The River, the Mountain, and the Temple
Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord. (Isaiah 2:3)
Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices. (Song of Solomon 8:14)
The nakedness of woman is the work of God. (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
Towards sunset, I come down to the Yuba. The day has been hot, but the heat is tired. Isolated houses in the pinewoods give way to the wild, winding slope. A short scramble among steep rocks to where the river beckons. The water is that northern water I know, cool, alive and life-giving, serene in its pools, gentle on the weathered rock. Its touch is tender. In winter, it would dash me on the rocks and sweep me downstream, but a dam upstream bridles it for the summer. If I lived here, I tell myself, if I swam in this water every day, I might live forever.
The high, sturdy, rusty span of the wood-planked bridge above. Translucent fish in the depths. A woman sunbathing, naked, so achingly lovely in every line of her body, in her slow movement in the sun, a silent, arresting glory, that my heart is still, my desire even is still. Her smile will bid a man come and live.1 She will bless him with a blessing he wants more than breath; he must want it thus, in order that his desire bless her in return as she deserves. Men say they want blessings, but in the end, this is perhaps the only blessing they want, the summit of blessings. I say this not to cheapen anyone’s life or desire: on the contrary. I say it because that blessing is supremely real, it is life, not a life that can be discussed and dissected; nothing that can be merely imagined, supremely concrete. Most of what we say we want is fog, cant, wilful forgetting, perversion, confusion. Perhaps all.
Whatever your faith, if your faith is not a garland and a song around that body, I’ll have none of it, God will have none of it, it is a lie, its salt hath lost his savor and will be cast out and… trodden under foot of men.
What are the paths of the forgetting?
In a motel off the freeway, in the wasteland of the Central Valley of California, I watch a parade of clients as they visit a prostitute in a neighboring room. The men are fat. They smoke and stand behind the building watching videos on their phones before and after. Maybe as long as there have been men working far from home, there have been scenes like this, but no matter how primordial, the human desolation is still stark against the fire of the evening sky.
I have come down from the mountains. I am among the flatlands and their people. I search the drawers but find no Gideons’ Bible. I open my pocket New Testament and read, Let the dead bury their dead.
I let them.
I turn, sightless now and longing, to the precipices, to the high groves of pine, fir, juniper, and redwood, choirs singing the silent green song of earth under the stars, a song that outlasts all our human songs, rapt, tireless. They are not waiting for me. They do not know me. Calamity: I am unknown to the green angels of the earth. How long would I need to be a silent pilgrim there in the heights, before they took notice of me? Before they smiled on me? But I am content, and discontent, to have been with them, shy, for a moment, the fleeting way that at the river I caught a glimpse of her slender legs, the curve of her breasts, her mount of Venus drinking the sun. Accepting my portion and the grace that is given me. An abyss opens and I know myself to be standing on its brink.
There are higher places still. I remember them, and I will not forget, even here. How often has my spirit turned to thee!
In those high places, beside the coals of a fire, body cold beneath the blanket of stars, heavenly white river revealed, I am a child adrift on an ocean, I have no lore to guide me; it is all forgotten by my faithless fathers, I am an orphan, I am in a sanctuary older than the earth, I cannot read the holy book, the song goes on around me and above me, and I understand nothing I can say. Is it desire or promise in my blood? I will dwell in the house of the Lord unto length of days.
To go up, we must go down; to go down, we must go up. The men of the flatlands do neither. The desert their toil has built, their souls broken by whip’s crack before they could even be really born, has neither rivers nor mountains, and I live in the midst of it, until I heed the pilgrim call again and follow the sparrows from the southlands to the place where I’ve left my heart.
The wild lives, the wild lives in me.
I come to the temple. I bow at the doors and cross the threshold into the embrace of the dark. For a moment, here in the desert where throats are parched and eyes burn, there is water; water to drink, water to give me tears.
The spring rises, and again I give thanks.
This post was written without using AI.
The phrase is from Stephen Graham (in The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915, p. 20), and I quote it with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in mind: “When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die” (in The Cost of Discipleship, Trans. R. H. Fuller, New York: Touchstone, 1995, p. 89).
Always an joy to see Stephen Graham quoted in his true religious spirit
This is kinda making me think of Leonard Cohen's *Book of Mercy*.