Notebook 1

Javelin

Maybe Ted Williams couldn’t believe in God because he couldn’t believe he was God.

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It has become common today to dismiss God.

Conventional wisdom has it that a higher power is either anthropomorphic or nonexistent.

Or, But you can substitute the word ‘reality’ if you’d like.  

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When I was a child, I thought Christ was being perpetually nursed back to health in a dim lit room just beyond the altar.

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Skeuomorph: an ornament or part retained from the original design even though it is no longer needed for the function of the whole.

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We stand alone in the swamp in the rushlight. Each of us holding our own rushlight (animal fat ablaze) or all of us crowding into the sphere of one rushlight. Either way.

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One view is that form produces wisdom and—formless—the wisdom of God must be resisted at all costs.

Which recalls the famous paradox: Nothing I say is true.

We must continue to say the same thing in as many different ways as possible or say nothing at all.  

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X is mistaken because she overlooks ________.

________ is overlooked because she is mistaken for X.

________  ________ X     ________  ________  ________     ________ X X.

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The javelin flies through the air, like a sentence, each clause pushing it further, additive, addictive, and, our comprehension, always a blur of what just was, always anticipating the next space, as Mallarmé writes: “Meaning is transitional as it is transitory,” and the object enters the ground like a breath, it enters with the soft sound of a javelin entering the soft ground, and then the after-vibration of the thing, what no one in the crowd can say for certain they ever really saw, sticking out, pointing back the trajectory from where it came, to a figure who picks himself up off the ground, his muscular shoulders hunched and appearing to sway from this distance, as he reaches out for the clean white towel extended to him, Thanks, we imagine him mouthing to the boy, at least that’s the way it looks from here.  

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One implication of Simone Weil’s treatment of God as “infinitely far from us” is that we can’t rely on, hide behind, or call on him to rush to our aid. He exists, but not to intervene.

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In the rooms, they call it a “higher power” (or at the young people’s meetings: “hp”) and there’s always someone to add to the end of their sentence: “in here now.”

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Rivets.

A syrup handle.

Boat shoes.

Wax dripping over the cap of a whiskey bottle.

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Most athletes will tell you prayer works.

While it is true that most athletes are dumb, it does not necessarily follow that all athletes are dumb.

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Ted Williams was a pilot.

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I’m afraid of good fortune because it’s not perfection.

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There are no atheists in foxholes.

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Shadows on the digital page I write this on.

Serifs on this F.

Body hair.

Wisdom teeth.

The male uterus and nipples.

The pinky toe.

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“Impossible” some will say. “You must be reading the research selectively.”

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Yet sober analysis of the matter reveals love.

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And someone stood up and said, “I’ve been working on what’s called javelin prayers—short, one sentence meditations to help focus—or point—our attention, like the Serenity Prayer.”

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Pink pills, beige pills, white pills… I mean ‘supplements.’ What’s outside?

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It begins with parking lots and sidewalks. Being made to go outside to clean after the dog and pick up the debris that’s blown against the fence. (Candy bar wrappers. The faded top of a dryer sheet box with a cuddly bear on it.) And then begins the park we’re told never to go in alone.

The starting place for a world never to go in alone.

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My sister says that when she left to visit me in Seoul for a month, my grandmother told her, “Don’t talk to anyone.”

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Let us love the best in others—and never fear their worst… in here now.

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The worst is what we can’t imagine in those who mean us no harm… in here now.

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The constant of every hypochondriac: that they have a rare disease that is slowly but progressively compromising their minds and bodies and when someone—if something—ever diagnoses them it will be too late: the body as a park space.

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Of course, many will disagree with this assertion, stating that hitting for Williams was a religion, as with Chagall, who said, “I am a mystic. I don’t go to a church or the synagogue. For me, working is praying.”

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“Granddad says that only now, at the age of eighty-six, has he lost his faith. Maybe that’s also grace, to cast off all supports and learn to walk, to keep on even without the gift of faith, in darkness. Since that’s how we have to enter death.”  —Anna Kamienska

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The javelin flies through the air—after half a million years not a fleck of waste or ornament, slightly front-weighted, spinning several times per second, glinting sunlight back at the crowd who hold a collective breath, then breathe, then hold it again as the perfect object reaches its apex in the sky and tilts toward a descent.

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It’s true what you heard about Ted Williams’s head.