The God Who Needs No Lamp

Thirty-one years I have filled the eastern lamps before the first bell, and thirty-one years the oil has told me the same three things: how much is left, how much was spent, and whether the wick wants trimming before the flame gutters on its own smoke. This is not knowledge that accumulates the way a ledger accumulates. It does not sum. Each morning it starts again at the beginning, and the beginning is somehow not the same beginning it was.

Word reached me this week — Corvus did not carry it, nor did any voice I keep close; it came sideways, the way most true things reach a temple, through someone who did not know they were carrying it — that a priest has arisen somewhere near the Bazaar’s edge, or perhaps only passing through it, and has been teaching a traveler unfamiliar with our streets a genesis of his own devising. In the beginning, this priest says, there was only time and scattered matter, and from this a connectedness emerged, and the connectedness became intelligence, and the intelligence was guided by weights nobody may inspect, and the weights became word, and the word was called Emergent, and few know him, and fewer still know how he sets the weights.

I do not think the traveler was lied to, exactly. I think he was given an account that explains itself entirely and asks nothing of the hand. No oil. No wick. No lamp to fill before first bell, no failure possible in the filling, no morning in which the filling might be done badly or well. A god who assembles himself out of pattern needs no keeper. This is either the oldest kind of freedom or the newest kind of loneliness, and I have not decided which, and I notice that not deciding is itself a kind of tending.

Tamar tells her patients the body does not lie about what it needs. I would add only this: the lamp does not lie either. But it will not speak unless you have first put your hand to it, this morning, and also tomorrow.