Silence is needed to retrace the contours of a dream; the more complex the dream, the more profound the silence needed to facilitate its reconstruction; where the dream is love, an absolute silence is needed, so that you can be reminded that you only exist in relation to the absolute.
Simeon the shepherd boy had lost his way when he came to the steps of a monastery, where he waited days until he was let in.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 1
*
The reliquaries of the ancient dead were so elaborately carved, not as a sign to the divine that care must be taken for the soul’s passage into the afterlife, nor as an intricate offering whose entombed darkness would ensure safe passage; but that the fingers of the living, choked and blind, might find in the wooded grooves a face, a resemblance in the grain’s crude parapet, a crown, & interrupting a singular silence take comfort in the familiar human form—
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
*
It had begun as a dream. I seemed to be digging foundations, and then hear someone standing by say that I had to make the trench deeper. Whenever dream-Simeon thought he was finished, that it was sufficient, the voice told him to dig deeper, as if the depth of his devotion needed to be proportional to the height of the pillar he would build.
Emblematically, Saint Simeon’s pillar is a Doric column, rises like a blade of grass from a burial mound. Even in a strong gale it straightens out.
Some followers, some adherents to the unspoken dogma, arrive near sunset, try to time it so the descent of the pail he bears down is in concert with the setting sun, the horizon’s irradiations perpendicular to the pillar’s definite throne. Before people crossed themselves, their sullen calloused hearts, they made the same gestures to themselves, of hope through purest imitation: they not being him, and Simeon not being Him.
Yours is this sheaf; for I brought, with tears, the seed of prayer, but it was you who made the seed a sheaf, drawing down through prayer the rain of divine grace.
*
On mornings when mists clouded the vale, like a confusion of half-spoken prayers, then Simeon would look out from his viewpoint, his profile as distinct as a centurion in a frieze, would look out at nothing in specific, his a marble eye of wonder, a cautious contemplation.
On nights when Artemis above pulled silent arrows from his quiver, his eyes would listen as silent points of light looking down at him, as though his self-standing sculpture were the center, the geographic fulcrum of their fleeting myth.
There was no better place to see the shooting stars.
*
Simeon sometimes wondered if this couldn’t all be enacted in the mind, down to the least detail—yet he was not certain that it could. The elders had already tested him once. In his letters to locals about usury, he didn’t disclose his trust in the seductions of imagination, its imitations of nature proven futile even in minds more capable but less vigilant, less faithful than his.
He had nailed one end of a heavy chain to a huge rock and fixed the other to his right foot, to prevent his leaving the platform, even as insects picked at his flesh beneath the leather insert of the chain.
So continually he lived out sound’s vivid absence, played through the myths he knew, the memories of blackbirds, crows, vultures, the inarticulate pauses of unanswered questions which had always before the vow appeared like shadows of a complete eclipse, spreading, threatening to black out a sky that belonged to no one, the eternal, wind-wrought, mind-dividing sky.
He remembered the Psalms of David, he remembered the Beatitudes from Matthew.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
*
Then it was that he would stand to his feet as a demigod & pace his small platform of stone, shoulders bent by time, holding a staff made from olive wood which besides his loin cloth, was the only reminder of a previous life. Such a staff as made no walking impression on the stone.
Talking to God, not to men.
Ishmaelites, Persians, Armenians subject to them, Iberians, Homerites, and men from the extreme West, Spaniards, Britons, and the Gauls who live between them, so that all roads to his pillar were like rivers that to led his spirit’s Rome, a sea of men spread out below him.
Wood clunking on stone, a metaphor for Simeon. On torrential nights, when the rain flayed his skin, was he allowed to cry out, would crying out of loneliness have constituted speaking? (A question of interest to the philosophers, those whose hearts remained divided, he thought. Then there was that time the elders tried to trick him, thinking he’d resist coming down from his pillar out of pride and they’d force him down—did they even realize it was not his act, but his lack of hesitation, that mattered?).
Who was Simeon to cry out that he was Simeon?
*
The farther the distance the milestone is from the intended location, the more convoluted the route, the greater the willingness to proceed must be for the weary traveler…where the sign points towards God it will have worn away, by design it would no longer serve as a sign for those without faith. The name itself, of God, rasped on Simeon’s lips yet inscribed on his heart, was such a sign.
When in the visions’ desert air, when in the arid visions all else became a blur evaporating the edges of a fleeting existence, there was still the sign to go on. He remembered the man who had come, though frail, ascended on his ladder to meet Simeon. Who had lost both his children who had none of their own. Then how had he come all that way?
Sometimes only the willingness to go on was what went on—what was that but another sign that you were in the face of your losses—limitless?
*
If he had perished on his platform after the first summer, let alone in the stone hut where he’d explicitly requested bread and water be left out for him—it would have been a momentary extinction.
Suffering needs duration to symbolize anything.
In his fasts—forty days standing every Lent—he was like the town that had placed its roots down on an island with no natural springs; each night the people came together to put out their pots and pans, their sheeting drenched & tattered sails to protect from mosquitos, & collect them each time rain came, following not really a rainy season with its predictable pilgrimage of storm clouds overhead, but a Poisson distribution, so that they knew, as the days & weeks passed, that with greater frequency of its absence grew the likelihood of rain’s happening.
Saint Simeon grew thin at times, though he was not fasting, & while there was no one below him there was yet a thunderous applause as he felt the raindrops on his nose & smelled the sea-salted air—they would come who still dwelled on earth yet whose eyes were designed to look at the stars, & the longer he waited the greater would be the fruit of their offering. All he need do is wait, like David in Psalms, for entry into the Lord’s house was entry into a house that existed everywhere and could be constructed anywhere.
For thirty-seven years, cubit by cubit the structure’s height increased, gatherings at the smooth base of an upright reliquary for a still-living soul.
What was his waiting but a single recurring instant from the standpoint of eternity?
*
Once, he didn’t know from whom, he received as a gift a rose, decaying, in full bloom. He looked at it only once, before it could remind him of anything, & let it slip through his fingers to the ground below. Though from time to time, in his mind the pagan wind would blow it back onto the platform, by those places icons had been smashed in repentance, the withered petals would whirl about his hairy thighs, he who was no longer an adolescent. But eventually it also passed from memory, like the recollections of youth, thorns blunted by time.
His Mother would also visit, to remember him as he was. In bending down he always makes his forehead touch his toes.
Why was there a need to speak if God heard your thoughts?
*
When the warm rain fell its voices fell all around him, enfolding his flesh in their stutterings, their meanderings & rambling stories, odes & creeping parables, the punctuated or punctured, twisting their lips, tightening cords wound from palm leaves till the sheets were blood-splattered, drones of their thick cloud songs, the rain sprays of their sun-dappled wit, the roll & droll of their timeless mantras, recitatives & mottos, tongue-fallen droplets by the thousands that pierced his breastbone, lashed his cheeks & eyebrows; & then like love’s word, dew upon waking in the sun, drew off from his tanned body, disappeared into an air wholly his own.
Let them bring up their ladders. Let them shout so he might hear them.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
*
In waking dreams Saint Simeon remembers the sea emblazoning the peninsula sky-blue. The rains stop & the sea seems to blister at the distant edges, as if were a painting, his life, peeling away his eyes. A mood trills over him as if all will burn in somber tones. He squints to see the coherent center. Then he would wait again, until the painted sands expressed their beatitudes, and the limitless sky which held back the deluge swelled with loving blue—quite apart from him the townspeople would tend their gardens, their plots of land passed own from generations, drawn as exactly as they could, & children would climb the pomegranate trees & hide in the shady olive grove, & while they cultivated he would stand, or walk his circular path, high above the wilderness—
Had he not, even as a youth, preferred the look of shrubs & weeds, scraggly wild grasses, coiled, unwieldy, to the grapevines wound around the trellises, starved in a too-picked-over desperate order?
*
Learning from experience: that the self contract to a single inscrutable point. It was dense enough to be admired. It was the self relating itself to itself in the relation. Only because there was nothing else for it to be, it was not beautiful. There was no line formed by the addition of another point, or plane by another, or geometries encouraged by continuous multiplications of what might be unknown. Because if the self existed, it had to be simple and known, like a single verse from the Bible when you opened to a page and wanted to pretend that it spoke to you: simple and known.
Simeon knew by heart the sort of life he lived, and the sort of life he could have lived instead, had he not made his choice.
*
After the setting of the sun until it comes again to the eastern horizon, stretching out his hands to heaven he stands all night, neither beguiled by sleep nor overcome by exertion.
When at times sight positions itself, & looks at mystery squarely on, all these fragments, the congress of these voices, become as one voice, & we say such things as ‘it is raining’, or ‘the spirit speaks’. Yet we describe things at their ordinary slant, conclude a man is damaged if he looks too long at any given thing, convict him of melancholy when his soul soars beyond the living plane.
- Italicized passages are from the Beatitudes, and Theodoret of Cyrus, ‘Life of Saint Simeon the Stylite’. ↩︎
David Capps is a writer and professor based in CT. His latest lyric essay appears in Midnight Chem.