Meditation

I have a heavy mouth and a heavy tongue.¹ The coffee might be responsible for some of this heaviness, but I can't remember a time when my tongue didn't feel thick with words, with the weight of them. Thick, too, with what, in me, yearns not to speak; with what yearns to be lingual before and beyond language: with unkissed kisses—their supple unjousting—and with all the things you can't savor and talk about. (Can you?) With every raspberry I have yet to taste. With every raspberry I have failed to blow.

In my case, love is the weight by which I act.² There are, it seems to me, two kinds of weight. There is the weight that holds us down or back when we really ought to be going: the weight of bad habit, fear, reluctance to change. And then there is this other weight, by which things come to rest where they are meant to be.³ How do I know which weight is mine? Is this heaviness the fuller, truer sign of my embodied life; or is it settling for less? Is my tongue more or less muscular, more or less kissable, more or less open to taste, when I speak? Speech, including silence, intensifies our touching;⁴ but what of the touching that speech and silence are? Who—including myself—am I touching when I speak; and who am I failing to touch?

Speech, including silence. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other.⁵ But surely it is one thing to say that silence and speech correspond, and another to say that the one (speech) includes the other (silence). The latter is obviously true in one way: without silence, speech, like music, becomes a wall of noise. Silence is the hole in the wall, the mortar, the window that lets light and air and bugs in. But what I fear—what I fear even more than speaking—is that this is really about intensification, about how, like it or not, silent or shouting, I am being asked to touch the world in ways that liberate, within that world, a depth that has always been there; a depth I fail to honor, time after time, in my utilitarian transactions with other bodies, with those bodies I call objects and those bodies which become objects through my objectification.

But you hold me just the same way/Levon would play,⁶ and I come back to my desk / with mouths in my fingers.⁷ I know, or I think I know, that as communication becomes more intense, it becomes more isolated.⁸ I think this is one of the reasons I am reluctant to speak, one of the weights on my tongue; but then you are on me like a duck / on a junebug,⁹ and even my unexpected finger-mouths (do junebugs have fingers?) are swallowed up by you, and isolated isn't the word for it. If solitude and community don't exist without each other, here what exists is an otherness as surprisingly intimate to me as mouths in my fingers, or a bright orange beak inside my bronze bug carapace.

If you want to do theology well, then for God's sake get your metaphors as thoroughly mixed as you can.¹⁰ But even for this poor theology—poorer by the minute—the metaphors are already mixed: are you Levon the drummer or Levon the guitarist or Levon the mandolinist or Levon the harmonicist? How can I be at once drum and guitar and mandolin and harmonica to you? What kind of hold do you have on me? There is something to be said for tenacity.¹¹ There is, too, some tenacity in the saying. This is a grip that feels less like a handshake and more like a junebug in a duck's throat, or a prophet in a whale. And if art is a way to release our attention from immediacy's grip,¹² it never fails to substitute a grip of its own, fingers...