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Gerald Schwartz Author The anonymous author
of The Cloud of Unknowing claims truth is only a point of view about things,
which is as simple a refinement on all the words as anyone has come up with
before or since. This was a practical determination, entirely corrupt, but far
from the theoretical or merely subjective. The anonymous author naturally used
language as a vehicle of his spiritual exercises and is of no importance in
itself. Beyond that there is the esoteric, if not theological, aspect of it. I
wouldn't know much about either of those. The truth is the anonymous author
couldn't know what the truth is, certainly not now. And even in this life, one
of the few things he verified for sure was the fact that the truth of our
longing and desire can be reached only by involved spiritual watchfulness, a
forgetting of the past, a dedicated will, and a determination to reach out to
something in the intellectual darkness of the cloud of unknowing, which is your
basic phenomenological program given as a starting point in any history of
ideas, which are not written to be obeyed. They are volumes whose pages we
cheat between. Thoughts in them exemplify the rules. Most of the thoughts are
thought to be true. Crushing as it is, truth belongs only to someone positively
unlike the anonymous author, who knew the scans of time and how they lead past
open doors and looking through, saw despair there. He didn't go in. But you
know he passed those open doors all the time and felt drawn. It's always there.
The anonymous author didn't deny anything. All I row out on the
Great Lake in a flat-bottomed boat no bigger than the camper-bed I leave behind
in my tiny apartment. Light as a matchstick it stumbles over the waves. The past
with my thoughts spills over leaving me awash in longing. Just beyond sight of
Point Gratiot I raise my oars and, crossing them at my feet, say my prayers. In
elevation, the spirit fills the air, all is risen. I betoken with breath, with
pulse. I spill my mind into the mind of all. Taking the oars, I pull forward
across green-blue waters -- that all yielding nothing. Never At Rest No daydream that I
remember comes to me. I wake to mornings, one following another, with a clear
head, the daylight clear as white vellum, and the small conversation of the
birds to listen to, maybe the talk of the contractors high above working on
somebody's roof, or new landscaping -- and this leaves me wishing I could get
by the way they do, about daily things, unamplified by supple turns of phrase,
though after I think this out awhile I slowly gain the strength to admit my joy
in how the words themselves bless the morning and repair my soul regardless of
the heavy freight of dreams, waking or otherwise, and the bird's folio of
colorful grace notes to which the ear can resonate despite the lack of
permutation in song. Anyway, I keep forgetting what I came here for. I don't
even know now the where of the wonder of it all or the where it may have gone.
After awhile I can no more account for why I sit here where you see me now than
I can tell you what the jay thinks the instant he takes the air beyond the
grotto beside that simple garden there with its simple its redwood bench of
simple planks upon a lawn of simpler trees and shadows swaying from above
raised against the sun, a mere star burning through a flank of sky brimming
with its own dream of ancient things never at rest. |