Reach into
this silence
we call brilliance,
the bomb;
Lao-Tzu’s cat stretches
on the couch and
a Grecian urn melts
to nothing in front
of the radiator.
This matters,
whether or not
we forget. It will
scratch its talons
through the ripples
of our minds and the
waves will surge forth
and break against
the walls leaving
stillness, an unmarked
car.
Moses was a distant figure. Mostly,
we were terrified of him. A man who
killed his own kind – we never
bought that he was one of us, in fact
if we thought he was a fellow Hebrew we
would never have followed him.
The fact that he was Egyptian
told us that he carried sufficient
lore to get is through the Deathlands
of Sinai. He had the palace connections,
talked to the spirits, had the ear of
Abraham’s God. It is true, what the story
says, he struck the rock with his staff
and it bled water. By itself, that was
not beyond the arts of Egypt. But he
was our Egyptian. That was the difference.
- An anonymous Israelite
On the slopes of this mountain I look as from a dream on a land I shall never walk. And I feel within me that later generations will know I stood here. -
Moses
Evening shadows lengthen, but cool air blows in from the distant sea, as I meditate on the acts and deeds of a small player in life’s routine drama, but one blessed to see extraordinary things.
To look out from this mountain onto the land I will never walk in or inherit, and to wonder how I will be remembered, if remembered at all, is the exercise of old age perhaps. But I step into this moment with as much strength and as little gracefulness as at any other time. And you, my friend, are with me. You seem familiar and yet I can’t recall your name…
My real name is not Moses. Although that is what later generations will call me. The letters that comprise the name “Moses” are an Egyptian suffix, as in Thutmose, or Ahmose, or Ptahmose. It is almost a codename. It conceals more than it reveals. That is appropriate. My nickname, maybe, is related to an Egyptian root for “to draw out,” since, as you know, I was drawn forth from the water by my adopted mother to be raised in the court of Pharaoh.
But the power of this name, that is not really my name, goes deeper. For through the life of this one human form of dust and vapor, the Lord has drawn forth something vast and glorious from the depths of the real. Painfully and painstakingly he has formed a people for himself out of the cast-off dregs of those who were not a tribe. Yes, some of them are of the lineage of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, but there are many others as well, from all over the shores of the great sea, that Pharaoh set in cruel bondage. And in truth, our numbers were not as great as later generations will say they were. We were a ragtag band, a motley assemblage. A makeshift mobile clan not much larger than our father Abraham’s roving family.
And what did he draw us out from? Under the sculpted heel of the world’s greatest civilization. As much as we Hebrews hated and feared the Egyptians for their cruelty toward us, we were also awestruck by their immense edifices, and the astonishing sophistication of their thinking and knowing. They had an answer for everything, although the giving of it would cost you. And it cost us dearly.
Why did Pharaoh set himself against us so? He saw in us the potential for a dangerous shaking of the foundations of Egypt’s ancient power, rooted in magic and the belief that their history went back 50,000 years. Our people were skilled, and our birthrate high, and Pharaoh was a better than average reader of the signs of the times. His own kingdom was sick from within, rotting from its obsession with death. Tombs and mausoleums haunted the landscape. The proud pyramids, focal points of prestige, could not fail to hide the fact that they were monuments to an attempt to stave off the inevitable termination of the existence of the King’s soul. Projecting all they could understand of this life forward into the unknown they attempted with all their power to live infinitely. And they died trying.
And they were obsessed with spells. Amulets, potions, trinkets of all descriptions to coax, coerce, or cajole the powers of the unseen world to do their bidding. Stave off the void they sensed at the end. Every way they could cut a deal with the spirit entities to give them a little more power, a little more success, a little more spice of life. For all their focus on death, the Egyptians were not an unhappy people. Their festivals were so frequent that they threatened the economic order, one of the reasons they had to employ slaves. They knew music, the dance. And yes, that is a glimmer of pleasant remembrance you catch in my eye. Not all of those times were bad in Pharaoh’s court. I had many friends and much enjoyment. But it was a celebration without a soul.
To use an image that few Egyptians could identify with, isolated as they are to within a few miles of their mighty river, they missed the forest for the trees. They saw and understood, or thought they understood, the powers that constitute and undergird creation, but they lacked knowledge of the one moving the whole raft downstream. Their attempts to get at it through their Sun God were a step in the right direction, but ultimately they could not get beyond the structural limitations of their whole society, which had no jurisprudence, because Pharaoh’s Word was law. They worshiped a man, and defrauded themselves of the fulfilment of their own humanness, in relationship to their creator, try as they might to grasp it through their magic and music and art. And their bureaucratic machinery.
