The reason the appearance of the volcano inspires spontaneous emotion is because intimacy is subjective. The eye makes the mind believe if there is no visible intervention between two objects, then there must be no separation at all. We mistake clarity of vision for closeness. And in our infinite loneliness, even the illusion of intimacy can turn to joy.
As the day wears on, the volcano’s looming presence is repeatedly forgotten and rediscovered, lost and recovered. We cannot always be beholding. Like dancers who avoid disequilibrium by nailing their eyes to a fixed distant point that they circle their faces back to again and again, just a beat faster than the rest of their bodies, we go back to living our little lives, turning perpetually in fresh relief. We sense and disregard the seeing. We see and disregard the sensing. A revolution of two faces upon a hinge—the one that turns away, the one that never leaves.
Before I left that city of volcanoes, I remember being fascinated by the fire eaters who would come out of the periphery at traffic stops to entertain passengers before the light shifted to let them pass. They were children like me, but while I sat safe behind the glass, they worked, blowing columns of flame out of their mouths. My favorite part of their act was right before the light changed when the fire was lowered back down into their throats, seemingly returned to its source. Just a few minutes long, the performance was a full revolution of an element incited and extinguished, spoken and swallowed.
Perhaps fearing that a spark of fire worship would catch in me, my parents would tell me: “No, they don’t have magical abilities,” “Yes, they can be burned,” “No, you can’t see those burns, they’re internal, that means on the inside.” Repeatedly, they tried to impress on me that these demigods in the bodies of children were actually tragic figures. That to swallow flame was not a beautiful act but a catastrophic one, not to be revered and never ever to be undertaken.
Too late.
I’ve never looked at fire the same since I understood it could be eaten.
I don’t believe in God. I believe in the fire whose smoke that name spells.
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Not long ago, a friend of mine was making a documentary about a very famous American artist, and as she was editing the film, she showed me footage of the famous artist sitting in a chair by what looked like a motel pool. It was thrilling to see such a famous man, not in pomp and circumstance or inhabiting a character in a story, just sitting alone on a cheap plastic chair on a desert afternoon, talking.
The camera captured how the harsh sunlight reveled in his stony beauty, how he moved with the majesty of self-aware power, how each of his movements—every gravelly utterance, every grimace of his adamant face, the crags of his visage, the peaks of his hair, his peregrine eyes perched beneath the outcroppings of his brows—was a motif, a pebble building the monolith of his artistic creation.
To say that the camera loves someone means that, for a particular face, the camera will erase the distance between the eye of the beholder and its subject, creating intimacy, creating love, spontaneously as fire.
The famous artist was pontificating to the camera about relationships and commitment and women as he sat in that plastic chair. As I watched, I noticed how my eyes slowly became acclimated to his presence, like they do to darkness, so that my ears began to hear his words, which I was surprised to find were a stream of philosophical pablum, a myth of maleness that had spent itself. And yet, despite the breaching of the underface of this American deity, I could not deny that I still felt the magnetism of his spell. I was mesmerized. Because the camera was showing me two faces flickering, wrestling there upon his neck. And because, just beyond those shifting facets—now visible, now invisible—one could just glimpse the hinge that allowed such oscillation, around which his entire person like a skirt of rock, spread, like a cloud of ash, spun.
You can all so be seen, said the camera.
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Even if we prefer to think of symbiosis as a harmonious and perfect peace, it is, in actuality, just the intimate association of two or more organisms. Mutual beneficence is beside the point. In any association there is always, even if infinitesimally, an upper hand. An explanation of symbiosis as a closed loop of animosity mystified, as one entity kneeling before another, as respite for one at the hands of the other, makes much more sense when we consider all of us will eventually be undone by a revolution in cellular trust.
“Deus nobis haec otia fecit,” says Virgil. God has made for us this otia. Sometimes the word otia is translated into English as rest, and sometimes it is translated as peace, and sometimes it is translated as respite. The difference being that unlike the time-resistant words of peace or rest, respite is just an interval wrested from whoever or whatever has held dominion over you. It is a finity, like a country, like a family, like a self, like a blessing.
