A Manifestness: "Say Something"

SAY SOMETHING: A Manifestness

1

"Say something," Eve requested.

I love you, came to mind. So Adam said that.

"I love you," the man obeyed.

"No," the woman quickly qualified, "say something I don't know."

2

"Every river comes from some place not itself," he said, hesitating just slightly before adding, "not itself."

"Does that place have a name?" she asked.

'God', he thought. So he said that.

"That place is called 'God'," he submitted.

"Is that its place name on a map?" she asked.

"The cartographers use names of 'Eternity' and 'Heaven'," he said, as if remembering facts that had served as correct answers on a TV quiz show.'

3

"So even if there is not a God by name," she reasoned, "there are places named after him. God is the mouth of the river."

He propped himself on his elbow, looking down at her with tender admiration.

"So to speak, yes, God is the mouth of a river," he suggested. "

"Is the world a proof of God? Is it that tautological?" she persisted.

"Proofs are for people out of practice at what they once excelled," he qualified. "A piano player sits down to prove he could once play."

"The history of God is never kind to the world," she added. "No history of God has ever left the world as good a reason for itself as it seemed on that first storied shiny Sunday after a week of inarticulate molten Mondays."

"If we ever have kids, I will show them this meadow as proof the world was God's best idea," he promised, squeezing his hand.

"If they have to take someone else's word for it, if the world is already bereft of self-evidence, God will become the property of religion," she warned. "We will be priests not parents and they will hate us for telling them we know more than they do."

"Yes, Eve, it will seem a punishment to swear to something no longer apparent to them," he prophesied. "Prayer will cease to be praise of the obvious. But not to preach faith as full mindfulness of the world will be even worse. Words must never fall from our lips like cups from a hand."

"What do you think we should do to prevent that fall?" Eve asked.

"Bathe them in the river of song. Drown them in the flow before we teach them to drink from it," Adam outlined. "Then we must hope they come back of their own accord as adults for a second swim."

4

"Say anything," she pleaded after long silence.

Fuck you, he thought instantly with unexpectedly gratuitous malice from a place inside he never knew existed. Until then. I'm having a lapse, he thought. They will be tempted to remember this moment forever.

"Do I have to say the first thing that comes to mind?" he stalled, thunderstruck by the thought he needed time. He had never before had such a thought or a need.

"You don't think I already know the rumors that you're the son of Lucifer?" she said her features wrinkling with deadpan scorn.

He laughed. "What if it was worse than that?" he qualified.

"As long as we imagine a God who could get it wrong before He got it right there must be Satanic Verses," she explained. "Fortunately, they, too, are inspired by him. This God contains multitudes."

5

"Say something worth saying," she amended a moment later. "Say anything that would make 'speech after long silence' worthwhile."

"'In the beginning was the word,'" he quoted an ancient silence-breaker. "In the beginning was something to get the conversation going."

"So on the eight day, at the start of the second cycle of days, the world became a story worth telling," she calibrated.

"Yes," he agreed, "on the eighth day God joined his vocabulary. God became a name for the world."

6

"Which of the names he spoke was distinctly his?" she asked. "G-O-D?"

"To take such a name proves there was a devil not that there was a deity," he argued. "Once God agrees to be a name among the many, he can be offered a throne to further set himself apart. Does he need to signify ownership? Does he need a distance greater than that between any two words that can be spoken? Does he need to make a sound greater than the silence the river's roar makes louder?"

"Doesn't every painter like to sign his painting?" she tried to justify.

"Some use an icon instead," he reminded.

"Give me an icon for God," she challenged.

"A red wheelbarrow," he suggested.

"'A red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens','' she quoted with rapturous rapidity from scripture.

"Now we're on the same page," he assured her delightedly.

7

"If the world as a Creation story begins with a red wheelbarrow, how does it end?" he asked as if posing a philosophical problem.

"Like this," she said, pausing for a long time, then repeating, "Like this . . . ."

8

"So there is no ending we can speak of," he said after a long while.

"'The birds do not disappear. The birds are still in flight'," she again quoted from scripture.

"Is there a beginning?" Adam asked Eve.

"There is no beginning other than resumption of the story," she answered. "A rider and a horse by the river. The horse drinks directly from the flow. The rider scoops from it with a 10-gallon hat. Both drink. Both are quenched."

9

They listened to the birds in the meadow as if their shrill sheet of song were an authorized substitute for river flow.

"Listen, darling," she invited, "the birds are making a meadow the way the river makes a shore."

"Do you think they see us standing here like horses drinking their fill?"

"That's as good a reason for a river as any ever given," she calibrated.

His face darkened. "But what if August drains the river bone-dry?" he asked. "What if there are only diamond-shining, diamond-sharp sands that cut like scalpels and make men think the river wants to thirst them?"

"Are you reading from the Satanic Verses again?"

10

"What if the red wheel barrow becomes an empty bird feeder of no use to the birds or their song?" he panicked.

"Our psalm will always promise seed," she assured him, "in accordance with the deep, deepest need out of which the Father creates. Anything less than deep need is not worth his while or our wiles. Just one drop of rain will suffice to make the seed explode into life. Just one drop of moisture from your mouth will remind them that the essence is song mingled with existence."

"Huh?" he asked, "I don't catch your drift.

"The human part of the story begins with need--deep, sacred need that coheres all things by decreeing them. The birds are summoned. And Adam tells them, 'So much depends . . .'"

"On what?" Adam asks Eve.

"Silly boy," she kids him, jostling his hair, "why, on a red wheel barrow, of course."

11

"To the birds, a red wheelbarrow is an empty bird feeder unless it becomes of use to them," she repeated, as if hinting at something he should do.

"Do you want me to fill it with seed so they can feed?" he paraphrased.

"That isn't necessary," she said. "Some things are better sung than said. Let them hear about the famous red wheel barrow of song and story. Let those who sing the sun up into the sky know that everything seen is lit from within. Words bring light from a matching fund of sacredness."

12

"Say something," she whispers, sensing she has been here before.

"'The river comes from some place other than itself' is a false proposition about God," he says with certainty, also sensing he has been here before.

"'No river wants to thirst men," she descants, "even if dry from drought or choked at its mouth by men who seek to prove water's scarcity."

"The river flows forever, always keeping the promise of an ocean," he ratifies.

"Even in times of famine," Eve says to her husband, "the river gives itself as eternal word and keeps its word by being so."

--David Federman, Ardmore, July 10-12, 2010