The King, the Warrior

the warrior survives, hides,

between the pillars

of low and high tides.

the sea rages denial

inside an empty shell –

iron red-hot courses

in martian veins,

with quicksilver wings

its mercurial elements

shift, love, engage;

and who, eros, are thee?

to force atlas over

my shoulders

the wolf father hearkens

the ocean mother beckons

howling in waves the earth

my warrior’s garden,

and prays his king’s alive

Everything is words now. I see them scrolling down the walls like the matrix. Every flower efflorescing; every bird swooping into the eaves and chirping before sunrise; every smile and touch; each fragile-as-glass moment, mercurial as the Oregon spring, translates into a babel-spring of kaleidoscope diction that twists as I shift the scene.

And nothing is plain, the world sings a chorus of curious words, like the opening scene of the Silmarillion. I understand little of this logos. Brent Weeks, a bestselling author wrote (tweeted):

If, while puking, you consider what words would properly describe what you're feeling... you're a writer.

Sometime this is me, though my skill can leave the descriptions wanting. I still want to write all the words, and fill my journal with meaningless swaths of them. While washing my hands just now, I contemplating how rubbing a bar of soap was like rubbing a religious icon, hoping the relic will impart its healing through its, and our, touch. I also contemplated the ill-advised pun using the word “lye” and dredging up some iconography wit, but decided against it.

Listening to the sermon this morning, I’m balancing each sentence spoken, tasting it as a delicacy – does it have the right sauces, spices, panache? The message was moving, and well spoken, this morning, and also of great importance. EM is an acupuncturist of words, needling the nerves with wisdom, wit, and an eagle’s eye for uncomfortable Biblical passages worth disassembling and putting back together.

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8)

We tackled 1 John 4, and among the verses of love, so customary we blithely read them now, there is this barb, like glass in the cake. And hearing this, we scramble for a way out, as a mouse hearing the shrieking owl, knowing our falling short.

We’ve all been hurt, at some point or another. Some numb the darkness down, tying it like Loki into our guts where it rumbles with hurt as our growing shame drips acid on the face of our fears and pains. Some explode – it’s fight or flight – and erupt in the face of offense, ever prepared for a fight. Internalize or externalize, at the end, we must still love.

I’m still reading Iron John, a book about the masculine and the mythical journey of masculine holistic life through the fable called, unsurprisingly, Iron John. Today, the passage was on the warrior, and I’m trying to bind everything I discover into a coherent whole, but as with the words, sometimes it seems like shattered stained-glass windows scattered across the hole of night.

Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashipn the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.

(Tolkien : Silmarillion)

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/05/the-king-the-warrior/