Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [139]
And then I let it go.
It feels like exploding, like being born, like breaking apart into a field of stars.
My body has fallen open—arms extended, legs spread, a complete relinquishment—but I feel as if I’m still opening out, extending on beyond the limits of my body; I am spreading out and out, I don’t think there’s any limit to how far I will go. I’m making sounds, I’m crying, sometimes loud, tears, laughter, groaning. Sometimes I’m thrashing, overtly, and other times what is rippling through me is the slightest wave inside a muscle.
It goes on and on, the self thinning and spreading like spilt oil, endless, beyond any notion of boundary.
I’m hardly myself now, but a great wide field.
And I think, God is there, or, there is God. I know, through and through. Great grief, great god; where there is one, there is the other.
And I think, all along I’ve been this, have been part of this great intimacy and light, that immense kindness that was holding me, supporting me, but I hadn’t been able to let myself know it. And I’m laughing and weeping at the idea that I had to be forty to find this out. I’m thinking how much love there’s been in my life, how much suffering—my mother, my father, Wally, Lynda—and how we didn’t know who we were, through the pain, that even that was a part of God.
My hips are vibrating; that’s the space, I think, where my doubt has been. And that space is being filled now with this warm loving energy that is healing my body. I know then I’m going to heal, and I feel the increasing fire of a kind of intense vibration, in my belly and chest, energy circling around in me.
A whirlwind.
I hear the border of its enormous, rushing roar.
How long did I stay there?
In a while, in no time, I’m dimly aware of M. on the other side of the room. Slowly, I’m coming back to myself. He says something vague, and after another long time I’m opening my eyes, I’m slowly sitting up, standing up, stretching. M’s sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette. It feels so good to stand, feeling my weight balanced on both my legs, my body alive, flexible, light, the life moving in me.
That night I sleep deeply, insensate; the next day I’m still sleepy, a bit sore, sense my body changing, emotion floating up out of nowhere, little tensions coming and going in my muscles, the strange sensation of having been swept up, set down again.
It wasn’t that I was healed, right then; the muscles in my spine, my unhappy disk still had its course to run, its process to move through. But something essential, something that reshapes a life had happened to me. How can I explain, moving into that territory where language fails? What have I been doing, through all this story, but moving closer to the unsayable’s edge?
I had risen—in the three hours I’d later learn I’d lain on M.’s table—to a kind of awareness above the everyday, above the individual forms of loss and longing, desire and grief, toward a great, benign indifference, an indifference which is the force of life itself. This is one of the paradoxes at the heart of the world: the Whirlwind is indifferent, but this indifference is utterly, profoundly good.
The Universe doesn’t care about Job’s suffering, and will not intervene. And the Universe loves Job with the intensity and tenderness with which everything in the world is held. It’s Job’s vision which is limited, our human eyes which can’t apprehend the design, the sense of it. So that when Job cries out against all the grief his life has brought him, the Voice from the Whirlwind says to him:
Who is this whose ignorant words
smear my design with darkness?
That design—ferocious wisdom, implacable light, time’s ineluctable unfolding—is too large and brilliant for us to see, though