For years I was consumed by the memory of all that I threw away when I killed the overseer in the fit of rage. But that had been building for a long time. I like to think I would have done it even if I had not been of Hebrew blood. But seeing the toil, the blood, the soul-crush of the Hebrews and other slaves, all for Pharaoh’s staggeringly expansionist sense of self awoke something in me that hurt like a splintered bone. It was a terrible thing I did, and yet that act formed my soul. Before I killed the overseer, I was as pampered and effete as any other aristocratic drone, and took for granted that the order of things was as it should be. If there were injustices they would certainly be righted in the long run through the beneficent rule of the Great God on the throne of Ra. Those coming after us can have no idea of the sense of antiquity that one took for granted in Egypt. I was raised to believe that Egyptian wise men had been prophesying for fifty thousand years. The pyramids were already centuries old when I was born. The Nile flooded three times a year, in an exactly predictable manner, had always done so, and would always do so.
The plagues brought this into even sharper relief. On one level, their sorcerors had real ability Even when the Lord worked through me, there were times when it seemed that the mages would have the upper hand. But the Lord who delivered his people from bondage is in fact the Creator of the universe, and his power is greater than the powers that creep upon the earth. If you notice the list of the plagues brought forth against Egypt, the Nile to blood, the frogs, the gnats and flies, the diseases of livestock, boils, hail and thunder, locusts, darkness, and the death of the firstborn, you will see that the Lord categorically overcomes each spectrum of Egyptian divinity. Flexing his muscle, the plagues read like a roll call of the types of gods the Egyptians worshiped, displaying the Lord’s mastery over each.
I did not break the tablets for the reason you think I did. When I spent forty days on the mountain with the Lord, there developed in me the realization that He was pointing us to something greater than dependence on any object. I had every intention of marching down the mountain, presenting myself to Israel in love, and then smashing the tablets before them as a dramatic endorsement of the reality that God’s word will prevail even when the stone it is engraved on has been smashed to powder by the march of time. What I found instead was an orgiastic celebration of the powers most of the Israelites still really believed in, concentrated in the form of a golden calf, incidentally made from the beaten and forged jewelry pilfered from Egypt. There was not even the pretense – which I would have expected from someone as astute as my brother Aaron – that this calf represented the God who had delivered us from bondage. No, this was the “gods” - plural – that had taken us out of Egypt. A change of heart from their previous ways had not even penetrated the skin.
And I had originally intended, on smashing the tablets, to allow the Israelites to drink the powder as a gift from the Lord, to celebrate the dissemination of his law into their lives, their souls, their very bodies. What was important was not the tablets of stone, but the law itself which was the word of the Lord, and should be to us more than any physically manifest form could be. But, when faced with this utter forsaking of reverence for the One who had actually taken us through the Sea, I shook with rage, a cold anger. And I made the Israelites grind the calf into powder and drink its dust the same way you put a dogs nose in his dung. Only that way would they get the message. And they did. For a time.
You ask why did I respond the way I did to the Israelites constant grumbling? Understand that at every point the Israelites were on the verge of boiling away into what they had been before – a fugitive band of runaway victims. One of two things were going to happen. Either they would all be killed by some enemy, or they would become that enemy by association and fear. They would either be the greatest heap of vulture feed the world had ever seen, or be themselves a pillaging horde of locusts, unstoppable but without any moral imperative. In either case they would not have been the people the Lord shaped for himself out of the prison of Egypt.
Even my own blood, Aaron and Miriam, shared this weakness. Aaron has never suffered from my defects of character – indecisiveness and halting speech, and the erratic way I give in to impulses of anger. And yet he gave in to the Israelites when they demanded he make for them an idol, though he knew better. The scheming of Aaron and Miriam had been going on for a long time too. That was normal politics in those days. In fact, they were amateurs compared to growing up in Pharaoh’s court.
