More on: Essays

One way to describe what O’Keeffe did with landscapes is to say that she was trying to figure out a way to look out at the horizon and to see things out there as deeply as she was able to see things like flowers and plants up close.

Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.

I’d read that they were edible, so, using both hands, I plucked one from the ground and carried it inside, where I moved it, slowly, from the table to the fridge and then back outside.

Glück’s novel was a particularly poignant book to read this spring, when I found myself abruptly unable to touch another person, go to Mass, or receive the Eucharist. Lent rolled on without any anticipation of a liberatory Easter; then it was Easter, and I was still alone.

Sometimes it seems inane. A woman visiting my church one Sunday morning came up and told me she saw a picture of me in a beautiful yellow dress. That was it, the whole prophetic word. Me in a yellow dress.

Paschal could not leave his beloved mother’s head bare. How could he? For he knew that nature gapes with lack. He knew that we’re meant to be hooked up to something else, as if our skulls were plugs. Or to put it another way: he knew that all of us are amputees from moment we’re born.

Jesus, is he everyone’s digits, the ends of your hairs, the wife not your own, the sexless nights, the bleeding snapvine, the Lysander leaf, the dish soap, the Council of Trent, Battle of Hastings, the pill, Saint Augustine, Saint Vincent, every couplet of Shakespeare’s and each child’s drowning nightmare—does he contain them all, things lovely or horrifying, is this him, all of everything stuffed inside? How does one bear such a man as this?

The counselor says that I am in the romance phase. She is right. I am in love with heroin and with the needle, the whole ritual, in love even with the bruises on my arms.

The monument is essentially didactic: look on my works, ye mighty. But the ruin, the legless trunk, is often the real lesson, on the passing of time and the erosion of reputation.

In Ibn Arabi, a totality of faiths were convened. His heart contained within it pastures for deer, monasteries for monks, a temple for idols, a Kaaba around which to parade, tablets for a Torah, and a Quran, as he said in one of his famous verses: “I follow the religion of love wherever its caravans go.”