We have emerged on the right side of the Wedding. Liz is married and we are recovering. Everyone in the greater Oregon City/Portland area collapsed today into the loving and maternal arms of an afternoon nap. We will be sorting out our tangled up possessions for the next week and will discover that maybe, after all, we did leave the left foot shoe at the reception, but our feet have new calluses from all the dancing--I personally danced until I thought I was going to throw up--and there are other shoes in the wide world. What we have gained is something joyful.
We have toasted and we have proclaimed the Rare Red label the best. We have ascended and descended the same flights of stairs more times than the angels of God trotted up and down Jacob's ladder. Our steps were less prophetic, carrying boxes and implements of wedding preparation, but I would argue just as hallowed. Those of us who still have stomachs will self-medicate on coffee. The rest will drink tea.
There is nothing like a wedding.
Or, to be clear, nothing like the wedding of a dearly beloved (gathered here today) blood brother with whom you have eleven significant summer driving songs, with whom you have scaled cliffs and slept on hard-faced futons in strange cities and familiar houses, with whom you have wandered streets and cigarettes in crowds and out of crowds, concealed great secrets from and told everything to, who shares a host of witnesses with you--all of us born together and falling apart to come back together again in a new way that resembles the old way but is better. While we have always been sad, we have always been happy and there is a glory in that which takes years to turn over. It has to be handled and examined and put aside, picked up again, run away from and returned to.
The wedding itself is a photograph. What makes it something vital and alive is everything that has come before--the buying of toothpicks, the larger commitments--and what we hope comes after. A photograph is a sort of lying truth and it is beautiful, but it is just a piece. We have all practiced the wedding a hundred times before we perform it and when it comes, we are all improvising. "Hannah and I have decided that even if someone dies, we're not going to cancel the wedding," Abbs said. "We've all put too much work into it." The next day, the president of Poland went down in a plane.
T.S.Eliot's "Four Quartets" will always be Liz's poem. We recite it to her out of habit because we know it is her poem.
Sean quoted in his toast: "In my beginning is my end..." I said to her twice every few days these last two weeks: "All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." And the first lines I ever heard of this poem, she read to me over the phone five years ago:
"You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."
Go with God, all God's children, and let your spirits be at ease.