And Miriam, prophet and poet, by the bank of the Red Sea she sang the hymn that by itself brought the host of Israel into being and made it a people, was always scheming and dreaming. The same intellect that had both the compassion and foresight to watch over that reed basket as I lay in the Nile, knowing that an Egyptian princess would be right there captivated by an infant’s vulnerability and need and promise, would be horrified when I married a woman of the same country I sojourned in during my youth as a soldier for Pharaoh. In truth she feared that the Lord was seeking outside the circle of our own kin for leadership of the people, and that He meant to supplant her and Aaron entirely for another kin and another blood. The Lord struck her with leprosy, and she must remain outside the camp for seven days, but could return. Even I was shocked by the severity of the Lord’s chastening. But He relented, and she was well. For to one who has been a slave and a fugitive, and to be accepted within the camp and hospitality of a new people and family, and then to be cast out even briefly, the very act of being excluded from the community entails all the shame and emptiness of the removal of those vital connections that envigor the substance of life itself
My friend, as we sit here on this boulder looking out over a new land that I shall not live to see, I will tell you the most marvelous secret of my existence, though it has been shared far and wide already. For, though the Lord has spoken to many over the ages of human existence, to them he spoke in vision. But to me he revealed himself as he truly is, and spoke face to face. And I was changed forever. What does that mean?
Looking into the glory forever unfitted me for satisfaction in human companionship. Though I see in the lines of every human face a form of the divine glory, to have feasted on the wellspring of compassion and sweetness, of an essence that burns brighter than the sun itself yet and yet is more tender than the flesh of a newborn baby, and to see the order and the shaping of the stars in their courses by One who treats it as easily as a man brushing a fly off his cheek, I could never again recline to eat with human beings and be as one of them. This was not an arrogant posturing of some noble who does not wish to be sullied, but a bare affirmation of the fact that the collision of the divine realm and this one cannot leave the beholder un-scarred by the intensity of its beauty. By some standards, I went insane. And some within the host of Israel took this to heart and probably believed they were doing the right thing by opposing me. But the Lord saw differently.
Korah had a point when he said that each and every member of the community was holy. I had said as much many times, long before when the Israelites quailed in terror at the glory of the Lord and demand that I be their mediator. The Lord’s intention all along had been for every member of the community to be holy and in equal standing, but they could not bear the weight of glory. They were terrified of the holy hill. And who would not be? I was terror-struck, but enthralled, and remain to this day, shaped and perhaps marred by its holiness. But really Korah wanted to be Moses, and did not know it. His ideal of an equal community would not have lasted one moment beyond my casting to the ground by the hand of the Lord. I was so dumbstruck by the turn of events – for as mentioned I am slow of speech – all I could do was throw myself to my face on the earth before the Lord. The only answer I could muster when presented with the arrogance of human cunning supported by a valid reason was humility, a reaffirmation of who we really were in the scheme of things. Korah said everyone was holy, but really, of course, he felt and his own followers were holier than everyone else and should be recognized as such. What was needed was a restatement of the true scheme of things. Thus, I prostrated myself.
So what really happened to Korah and his followers? They disappeared, no more. When faced with the fact that they were outnumbered by the faithful, they fled to the hills. The earth swallowed them up. A bard said they went down alive into the realm of the dead, for they were dead to us. After having shared all the trials of all those years, they relinquished their hold on the divine realm. I hope they have some peace . But I am sure they are still scheming and fighting among themselves, because those who are not a peace with the Lord are divided within their own hearts, and will surely perish, for they have already fallen.
God was so angry with Israel because of Korah and his followers that he wanted to destroy the whole people. If that seems excessive, remember the magnitude of His deeds who brought us out of Egypt. It is nearly unbelievable that anyone who has seen the hand of the ultimate opened and outstretched in tender mercy so many times would nonetheless fail again and again to live up to its promise. But, as the Lord told our ancestor, Cain, sin crouches at the door, but you must master it. Our own nature, cunning with the wisdom of Pharaoh’s court philosophers and sharp edged with the weapons of his army, will surely cause our defeat if we do not look to Him who reached out to us from beyond the stars to show us who we truly are.
I myself of course am not immune to this failure to reckon with the nature of things, and that is why I stand here speaking to you. For it was my own failures and nothing else that I am not permitted by the Lord to enter the land of promise with the host of the children of Israel. You wonder if I feel desolate, or am overwhelmed by feelings of guilt, remorse, or self-pity, but truly I tell you, I have been blessed beyond the ken of mortals, and am favored by the Lord, for have I not seen the face of the Lord and lived, and have I not stood within the sacred precints of His very presence on His mountain, as the sides of the hill quaked and the stones melted with terror, and yet I was not consumed? And was I not lifted up beyond my own naked worthlessness to be subject with the breath of life still in my nostrils to vistas of beauty and glory that even were I permitted to speak of I could not begin to, because no word may ever be written that captures the power, or even then naked fact, of the experience, and words fly in shock from the attempt.
