Poems, essays, and other writings by eric bleys

The Conversion of Saul

In a moment neither thunder nor time could cast a spell. In the instance of that singularity complete, there was a light. And in light there were lights. And in casting out darkness there were clouds of heavy time. Swirling in several starry seconds the time meant nothing still. The clouds were heavy laden with the thoughts, as each thought was growing older though time was never passing. Thoughts of harm, of violence and vengeance and terror as bloody skies which haunt the earth. Yet thoughts can feel like nothing in the formulations of heaven. And the light was there to rest on Saul, his mind was then complete. But in completion there were such irregularities that he could no longer think. In knowing there was no longer knowledge but a lingering of the eyes with only heaven, then a focus on excellence as time unites with silence. The light was heavy while silent, and gray, and empty. But the emptiness was there like contemplation, in that it slowly overturned conceptions and built new meanings in the likeness of a heavenly dust. 

The nothingness of light was melting into eternities, as the glowing of the fields did sing a holy song in the casting of fair waves never ending. The song built itself into labyrinths of mazes as the past eternities resounded in the ocean of light. 

Ineptitude like heavy dark eyes was awash in light and was quickly in silence. The silence is nothing and slides through time as with slight little stars that speak too softly. Cruelty, too, was like an animal, tearing and killing and breathing. It was like red forests which kill slowly forever. The cruelty of Saul was heavy, and white, and dark and never ending until Saul was himself no longer. His hands of blood could think like blood. His eyes like radiance in a sharp yet fuzzy image with contradictions in his speech which he himself could never tell. Ruthless, and endless and tempered on merciless legality, with hands that know only violence. In itself it is wrapped up in thoughts of death as a solution, of silence as a name, of victory as a cause, of hatred as a motivation. 

Lightness in itself bled through heavy death and in heaven there was a remaking of life. Timeless though in time the light had its presence in the center of the man, not from the sky nor the ground nor any face upon the earth. The creaking of the trees would see it, the voices of the flowers would know, and the ground would cast a spell. 

Emerging in light was conceptions of love in the body of the victim. As starry skies within his eyes were dropping the heavy sun on luminosity in innocence. Innocence and virtue as incantations of light wine in the lightness of the moment with halos of mercy. The formulations of mind that take a strange path to false thoughts and the brewing of odd conditions. The formulations of heaven know another path. But as thought is sacred still they bleed together into white papers of love with visions so new that the world was altogether. In the light, his hatred was then love, his cruelty was then kindness, his folly was then wisdom as visions of the past were swept away into new meaning. Saul was new, in the freshness of time, he was no longer himself. 

This moment was when he saw the truth within theology. All theological reasoning is straw as every argument never answers any question. Inclosed in such complexity is still contained in such simplicity that every argument leads itself to ruin. And the questions themselves are an art too simple so that words and language are plagued with thoughtlessness. However, the arguments are excellent and the reasoning sublime. A beautiful folly, a weakness of strength, an emptiness still existing, a silence unanswerable and more sacred than answers. Each argument and question led to folly, and at the end of every defeat is a beautiful mystery standing at the end, like the problems of math that no thinker can solve. At the end of each problem the order is brilliant, the thoughts profound and the conclusion never certain. A failure by love, is every thought in theology, a failure by love, is every argument and question and conception, as every failure points upwards towards the divine order above.

On the Bridge to Midnight

In Words and Visions