D is for Distance

Distance occurs not by degrees but by small catastrophes. It is not there, or, small as it may be, it is. Like the princess and the pea, you can lay as many mats as you like over the fact, but if it is there than it is there. Our perception of contact is an illusion. On a molecular level, I am never actually touching you. There are strong and weak nuclear forces keeping us apart. “It is sad that the air is the only thing we share. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us."

In the beginning, God created… Before the beginning, for all we know or need to know, God simply was or perhaps not simply but it may be enough to say that all that was was God, but then, suddenly, catastrophically, at the beginning of things that could begin, God created. There was now something other than God. In order to create, God had to separate himself from his creation. “God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.” “In a sense, God renounces being everything.” Distance is necessary for creation. Distinction. The waters from the waters…

Or you, broken with a clean break from my chest, still sleeping when I awoke and for the first time beheld myself or not myself and you and your gentle sigh that stopped my breath inside itself. Singular. I would insist that time had stopped were it not for the rhythm of your chest, it’s rising and falling – it was here I learned of waiting and counting, of measuring the distance between apexes, the agony of moments and silence and the sweet end your voice brings to both. It was here I learned of the eternity my heart was knit to contain, to drink from unceasingly, to contemplate across that first journey on which my hand made to prove eye’s best guess. O mystery! What did you see at the waking of my touch?

Hagia - holy. Both the Greek and the Hebrew terms mean first pure and clean, but necessarily imply then a separation from the impure or common that they remain in their pure state. To sanctify (hagiazo) is to set apart. A saint (hagia) is one who is set apart, a holy one is a set apart one. To be holy is to be beyond, to be other than. "To soil is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil....To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love."

The Greek prefix para- denotes a position beside or next to, yet it can also mean beyond, for what is beside us must not be us, and what is not us is beyond us. This distance between us is reality, and any attempt to bridge it is illusory. We must prefer real hell to imaginary paradise. Between you and I is not merely air, but an aporia, a chasm that cannot be crossed.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,

Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;

Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;

Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten

By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable,

Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshipers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

- T.S. Eliot

We act as though our bridges, practical and pragmatic as they may be, have subdued distance. “We thought they were intended to have houses built upon them. We have erected skyscrapers on them to which we ceaselessly add storeys. We no longer know that they are bridges, things made so that we may pass along them, and that by passing along them we go towards God” (Weil). These imaginary bridges can only lead us to imaginary ends, and all the while, the brown god of distance waits to leap up and shatter our illusions, leaving us with nothing. We must embrace and not ignore him. “It is necessary to touch impossibility in order to come out of the dream world. There is no impossibility in dreams – only impotence.” “The links that we cannot forge are evidence of the transcendent” (Weil).

"It’s also nice that we share the air.
No matter how far apart we are,
the air links us." - Yoko Ono

E is for echo