A whisper runs, dances gently, twirls in undulating arabesques, lifting my hair ever so slightly; it is the early, early morning, or late, late night---I am not sure which. As the scene before me gently reveals itself in the remaining starlight and the coming dawn, heralded by sleepy murmurings of birds, I discern in the dark two male voices, also murmuring, two grey forms huddled over a growing pile of branches set upon a cairn of rocks. I can only hear the voices as part of the landscape, much like the gentle noise of wind and bird; I cannot understand even where the words begin and end; the speech is fluid, undulating, arabesque, like rhythm unadulterated by instrument. The human forms are busy, in their fluid way: the more solid, bent shape stays at the center like a navel of the world, this little world of rock and dust and brave vegetation arranged in a circle around the cairn, the sage-like tree-scrubs bending toward the center, toward the solid man who is also bowed. The more lithe man-shape is moving deftly through the trees, almost like a horse in rope-training moves in response to the trainer at the center; he brings back choice pieces of branch and breaks off smaller branches from the larger pieces and places the wood, in response to the murmuring from the other, on the cairn, always on the cairn, piece by piece, murmur by murmur.
The man at the center is revealed as he looks up from the cairn and toward the Eastern edge of the visible world, and reflected in his face, I see the light has been steadily, gently, inexorably, growing almost unnoticed. The wind stops and there is absolute silence; at this, the man's expression fractures ever so slightly, and I see that he has deep crevasses around his eyes; I cannot see his cheeks or mouth because of the head cloth and his luxuriant, flowing, white beard. Only his eyes and the wreckage of life around them, a wreckage that grows more apparent, deeper, as the seconds pass and the light grows and the silence weighs in on us. Even the young form stops and turns toward the East, toward the silence. My eyes invariably return to the eyes of the old man by the cairn, and I see that they are full of fire, burning still, a fire of desire. He stays like this for a long, long time, as the light grows, and we other two, I and the boy, we wait upon his eyes, upon that desire and the silence it draws in. My heart and mind argue as I think I see, in the relationship between his eyes and the Silence, Another. The reality becomes overpowering and I know there were never only two of them here; there were three. I see this Other in the old man's eyes, I feel this Other in the whisper, the growing pressure of the Silence, but this One impoverishes my ability to categorize, or perhaps I understand the poverty for the first time. I dare not move, but I feel I must kneel, so I do so as slowly as possible; I feel the tired, silky dust and the little rocks mixed in as they dig into my skin. The old man and the young one do not know I am there watching with a heart pressed in from all sides and a mind stretched to the breaking point. I leave my fruitlessly searching reason and return to contemplation of what is passing before me.
The fire in the old man's eyes begins to fade in the face of the growing glow on the eastern horizon; as if this is a signal, he suddenly turns and attends to the pile of sticks; I hear a scraping and at this, the boy breaks also from his vigil in the trees and rushes to the center. I hear a murmuring, but the sounds have, almost imperceptibly, lost the elegant, arabesque-rhythm; they sound broken, like a record that has been warped and tries yet to sing. Singing is over, it seems; there are things which must be said, things that break the instrument with which they must be sung.
As the small fire holds its own on one side of the cairn, so near--ever so near--to the protrusions of the larger pile with its flat bed of dry weeds and grass on top--the boy finally, as the sounds of speech die, holds out his hands to be bound. The Silence presses in again on us all, birds and silent predators slinking, ground animals in their tunnels, the tiniest insect arrested in mindless flight; I feel myself most akin to those insects, arrested, convicted, and I see myself as I really am, almost--not quite--but almost by nature convicted, almost made bound over, already condemned, condemned in the blood, from the very beginning, from beyond my beginnings; I see it as certainly as any sum demonstrated, an inexorable rock of reality. I am, in a sense, helpless, helpless as the boy whose hands are now bound, the boy who has now gone silent except for the groaning, cackling, whining branches protesting as he climbs with the old man's help; I can see now they are father and son because the old man's hands are shaking as he helps his son, a shaking that seems backwards, somehow: anti-shaking, hands not used to shaking, a shaking that should not be, but is, nonetheless.
A massive, last groaning and creaking as the boy lays down; my head also down as the knife reveals itself in all its man-carved efficiency.
In all that Silence, a whispering wind, undulating, arabesque: the Lord is in the Silence and the Whisper and the Light rushing suddenly across the dark blue-grey mountains, breaking suddenly free of the edges of the eastern horizon, rushing like a youth of a thousand summers, an unconquerable joy and life, dancing and leaping toward the cairn and the bound boy and the broken old man with the knife; the Light rolls itself in the surprised chattering of the birds in the trees, making each leathery, thirsty beak and leaf sparkle with morning dew, the salvation of the desert; He, Light, rolls and rounds in one spot among the trees, in perfect line with the Sun at the eastern end of the world, and a bleating is heard from the blinding, shimmering, exploding spot; Jason's golden fleece suddenly has meaning, its true meaning for me, a living fleece, golden with the Light, almost, it seems, one with that Light.
The sticks groan again as the boy descends and the ram is taken, with unnecessary firmness by the boy, because it does not fight as he expects. It lays in his arms as a lamb would in the shepherd's arms; the boy looks at his father and something I share in but do not fully understand fills me: wonder, relief, yet shame and grief, grief and wonder mixed in the face of a burning, light-filled love that knows no death, no bounds, yet will resolve itself into creature, into death, for the boy, for the man, for me.
The ram makes no sound except that which it cannot help, the gurgling of the throat as the blood pours forth in response to the stone blade, as the heart desperately pumps harder to keep life alive. Eons, eras, pass before the gurgling stops and I can stop my uncontrolled reaction of swallowing in mixed horror, disgust, shame. Silence returns mercifully and presses in, making it hard to breathe. My head is still down; I have only looked with my ears: the crackling of fire makes my eyes snap toward the drama in the center, an ancient instinct of self-preservation within me at the sound of fire, at the sound of nature being destroyed, and I pull my heart away from my instincts so that I can understand the scene and not simply flee with my strung-out nerves.
As the fire caresses the carcass, dead now, no longer golden except where the flames eagerly lick hair and flesh, the sun looks across, growing in strength, and the birds begin singing, as if on cue from the maestro of the east; they cry out, not in the normal cacophony, but in one, minor note; as this note progresses, another note, from the sky, wafts down from a flock of the lords of the sky approaching, what I see as eagles or hawks, perhaps even vulture-types drawn to the carcass yet kept by the fire in the sky---this other note, firmly in the major key, takes over the minor birds and draws their note into a lovely harmony that turns sorrow away.
He has been given. He will always be given.