Few as they are, I treasure the moments when I can see this wearying oscillation, this lurching, for what it is—not a conception or an exception, but life itself. The opening or the closing, the upswing or the down, the sparking or the extinguishing, the fighting or the begging, the flame or the ash, infinitely turning into each other on that delicate hinge of or. And each iteration, each utterance of this endless turning, is so definitive, that when I inevitably arrive around again to either antipode, I never fail to either proclaim that this momentary eclipse is proof of eternal escape or rue it as eternal subjugation.
In the myth of Jacob in the Bible, a man alone and flailing in his failure captures an angel in the dark. By simply refusing to let go, this man forces the angel to bestow a blessing on him, a blessing which is a new name. In the story, the way Jacob finds the angel is through touch, by holding his hands out in front of him the way one does when crossing the dark. The suggestion is that somehow the angel stood out in relief from the surface of the night, as if relief from the man’s despair had taken the form of a physical relief.
There are three morals that can be drawn from this story: one, there will be a fight; two, the only outstretched hands will be your own; and three, remember what happens when you don’t ask—you receive nothing apart from regret, the festering of a request unvoiced. There is still hope, however. Relief does not just mean aid or a design raised above the plane, it also means what is left behind. And over time, all these instances of your swallowed gestures can be rekindled to light another way, an underway, toward your destination, your true name.
+ + +
The last trip I made right before the world changed was to Mexico to celebrate my father’s birthday. My little sister and her boyfriend picked me up at the airport in a pickup truck full of flowers. The flowers were for the party, which would be held up over the mountains that ringed the city in a little town out on the plain. It happened to be a clear day, and for the whole drive out of the city, we were accompanied by the crystalline presence of Popocatépetl. Its appearance incited a joy so thick that I was given all the cell phones to take photo after photo of it from my seat next to the glass before we climbed into the mountains at its feet and it became lost to our view.
It was the season of pilgrimage, and as we rose out of the valley into the passes, we passed the blurry figures of the peregrinos walking along the road in the opposite direction. They walked alone or in knots, escorting trucks decorated with tableaus of the Virgin of Guadalupe to her shrine in the city below. We drove against that tide of faith into the night, to the place we were staying, and in the morning, I woke to my father’s voice saying, “Come quickly, come quickly, Chloella, and look: the breath of smoke, the sweet cloud kiss, the volcano, Popo, has blessed us with.”
+ + +
The only effective way I’ve found to dissipate the smog-like sensation of regret is to part its atmosphere. To look through the intervening opacity for the subtle glint of the unasked moment, its sharp needle of unknowing, the point of branching when a different past was passed. For me, the definition of regret is distinct from instances of wishing I had done this, if only I had known that, yearning for a tied-off end, a discernible neatness to the pattern. Regret is where the pattern disappears, stops, conceals itself. Regret is the moments, not hierarchical, grand, or sublime, when, flanks against the stall, you sensed the give, the hollowness behind the wall, and you didn’t kick, didn’t gnaw, didn’t do anything at all.
Here's one of my regrets: the night I drove you writhing in the back seat to the hospital and waited beside your bed until drugs were dripped slowly into your screaming body. The attending doctor had recently suffered the same illness, and, as he looked at you, he visibly struggled to not take you into his arms, to not take the memory of his own pain into his arms. He reminded me of the monument to the famine of St. Petersburg at the entrance of that city, the statues of elongated soldiers holding the starker starved in their outstretched arms. The first time I saw that statue was the first time I saw the male Madonna, the way he holds, like her, his charge, the love radiating off his shape of bronze, his white coat. When the doctor had finally quieted you, they informed me that someone would come along soon to take your body to be imaged, and eventually the thin curtain was slid aside and a small man appeared to take you away. We roused you together and settled you in his chair. It must have been sometime in the uncanny valley after midnight, those hours when everything seems to strain a little at its stem, loosening its roots in reality. The hospital building outside of the emergency area was silent and black. When the man spoke to me, it was clear from his accent that he was originally a French speaker, his English rough and soft as a cat’s tongue. He told me that the power was out in part of the building, so I would have to guide us by flashlight as he pushed you. At this point you were somewhere else, on some other plane taken there by pain, and the two of us, the man, dark with light hair, and I, light with dark hair, wound around you like the strands of a braid in opposite patterns of matte and reflection. The man was as intent and focused as a ferryman, calling out now and then, “Right,” “Here,” or “Through this door,” and even though it was the deepest part of the night, I was thrillingly awake, shoulder to shoulder with this stranger, as I held the beam so that he could push you forward.
