Mathematical meditation

These days, when I describe meditation, I talk about "becoming the naught" and bring in concepts of infinity and negative infinity. I'll try to explain what I mean.

When I imagine my inner being, I sense my center of balance. That place, for me, is the starting or center point. I am my self, I am my whole. But I wish to be filled with the All (e.g., God, or the Universe), so I try to imagine myself growing smaller and smaller. Miniscule. Reducing my self to such minute proportions is "becoming the naught"--becoming, in effect, the zero, the nothing, so that you may realize the All.

The next time I meditate, I plan to use the metaphor of a black hole, that I'm effecting a black hole in the center of my gravity. I mean to take the natural gravitational forces my body already holds, use it in relation to myself, so that my self will conceptually move exponentially toward -infinity so that the rest of me can become filled with +infinity.

I realize how kooky this may sound. I've come to the idea that despite the weirdness of the words that inevitably come out of my mouth, I must say them. Otherwise, I'll never get to the revision process.

The Whipping Remainder

from Compositions journal, 9/15/01


How young was I? I estimate five or six. I'd have to be: this was when we lived on MacArthur. Was this a dream? I know I made up memories, woven from stories my siblings told me. I have few memories of my own before age eight or so, and I don't know why. I know I've "recreated" some events in my mind, pieced from information my parents have related to me about my own past. There is so little I actually remember.

But this time: was I in the basement? Our basement was a bare concrete place, dark mostly. There was at least one metal pole, with a depression in the floor where the two met. The pole was painted a cross between burgundy and magenta. I used to twirl around it, around and around, my little hand grasping that pole, letting my body weight propel me by centrifugal force, my feet playing in that depression, carefully, so carefully. I never tripped.

Was this in the basement? Did this really happen? My mother--she would have been only thirty, right in the prime of her life. I don't remember why, or even any tactile sensations. It was bright, daytime. I don't remember seeing my mom--my mind's eye sees only me: another reason I suspect this isn't a memory based on fact. I was in a dress, a light pink dress that cutely exposed my knees, appropriate for a little girl. My back was at the door.

My mom held out her left hand for my right. I can see the dark brown lines in her smooth adult palm, beckoning. Her voice, hard, resolute, authoritative. It wasn't often she spoke to me in such a way. She had to have held my tiny wrist, my tiny five-year-old bones in her tight fingers. Yet my palm laid turned upward in her own, reversely congruent.

In her other hand, a white strap. In my mind, it resembles the pattern of faux snakeskin. The strap was much thinner than 1" across in width; I'd say closer to 1/2". This she held bunched doubly, the whipping remainder one long loop, less than a foot long. Maybe less than six inches. And I was already crying, squirming for an exit. I don't see my face here, only my right hand, and hers. I can feel my body crying, the wince of a tightness in my throat, the hot liquid in my eyes, the lids barely open a squint to see what may transpire.

And my voice--what was I saying then? God only knows. I may have been saying No, please don't, Mama please, squirming, writhing all the while. I suspect, though, that I was merely crying, wailing the wail of the five-year-old in trouble, knowing--seeing--the punishment to come.

SLAP! My mother says some words in her adult tone, words all corporal punishment parents impart to their charges, punctuated inevitably with each landing of each blow. "How--many--times--have--I--told--you--not--" But I don't remember, don't know what stupid little-child thing I must have done; I just remember that strap landing in oh-so-quick succession, on my tender palm. And no matter how hard I tried to twist it out of her grasp, my efforts amounted to nothing. She continued to deliver that recurring smack.

The pain has faded with time; twenty years later I have but the barest idea of how much that could or may have actually hurt. But in the years since, the pain I remember was that this was my mother, my mother doing this to me. Oh, my Mama, why did you beat my hand? Why did you wish to see me cry? Whatever lesson she meant me to learn has been forgotten--this noncontextual scene is all that is left: me, crying so hard for temporary escape and freedom; and my mother, divorced of her usual love, her meanness realized in each hot welt in my naked hand.