Breath of a God

We are all ears—though many of us are plugged with wax. A garden of ears (Nabokov) watered...from where? By what? By something that precipitates out of thin air, as mysterious as rain, and trickles through the auricular canal and the cochlear labyrinth into the center of the clay flowerpot we call the “skull”: the voice of the nonhuman world, what we call “language” or “word” (which speaks with a peculiar freshness in children). Every human being is a voice from the nonhuman world. Human larynx: silk road to the Orient of silence. There are places where a certain gatheredness collects. A gathered strength. A sovereign emptiness. Places that are zatheos, ripe for divine emanations, epiphanies.The human throat is one of these. Something not even close to human has us by the throat. In the struggle to regain mastery of our own throats, only the stupid prevail.

If thou speakest sooth, then of a surety have the gods infatuated thee.

The poor dumb world, its mouth too swollen with human flesh to utter speech, now chokes on its own syllables.

Will gods again visit the ravaged earth?

They seem to require more breathing room than the present real estate situation permits. Breath of a God, blow on the earth, blow all our cities away like cinders, motes of dust.

There are no meanings, no syntactic rules. Grammar is Platonism. The putty of your language facility is still too cold and stiff, it won’t flow into the cracks of the text, so what does it matter if you can “solve” the grammar of one phrase, you miss five more, or better yet there is no grammar in the text for you to “solve” at all, grammar is Platonism, a creation of your own mind, a crutch used by those who still lack language facility. Throw grammar from the train. Nevertheless, every word is a glint of light from something concealed, fish scales, a dolphin’s back. Rare and dainty things. Bird’s milk. Language mantles like wildfire over the surface of the earth, like breath on a crystal orb, coalescing in intricate hoarfrost patterns, then melts away, along with the earth itself. And no one speaks it. It is as if a god breaths it onto our faces.

A thing is nothing but a large level expanse of cold, desolate water. Suddenly it breeches the surface of itself and vents a plume of moist, blood-warmed breath in our face.

6/14/2014