the green knight

It may be that guilt and sadness make me look Oriental.

There occurs a second distortion of the divine image, already so blurred, wavering, struggling. The real question! He stood there looking at the tracks. The most real question!

When does the most real question cease to become a question, he thought.

blotted eyes of men, sunken mouths, and inky nostrils...the knife and the wound aching for each other, until they forget who is who.

Herzog stated it impassively, though with pain, and his mind immediately looking for formal stability, catching at ideas...

remembering Augustine, My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human but what is it? Not human of itself. But has the longing to be human. And like a troubling dream a persistent vapor. A desire. Where does it all come from? And what is it? And what can it be! Not immortal longing. No, entirely mortal, but human.

Not, God...Not, God, what am I, but who am I?

And the sun, like the spot that inoculated us against the whole of disintegrating space. He looked into the blue vacancy and at the sharp glitter of wingborne engines...

You think we can find solace where we can?

Brother, this generation thinks that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power.

But what do you look for Herzog, with all your ramblings, your ancient instability, blood-daze?Turn your gaze inward, Moses, see what you've become. Only the wounded heart can know, only what is not of time can comprehend the pattern of one's life.

Perhaps that is true. The dream of man's heart, however much we may distrust and resent it, is that life may complete itself in significant pattern. Some incomprehensible way..incomprehensibly fulfilled...and thus a broken circle.

The devil's job in this day and age, if anyone still believes he exists, is to divide:"But life isn't one, you fool! You don't know what's around the corner. All this talk of the self. Know thyself! Don't you see what a fantastic deception that was?!"

But there's a strange division of functions that I sense, in which I am the specialist in...in spiritual self-awareness; or emotionalism; or ideas; or nonsense.

Save your soul, brother Moses. Haven't you suffered enough, haven't you stuffed your head with ideas for too long? A seventeenth-century soul will not get you through.

I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language.

Then Herzog said, I remember the colours, Lord. It doesn't matter if you're not listening. It was all here. I know that. No Magianism for me!

The strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life. Iris, how well you saw this.

All that is, is holy.

The crude oval of the basin was smooth and beautiful in the gray light. He touched the almost homogeneous whiteness with his fingertips...unexpected intrusions of beauty...

the colours. Life, again.

He painted the lid of the piano with absorption, the green was light, beautiful, like summer.

Ubo

Then Father Herzog said, "I have to sit down, " Moshe. The sun is too hot for me." He did, suddenly, appear very flushed, and Moses supported him, eased him down on the cement embankment of a lawn...

"Even I feel the heat today,"said Moses. He placed himself between his father and the sun.

---from Bellow's Herzog (dark grey)