Future Home of the Living God(23)

For lunch, I cook and eat a whole bag of frozen peas with butter, drink two glasses of milk, fry two vegetarian burgers and place them between two pieces of bread with sliced pickles, mustard, ketchup, and why not, an onion. As I bite into the onion, all of a sudden I know, completely know: this issue’s theme will be the name of my church and subject of the ear/fuck paper—Incarnation. My issue will examine the breadth of thought on how Christ’s divinity was made flesh. What could resonate more with what is happening right now? Now that it appears we might be losing our own spark of divinity, our consciousness, our souls?

New energy of purpose claims me and I clean the kitchen, wash and dry every dish, and when everything is put away I go into my workroom.

My desk is a large, sturdy, portable banquet table set up on one side of the utility room. The other side holds my washer, dryer, and wall-to-floor steel shelves of white file boxes neatly marked with dates and titles of my projects and back issues of Zeal. The only windows are small rectangles set high into the west wall. But I have full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs in the overhead panel and two natural-light lamps at either end of my desk. When I turn on all of the lights, the room is a brilliant white, the blue screen of my computer the only major block of color. On Glen’s advice, I’ve fixed electrical tape over the aperture that holds the computer’s camera. It seems absurd, but he made me promise.

I am the utterance of my name. I sit back in the chair and stare at the white wall. This line of a fragment of the gnostic text The Thunder, Perfect Mind, is the last sentence I wrote before I drove north. It is unlike me to reference writing other than canonical references, and the tractate is troublesome. But I am drawn to the text and have read it so often that I have much of it by memory. For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. Perhaps it is the voice, I think, so arrogant and so alive, using antithesis to cause in the reader’s mind the romantic dissonance that occurs when one attempts to comprehend the unknowable. I am the midwife and she who does not bear. I am the solace of my labor pains. I am the bride and the bridegroom. And it is my husband who begot me. I am the mother of my father. . . .

I am comforted by the voice—it is so ferociously modern, so timeless that it is perfectly of this time. For here I am, maybe a walking contradiction, maybe two species in one body. Nobody knows. A woman, a dweeb, a geek, a pregnant degreeless dilettante straddling not just millennia but epochs. I am also an insecure Ojibwe, a fledgling Catholic, an overstriving brain cooking up conflicting dramas. I can’t help myself, I overcollect trivial ideas and can’t distinguish them from big ones—yet the Incarnation, that’s big. That’s pertinent, I think.

Perhaps we are experiencing a reverse incarnation. A process where the spirit of the divine becomes lost in human physical nature. Perhaps the spark of divinity, which we experience as consciousness, is being reabsorbed into the boundless creativity of seething opportunistic life. A great wish courses through me. I am curious with desire. I want to see past my lifetime, past yours, into exactly what the paleontologist says will not exist: the narrative. I want to see the story. More than anything, I am frustrated by the fact that I’ll never know how things turn out.

My old-fashioned phone rings and continues to ring. I’ve kept it because Glen and Sera insist. They don’t trust cell phones. First the Stingray, now the translucent Jellyfish bobbing around in parks and yards. They capture cell phone information for big corps who bombard your phone with calls. The landline is unlisted and has a strong filter. Your father is punching a redial button. He’s frustrated, of course. At some point, I am going to have to answer my phone. Or unplug it, I think, and reach toward the receiver but do not pick it up. You make a rolling swerve deep in my pelvis and tingling needles shoot down my thighs. I lean closer to the desk and to the keyboard, writing my introduction, “imagine what it was like for the young woman, Mary, to feel the extraordinary kicks and shocks of her unborn child and to know that she harbored a divine presence, the embodiment of God’s Word. Yet, what she felt was probably little different from what all pregnant women have felt, throughout time, ever since we could both feel and be aware of our feelings. This bewildered awe for the mysterious being we harbor certainly borders on a mystical apprehension. . . . ”

But the words on the screen are suddenly so paltry and finite and thin, impossibly futile. “Pregnancy is a wilderness of being,” I type, then rest my hands on my belly, think for a while, then type again: “In this wild state the markers are so ordinary and mundane that the grandeur I feel as well seems delusional. Perhaps at all times and in all countries women with child are actually at risk. At some level we are quite insane. We go about the business of the day and find out that our baby, like every other baby on earth, will be a throwback of some kind. We can’t imagine what yet. Our entire evolution up until now has apparently been coded into some part of the blood or tissue we haven’t noticed or deciphered.”

Now it’s too late. Our bodies have always remembered who we were. And now they have decided to return. We’re climbing back down the swimming-pool ladder into the primordial soup. We pregnant ladies find this out and make sure to take our folic acid supplements and get some sleep, all while growing within ourselves a unit of life so complex, regardless of its evolved state, that only the Koreans can make even one of its fingernails with all of their technology. And here I am, wiring a whole new brain in my sleep, some kind of brain. My body is accomplishing impossible things, and now there is something wrong, most terribly wrong. . . . As I write these last words my knees begin to shake and the shaking travels as a shudder up through my body and wrenches a cry. And the sound of my own cry, ugly and raw, startles me. I go silent for a moment and then began to weep, in low gut-wrenched sorrow, a baffled, fearful sobbing that leaves me beached after a while in my desk chair, still facing the calm, blue screen.