But what was this transgression of mine, you may ask, that itself was bad enough to disqualify me for the inheritance of the children of Abraham? It was simply in this, that I struck rather than spoke, and this is the flaw of men since our ancestor Cain (Gen. 4) and Nimrod the hunter. For, though at Rephidim (Ex.17) at the Lord’s behest I struck the rock and the water flowed, where there had been only dry sand moments before, and suddenly there was a river in the waste, and the people could drink, many years earlier, in my youth, I had seen an Egyptian flogging one of my kinsmen, and was overtaken with rage, and struck him to death. I should have reasoned with him, for he was a reasonable man, and known to me. If I had done so, and had shown my respect for the Hebrew and for the Egyptian as an emblem of my office as a member of Pharaoh’s household, the Hebrew would still have been spared, and might have learned not to hate back or that deliverance need result in the death of the persecutor. And the Egyptian would have learned a lesson in self-mastery. And the hand of Pharaoh would have been exalted in the wisdom of one of his adopted kin, to the edification of all. And perhaps the Lord may have had mercy on all evenly, and allowed all to recline together at His table, and in his service. Instead, I became a fugitive, and the way of the redemption of God’s people and the justice of Pharaoh would be forever opposed. And still are. But such are the ways of flesh and the world, understood only by the Lord. To speak is always better than to strike. But sometimes evil will not allow
word alone to prevail, and the Lord’s fist must clench. Remember this, though. The Lord spoke to me first, and then I struck the rock and the water flowed. The proper order of things is important.
Sometimes anger can be beneficial, as when I burned against the shepherds who showed disrespect to my future wife Zipporah and her sisters when they came to draw water for Jethro’s sheep. There were both harsh words and blows struck aplenty then, and I was blessed to escape with my life though I prevailed, but the Lord’s hand was in it, for I met my beloved, and was united with Jethro, who began to instruct me in the things of the Lord, though I was very slow to learn and my heart was even more reluctant than my speech is halting. Zipporah it was who in turn saved my life, for when in my anger at the Lord’s imposing the rite of circumcision on my son – I was embittered at being required to injure any flesh at the beshest of anyone, even the most High – she performed the deed and the Lord did not kill me as He intended. Who can understand the ways of the Lord? But even more obscure are the obstinancies of men, and mine more than most. Yes, our father Abraham did not shrink to yield the life of his only son to the Lord when he could not know that the Lord would relent and spare his son, but I would not even injure mine for a greater good because of the hardness of my heart.
Most obscure, though, is the identity of the One who called us forth out of Egypt, for when I asked Him in the midst of the conflagration of weeds on the Mountain to tell me His name so I could invoke Him when I spoke to His children, he merely said, tell them“I AM has sent you.” His naming was a refusal to tell His name, but I realized later, and saw with my own eyes, that there was no way He could have done justice to the splendor of his radiance by word alone, and no single name or ten billion names is enough to contain it. And something I realized later was that the bush that burns and was not consumed stands for you and me, and the fire is the Lord’s presence. The presence of the Lord in our midst is meant to sustain us and keep us more than alive – ablaze. But without destroying what is essential to the fact that we are made of Earth stuff. Many religious thinkers coming after me will forget this essential truth. Even the children of Israel did not comprehend it, as they refused to stand in the Lord’s direct presence themselves but required – and begged – for an intercessor to stand in their place so they would not have to contend with the blinding vision from the core of reality.
You ask about the pillar of smoke by day and the pillar of fire by night. Was that a literal presence that someone could see with their own eyes? In a sense, yes it was. It was something the Israelites could see with the eyes of their spirit. In other words, if you went back in time to be with the children of Israel wandering the desert all those years, do you think you would see what they did? Maybe you would. Maybe not. It could happen right in front of you but if you don’t believe you won’t see it. It’s that simple. Your mind won’t accept that it’s there. If you do accept it then you will see. It has always been that way with the Lord. There are those who were with me in the wilderness who did not see, and perished.
Questions.
1 How can you know a person who lived three thousand years ago?
2 How can we know even ourselves, as we truly are?
3 What is it God sees when He looks at us?
4 If God spoke to you personally would you know it?
5 How can we be assured of God’s love? Can we?
6 Can we a believe a single thing we hear, feel, or even see?
7 What is the basis of trust between people? Nations?
8 Can God trust us?
9 How can God is if God Am’s?
10 If God left you for a fortnight, would you be okay when He got back?
11 If nobody can see God, How did Moses speak to God face to face?
12 If God is I AM, then who am I?
Node strums forth self;
transcendant calamity
is the eleventh dimension
from main street,
sweetly tucked in
beneath the railroad
ties, or lazing
on the rafters
watching sunset.
