This is no age for old priests. There is nothing left to eat here and the sustenance of all the great things has been consumed by the teeth of much younger men. Everything that was has been gnawed to the bone and all that will be lies like a stone in a desert temptation awaiting some great miracle that will not come. So it is with all things: in living and dying, in past and future, there rises a discernable line from the yeast of our memory and with it the acknowledgement that one cannot point to a singular ingredient or immaculate event. Our lives are strung along, like telephone wire or fencing, attached to certain, firmly planted posts that bubble and pop in the rising temperature of age. Each fence post assembles a founding link to the chain of who we have become, degree by degree, until the whole loaf itself has been consumed.
My decision to starve myself to death in the abandoned sanctuary of my first parish is one such long chain of events with grounded posts, and being that this is my first day without food, I felt it appropriate to start at the beginning, during my initial understandings of these things. And lest one should believe that this starvation is unholy, we must remember that man does not live by bread alone.
I’ve told this first marking along my life’s trail scarcely enough it seems that no one outside of my immediate family is aware of it. I recall once repeating it to my own mother in all its macabre detail who simply replied that she had only a small recollection of the event. This admission hardly surprised me in that my being, as a child, was highly elusive and intentionally so. It never was so much the privacy or the lunacy of humanity that kept me silent so much as my inability to fully communicate myself. And of course it wasn’t that there was all that much to communicate, but what there was of me was mine, and I have always been inherently selfish.
It was the fall season; and I remember this only because of the slight chill in the air and the color of the leaves. Along the Appalachia, the leaves turn with vibrant enthusiasm – a welcoming of death that to this day I have only gained glimmers of understanding. I suspect that in some short weeks, I will have more understanding of this unless my colors are not allowed to turn should they intervene. I fear that if my son has any say, he will against my wishes, authorize the deep mechanical tubes of man and they will poor back into me the very substance of my protest, like a clarinet of medical serendipity – a benign and altogether cancerous invasion of my own dying, and all in the name of some undefined good.
The smell of leaves while crisp and beautiful has always left a stench of death in my nostrils. I’d like to blame the asthma, but I’ve always known that something much darker has been at work in me and this great work began at the age of seven staring down at the matted fur of my dead kitten.
We had an old grey farm cat on our four acres and I loved her as much as I suppose any boy is capable of loving the source of his sneezing. Impregnated, she gave birth to a litter of nine and I was fortunate enough at such a young age to witness the entire spectacle. Never particularly squeamish, I can still recall with great curiosity the form and grace by which this sleek and covetous mammal ate her own placenta; a metaphor perhaps for what would come in numerous births and rebirths, be they spiritual or otherwise. The production of something new always carries with it the blood of something old, and in this conglomeration of discard and flesh one might always find, if not appetizing, at least the things for which a soul needs. It matters not the hour, nor the resolve to do without. The spirit consumes what the spirit births.
Of the nine, there was the usual runt: the poor nipple-less wanderer in search of milk. And while totally unaware at age nine, in some short years I would come to understand this lot in life in much more personal detail as the majority of my own fumbling to breast would be repelled with great anxiety from lovers of a less open disposition.
The cat’s motherly eyes were never far, nor her sharp pinch of mouth on fur, which she would place along the back scruff of her eyeless babes and carry them back to warmth when they tumbled out of the basket. It was with great encouragement that I noted an instinctual commitment to keep the nine bags of fur and claw near enough and warm enough to have their fill. The weak one grew, albeit slowly, and within a few short days had sprouted bristle-like hair, resembling a seminal grass along its oil slick back and my heart was stilled knowing it would survive the malnourishment.
Many weeks later, the litter’s runt finally began to wander. She wobbled at first, eyes barely open, not unlike us all I suppose. Wandering in any capacity is quite akin to its amoebic origins: like a spore of jelly, we each tumble outward to collect whatever might stick to us; and today, as an old man, I now see that most mammals progress beneath the weight of such a great symphony. Our wandering is a flag unfurled, the great cosmic flypaper – and as much as my ideological opponents would have me believe that this process is born inside the meat, I am forced to wonder as they themselves cling to me with their countless theories. How is it I managed to move forward and gather newer, fresher mammalian ideas from outside this envelope of being, while maintaining the choice to deny my physical being?
