Taken in mid-August the last time I visited C and rested and drank tea at the table in the morning over another book she leads me to. Now in the Minneapolis airport, a flight away from Moline and a fifty mile drive from Galesburg. Seems impossible I ran the dirt road in Vermont today and felt the cold make my eyes tear and my lungs ache in a good way. Seems weeks ago, that quiet slice, returning to the house, greeting King George Jesus the cat, feeling grounded in my legs and feet and in the outside chill smell of my fleece, hair, and skin, the outside inside my nose. In my breath.
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Thank you, C.
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Don't forget: Francisco Aragon is BLOGGING at Tertulia.
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Home now. Mostly sleepless. But very happy. The apartment is quiet and I am alone. The night is unseasonably warm. The priory writes with news of this week's upcoming classes, and I am reading the book C gave me, God: a Biography, which is utterly compelling as literary criticism but which also makes the evangelist in my head scream blasphemy. The critic, the scholar, in me says: if you would rummage up the most disconcerted image of divinity's person and place it into the great canon of tragedy as understood by Early Modern thought--since Miles insists on using Hamlet and readings of the character of Hamlet as his guide--you're bound to draw up a frail unpredictable violent version of God who will murder, let drown, test, devise stages, find vengence. But I think without a God who is omniscient (and Miles' God is not) there is no story. The story of this story is authorhood. Hierachy. Rise and fall. Chronology. Beginning and end. Otherwise it's just violence. Or all things being equal, chaos. Confusion. Ultimate freedom. Anarchy. You can't elide purpose within a methodology of purpose for the sake of having God reveal himself to himself. Well, you can. But then you don't end up with a character much resembling God, do you. He looks suspiciously much like man.
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