January 13, 2008

Late, weary night, the moon a fat bright crescent over downtown. I drove to Statesville to lecture at the library, but only by Kelly’s good deed. My radiator is leaking, (or, I blush to speculate, I didn’t put the cap on right), so I was going to cancel the drive and the lecture. Kelly heard me, and promptly lent me her car, so that all that little thing was accomplished. Irish music on the radio as I drove.

More thinking about my father’s move. Any possible reservation is balanced–overbalanced-- by the fact that he will be within a five minutes’ walk of his grandchildren. That’s an ending so good it can almost be called Hollywood. I hope he lives another decade, to take advantage of it.

A voice whispered in my ear as I was singing "Saint Patrick’s Breastplate" in church this morning. I was going to say "a strange voice," but it wasn’t. It was the voice I heard in Galway in the tunnel of rain. The voice said, "You are in the midst of yourself." I have not always been in the midst of myself. Often I have been in some wild corner. Because of what we were singing at that moment, I knew what the voice meant. We were singing "I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity." There was no doubt who I was. A trinity myself, past, present, future, all simultaneous, all existing in one moment, complete, though known to this mind, as it is, sequentially. I thought of my father in that instant, too, how the sweet child and the kind old man seem sundered by the sad angry man in between, but it isn’t so. Only now he is in the midst of himself. And I am in the midst of myself. It’s hard to say what I mean, but I can see it, three ardent flames bound in the middle, Was, Becoming, and Will Be. Together they are "Is." It is a body light. I am a body of light, if I could but come fully to myself in a moment of history. One never perceives things such as this. One must be told, and it is best to be told by a song.