Odd paradox, that the believer and their God take turns as wolf and lamb: if the believer believes that the God holds their life in its hands, can choose to root or snap the twig; if the believer sees believing as a choice, knows that at any moment, they can twist the fowlish neck of their own faith, choose another or no deity on which to lavish their adoration. The mortal and the divine, equally shapeshifting beasts. Equally desiring to see themselves mirrored back by the other’s face, the other’s form. The terror and liberty of recognition. And of recognizing what is not owed: to, by.
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Remember, in this story, that the God could lose.
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My hands, dark ochre. Nails uneven, over-long, and dotted with minor moons. Whose left life line may be a neverhealing umbilical gash or a to-scale sketch of one corner of Pluto. Whose right back bears a pale mark, forever-dent from chipped ceramic. My hands, like all of me, not quite delicate yet very small. Very small and very temporary. That these hands, my own, shaped like my mother’s, shade of my father’s, of the usual mortal pedigree, quick pit-stops in forms of matter—could wrestle eternity and win?
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The Greeks, at least, were forthright about the immortals’ ironic humanity. Virtuosically violent envy and boisterous libido, carnality writ cosmic, blinding, the—punch line, parable—being that they are at least as base as each one of us is in our basest moments, if not lower sunk. Godishness a question of quantity, not quality—not to be better, simply more.
The God’s humanity is the Christian’s favorite thing to deny. As if their savior did not wither the fig tree for no other reason than: he was hungry for figs, the tree was bare, it made him bitter. As if the God did not displace the human’s hip for no other reason than: it is embarrassing to lose a fight you yourself were dumb enough to pick. As if the greatest thing the God could consider worth sacrificing, when the time of sacrificing bloomed like a purple pitcher, weren’t animal humanity: to give itself a mother’s love and the smell of perfume and the chamomile of steadfast friendships, and fear and futile desire and pettiness and existential terror and the heartbreak of betrayal—and then, to give it all up. To give itself the experience of being a body, and then to lose it.
The Christian’s second favorite thing to deny: the holy pleasures of the body. Which, we are told, may be worth everything.
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Jacob had been sleeping (and probably would have loved to continue).
No one asks to be torn from rest by a hook to the left eye, driven by muscle hors humain, by a force as esoteric as the motive.
God started it, Jacob could whine. I was soaking in dreamsea, and alighted an angel, hellbent on brutality, like I’d said something uncouth about its mother. And all time and meaning in that moment ruptured. The war I was resting for became the war I was in.
The war he was in, he should have won. Had the God been less petty. Had Jacob himself been less willowy, a little stockier—loved a meat stew as devoutly as his brother—and looked a little less like a fig tree.
Some questions resist the ease of metaphor. The God fought Jacob just because the God wanted Jacob to fight.
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To dislocate a hip, the uppermost part of the femur must be separated from its pelvic nook. The body’s longest and strongest bone, wrenched from the body’s holiest: its site of creation, of most staggering sensation. Pelvis as ampersand: anything before is above, anything after is below, this bone the exalted link. The angel’s touch, then, a double re-enactment of being thrust from Eden. Exile a wildfire coming alive in the nerves.
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The primordial memory rekindled: that to challenge the God has always been an option. That the God made a door out of paradise, knowingly—a red-fruited punch on the nose of utopia.
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The God’s faux-rage at the first daughter, comparable to that of the parent whose child is in detention for kicking the bully back. And after having itself donned the disguise of the bully; clearly having in heaven too little to do. And thinking, perhaps: This could be fun, this destruction. The expectant unknown it must now be filled by.
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Before childbirth, the pelvis tilts, the pelvis transforms, the pelvis relaxes its ligaments to evolve into something elastic. It must relinquish its structure to actualize become, to make the word flesh. Eve arguably the favorite—the child made demigod, the one who, having wrestled with the God, if not in body then in matching its airtight aggressive will, was blessed to birth nations, permitted to assume a right once singularly divine: composing and composing the psalm of life.
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If you ask me if I believe in God. I believe in. What I feel. A loneliness so cavernous fungal inescapable it decomposes me from the inside-out. A possession of dispossession. Makes me less woman than dormant volcano. Severs me from hour, temperature, color. And all possibility of sense.
