More on: Essays

These recent books of psalms by Diane Glancy and Julia Fiedorczuk remind us that voices put us in the generative space of the shared, the relational; they engage us in a place of self and other, self and world, self and self.

Anyone in love is insane.

Clarice Lispector. The Complete Stories. Translated by Katrina Dodson. Edited by Benjamin Moser. New Directions, 2015. Kevin McIlvoy. Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, and Found Novels. WTAW Press, 2023. Alva Noë. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. Hill and Wang, 2015.   HOW TO BEAR HAPPINESS?” That’s the question a character identified only as “Number…

Now these voices hover around the belfry and bellow out Pray every day that you’ll see things.
I have. I’ve worked and watched. This was not the answer I wanted.

Sham is subtractive, but I, a being, am aggregate. Creation is aggregate. Human creativity is, in its deepest dynamics, aggregate and productive. Let us ornament ourselves, yes, but not toward the end of erasure. Let our adornments extend our penumbrae, our enveloping souls, into the ether that melts into heaven, stacking glory upon glory as cell and organ, skin and fur, aura and crown, radiate the Life that animates all.

Finally, you add a layer of cookies, and—voila!—a chessboard. Then you let the whole thing sit in the refrigerator until the cookies get soft, and, oh, sweet Jesus, it is so gloriously rich, so simple but so good, like the very best things about Appalachia, sweet iced tea and ghost fireflies and steep, winding roads leading nowhere in particular and everywhere all at once

A hen, however, is not a word. Let us be clear. She is a living creature, a being to be experienced. She is her own center of consciousness. She cannot be explained, will never be solved.

Though my answer wobbled on the edge of insincerity, I knew it was the right one. I have always known how to give the right answer. The cost of giving the wrong one was too great.
I knew it was the right answer because Brother Mark savored it. His face relaxed into admiration, as if I were a young dog who had just accomplished a complex trick.