Ecstasy

(a path to the via negativa)


A cold day like any other day in England
When one’s feelings are unable to go forward
And a familiar telepathist tells you:
“I was not expecting anyone. Yet, I knew
it was you at the door. But, please, come in.”
So you enter , sit down and drink your coffee
As the result of a spiritual atrophy.
“ It is nice of you to come and see me.

If you wouldn’t mind closing the door?”
Yes, of course. Truth
Comes from some other entrance,
From a far world of lilies and ignorance.

He smiles pretending to agree, while
His mind travels across a room of debris.

So, you arise and go towards the light
Because very beautiful he is in his splendour,
Loosing balance on his warned out pedestal
And falling into the stagnant water of self-oblivion.
“I need to know where I stand.” he asks,
Who am I? Do you remember?”

“Dionysius the Areopagite, indeed you are,
The Syrian monk,
Eyes of celestial objectiveness,
Thin lips for the emanation of the true word,
Sword bearer who came
All the way after St Paul to set up this orchard,
A red and rosy tongue of  passion
To made us blossom in a reverie of germination,
The guide of our souls who led his flock all the way up
To this bare town of Oxford
Where we repose as stones by a rivulet. The one who would share
His bread with  lepers, who sees and knows that which
Transcends our sight and still keep jolly.”
So, you low down and kneel at his feet, quietened,
In ecstasy. But here he speaks again.

“This is not me? This is some other Saint?
My bowels order my law, not Paul. Bear this in mind,
I have my copper plans on the Divine. This house
is mine. Under this roof, no one can do me wrong.”
he grumbles, pointing at the door
“So, finish your coffee and go.
You pack your little things and bugger off”.
So you depart through the wall, chalky faced
And still half rapturous,
While he keeps on shouting after you and to the wind
“Bugger offfff. I am not that bloody
Syrian pimp, I am a British man (actually, a martyr).”

Take no offence, this is his way to say
 “Good bye, my dear. Come back, will you?”.
or, conceivably, he just wants  you to worry
about the possibility
that you have hurt his sensibility
by making hazardous hypothesis about his personality.

Seriously, who might he be? Let’s see. He wanted you
to figure out his true identity with honesty
like one would do searching in the dark for an old bottle
of red Bordeaux down a sinister cellar, holding up
a burning dripping candle and crushing under one’s feet
black fast running cockroaches that mash
with a sound similar to a cric-crac.


Initially, one could assume he might be the red-winged
Angel of Justice, holding a scale with the virtues in one plate,
in the other, all the vices. Possibly a descendant of Socrates.
Dionysius. (no, that was your wrong guess, was it?).
One of the Desert Fathers, committed to martyrdom
as a crucial expression of the soul’s perfection?
A devotional mystic, the more stubborn of the many enlisted,
St Anthony,  St Dominique,
St Bernard, St Francis.
St Hieronyme, St Augustine,
St Laurenti, St Bernardine,
princes of contemplation,
beseeching  deprivation,
physical mutilation, deformity, alteration,
submission, self-negation,
rituality, observance,
disfigurement,
penance.

(No, those have been already debarred. They are no islanders.) You have a
last option.

Well, a final choice could be Julian of Norwich, close friend of Richard
Rolle, Margerie Kempe and Walter Hilton, whose views were firmly founded in
Plato’s teaching, and who deserves particular mention in the English
tradition of European mysticism for she experienced a series of powerful
visions and was indeed temperamental.

(Sheeee? Look, it can’t be:  the guy is a “he”.)

Here comes another failure.
When he will know, he will have seizures.
The public too is against you.
How could you possibly mistake his truth?

So, you deviate, you take the first turn on the left and leave
the path, a dog is barking behind a bush, a flash fractures the landscape
of your gloomy thoughts,  in the east,  the sky lowers on the crest of the
far hills, like lead and grunts with a menacing tone. It is not rain.

It is your friend still shouting: “You there, bugggeerrrrr
ooooooooofffffff ”.


Oxford, 30 July 2001