Out of the Granite Darkness

6/26/2012


Out of the granite darkness a blue smile materialized–a smile which could split rock. The blue friendliness became a rocky perch in the open air on a mountain crag overlooking a bottomless pool of clear glacier water. Somehow I understood that it was the custom of those emerging--against all fate--from the labyrinth intestines of the mountain’s hopeless schist to hurl a fragment of rock from a nearby vein of lapis lazuli into the glacier pool: as its blue farewell of stone disappeared into the bottomless depths, it was supposed to signify the return of hope to the darkness which is its dwelling place, from which it could be summoned again by memory at the opportune moment. The connection between darkness and hope had some obscure connection with the sound of the words “suffer” and “sapphire” I think, or “semaphore” and sapphire, but I can’t remember.

Once I heard the slow merciless steps of confirmed executioners–black-uniformed stage Nazis with jackboots and lugars–approach me inexorably across the cold stone pavement of a dark cathedral transept. At an opportune moment I took control of the situation by remembering to wake up (remember to remember): the cruel slow steps–monotonous metronome of murder–became the slow, steady, flinty jackhammer “chip...chip...chip” of an absurd bird in the morning scrub pines outside my tent somewhere on the northern shore of Lake Superior.

Must there not exist a map somewhere, legible as the sky and with a legend printed in peacock inks, detailing the sites where the springwaters of surprise trickle out of the bleak rock of despair?

Our world is porous and shot through (chatoyant like a silken cat’s eye) with strange lookouts, returns, points of intersection and escape. Hope sees us naked without our knowledge.