Carolina mystic
notes from 2016 onward
The humidity forces you downward and inward, bowing and feeling, bending and caving, eyes down to the bloody red clay, soul to God. The weather gives you a taste of hell so you don’t have to wonder. Scorching and wet. It is a climate unsuited to atheism. The weight of air brings you to your knees.
The Prophets’ paradise is a big patch of my woods lush with muscadine vines. Rotten muscadines on the ground and fresh ones on high steam the air until you’re walking through wine. Piercing the muscadine’s hard, bitter skin; tasting its soft, sweet pulp: entering evil to find good. Such have the mystics taught we have to do, in their worse moods. The moods of a mystic are as mercurial as clouds at the end of summer above this wild vineyard of Eden.
Copperheads, flaming serpents, linger as an ancient curse. Harmless water snakes emulate their searing beauty. I see them swish back and forth upstream, elegant frauds, in drag as death itself. I see a water moccasin too. She is no fraud. You have limits, says God to me.
Out west on I-40 the mountains poke up against the horizon, a jagged wall, ribs of a sleeping god who breathes to the rhythm of epochs. These mountains are too old, worn down by half an eternity of water as if cursed to wait — for what? The sun sets. The contrast of mountain on sky is darkness on darkness. Land bleeds into stars.
Driving at night, lights flicker out on mountainsides, isolated houses in which crosses hang crooked but alert.
I pull an all-nighter again and watch the fog roll out across a meadow field like a Torah scroll made of cloud. If only I could read its mutable hand. Then I would understand the holy stone-land in which my roots are failing to grow.
The power is out. My ex and I go on a walk. We see a bear, the biggest I’ve seen, look both ways and cross the street at a crosswalk. Shapeshifter? She doesn’t look at us but you’d best believe we watch her. God reminds me again in these hills that I have limits.
Out in Hot Springs on a misty early morning I see a landscape that in a few years will be ravaged by the left hand of the God of Hosts. I still don’t understand.
It is unsurprising that in these mountains men would be driven to grasp snakes and to gibber in the only ecstasy they have known. The stones can understand any strange tongue. They’ve heard it all. Appalachia’s grey boulders are too ancient for me to bear sometimes. Their years crush me as if they’ve rolled down in a landslide and come to rest on my sternum. They will outlive my memory’s memory. They will outlive the concept of memory.
Roaring southeast past Hickory, flatness prevails. The world is younger, more human. Yet red clay, God’s southern Silly Putty, resists construction of a new lane.
North Carolina has been and remains a Promised Land for the mystically unquiet. Snake handlers, Charismatics, Frankists, Quakers, Catholics who remember, Moravians who forget. God’s chosen firebrands are the unbearable age of stone and the sticky heft of breath.
I used to live in Winston Salem and it's always funny how few people anywhere else I've lived have heard of the Moravians!
This is very beautiful, and so interesting as a perspective for me as a non-native. Appreciated the Quaker shout-out.