Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro

Author:Jamie Quatro [Quatro, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802165558
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

October 2017

Dear James,

It’s been six weeks since I took out this journal. Which also means it’s been six weeks since I’ve prayed.

The blue author (I wouldn’t bring her up so often if I were actually sending these letters) writes about “nostalgia for samsara.” Longing for the past, our own or someone else’s—in the Buddhist tradition, a source of dukkha, the Sanskrit word in the first of the Four Noble Truths that is most often translated as “suffering,” but is closer in meaning to dissatisfaction. This nostalgia-suffering has a noble purpose: It alerts us to our attachment to the illusion of the birth-death-rebirth cycle. The importance of escaping the burning wheel of samsara. Yet the talons of attachment seem to sharpen, she writes, as soon as we begin to understand the need to escape them.

When the talons of attachment dig in, I remind myself that the act of remembering changes the thing remembered. That I’ve replayed what happened in Chicago so often, the night has become wholly my own invention. Who was it that said if someone gave her flowers, she would arrange them in a vase with no water, give them a good hard look, then put them in the back of her closet? That she couldn’t wait for them to die so she could enjoy remembering them?

C. S. Lewis says that if we were able to return to the locus of our nostalgia, the place or person or spot of time in which we experienced joy, we would find only more nostalgia. As far back as we could go—a view from a childhood window, patterned light on a nursery wall—we would find only an unsatisfied desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. An indication not of the illusion of our existence, but of its ultimate reality elsewhere. A home we once knew but can’t quite remember, to which we will someday return.

I try to hold these two views in balance. Buddhist, Christian. Impossible. One ends in Nirvana, nonbeing; the other in personal, individual resurrection. The Christian idea of an afterlife in which we all still exist as individuals, but together, as a body—our ancestors, children, grandchildren, friends, every soul we’ve touched, and they’ve touched, and every soul those people have touched, and so on, some grand knitting-together of persons, each still him or herself but in a new, completed, interconnected way—I mean, it sounds nice. It sounds like a child telling her mother she’s got friends in heaven.

But the other idea. Extraction from the talons. What relief there would be in no longer longing to feel, again, your whiskers on my inner thighs.

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