the shake. the agnus dei

I am listening to noise. I'm shaking like a leaf.

I am tired. I haven't eaten enough. I just sang my lungs out for a couple of hours.

Caffiene is getting to me.

I've left the windows of my place open. It's cold.

Yesterday I was playing with a piece of glass and I cut the first finger of my right hand. My mouse finger. My writing hand. There are three tiny slices in the fingertip. One is deep and hurts a bit whenever I touch this keyboard. I didn't notice that the finger was bleeding for ten or fifteen minutes after I cut it.

Praying. Still shaking. My teeth are chattering. Thinking about sex. They're tangled in my mind sometimes. Two kinds of intimacy. Two consummations. This is not so much heresy as a recognition of a place beyond words. Prayer is something visceral.

There is a beautiful film by Roberto Rosselini called "Stromboli", Ingrid Bergman plays a woman named Karen, in a tiny isolated village on a volcanic island. At the end of the film Bergman's character is overcome. She stands at the top of a mountain, a volcano, and screams "Dio! Dio!" It's the encounter with the "too much, too much, too great for me" that is her scream. This is the visceral.

Too much. Too much. Too great for me. My prayer is the shaking. The consummation. The noise. My own wordlessness. The notes of "Agnus Dei" are in the ache of my muscles, in the sting in the first finger of my right hand as I write this.