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The irony is that Jacob had come to that land to avoid a fight. Wanting only peace and for his barely-older brother to love him again. Better to send gifts to the jealous warmongering twin. Better to just say sorry. Better to lay the inborn wiliness to rest, save oneself a drown in rivalry.
To be human is to never receive exactly what one wants: what one desires most wholly, most terribly. Requires to make one’s own life survivable.
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This is what it means to be the poem that the God is in the middle of writing. Which, like all lyric, astonishes in teaching the poet what the poet already understands. Another conjugation of unburial. Another way of being overcome.
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The root of all want is the desire for a drip of divine sweat on your skin. To want that body’s water to mix with your body’s water. To be redolent of the nature of more. To inhabit expansion. For that flesh to touch you to gasping.
A condition inseparable from the nightlong fight, that knavish dislocation. From Godhand as blunt force weapon. From the terrifying too-proximal music of wound and womb.
The moment God shoves femur—the moment of wounding. Epicenter of extinction. Jacob exits; a universe falls away. A fresh name becomes; a universe arrives. The supplanter supplants himself. Turns the corner to arrive again. There is no longer a being that emerges first from the mother’s gravity. The heel remains ungrasped. No beginning cometh without an ending preceding. Ruin marches in the avant-garde.
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It is in being broken that we are made new. That we allow night to strip us prelapsarian bare and meld our bodies to the body of spirit—the body that spirit has allotted itself for only this purpose—and in the trembling tormenting jouissance, in the ecstasy of divine-struck pain, we are delivered to ourselves.
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Sometimes a God submerges an earth just to be ornery. Other times it rolls on its hound back and permits itself commanded. I say “you will bless me,” and it will bless me. It says, “let me go,” and I say first you will give me what I want. Don’t forget. My hands that can fight a God can also keep a God from running. Monarch pinned by titian wing. My mouth will devour any fruit I like the taste of. I, too, can decide to birth new worlds. You made me inyourownimage.
Who can say what the ceded blessing consisted of; maybe only to survive having looked timelessness too long in the eye, having felt too much of its skin. Overpowering or overpowered, an identity as unstable as a hydrogen atom.
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What ties this wolf to this lamb…is the fact that it hasn’t eaten it.
It’s thanks to the lamb that the wolf accedes to the plane of love—
But thereafter—thereafter there is the aftermath. Now the wolf can never break away from the lamb, for the lamb retains, for better or worse, traces of the gift.1
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What does it mean if a man and a God are evenly matched? If the God must employ divine powers to best him?
If what is pushed out of place is a bone, not a life, if the God plays its fists moderato cantabile, if the God refrains from killing, it is because killing, to the God, is not merely an incomprehensible but an impossible act. Resurrection the second entry of death’s definition. Renewal the recipe’s subsequent step. After the battle. At the hour of dawn. Comes the blessing. Though blessing, unlike dawn, must be battled for. Demanded, I-will-not-let-you-go-unless-ed. And the God raises an unless back: You must be prepared to labor for it, to woman, to fathom and unfathom what the body signifies, to learn firsthand the lightning-strike agony of contractions and that the agony is hallowed for what it will loose into the world.
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What no one will tell you is that it is impossible to touch your heart’s own bottom.
If I am alive now, it is because love will not stop flaying me open.
The certainty I had relegated to my peripheral sight.
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If the God wanted Jacob to fight, it wanted him to end something in himself. Extinction a condition plastic as an expectant pelvis, making space for its own transcendence. Forest fire to wrench the stubborn lips of the seedpod. A wrestling to earthquake him, sinkhole-open a void the shape of doubt. A void the shape of fear. A void the shape of forlornness. A void the shape of some acute and untouchable desire. And to be filled by the yet-unknowable next thing.
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It is vital to remember: the God is still a God. And will always get what the God wants.
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That impulse we call love has many forms. It transcends form, transforms. Us. In ways at once splendid and bloodthirsty. In ways that lead us towards perfection and away from perfection at precisely the same pace.
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By daylight, we will be exhausted by rejuvenation. The distance between rupture and rapture: a vowel. Between Godbody and humanbody: closed. By a touch—like a meteor, like a shock of red on the bough of night.
Endnotes
1 From “Love of the Wolf” by Hélène Cixous, trans. Keith Cohen, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts
