Epiphany

 

Wisdom, wherever it comes from and however it wins, knows to play at times the game of gesture. If you must give something to someone of highest value, give gold. Even kings do not sniff at that. This substance will not lose its favour on the bedposts overnight. Even if gold can only imitate the sunlight shining in the flowing water, the millions of leaves that yesterday were green and tomorrow will be shrivelled black on the ground. Even if gold is inedible and can never replace loaves coming out of the ovens in a night kitchen. Even if gold can buy everything that looks, sounds, smells, tastes and feels like happiness, but will have to be traded in at reduced cost, sometime, back there in the good old days. Gold is no substitute for the blood in people’s veins, the shapely mysteries of the body, the clarity of consciousness. Wisdom venerates wisdom. Wisdom gives back seventy times seven, long after the gold gift finds its way into a display case in the museum of ancient history. One of Herod’s little toys, left behind when wisdom went where wisdom goes next. Always on its mettle. Or out on some backroad without a signpost. Wisdom, whenever it happens and whoever it speaks to, is ordinary stuff. It makes no great show of its own knowledge. Its lack of pretension is humbling to the average person of pretension. As ordinary as incense, that is no more than a stick and mud, stuck in mud, that burning makes a fume rippling up into space, and a scent that soothes the tired head. Shit mud, or the ooze from a tree that frankly no one’s paying much attention to, as they frolic after fantasy, or gorge on glamour, or believe in others’ captive lies. Dried ooze that glowing hot sends out lines, like a continuous prayer, nothing but the truth, quiet as you like, even on a windy day, or when it’s snowing like in a Christmas card. Incense, that is nothing to write home about, but that people keep a bundle of for special occasions. Wisdom, whether or not it has any palpable use, will admit of dying. Who knows, people sort through every kind of epiphany to find an explanation for that one. Click their fingers, as if the answer will appear like magic. Or, wishfully, sink their shares into death disappearing, preferably forever. Think, if they snap freeze the epiphany will happen in their next life, because it’s sure not happening in this one. Yet it has already started. It is starting now. People’s bodies can scarcely guess what might happen next. Their hands fill quotebooks more and more, their lifetime of myrrh. Whereas wisdom, for reasons that seem to change meaning over a lifetime, would have death be a gift. As if this were the only way forward, handed out from the start. Here also is where the body must be cared for, even people’s lifetimes are the body caring all the time for the bearer. At the start, wisdom is given gifts, then enters into the classroom to learn the whole thing again, at the most personal level, seventy times seven.