2024
Note: There are three unanswerable questions: So who have you been? What to do with an obsessive image? And where is beyond?
The only thing that mattered today was thinking about the cobalt blue church in the middle of the desert. It came with visions of nocturnal hooded figures sneaking into it for spell casting, under the first star. Perhaps the figures could hear the sound of the two sisters walking in the desert, throwing empty glass bottles into the air and shooting at them as many times as possible before they hit the ground.
The tallest of the sisters owns the gun and serves the hottest red tea. She lives by the dream that tea must bring us close to how fire would feel were it always alit inside our body. It is her only way of understanding water, being herself a creature all-consumed by fire.
In the small blue church she always sits on the bench that creaks. She goes to the small blue church on Tuesdays, and Fridays, and sometimes on Sundays, but only when she is sure the sunlight or moonlight will seep in through the stained-glass panes on the left side of the bench. She always sits on the bench that creaks, so that when she gets up, the officiating poet can’t resist glancing at her. When he does (always) she gloats in her gut and feels her cheeks rush red. The small church is painted in cobalt, it has cacti in pots lined up against its walls. Small and large cacti in big and round terracotta pots, their sharp spikes making sure one thinks twice before getting too close.
The other of the sisters finds comfort in being held by the cobalt walls, they whisper to her a cosmic erasure of boundaries, the dissolution of illusory separateness. Sitting quite still on the quieter bench allows her to experience the dances of layering, the seemingly distinct intricacies of being in the world. She witnesses as they begin to merge into one single party, of matter, of fusion, of endless torrent that is and lets be.
Attempt now to describe the stillness, the sound of stillness inside the stone walls. Are they made of stone? Of compacted sand. Cool stillness or warm stillness? A chilled respite, yes, a breath of peace from the desert heat, the white sun that thrusts itself against the cobalt dust coating the church. It’s a wonder the color has not faded over the decades. From afar, a speck on the desert horizon, a shaky halo of cobalt guides one to believe in a mirage. (Return to the stillness inside the cool walls). Stillness can have many sounds, like a hum or an empty echo, the trembling air that is left after the echo has bounced up and around and all over enough times to shatter into infinite particles.
The two sisters often enter the cobalt blue church to sit down, listen attentively for the stillness. For grace, for ease, for a moment of adoration, all is well. Once the two sisters are gone, the soft nocturnal ballet of arrivals and departures continues to the music of stillness. The hooded figures enter the cobalt blue church to cast their starlit spells, undulating figures, on blue moon nights, and ever without shoes on, their gentle footsteps weaving the hot outdoor sand with the fresh sand within, just across the threshold. A fine line separates the hot desert night stillness from the stone protected stillness, and by now it is known that this line is not merely the cobalt blue shadow on the orange sand (it is the space that houses all the in-betweens).
The spell-casting hooded figures come in threes or sevens, depending on the night and the spells to be cast. They are in the church both within and without, in the way one can simultaneously be looking out a window and be seen inside the frame beyond. The spells are varied and secret. They most often involve a yearning, the feeling for more, for more, for more. (More: again, anew, repeated, magnified, doubled, tripled, expanded). The hooded figures’ yearning is also one for secluding and disentangling the webs of illusory separation —the craft of connecting the dots, so to speak. Wherever the texture of the stars invites a consideration, is where the hooded figures point their obsessive encounters.
There is a humming kind of music that blesses the cobalt blue church, should you walk in on a pale purple Tuesday, such as today. The starlit spellcasting on those nights involves a voice, an emphatic voice, singing at-homeness in the world.
(What of the terracotta pots with the cacti in them, the ones that line the walls of the church, who tends to them? How are they cared for?)
It seems the tallest sister cannot leave the creaky bench tonight (the one she sits on to make sure the poet glances her way when she rises). She came in to listen for the stillness, but has found herself with tears streaming down her cheeks, large, slow, translucent water raining onto the ground between her legs, poking its ephemeral craters into the cool sand. A martian landscape begins to appear between her bare feet, cradled in the glorious stillness of the dusty cobalt.
After two days of rest, the black-haired woman who tends to the church cacti (we have found her) returns with a fresh bouquet of sagebrush and desert marigolds. Setting them down on the quiet altar, she slowly, one at a time, picks apart the strands from each other and rearranges them in a pattern that spoke to her. As she is performing this composition, the poet walks into the cobalt blue church, their footsteps thudding gently against the cool sand, remolding its peaks and valleys in the liminal shadow of the doorway. “Last night I saw with my own eyes the two sisters who shoot and paint,” the poet proclaims, to no one in particular. “They were standing so close to each other, at first I believed only in one person. But the four outstretched arms of the deep black silhouette told me otherwise. And indeed, after that I was not surprised to see the bullet pelt out from the shape, just as the silhouette split into separate figures. It split right down the middle, their two hips detaching at last, letting each other loose.” As a response, the black-haired woman smiled shyly to her bouquets. She was not one for conversation this early in the morning.
These were the workings of the church on most days: replenish the plants, let the poet speak freely, look at the crack in the stained-glass panes on the east side of the church, wonder when it would give up. (The stained-glass panes are worth spending some time with). They were handmade by the black-haired woman, with help from the two young people whom she had birthed and raised. Their names were Ethe and Doe and both were no longer as young as they lived in her mind. She still felt they had sprung into her life one recent morning, bright white sun morning, even though it had been, according to the rice paper calendar that hung on the cobalt blue wall, more than fourteen years ago. Objects that spoke time tended to lose their presence for her once she had gotten used to the way they broke down days, half-hours, seconds and fortnights.
On another of the pale purple Tuesday nights (not today), what happened to the cobalt blue church was both extraordinary and very much aligned. The sisters were there, the poet was there, the black-haired woman was there, the spell-casting hooded figures were there, Ethe was there, Doe was there. They were all there, within and without the church, when the altar suddenly collapsed (: an intervention). It was made of cobalt blue sand, and it came crashing, all at once, all in one, without giving anyone any notice, not even crumbling a little before crumbling a lot.
The cobalt dust rose, swelled, and never settled after that. The soft heavy crash made the stained-glass shatter in slow motion, opening a corridor of sky on the east side of the church. After a moment that vibrated into everyone’s bones, leaving them ringing on and on, the church was swallowed by its own dust, the altar of sand engulfing it forever (we fear the word forever but that doesn't mean it is off bounds).
There is an epilogue:
The desert ground on which the small church had stood remained an open plain, a cobalt blue dusting on the hard gemlike sand, on which many moons later, the people would come to tread, to dance, ecstatic to live on.
Note: The author of these pages has never been to church: this is all fabulation, worship included.
Note: word count -church: 20 -cobalt: 17
Note: word count -church: 20 -cobalt: 17