Memoir Of The Sacred (for the Rotten Sun)

Tonight, the eve of my 28th birthday (talk about attraction and revulsion) seems a suitably weird occasion to attempt a memoir of the sacred in my experience. At last Friday's Anthropology Department party, Juana told me that living on the farm had made me much too calm. I replied that this was something I'd not always been aware of, but had been trying to work out ever since I left, that in fact it was likely this precise quality which put me in this position in the Anthro department. Her laugh broke the maternal chastising expression of her teasing schtick, and she covered her face.

The sacred tingles in my neck, then in my calves, then thighs and then extends up and down in two waves of piezoelectrical goosebumping which crash into one another in the small of my back before fading into soft warmth. The sensation chills and excites, the reflection of the first step outdoors into a frosty gust, but emanating apparently from nothing so much as thoughts, inside to out. Sung harmonies, whether I'm singing along or not, and the stroke of a bow on a double bass move me this way.

This was the feeling that gripped me as I looked out from my bedroom, standing tiptoed on the brown blades of the heating duct, watching the trees across the yard sway in the moonlight, finding familiar shapes, no matter the weather. The trees and the shapes are still there and I still do this. I think this watery gaze of shifting, distant focus generally informs my habitus with respect to windows.

Spaces of collectivized belief and imaginative continuity brought this frantic excitation to the fore. The great flag-capturing, ball-hurling battles of field days and camp, where legions of screaming children hunted one another through fields and forests like packs of velociraptor. Likewise, the delusional space maintained by school chums: the stories, the ongoing tales of analogous parallel worlds which existed only in the interstices of the school day. We leapt, kicking our feet together in practiced patterns, avoiding particular cracks in the pavement and riding others to safety. We stripped the bark off branches and read the worm trails beneath, orienting and orienteering in an occult topography.

One morning before catching the bus to third grade I played with my father, batting a balloon back and forth, keeping it aloft but not making it too easy on one another. Suddenly his body jerked and seized, his right arm locked aloft and he screamed, a twisted squawk of bugged eyes and impossibility, after which he broke at the waist like a shotgun and stood on his hand, cradling his shoulder with his opposite hand, panting "Oh GODDAMNIT!, OH DAMN, OH DAMN, OH SHIT, OH FUCK, OH DAMN, OH SHIT, OH FUCK…" I lingered, the game had shattered and the balloon limped around. I could only gape as my father bitterly cursed his agony.

The endless, immanent time spent with my dog, weaving paths through the woods, following one another, me imagining and him smelling for and inevitably attacking rabbits and 'possums and woodchucks and skunks. I wonder sometimes just how much Ole relied on my presence in gauging his strength in these encounters, or whether his nose worked more like an unthinking magnet for the right aroma. In any case, these were the first times I saw a friend bloodied, shrieking with pain and rage, lost in a blur of red-orange murder, and turned the stick I'd been pretending was a rifle into a ragged staff for transforming fur and teeth and bone into fetid mush. In the heaving breath that follows, few things are more reassuring than the killing shake, sanguine grin and victorious wag of one's intact companion.

The sacred was there in church too, I suppose. I felt it in the unholy boredom of the esprit de corp of holiness on long hard benches, the hypnotic drone of litanies spoken and sung by quavery old men and women, the pretty dresses and tights and little glimpses of the beyond in a staggered cycle of crossing and uncrossing and re-crossing Sunday School legs, and the fleetingly vacant, vast hiding spaces available to those who excused themselves from the spectacle of the sanctuary.

The newest iteration of the sacred I know, buried in the parties where we young adults gather to really dive deep and grasp at childhood pearls, emerges phantasmagoric in a cloud of dust and smoke that melts walls.