Nevertheless, when things wander they do perchance get wandered upon and as such leave permanent indentations. These are more than psychological imprintings from a myriad of doting mothers; they are more often the harbingers of great and permanent marks carved out from the basement of time. So it was with the runt of this litter who in some short weeks was forever engraved with the imprint of a harder rubber tire whose tread existed to glide upon the stains of Nature’s tears.
The perpetrator of this death, like so many, kept moving and never stopped. There were only two tiny thumps and rush of wind. For years, I had imaginations about who the driver was and where they were going. I thought about the subtle differences between destinies and destinations, all of which applies to where I sit today.
When I approached the street, I found her there near the road, body completely smashed and paper thin; two tiny eyes spread randomly as an ink blot test sent by a stranger therapeutic mind to probe and measure the abyss behind my own, as if such a spread of kitty gelatin and paint could glean anything more of the event than the despair of coddled brains on cooling cement. I don’t wish to link us too desperately at this moment, and yet from mother’s teat to simple travel staples we all seem to find something of ourselves along the curbsides of our wandering. The meat itself isn’t what calls us backward from the streets in shock so much as the attachments we are severing, but death does have a way of driving the pulverized moment back into a frozen time when we first saw a picture of what will surely come.
My decision to starve myself to death in the abandoned sanctuary of my first parish is one such long chain of events with grounded posts, and being that this is my first day without food, I felt it appropriate to start at the beginning, during my initial understandings of these things. And lest one should believe that this starvation is unholy, we must remember that man does not live by bread alone.
I’ve told this first marking along my life’s trail scarcely enough it seems that no one outside of my immediate family is aware of it. I recall once repeating it to my own mother in all its macabre detail who simply replied that she had only a small recollection of the event. This admission hardly surprised me in that my being, as a child, was highly elusive and intentionally so. It never was so much the privacy or the lunacy of humanity that kept me silent so much as my inability to fully communicate myself. And of course it wasn’t that there was all that much to communicate, but what there was of me was mine, and I have always been inherently selfish.
It was the fall season; and I remember this only because of the slight chill in the air and the color of the leaves. Along the Appalachia, the leaves turn with vibrant enthusiasm – a welcoming of death that to this day I have only gained glimmers of understanding. I suspect that in some short weeks, I will have more understanding of this unless my colors are not allowed to turn should they intervene. I fear that if my son has any say, he will against my wishes, authorize the deep mechanical tubes of man and they will poor back into me the very substance of my protest, like a clarinet of medical serendipity – a benign and altogether cancerous invasion of my own dying, and all in the name of some undefined good.
The smell of leaves while crisp and beautiful has always left a stench of death in my nostrils. I’d like to blame the asthma, but I’ve always known that something much darker has been at work in me and this great work began at the age of seven staring down at the matted fur of my dead kitten.
We had an old grey farm cat on our four acres and I loved her as much as I suppose any boy is capable of loving the source of his sneezing. Impregnated, she gave birth to a litter of nine and I was fortunate enough at such a young age to witness the entire spectacle. Never particularly squeamish, I can still recall with great curiosity the form and grace by which this sleek and covetous mammal ate her own placenta; a metaphor perhaps for what would come in numerous births and rebirths, be they spiritual or otherwise. The production of something new always carries with it the blood of something old, and in this conglomeration of discard and flesh one might always find, if not appetizing, at least the things for which a soul needs. It matters not the hour, nor the resolve to do without. The spirit consumes what the spirit births.
Of the nine, there was the usual runt: the poor nipple-less wanderer in search of milk. And while totally unaware at age nine, in some short years I would come to understand this lot in life in much more personal detail as the majority of my own fumbling to breast would be repelled with great anxiety from lovers of a less open disposition.
The cat’s motherly eyes were never far, nor her sharp pinch of mouth on fur, which she would place along the back scruff of her eyeless babes and carry them back to warmth when they tumbled out of the basket. It was with great encouragement that I noted an instinctual commitment to keep the nine bags of fur and claw near enough and warm enough to have their fill. The weak one grew, albeit slowly, and within a few short days had sprouted bristle-like hair, resembling a seminal grass along its oil slick back and my heart was stilled knowing it would survive the malnourishment.
