'Natural Jesus' by Brian Clements

    

Throughout October and into November, the certainty that objects fall reassured us more than belief. Religions exhaust themselves, and something else rises up from the rubble--maybe slugflower, meatweed, selfshrub, people like lamps floating in the twilight of a noon 6,000 years ago, ex corde ecclesiae.

Each day inscribed itself on available things--rocks, timber, brain cells--and confused us all about exactly what “essences” means. You ask the Essenes and all you get is salt.

But something will come again. The etiology of accidents uses the cogito as a point of departure, and I have no present use for that. All that logos comes from a lost unit on Social Theory. They need more detail in the chapter on the Architecture of Experience, in my book, which enables every reader to chant like Tibetan women lallalating their yearning for a Messiah.

One guy even tried to track down his rebbe in India and found that no matter how long he stood at the top of that crazy cliff, there was no way he was going to escape time. But when nothing is certain, everything is possible.

If the modern age ended in 1969, then we’re elevated above the truth, waiting for a rush down the slope into certain warned-about meteorological conditions that can also be caused by dying the ice caps and whose acoustics are supposed to sound the great shofar of the still-to-unfold future. 

When you think of it, transcendence usually isn’t a wilted leaf. But it may be a new articulation on the subject of impotence: old people actually recognize time in their own eyes and are able to view the destruction of temples that could reasonably be expected to cause death or serious physical harm to novices. It’s certainly not enacted in a text. It’s more like a carousel scene. In a baptismal setting.

Tadyatha: To tell you the truth, some of us will not taste death but will be totally emptied. Learning to see means going out front and realizing that Shiva lives next door, Zed across the street. Zed reminds us of where we stand, and there are his dogs--Signless, Uncreated, Unceased, Unincreased--playing in the street again.

Then at a certain time you start to forget--no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no hand--and when you come back to, you want to sue for damages and reinstatement. What’s wrong with immanence and maybe? When you use the defense of necessity, they have nothing in common with each other, nor with the Sutras revising each day’s entry, with the exception that each of them whispers hymns behind your ear.

Listen, no one wants you to be uninformed about those who are asleep. But the only rapture came just a minute ago. It was on the other calendar, the one the creator gave the particles in their lunch boxes. 

O holy moment ago, O long lost jihad.

(from his book Jargon, Quale Press, 2010)