This instance is one of many studded across the expanse of my years that I believe, if condensed like the atoms in a human body, would compose the microscopic density of my soul. I recognize them from where I stand now by how my past self hovered, wonderstruck, oscillating, pirouetting between objectivity and subjectivity, the same way we recognize when rushing water senses a place of possible weakness in its enclosure by a slight dip or fold in the stream from above, a tiny whirling, a circling hesitation. Even if ultimately the stream does not pass through, even as I did not turn to the man and ask his blessing, a blessing I to this day believe, though I cannot say why, would have opened corridors that are still dark to me.
+ + +
My favorite imperative in the Bible is: Go into a closet and pray.
I’ve read that the original word is not a closet in the contemporary sense but rather a storage room. The only room in a house at that time that had a door, so when you entered and closed that door behind you, you would have been subsumed in darkness.
I have always read that directive as a chastisement of the church, that one could just as well pray in a closet. That, before it was even conceived of, the airy castle of the cathedral was obsolete. But perhaps it is just as simple a directive as it sounds. Perhaps the only requirement for prayer is a turning of the lock between sense and body with the key of darkness. Perhaps all that is required is acceptance of the resulting disassociation of the senses, the wavering of the self, the aloneness. Perhaps all that is required is to stop fighting. In which case to pray would mean to resign yourself to bailing out the well of resentment so you do not fill with bitterness, so you do not fill with despair at the lifelong, hammering into you of the refrain: alone, alone, alone.
Alone! Alone! Alone! It does seem to make perfect sense to reduce human prayer to simple acceptance. What power do we have after all? But prayer is not acceptance of a thing, it is its refusal. And the disassociation in the dark and the profundity of aloneness that swells from this disassociation are both illusions. And if I’ve learned nothing, it’s that the recognition of illusions is the hero’s only and truest defense.
So, alone, alone, alone. You are always alone. Where can we find the give in that sentence? Not in the alone, which we are always trying to counter with fairy tales of accompanying but intangible deities. Not the alone, which stands solid, rigid, and unyielding as stone. Not the always, which I won’t waste your time in refuting. The you. That’s the door. The place we can break open to find bigger than we first conceived. That’s the word we can walk into, the portal into a space that spreads around us like the skirts of a mountain, high and wide and deep as an infinite mouth.
+ + +
When it was time to leave my father’s party, and because I had left my husband and my children in a different country, I walked alone across the garden to my room. To my left was the volcano, to my right was the moon. Both stood out in stark relief from the plush velvet darkness that is the particular truth of a Mexican night. The pale cloud of ash over the volcano, in which the barest redness of its true nature shone, the gaping burnished void of the moon—each were their own form of light, each were an inhale and an exhale, a speaking and a swallowing. I walked in the valley between them. Behind me, dancing, in front of me, nothing.
Come in.
Close the door.
Claim what you find. Change your life by changing your name.
Yet, a name of power is not just any name and will not be freely given—it must be seized, in the dark, by besting the one who has the power to bless you with it. Never forget the nature of those beings we ask to bless us, the same beings we kneel before, those who, if not appealed to, will destroy you: gods, kings, priests, parents, volcanoes.
