, blue sky, some breezes coming and wiping everything clean. The wife weeded the garden and planted a few more azeleas and some other fragrant plants that I don’t know the name of, but with waxy deep green leaves and the promise of big white flowers.

I sit here and listen to the chicken timer click along. I wonder and wonder. I try to clear my mind and not think at all. The stories emerge from the unconscious, but the unconscious doesn’t weigh much on me today. Perhaps I’m no longer in contact with it.

Yesterday, on the wicker couch on our front porch, reclined, reading St. John of the Cross. Embrace the aridity, he says. The sapping of that rich connection that used to bring you so much is part of the test, part of the process. You’re learning to walk on your own feet, like the baby being placed on the ground so it can learn to walk. The writer must learn to write without the support of the Muse, and he does that mechanically, by feeling his way with fingertips, using the formal knowledge that has sunk into his muscle memory. You know how to write the sentence, you have a store of words, you know the shape of the genres. Now you must learn to walk by yourself, without the help of anyone, without inspiration. This is how you grow up.

The white winged doves hoot and groan. They fit into the bird feeder like shoes in a shoe box and vacuum up everything they see. But the sparrows scare them, though they are much smaller. They’re agressive and peck at the doves and make them cower like beaten mongrels. When I open the door they all fly away, the doves muttering, annoyed, as they flee.

While reading Molly Bang’s book about image design I wondered if maybe I should be a poet, placing this same sort of care about the arrangement of words that an illustrator places in their images. I often have these ideas, and then remember my age, remember my heritage of cancer and early demise, and I tell myself that I can’t change course again. Maybe this is the straight and narrow path that Christians preach, that once a decision is made it should be followed faithfully, that the aridity one experiences is part and parcel to every path one could travel, and it’s best simply to stay on the one and learn to travel through the midnight desert, through the darkness of the soul.

We are storied animals, and storytellers are ones that either tap into this or they generate it, I don’t know which. Yann Martel says that the greatest stories are the ones that are religious in nature, that these are the aspiration of stories, a kind of connection to God, or however one wants to put it, An ordering of reality in a way that gives it significance. Ultimate significance.

For a long time I thought people either believed in God or they didn’t, but there are many who have faith in something they wouldn’t call God, maybe Fate or Luck, and they curse it or feel forsaken by it much of their lives. I think this aspiration and disappointment must be some kind of faith in a power that decides things, and thus these people seem religious to me, if but sadly so. I know I myself most often feel spiritual when things are at there worst, when I am adverserial to God, to Fate, to Luck. But what can one do other than accept it and keep trying, just like the artist who never seems to get ahead in his craft, let alone create an original piece of art. But those who keep trying, despite all evidence of a lack of talent, then one day create something that resonates, if not with other people, then at least themselves, in which they at the very least catch a glimpse of the potential housed deep inside them. They may never catch it again, but it’s enough to keep trying, to keep showing devotion for that moment long ago.

The clock ticks. My face is heavy, a sharp electronic pick pierces through each temple. My neck is crooked, stooped, and it would take many years of effort to straighten it again.

And the anxiety sloshes from one side of my body to the other and back again. When there is no definite project, no destination or scope, the soul wants to be shown the path. But the path has been obscured, and we can either wait, or feel about and wander blindly through the fog. I don’t know what the best answer is, maybe neither. St. John of the Cross said that those undergoing the desert of the senses often lose access to their previous intelligence and facility of language, and that one should lean into this deterioration instead picking up these crumbling bits of themselves. It is preparation for something better than the ego, a stripping away so that one can prepare for the desert of the soul — which, unfortunately, is much worse than the desert of the senses. Stripped and vulnerable and without any assurances, one has to maintain his unrewarded faith in the void of silence, in the face of annihilation.

Many popularized Western versions of Eastern thought speak of “letting go,” as a thing one can do at this very moment. But letting go isn’t doesn’t mean to finally put down some enticing object, it is a bringing into death of the attachments that have defined our identities up until now. It is a painful process, filled with dread and long bouts of wishing for everything to be back to the way it was. It is a giving up of selfish aspirations without any promise of a better return. It is a process built on higher purpose rather than higher gain. The promise is tranquility, but when one really thinks about it, tranquility doesn’t sound as enticing as adventure, as squeezing the marrow from life.

What if “letting go” meant letting go of my artistic pursuits? What if the voice of God came clearly to me and told me to give up on my dreams of writing novels. What if it told me that my real place was working behind a register and nothing more? What if I was told to give up my house and live under an overpass? What would I say and how would I feel about this letting go? How would I respond?