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SANCTUS ET BENEDICTUS

138. Seasoning: Ephesus

      Sed haec prius fuere.

OUR holy season’s sex is over, done;
and Nothing, that thing holier, doth obtain;
the lustrum now to grow us closer, spun
as earth still sails in stars where we have lain;
though abstinence itself ’s not worth a damn,
as fasting in itself can’t purify;
it’s what one does instead: pile, seize each drachm
of pungent time in every empty sigh
     to overflowing! See! abstention’s juice
joined by the swollen ocean’s high tide’s brine,
from which some Power enticed and did seduce
the puissant creatures forth, in sun’s warm shine.
     That Power who once selected us through sex,
     gybes us a sea change to enshrine these decks.

The EPIGRAPH is from Catullus 4: “But the fact is what’s previous is past.” A lustrum was an ancient Roman purification rite with water, and hence the period following it. A drachm (also dram) was an Attic coin and weight (probably meaning a handful). Apothecaries used drachm for 60 grains, 1/8 ounce; hence it means a very little. Nothing, emptiness, the void (sunya in Sanskrit), and other terms point to the potential Power, such as evolution, out of which all things continually arise, the emptiness which is the source of all; our thoughts clothe the void with the illusions we mistake for reality. The void does not deny reality; it means that all our labels and distinctions about reality are relative, products of our inherently limited human scopes. We suffer when we take the relative to be absolute; in Buddhism the chief example is clinging to the idea of a self instead of noticing that we emerge from an infinite number of situations and influences; fully perceiving the void is an experience of compassion. Sunya implies the absence of God, but maybe such emptiness functions like God. For example, many Christians say that ultimately everything depends on God, as some mystics say that all things appear from the void: everything is interrelated and interdependent. Perhaps the void and a transcendent Creator God differ in that God is the ultimate criterion by which all is judged, whereas the doctrine of emptiness says there is no such criterion: everything is relative to everything else. Some Buddhists call this emptiness ‘suchness’ to mean that no ultimate distinctions are possible. Buddhist master and scholar Joshua R Paszkiewicz suggests ‘transparency’; in his 1982/1992 The Myth of the Great Secret, p56, Toby Johnson suggests ‘contentlessness’; >«Interbeing». Does this parallel those Christian mystics’ ‘God’ about whom nothing can be said? “Because the human mind cannot come within light years of comprehending God’s nature, we do well to follow Rainer Maria Rilke’s suggestion that we think of God as a direction rather than an object.” —Huston Smith (1919-2016), Why Religion Matters, 2001, p3. Sea change: “Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.” —Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1,2. On the sea, ancient Ephesus was known for its temple to Artemis, goddess of chastity. Ψ Q1 Q2 Q3 C sea.