“My faith is a rock,” people say. I assume because they hope that through belief the unseen, the unsubstantiated, the immaterial, can become tangible, irrefutable, material. But how could belief in the immaterial in any way resemble a mass or a material substance? Why do we insist the miracle is transubstantiation? To me, that seems as much of an illusion as the intimacy of a faraway mountain on a clear day.
My faith is like light. Like all light, it is subjective, it passes, it flickers, it flares. The molten light of lava, the mirror light of the moon, my car lights in the woods that I turn on as much for companionship as brightness, the starlight of my childhood, the loneliest time of my life, when I kept myself company by smashing my hands against my eyelids just to see what infinite firmament I could summon when I closed the doors to my face.
+ + +
My first lesson in infinity was the three-way mirror in my grandmother’s pink bathroom. The three panes of glass angled together above her sink in such a way that they caught everything they saw thrice, throwing it back and forth between their transparent layers forever and ever and ever. I remember when my grandmother would turn on the televangelists after lunch, I would retreat to those mirrors, spend whole afternoons kneeling in the sink in front of them. I would disappear inside them, waving her brushes, her lotions, my face, mesmerized. It seemed such an easy thing to fall into the abyss of all the myselves on either side of my physical self, and yet somehow, miraculously, I remained suspended between. I remember my grandmother always being a little panicked whenever she found me and pulled me out because she never remembered to look for me there, and had searched elsewhere for too long. She was panicked because of the unspoken past of my uncle who also lived there. There was a reason I was the only one of her many grandchildren who played at her house on those long, hot Texas afternoons. But his story, and the story of his father before him, are just more mirrors I have learned to live between. Out of hate, love, out of love, hate. Forever and forever, amen.
My second lesson in infinity was in middle school when my algebra teacher taught me Zeno’s dichotomy paradox and I translated his explanation of the mathematical problem of infinite division that is the arguable fate of any presumably fixed entity as proof that the road of infinity we pilgrims walk alongside runs both ways, up towards accretion and down towards attrition. I translated it as proof there is no correlation at all between a presence and its enclosure; all measurement, including time, is hollow. That the solidity of the present can be melted like rock to reveal the infinite void within; a void that can only be crossed the way Jacob crossed that night—through refusal. That this refusal of the emptiness that fills everything is the alchemy that turns aloneness into its relief: an answer, which turns into a presence, which turns into a door.
Even when I was so young that the illusion of protection was still tangible enough to be accepted as fact, even when the false idols of my parents were still intact, even then I was a child who turned away. Whenever I woke, alone and sick, I would not go to anyone for help but wander alone through the hallways of the night to lay myself down on the floor of the bathroom to sleep. Pressing my face against the tiles always quelled my nausea. Their coldness was the only presence that could soothe my molten blood.
These days, when I feel feverish, I walk through the darkened pages of my home, through the paragraphs, through the sentences, to the words themselves and lay myself against their substance. They are my spiritual atoms. There is no force that can dismantle them. They melt, they harden, they go dormant, they reemerge, they flicker, they shift. They provide the only true ground I have ever found in this hovering life.
+ + +
In order to withstand, the word, like a self, must be able to turn. And for anything to be able to turn—to bend, to kneel—it must hold a hinge. In the case of the word, this hinge can be glimpsed through the act of translation. The mechanism is proved by every instance of any word arriving changed into a new language, just as we arrive changed into the future from the present moment while still remaining incontrovertibly ourselves.
My chosen profession is to open the door in the word and shut it behind me, and once inside, to quietly kneel. To wait until I feel its presence, its humming valences of meaning, fumbling toward me in the dark. And when it reaches me, when it lays its hands upon me, when it refuses to let me go, only then do I bless it in a new language with a new name.
I do this work in the spirit of reciprocity because I need to believe that I might have something, anything, to give them, the words who have given me everything. Because my faith tells me that translation, not transubstantiation, is the miracle, as the divine remains intact, untethered by materiality as it turns from ash to flame, from light to night, from silence to speech, in an act that can be performed over and over and over again, amen.
