Michael Bolerjack

To Gather
The Mind, The Word, The Spirit, The Book is a structure in which we see figures of New Jerusalem and the Temple in Ezekiel. This structure may only exist in the book, or only in the mind, or only in the language of the word, or only in a spiritual sense. The history of metaphysics and religion, even literature, all of it in some sense scriptural, as is evident, is the conversion of the terms, their reduction to one or the other. We draw maps of it, but we can not find the site where it is. Call it God or Heaven, say it is among us or within us or above, or in some future eternity, which being eternity must already be, I have sometimes seen it unfold, or stood within its courts, and did not know if it was revelation or imagination. Perhaps there is no difference. We look for it in the heart or the brain, where it is said to be, but find only corpuscles and fiber. Yet when it is, I know it, and to say I am it, is not incorrect, but should not be noised abroad, for scandal, at the very least uncomfortable controversy. It could be writing. It is often written. Yet as everyone knows, it is found more in the white blanks and spaces, than in the linear script, but occurs even more in the lability of the combinatory aspect of the alphanumeric. Let us call it provisionally a book. When God is all in all we will be contained in The Book. The book is limited. It is the limit. Bound, restrained, the emblem of religion. Books have beginnings and endings, but the text has none, writing is now without definition or delimitation, it is everywhere, it is everything. The book, ordered by logos, observes word, reason, harmony, proportion and is one. Writing is none, disordered, discordant, without proportion, a sin as they say in Spanish. The lack and absence of writing is said to be really real, without ideal or illusion, perhaps even without idea itself, being but the literal evacuation of meaning by another wizened.

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Mutatis mutandis messieurs, the other witnesses, at least sixteen, with Buck Mulligan and Kinch, in towers as the two testimonies of the new and old, w for the w, pc, was Jesus a Christian? do you really by misprision engender your own father? When Buck Bulligan becomes Molly La Moon though and his query on love becomes the decontamination of all of loves sometimes taints in her swoon, and that even in the tain of the antinovel without a pat plot in the theory and practice of literature, it is not unlike the Blakean vision of Christ ascending to the Heaven and becoming Jehovah, though the decontamination in the cleansing of the Temple was a propadeutic or prefigurement or preparation for the gospel, and he did it out of zeal for his Fathers house, it may be as it is for Edith Stein in the meaning of her experience, that is to say, she n tied it, he st tied in, if the virgins of Christ, his brides, be caught in one graceful embrace, why not from an embrasure aim for the coming of the same, and as if thoroughly be reminded?

In prayer we see it is not a world of power, of unleashed, unending, unequal forces, pitted against each other, and nothing besides, but a world of pain, of suffering, whether rooted in desire, or in the wages of sin, or economic injustice to be ameliorated through declassification, and people going to work, to good jobs or bad jobs, every morning, to be with people they like or dont like, paycheck to paycheck, dreading illness or layoff, or accident, and hope for that pure apocalypse, to come, which even as they walk slowly to their cars, may be breaking over their heads, in their hearts, here and in Rome and everywhere. The rehabilitating apocalyptic, as under the form and pressure of the time, caught between the fell and incensed points of mighty opposites, as on a whirling stage we say our lines and try not to trip over the furniture, for it is our author and director who is the audience, with his immortal ensemble, and it has not yet been demonstrated that he cannot produce an infinite number of plays at the same time, but as in a book or play or movie, as in a life, there is an ending of things, either tragic or comic, or of an antiheroic nature, albeit with an epilogue in which explanations are given, and loose ends tied, and how are we to know that time is up, that there are no more days to

The book arrives, but writing is structurally unable to do so, being the indefinite that lubricates the machine of the world contamination. Life is not that machine, but has been caught up in that machine. Life is a book, the mind of God, written in the Word by the Spirit, which we read for our roles. And it is the Temple. The Temple observes number. The measure is God, and as you measure life out, so will it be measured unto you. The machine world can no longer be measured, having erased God, not thematically, but through structured taint, through a contamination that appears to be connectivity, where we are all looking for a good fit, but the question of the fittingness of things has become itself inappropriate. There is no coherence. If the answer is scripture, to open our Bible, we are given it to 1) learn to read the morals of life, 2) understand the truth in words, 3) to be inflamed by the Spirit of holiness not to pass away, and 4) to realize now the mind of God. The book is square, hierarchical, planned, bound, held, numbered, and limited. But the world has exceeded that more than paradigm, that divine map, and now we are liable to be caught unawares in the midst of writing our cantos on the chaos, and enfolded not securely in the great book, but constrained in the garment of Nessus, trapped and poisoned in the taint, our Herculean effort come to naught in the closure of the antichrists. In the icon, the Teacher holds a book. If the truth can be contained in a book, then God must be that book. If God is the book in which we are all written, that book is the site of our eternal gathering, which has always been, for God did not write himself, but for us he is written. Through begetting the word, a Son, he read himself and understood who he is. The Spirit of love is a communication of the communion in the minds word, where the book takes place. The son, the word, arose from the desire that the book of life be read. The Father will be, but without a son, he will not have been read.

exceed and no more nights of excess, no more more-to-know? Someday, soon, we may see the stars fall out of the night, and by day barely discern a sun that gives no light, as a moon rises blood red, and our minds turn in transformation to these things real, whatever their sidereal truth, and have enough time to recall teachers and their teachings, not only 2000 years ago in Israel, but in the prophets who were unchurched, and wrote fiction and poetry that seemed to be about everything else on earth in encyclopedic sweep, but all the time were composed on platens with the end in view. In the impossibility of literature, in its essential nature as word and book, the author of life rose up authors to read him, and pass on what they, in a telepathic and prophetic vocation, understood, and more than that, what could not yet be understood, but in apocalypse becomes clear. With snow faintly falling, falling faintly, amid the crooked crosses, another Gabriel looks out over the snowfall of the dead, where all are gathered in, and feels a Michael who loved and died, whom he never knew, but shaped his life incalculably. If speeches would do, we would all make speeches with politicians and professors and priests, but on the last day, we will all either stand bare-headed in Gods winter, or lay in bed, curled in fetal surrender.

The Spirit of God is a spirit of understanding, the unity of the son reading the Father, and explaining him to himself. It was for this he was sent, with prophets, among patriarchs, so that the Father would be understood. His book became our literature. All is scriptured, and does not only describe and declare, but disclose him. Now, there is a passing of the book, into the past, and in an infinite acceleration, we hurtle forward, or plunge downward, and almost realize that what began with a fall, could end with one as well. But it need not be so. Among the world of books, one points up, while another points down, but as we have read, the way up and the way down are one and the same. In the same place we read that the most beautiful thing is just the pile of trash heaped on the ground. It speaks not of nature, but more truthfully and charitably of this human city, where our freedom is not only to discard, but to pick through and gather what we will. Of what will these wisdoms make us? The task of being compelled with infinite acceleration toward the end seems impossible to fulfill. There was a man named Jacques Derrida who spoke not unprophetically of these things. He wrote of the impossible as such, on the one hand, as the only thing worth attempting, though still unattainable and indeconstructible, while on the other hand, in the very thoroughness of his destruction, having in a sense already destroyed the world in principle, he found a remnant based on justice, democracy and the odd-sounding hospitality. In the felicitous discovery of what would remain, JD lived in the conjunction of the signature effect with Jude, saint of the impossible, of the difficult and desperate, of lost causes, the saint of those who almost despair. The apocalypse might seem to be that, but the infinite acceleration we sense is true, and as the great transformation takes place, it may be that those novels, some pointing up, and some pointing down, were true, too, and so our infinite paths, as we rush to eternity.