He roamed quarries at Carrara caressing blocks of marble, tracing veins like a blind man to find the Virgin within. Here, the limp arm hangs; here, the bent head of the mother; here, her murdered son.
He coaxed her from stone chiseling in her face the memory of Simeon's prophecy of a sword piercing her heart: a wholly inadequate portent for this, this hammer of death harder than marble.
Veronica. Her name rolled off my tongue. Like water. For one moment my thirst ceased, her lovely apron over my eyes flung in the manner a disquieted beast is comforted in a floodtide or blaze. Shy, she led me as though asleep in dray, whispering and shushing me into place. In the buckram my face had come away. Not young and virile, the eyes Nordic blue as in all the portraits I countenance where I am a mask of flaxen virtue and even my wounds are diaphanous; but swart, bloody, scourged, half-mad, spike-nimbus— Yeats' clairvoyant beast, slouched, androgynous.
A half phrase from Augustine has challenged and inspired me for a half century: “God is like the nature he made.” It appears as a virtual throwaway line, quoted in José Ortega y Gasset’s History as a System (1941), in which Ortega adds a flourish connecting ideas about God with ideas about humans: the human “likewise finds that he has no nature other than
The question is Pontius Pilate’s. It’s early morning, and the air in the room is laced with lamp oil and irony. Jesus stands before him bound, his cheek puffy from a slap by the high priest’s guard.