+ + +
“No hay borracho que trague lumbre . . .” my father says as he drives me to the airport. He returns to this dicho a lot when I try to explain away the opaque actions of others as unintentional and benign. “No drunk person drinks fire,” he is always trying to remind me. Self-preservation trumps everything: even out of your mind, you stop short of destroying the self. I think he’s worried about me being too forgiving of people, because he’d like to be less forgiving. But the fact is it is not in either of our natures to fixate on slights, instead, against our better judgment, we turn.
Every time he repeats this saying, I never apply it to the situation I am recounting and instead return to wondering, Who does consume fire then? And why?
To leave Mexico is always fraught because it is the point around which I spin. I am a woman with two faces, one that never left, one that is always leaving. And the one who was meant to live a different life, the one who never wants to turn away, the one I force inside and shut the door behind, that one is like a weed; I uproot her, I uproot her, and still she grows.
It was the early hours of the morning and still dark as we took the elevated toll highway, which is built directly above the ground-level highway. The roads were so empty that we flew as we drove up into the sky. Only the peregrinos, perhaps the same ones I had passed on my own pilgrimage just days before, accompanied us. They walked single file against the ramparts of the road because the toll booths couldn’t keep them out. In that moment, as before, they were blurs we passed, points of clarity that were lost as we whipped by. And then, suddenly, just as we came up over an undulation in the ribbon of the road, we broke hard in the lightening darkness to keep from hitting the mother of God.
She stood there in a box on the bed of a truck, haloed in plastic flowers and neon, standing like she always stands, with her arms outstretched on either side of her in a position somewhere between inviting an embrace and motioning us to kneel, somewhere between reaching to us and showing us the emptiness of her hands. Then she went left off the overpass, down into the city on the way to her shrine, and I went right toward the airport and another place in time.
Years before, at a small gathering celebrating his return from prison, I failed to answer my tío when he asked me a question. Like a ghost, he had kept mostly to himself on the edge of things until the end of the night when he wandered over to me and confessed that seeing the family was painful because it highlighted how alone he was. He said he had no faith and the fact that he had none made that aloneness vast. He turned to me and asked, “How exactly can a body cross the infinity of a faithless life?”
I remember I was desperate to answer him.
I remember I agonized before I told him what the written words of others meant to me, how they may not dispel the solitude, but they do make it multitudinous.
I remember as soon as I finished speaking, I could see in his face that I offered him no respite, that I had given him nothing.
I failed to answer on this night because I am no longer there but here. The valley of middle age. A place of foretold harvest when all my life begins to fruit and where, despite that flourishing, I feel like I’ve turned into some sort of reverse Midas, every anticipation, every desire, every accomplishment finally attained, then sputtering defiled as I touch it, grinding to ashes in my mouth. I failed to answer because the years I drove through are like mountains at my back, because he is no longer alive, and I will fail because there is no one here to answer me when I ask the same question: Who do you turn to when no greater power is felt? No relief in the darkness, from whom, armed only with bravery, you can wrest the rest of your life?
In any tense, in any case, to pilgrimage toward an illusion of intimacy with the impossibly distant other turns into failure. But you don’t need the cathedral of the other when you have the closet of the you. The you is a closet, the you is the door. Or I should say, you are the door. You is is incorrect because you are not singular.
“Plural,” says the self who refuses to let me go, the self I have tried so many times to destroy.
“You have mistranslated the ashes you walk through as proof of the pointlessness of life. The word is not ephemera, it is perpetua.”
She says:
The reason everything you accomplish turns to cinders when you draw near is that you have spent the entirety of your life trying to eat fire.
Yes, ash is fire’s relief, but ash is also ground. Ash is the beginning of again.
Yes, ash is fire’s relief, but ash is also ground. Ash is the beginning of again.
She says:
Look, through the smoke, the rock, the flesh, the breath, to the unflagging, red-edged appetite for the blaze. When has it not accompanied you? When has it ever deserted you?
Fire eater,
she answers,
Here is the constant. Here is the only presence you will ever know.