Many weeks later, the litter’s runt finally began to wander. She wobbled at first, eyes barely open, not unlike us all I suppose. Wandering in any capacity is quite akin to its amoebic origins: like a spore of jelly, we each tumble outward to collect whatever might stick to us; and today, as an old man, I now see that most mammals progress beneath the weight of such a great symphony. Our wandering is a flag unfurled, the great cosmic flypaper – and as much as my ideological opponents would have me believe that this process is born inside the meat, I am forced to wonder as they themselves cling to me with their countless theories. How is it I managed to move forward and gather newer, fresher mammalian ideas from outside this envelope of being, while maintaining the choice to deny my physical being?
Nevertheless, when things wander they do perchance get wandered upon and as such leave permanent indentations. These are more than psychological imprintings from a myriad of doting mothers; they are more often the harbingers of great and permanent marks carved out from the basement of time. So it was with the runt of this litter who in some short weeks was forever engraved with the imprint of a harder rubber tire whose tread existed to glide upon the stains of Nature’s tears.
The perpetrator of this death, like so many, kept moving and never stopped. There were only two tiny thumps and rush of wind. For years, I had imaginations about who the driver was and where they were going. I thought about the subtle differences between destinies and destinations, all of which applies to where I sit today.
When I approached the street, I found her there near the road, body completely smashed and paper thin; two tiny eyes spread randomly as an ink blot test sent by a stranger therapeutic mind to probe and measure the abyss behind my own, as if such a spread of kitty gelatin and paint could glean anything more of the event than the despair of coddled brains on cooling cement. I don’t wish to link us too desperately at this moment, and yet from mother’s teat to simple travel staples we all seem to find something of ourselves along the curbsides of our wandering. The meat itself isn’t what calls us backward from the streets in shock so much as the attachments we are severing, but death does have a way of driving the pulverized moment back into a frozen time when we first saw a picture of what will surely come.
Again, I mean not to draw too many similarities.
The strangest thing about looking up at suffering is what you suddenly glean, or perhaps convince yourself you have gleaned, about the Divine. This is no less true at nine than it is at ninety-nine, or at least I imagine it to be so. The irony of damnation is that like decomposition its entry lacks the savage intensity of its contents which is likely why I detest hearing the word “damn” roll off the lips of those who fail to understand such things. Something wholly other is at work in the world and only in the accumulated mass of dying can one fully glimpse its terrible beauty and call it damned.
My shrieks were thin and high pitched, like some grandmother reciting lines of Giovanni in a broken opera; the world itself the stage and those crumbling leaves the vibrating seat on which each sound wave sat and churned and bounced; and even wandered. I’ve been told and believe it is true that all sound is interpreted by the broken connection of nerve to bone; and in our case as human beings this severing is not between one singular bone and its nerves, but rather three tiny bones in particular. It would seem that even our most tender interpretations are rooted in a skeletal reality, like a child’s nightmare the greatest of Nature’s conductors usher forth movements to us of the Divine Spirit; and these are received unintentionally into our an empirical, Trinitarian disposition.
They came running, these entities from which I sprang. My father first followed closely by my mother. Firm hands pulled me away from the curbside and directed me into the house. But I watched from the window as my father scooped each feline bit of her up to the sun with a flathead gravel shovel. In his defense, there would have been no other way to retrieve the dead kitten and this too gives me pause to consider how quickly our warm substance entwines with the inanimate only to dry and cool and stick there upon the asphalts of cosmic paths; all that we are even in our most rudimentary forms is cuddled and hunkered down as if to resist the most prying instruments of man.
When I returned to the scene there was only a deep red stain settled between the rough black nodules of pavement; and one more thing: a white chip of skull, flaked off and reflecting a fading light which would serve for me as a lasting dim image of the pain and the sullen realization that autumn was never bound by a turning earth or the wobble of rock in deep space. Autumn comes from someplace wholly other: Hallowed Be Thy name.
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