so and so

j asks about brokenness and s asks about a body crossed by lines. i feel these two bits of insight from you two helps something- brings a unity to my kitchen and an internal struggle to my kitchen. both are honorable, and illustrate a kind of willingness to take things on: the way we drop things, the way we pick things up, the singularity of the body when we fall.

i was reading merton’s “new seeds of contemplation” just this past week for a book group i’m involved in. of course there is a chapter/seed called “a body of broken bones.” of course, of course. here’s a bit from it that seemed to be talking to us:

As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them.

There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate.

Hatred recoils from the sacrifice and the sorrow that are the price of this resetting of bones. It refuses the pain of reunion.

i could hardly believe that last line when i read it. thinking about the mayor refusing the bits that seemed to pain him, thinking about our internal borders, lines that cross us, the violence done to the women in the dr congo, all sounds like the sloughing off that comes with the rubbing together of every edge. it makes sense that everything would hurt—so many internal sites of setting, so many almost-external sites.

so then i think that’s part of what the writing is for: showing in the work your own setting of bones, places where you are the breaking. it seems it’d be important for each of us to keep engaging with that—as we do, but you know, it’s hard, and for good reason, and sometimes we get tired.

j says skeptical of brokenness. i thought man oh man. i’ve been that guy, who looks away from the destitution of the other folk, emotionally or physically, who looks away from the chipped parts, and gets all defensive at the insinuation that the broken thing belongs to all of us. that it’s out there, it has a public face, a face we can recognize? “people just dig and deepen the crease in order to protect their placement”—so we don’t have to be lost, confronted with our own borders.

how to deal with the big— i feel like s shows me again and again that i can let the big happen at the small intimate sites where it happens, and be ready, catch it there, pay attention to, be generous from that place. but i don’t know, i don’t know.

there is no justice, and no mercy, in line-drawing, so, find the places where there is a bit of a tangle? where the natural of the line-drawing endeavor is perverted?

i feel silly saying anything. but.

another bit from merton, from that same piece, regarding those unconscious prejudices, s: Punishment cannot cure the feeling that we are unworthy. so i’m thinking about our incarcerated, especially certain populations, who have always been wrong in their existence, who were unworthy or or unhuman or unfree for a long time. where does all this stuff go? i don’t know. what can this country, or any, know about justice? i don’t know. but we do know something. and that non-mythical view can always be aspired to?

a