All One, Alone

The following is an email sent from Art to the group on 8 April 2016.

Utterance is its own rationale: by speaking one dispels the reigning silence, creates the clearing, floods in to fill it.

Speech is its own rationale: it partakes in the self-referential “I Am Who Am.” It is how we bring being out of nothingness. To a greater or lesser extent, every creative work arrives at a stage where the circus animals desert.

So abandonment, desertion, desolation, the profound aloneness—these are necessary for one who would become creator, a little god made in the image and likeness of the One.

Abandonment is itself a word. Abandonment is both a curse and a summons. Abandonment is not (nothing is) the absence of word. It is full, superfluous, gratuitous.

It is the way the creating word echoes in our ears. Not nothing, not every thing, not many things, but one. All one. Alone.

What seems at first to be a curse is still more a summons, a prophesy, a promulgation, a fable, a preface--spoken to us by the Father, singling each of us out individually as son or daughter. We abandon ourselves with wild abandon!

Deserted = summoned into the desert

No blue bloods in this world as those who were born blue blooded know. No mountaintop, only a swamp primordial. No parade of prophets who precede us. Only paths that can be made straight, a highway or a river.

Nothing to be dug up or discovered, no more sound basis than this malarial marsh. No basis in other words. Everything comes after.

That is why abandonment is necessary. The action of speaking toward, the moment at which God addresses me, speaks to me. His speech is a summons, a prohibition, a curse, a proclamation.

At that moment I am again an infant—literally, not able to speak—in the face of the ineffable.

Brought out of nothingness, brought out of the malarial swamp, brought out of blood, washed, adorned with jewels, earrings, nose ring. In this is our dignity, but still more is the moment of abandonment.

The verdict is a tolling back, a remembering: all one, alone.

If that moment of adornment is critical, still more is the moment of abandonment.

We aren't the Word, but we are a word.

A remembrance, a dismembering, a pruning, a lopping, a stopping, a stemming the flow. At once a remembrance and a dismembering. A recollection. A return. Because those branches have bankrupted the core, the spring, the seedling.

O to be an infant in the face of the ineffable, no more casting forth of fibers! O dimensionless, infinitesimal infant!

Not infinite, you infinitesimal you. Infant small.

This speech is a summons, a prayer, a request, a pledge, an acknowledgement, an admission, an utterance--cacophonous, euphonious, blasphemous. An abandonment to the fabulous, to fate.

Hiding in the lee disturbs the river, ripples eddy into swirling worlds.