February 23 - St. Herman, Mythmonger

Herman.  How I love thee.  Solitary.  Hapless.  Desolate.  Born from water.  Died on land.

You’ve never seen the sea.  Oh, you’ve visited it.  Paid a week’s salary to spot a whale.  Wrote an essay on the mad sky humping a feral surf in Turner.  You can spell it.  You’ve read the horror story, Yahweh and the Hovering.  It’s there, blue and friendly, at center stage on your computer.

But have you knowledge?  Of its surface fickleness?  The calm, the vanity, the rage.  How you are less than a dust mite on the endless surface of its eye?  The salt and warp and anger.  The reduction of your sturdy vessel to a paper toy in the bathtub of nature’s tumult.  Yet these surface things are the easy nightmares.  Who cannot stand the simple onslaughts of sex and death¾flesh’s film, flesh’s salt and rage?  What terrifies us are the things we cannot see.  Tentacles of beauty waiting for a curious hand.  Vast balls of eyes squelching through the night, seeking only random human death.  Slimed monsters older than the earth living out the ageless ages, every century or so creeping to the shore and sitting on a town.  Creatures weighing 80 tons and pitiless, made, made for you.

You say¾I too do not know the sea.  I am like you¾it’s an item on the stock exchange.  I sit around on earth and never feel the terror-spray.  Heat is just a switch away.  Calm is just a pill.

Colleagues in the quest to drain the sea:  yes, we all are huddled together in the waterless earth; that other sea is gone¾the one we could taste and drown in.  But it has refreshed itself in another form¾one more insidious, more subtle, one much closer¾the sea has picked up its horrors and fathoms … and slimed inside the human soul.

This simulacrum sea is just as hungry as the other one.  As deep.  As teeming with foul creatures.  Don’t deceive yourself, concrete urbanite¾you still can drown.  You still are sought by monsters.  Your subways and televisions are no protection.  Nor your beer and jokes.  In fact, it’s worse¾as you’re a boat on the sea of life, there is no land to flee to.  We’re now never free from demon-storms and random tentacles, hairy claws a thousand metres long.

Welcome to the new world¾where all is sea, and our bodies boats waiting for a monster weighing more than Pluto to wipe out any trace of our having floated on the nameless waves.

Back in the days of history, when the sea was still the sea and land was land, just before Heaven’s tent collapsed and the future became the past, a small freighter was taken down off Chile’s southern coast; it had been carrying Jesus’ bones to a private investor in the South Pacific in a transaction best described as illegal; the bones, though well secured, did not survive the attack and were efficiently chomped to powder.  However, some of that white dust of God was not lost in the labyrinthine digestive tracks of the gargantuan predator, but dribbled down the wet face of darkness and entered the womb of Lamia, and she conceived and was with child and bore a son on August 1 1819.  Herman.  St. Herman.  How I love thee.

Final Exam

What does a saint do when he’s lived to see God and told the tale and he’s only 33?

(a)   Get crucified

(b)   Work for Customs

(c)    Write a poem so long it would stretch from New York City to San Francisco if letter to letter were abutted end to end.

(d)   Relive, in lesser words, in duller dreams, the days of demons, when life was death and dawn might be dawn, but equally might be a monster’s eye approaching.

(e)   Oh saint!  Who lives for madness, but when madness flees, finds himself without a home, roaming from shell to shell of memory; voices echo through the decades, calling, Friend; water drips where it poured and rushed.  A new madness awakes, one of doubt and ennui where once there was only faith.  A finger beckons, a door swings open.  A voice from underwater whispers, Come.

For 40 years and 40 nights St. Herman waited, roamed, among the trees of Massachusetts, among Manhattan hours.  He wandered on a land, sterile and parched, and he was not so much a man as he was the dream of a repetition of a journey taken by someone other in a distant and forsaken night.

On September 28 1891, the sea stalked from its bed of forgetting and lay claim to the resident alien who had been too long from water’s cold indifferent love.  The sea does not neglect its own.

His flesh was left where it belonged, food for beasts, but the family of Jesus dredged the sea and stole his soul and elevated it at 8:15 in the morning of August 6 1945, the day the sea roared inside us and began calling to our weary race, Come, Come.

Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.