Scripture

Creative nonfiction
by Karel Sloane-Boekbinder

Sometimes I feel like a bird flying in circles. Like these swallows now crisscrossing the gilt patterns of the entrata to Peter’s Basilica. From this Italian stone where I sit, I can see six openings that lead back outside, but the swallows keep missing them. Over and over, they pass frantically, inches from each one, and I wonder, can’t they sense the light on their wings? I wonder and they zigzag around again. Two more swallows come in and join; for these other two, it’s tag. They crisscross inside the entrata for a minute or so, get bored, and go back out. I am sitting in Rome, inside the Basilicam Principis Apostolorum, and I wonder how many times I have flown by the window and not known about the light.

I stand up and find a pattern, two metal keys under my feet. Keys to the kingdom, to the opening, to the connection between flying and heaven. I look back to the ceiling of the entrata. The two swallows are gone. They, too, have keyed in, figured out freedom connects to where the open spots are.

Flying to another Italian city, I circle the insides of the Basilica Di San Marco. San Marco sits near the mouth of two rivers, on a piece of archipelago, the whole archipelago aligned by four hundred bridges to piece together a single city. I am told in the spring, the floor of this Basilica floods. A group of many tile islands bridge to align San Marco’s floor, separates piecing a single mosaic.

Mosaics have no start point. No end point either, for the pieces are put together by pattern. They make up an assembled circle, like the circular scripture of the sky and the circular patterns of a river; wet to dry, high to low, dry to wet, low to high. Another face of the great spiral of creation, each person carries a fleck; the flecks we carry intersect like ripples in a well. Each fleck of this sacred mosaic that’s assembling speaks out its own secrets, each small section part of the passage of a larger spiral created by a clever calligrapher who has many names. What rolls riddle in the ridges of the clouds . . . continual encryption paging between sky and earth. Maybe these riddles are the keys that open both above and below.

Survival is a gritty business, a wreck of widening. Like a mosaic, survival is based on pieces. To grow, one must first find the opening, an explosion followed by expansion. A seasonal traveler, like a bird, I go back to Connecticut every year to find a new crop of grass, plants, sugar maple, red and white oak. All of them exploded from something little, to be the bigger of what they now are. Seeds broken as roots burst out.

The roots found the white opening, found the window.

I have read how these transitions are measured, hundreds of pounds of pressure as new plants split themselves from seeds to dirt. The result of splitting is new context, is something spread. Even falling away has its place in the cipher; things must fall apart to grow wide, the small making up the larger. This is the beauty of glide, the glide of continually finding the opening.

Wind picks up all these small split things and puts them back down somewhere else. No start, no end, only an open in between. Everything the wind picks up is pushed to a new destination, marbled as one of many.

Each speck is colored like a quilt, a single pixel in an infinite screen, filling the big open of cobalt concoction called sky. Cobble the sky a mosaic, and then decide where to invest your eye.

I am fascinated by the configuration of bodies.

Bodies of air. Bodies of water. Human bodies.

Bodies of evidence. Bodies of text. Each body is a pattern collector, pieced out by separate pixels, the composition of each body configured as the mosaic of creation. No beginning and no end, creation and destruction are part of the same vine, and our proximity to either one depends upon how we choose to direct our lives. Ritual relates to pattern. Ritual relates to the pieces we are patterning. If recognition became part of our daily routine, if we made recognition into a ritual we did regularly, would we notice all the flecks, all the pixels we are piecing into a larger mosaic, and, in all our circling patterns, would we recognize the open window?

Coming home from a movie about a war fought more than three thousand years ago, I can’t help but wonder: What will we be remembered for? Will our culture be remembered for our creations, or will what we create turn us into dust? What if we measured accomplishment by what we scattered into the open, rather than what we held together? If we valued the spreading more than the container, wouldn’t the ultimate end be development and interconnection? Like the frantic swallows inside the Basilicam Principis Apostolorum, will we just circle the same route, unmindful of destination?

Means and ends. Means need to justify the ends rather than ends the means, before ends mean the extinction of everything.

My home sits at the edge of a river. Where I live in Louisiana, the wetlands are disappearing. The pattern of disappearance, coastal erosion; people keep pointing fingers at pieces instead of pulling back to examine the larger picture.

People point their fingers at the chemical plants; they point their fingers at the oil refineries. Where I live, every single refinery, whether it be petro or chemical, does not pay taxes. It was set up that way, never a consideration of sequence, of what would be left behind at the end of the refining process, never a consideration of refining interconnected to every gallon of gas used by every lawn mower, every car, every airplane, every water heater, every gas grill, every central heating unit all over the country. The same general lack of assessment can be said for the Mississippi running its 2,339 miles, or any other river, all the undeciphered patter that collects in river from beginning to end, making that river made of something more than water. Three thousand years ago, the means of civilization began transforming two other rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Three thousand years later, the Fertile Crescent humans sought to grasp has slipped through many hands; the ends have become something for the wind to scatter. Who will hold our memories when all our dust is gone?

I talk of dust to demystify it. Dust scatters. There is always an open window, an opportunity to understand that the little spot where we are circling is bridged to a larger context.

Taking a minute to decipher the sacred, to look at birds, or the sky, or seeds, or a mosaic, or a river’s sides, tells me the pattern of assembling from smaller to larger is so. Just exactly what shape the pattern of that calligraphy’s open spot will take once the dust of this century spreads out remains to be seen.

Copyright © 2007 by Karel Sloane-Boekbinder