the air above the river

 

Monday morning, still dark at 6am, getting up and hearing an owl calling in the back garden. The housemate feels better and the crisis may be over. Until the next crisis.

Reading and reflecting on this from theologian Richard Harries, in praise of the  medieval mystical book called The Cloud of Unknowing:

According to Christian theology there are two ways to know God. There is what’s called the positive way, where you try to say things about God, and then there is the negative way, where you have to unsay everything you have said about God and go into a kind of unknown. This is because everything we say about God can be somewhat misleading because we talk in metaphors all the time. And metaphors are always as untrue as they are true. They have to be broken and then remade and broken and remade. And therefore to know God as God truly is, instead of purely our projection, we need to go beyond all our metaphors into what he referred to as “the cloud of unknowing”, where you simply reach out to God whom you can’t characterise or describe at all.

Obscurity on a dark Monday morning!  I post from time to time on a large writers forum and we recommend books to each other and discuss writers like Amos Oz and Etgar Keret without getting into political slanging matches about the Middle East. Writers are a little like many recovering alcoholics in that the problem of loneliness is somehow forefronted. And then there is writers’ block. Or the toll of daily rejection, the hard-heartedness of agents, the piddling amounts of money made from publishing, the hope of getting  to be a better writer and that the next book will sell better. The love of writing itself.

Eggplant, aubergine, brinjal. I have  glossy purple aubergines that need to be made into something that will not scare eggplant-haters. Meatless Monday and a friend is coming around for supper, the kind of easy-going  cheerful friend that does not like to complain and insists she eats everything. ‘Everything’ may not include eggplant, so I must work out a dish that will not scare the horses. Personally I love eggplant and will eat it in any form or shape or size. What usually works in some kind of eggplant ratatouille or Parmigiana di melanzane, with layers of eggplant bubbling away in homemade tomato sauce with  melting cheeses, grated Parmesan browning on the top, a kind of scrumptious eggplant lasagna. But that is too rich, so ratatouille it will be. Red onions, pink garlic, courgettes/zucchini, sweet red peppers, ripe tomatoes and eggplant all chopped up and simmered together, a handful of chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley and basil tossed in at the end. Pitta breads on the side for scooping.

 

And back to the unknowing of writing, the images flicking on the cave wall, the  letters scraped in soot, the  invisible writing that melts away on the page.

From Richard Hoffmann’s poem Stories:

I am lying through my teeth
the story isn’t true
He wasn’t a tree there is no tree

and death says nothing
Now that it nests in my branches I know lies
alone have wings

I tell these stories
cup them beating in my hands
and fling them into the air above the river…