Hosanna

I've been searching for a writer to remind me why I love to read, why I love to write. Sometimes I go through a dry spell; a longing where I pick up 10 different books and put each down. Books and words are right when they are right. Mood, time of year, what my soul is seeking.

Hosanna. Yesterday was Palm Sunday. Hosanna is a word that takes me back to St. James church services, "Hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Just before communion.

It's a word I've always dug. Just the sound of it, to say, to hear. Hosanna.

March 18 was Franz Wright's birthday. He died last May of lung cancer at age 62. It's not a name most people will know, despite winning a Pulitzer Prize. Poets don't get to be on Oprah or make the best seller list.

Wright is one of those writers, who lights up my soul, points it in different directions.  Yesterday I picked his "Walking to Martha's Vineyard," up off the bookshelf. He is a writer who has been to, lived in, the depths, the mud, the suck, and found religious transcendence; used his struggles to fuel him:

This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught
    glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have
    I described it, I can't, somehow I never will.

Hosanna. Palm Sunday. The crowd is going crazy. Rock star Jesus is coming in to town and Hosanna is the word they are using to sing his praises, thinking he is going to overthrow Rome. But they got it wrong. That's not what He was up to. Yesterday's sermon in church touched on the crowd, waving their palms, waiting and pleading for the wrong thing.

Back to Wright, last night, on the couch:

Rilke in one of his letters said that Christ
is a pointing,
a finger pointing
at something and we are like dogs
who keep barking and lunging
at the hand

Spring is rebirth. Renewal. It's a return. Saturday was a return, on a cold, rainy afternoon, to Tuckahoe State Park, and a 10-mile trail run loop that we've done countless times over the years, but I'm not sure when I'd run the full loop last.

I went out there to put a hurting on myself, to make good on a promise to log some trail miles and find something in me that I haven't found another way to access. And there were times on the trail, particularly the parts I hadn't seen in some time, that I found myself smiling, laughing, for having returned. I found some part of myself that maybe I keep out there as a reminder.

Hosanna. I was playing with the word like a puzzle, like a challenge. I was repeating it in my head, the sounds, the word, the language. But mulling the meaning. A friend pointed out that "Hosanna" is frequently translated as, "Lord, help us."

And then I saw someone talk about how the word has changed over time: "It used to be what you would say when you fell off the diving board. But it came to be what you would say when you see the lifeguard coming to save you... the word moved from plea to praise; from cry to confidence."

During the course of a run, during the course of years, during the course of a day, perspectives, words, meanings can change. When I am active, exploring, paying attention, I can have something to do with that. The weekend was/is a journey of meals, runs, worship, dog walking, reading, reflecting. It takes getting my feet wet, metaphorically and literally, to get on that path.

As I came down to the creek in the middle of Saturday's run, a Great Blue Heron flew horizontal to and parallel with the creek. One of my favorite things to experience while running.

Wright, in his searching, in his writing, in my reading...

Still sleeping bees in the grove's heart
(my heart's) till the sun
its "wake now"
kiss, the million
friendly gold huddlings
and burrowings of them hearing the shining
wind
I hear, my only
cure for the loneliness I go through:

more.

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will
              disappear.

Hosanna.

God, groceries and language

I have God and groceries in my pocket. Onions, butter, red bell peppers on one side and on the other, Peter Rollins, saying, "God can no more be contained in experience than in language."

God and groceries equally contained in language, jotted in a pocket notebook, referred back to on a shopping trip or in the throes of back porch contemplation. Of course, neither are actually contained in language. Rollins is right, language is just a finger pointing at the two. And groceries are a lot easier to point to than God is.

Language being imperfect is no reason to abandon it. Maybe to reinvent it. Sonny Rollins (no relation to Peter) in the 1950s was thought of as one of the top saxophone players around. But he stopped playing in clubs and spent three years on the Williamsburg Bridge, reinventing his style. His language. Getting it right.

Martin Heidegger looked at the whole of western philosophy and decided that they'd all missed the damn boat in how they were thinking about "Being," so he went back and tried to start over, better.

I like S. Rollins' commitment to his art and Heidegger's stones to think he could see something that the sweeping history of philosophy was missing. After penning something as dense as "Being and Time," Heidegger throttled off the word count and runed out this:

The world's darkening never reaches
     to the light of Being.

We are too late for the gods and too
     early for Being. Being's poem,
     just begun, is man.

To head toward a star--this only.

To think is to confine yourself to a
     single thought that one day stands
     still like a star in the world's sky.

He peered into one of the early doorways to existentialism, which others would have to walk through later. He trusted groceries more than God, or at least in language's ability to get to the former.

Thought and language. Together they can guide you through the supermarket, contemplate Being, or leave you just shy of God. What is it that gets us beyond? If you asked either Rollins or Heidegger, I think they'd all disagree.

Only one of them can play the sax.

"Saying what I mean to say"

Friend, sometimes the wind's scuttle makes the reeds
In the body vibrate. Sometimes the noise gives up its code
And the music is better at saying what I mean to say.
--Terrance Hayes

And how. How many times have I wished for the right note to convey what I am after. Or the right brushstroke. Writing, stepchild of the arts, is what you have left if you can't draw or sing or play music or dance. It takes home the least primal award.

I've been listening to Robert Johnson and Son House and Blind Willie Johnson of late. Those cats could sing and play nursery rhymes and still move you to tears or reverie.

Language must have been born out of frustration. Why can't he/she understand? How come they don't get it? How can I make them know? How can I make them see me? And words grew and attached themselves to things and concepts and actions through consent and a hope that we were speaking their true names.

Maybe I am glad for this frustration after all. This need for language and to find the right words--to invent them if need be. The struggle to say it precisely.

Maybe. But sometimes I'd still give music the nod.