Adam eats mangoes
beside me while the sisters
process pizzas. Everyone
knows there’s a wild
ride inside. The light
comes on when the
oven is pre
heated.
The hole within us opened up
and tore a continent in the
decadence of eternity. You
could plant fish there and
grow cornbread. You could
spill a cup of empty onto
the water and grow thorns.
This is the mutability
I’m speaking of. Rivers of
it. Like oil in Nigeria.
Dishwater running over
the edge of Niagra Falls.
I was there, and caught
the fork, while the neighbors
had me over for dinner.
Pangaea recoalesces
in the bathtub and
we learn to burn its
fumes in a primitive device
for heating octaves.
They are mellow
and yield strange
energy.
gingerly dangling the thermometer over
the cliff to measure the frigid airs spilling
from the earth’s bowels, he realizes he
cannot hit rock bottom because there
is no bottom to hit, least of all his,
here, at the edge of all that matters,
nothing, an aurora blinking in the
shape of a wedding ring he does
not notice in the stratosphere
above him.
He is married to
ice particles floating
upward, scurrying in sympathy
to the volcanic miasma
beneath the ebon
surfaces of rising gases
several kilometers below
the ice shelf.
fragments tantalize
moss up the sheer wall,
wounding granite cleft a thousand
epicycles into Ptolemy’s eyestrain
at trying to figure out the
nuance of gophering
infobytes between
stars singing sugar tones
before the quasar shriek
of galaxyquake,
membranes fracture
my headspin and I
am now still on the surface
of the waters that
have lapped at my consciousness
since before I pushed out
from between Isis’ legs.
How much pain is there in the world?
Can you quantify it? Can you explain it?
What is there to be explained? Why does
one feel the need for an explanation?
Is it not like the crumbling of earth
at the edge of the precipice in the face
of a storm? The storm comes
lashing trees, washing out
roads, pushing boulders
off mountains,
changing the landscape
little by little.
Cataclysm by cataclysm.
Tempest in a teapot
becomes mysterium tremendum.
In the cave, a small voice whispers.
Finding a comfort level in craft is worrisome
because while the hourglass shattered spilling
sand grains everywhere and the wax melted
onto the paper in pleasing visual euphonies,
one wants to be called forth by storm, by flame,
by want, by God, and not to have it in the
back pocket or any pocket for that matter.
Because the art of requiem is not a portable
hole for just any poet to spit tobacco juice
in.
How much revelation can a woodchuck chuck,
the Earth being round, and Ezekiel splendid?
The cats at the gate mew easily,
spilling urns full of old ideas they
are tired of. As are we.
If Wallace Stevens had any clue about what
I’m seeing now he didn’t leave it for me but I
give him credit for superior philosophical insight
anyhow.
If I take this thing seriously I will
do this and that
and be that person and
send to that publisher or
show in that gallery.
Overall the process
tires me, grievously.
But I wander forward
interested because
this is life, and therefore
punctiliar feelings
punctuate my every
crossing a railroad track
in bedroom slippers.
The brush from a stern
pheasant across winter
sky adds dash to a spry
wit from last year’s black
hole finagled mango
cosm.
That we are not machines
I take to be axiomatic but
that I can continue to breathe
this toxic oxygen is without doubt impractical
- take for example the walrus, whose odes to the aurora
borealis consist of floppings about on the ice to
rend fish who wish to be left alone of course
as do we all but the walrus dives - or rather,
burrows, into the water to pursue them
elegantly, elephantine, and moving
mountains of water to do so.
This ungainly creature on the ice attains
divinity in its dive under the sea, for what
was misshappen and purposeless above becomes
pure precision, beauty, and evolution-driven
lethality on a par with, no superior to, any human
cobbled cruise missile.
I say this to say that I am not a machine.
Yes, I slip rather unacrobatically on the ice, and
am not fond of cracking said substance to split
into my dinner, or any atom.
But once I get into the water, watch me
become one with the spiral glyphs that
nourish and communicate, express and
extend me. Cybernesis is no addition to
what human being is - it Is the holon
of self. Cybernetics don’t add, baby,
they are. And the extensions of one
are tentacles of conventicles
of memes, dreams, schemes…
brawn without vim
text without consent
vortex within a maze
of trying to find out why
you were the one
worming into my
mind with love and
wishing only the best
for me caressing my limbs
and loins and I damned you
to hell for it as I hated myself
for loving it.
Forgive me.