April 16, it was a pretty clear day, windy and a little hazy, not much rain in the second half of spring, enough for the roadside flowers and hillside meadows. I was driving up the 1, I was going to the New Camaldoli service later that afternoon. I got up to around Big Creek and idled around the piney brushy ferric-soiled turnouts there. It’s an especially lush and wild section of Big Sur, on that north slope of Cone Peak’s scalloped arm. At one point driving, dark birds up above I glanced and stopped. Two condors move over the slope slowly twisting and turning with the various invisible rivers of air. I was gathering plants for my dear friend Wyatt to send him dried flora samples of California to allure him out for a visit. I drove back down Limekiln-ways, and took the road up on the east end of Lucia to the hermitage. Pulled over around where that road ridges over the west fork of the Limekiln and the bench that overlooks the Pacific Valley. Three condors way up high over Stony Ridge, a name I didn’t know. Mother, father, child. The brethren of monks began their hymns and mantras, a severely grave homily after the reading of Isaiah 53. In Big Sur, sunlight is either bright tan, glowing sherbet, or quicksilver. The brethren of monks were wearing their bright tan garb.

Already knowing the Hebrew etymology behind “soaring” had shifted my understanding of everything. When the scripture says, “Yahweh is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not grow weary or faint, his understanding is unsearchable, he gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will grow weary and faint, the young will fall exhausted, but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like [eagles], they shall run and not grow weary, they shall walk and not faint,” it is worth noting that the author Isaiah lived in arid Israel, not lush northern Europe. Eagles are few and far between in the desert. The Hebrew word translated as [eagles] is “eber.” And it turns out eber is actually better understood as [vultures,] of which there are many in the desert. Eber is both noun and verb depending on context, verb for the act of dynamic soaring or thermal gliding, noun as wing that does this flying or bird with the wing for it.

This difference is extremely significant. Embedded in the translation dilemma here is the Aryan-Jewish divide behind the Holocaust, the perennial Cain and Abel, strong and weak, contrived and original, force and grace. Eagles are birds of great power and strength, predatory strength, strength of muscle and strength of will. But the passage seems directed toward what happens when even the strongest of the strong lose their strength, the youth become feeble, the most vital lose vitality. It would be a strange twist of tone to turn from desiccation right back to power, without losing a beat, almost a willful ignorance of that vulnerability of the great and mighty, the very vulnerability in the Jewish heart of hearts displayed in the Book of Job. In translating that the young who at their last rope wait for God will rise up on great, patriotic, bald eagle wings, rising high like a star-spangled banner above Pike’s Peak Colorado, I almost feel that the minority-underdog-character of the Jews has been accidentally conscripted on behalf of Aryan (Zionist?) revisionists. The whole passage is about existential frailty and the deepest undercurrents in the nature of the world, not unflinching braun. It’s about an inversion at the root of the world. At the teleological xenith of power is weakness, at the ontological nadir of weakness is power. No, Goddammit!—the word eber is for vulture, not eagle. Never is the word eber for eagle. It is for the whole inversion of lifestyle of the vulture, the Zoroastrians’ recycler of life force from earth back to sky, our lifeless bodies are carried up from humanity’s highest pinnacle of the ziggurat carried up into heaven by the vultures who are lifted by the life in death. Even death is a source of life, and reaping its bounty harvest does not require power or force. It is a falling up, a psychedelic wandering downward up the waterfall of entropy into complexity. In scavenging we discover our life’s source, genesis itself is latent in the act of following the cascade of decay to its final end: highest heaven is in the deepest hells. Eber, eber, eber—condors being the largest soaring bird on earth makes them the best representative of the word. California condors somewhat moreso than the Andean, for their sheer pacifism (Andeans will snack on young or small animals.) And eber is the root word for “Hebrew.” It’s where we get the words ever and over. Pure transcendence is condor Californian. Eber, eber, eber—they went almost extinct thanks to human folly, disregarded ugly disgusting carcass birds dying from DDT-softened-then-crushed eggshells. Eber, eber, eber—they have faces only a mother could love, voiceless grunts and croaks, without guile or violence at all. Eber, eber, eber—they sprung back from the brink on what? Eber: the reading of the day for Good Friday was Isaiah 53, Messianic to its core, now with five Big Sur mountain-ocean condors on my mind:

Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed
For he grew up before him like a tender sapling,
Like a root out of dry ground,
He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him,
No beauty that we should delight in him.
Despised and rejected by others,
A man of suffering acquainted with grief,
Someone from whom people look away,
We esteemed him not.

But surely he has borne our infirmities
And carried away our pains,
Yet we thought of him as cursed,
Cast down by God and afflicted, ill-boding.
But he was wounded from our transgressions,
Crushed from our iniquities,
Upon him was the dark side of our welfare,
And by his wounds we were healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray,
Everyone to his own way,
And the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, he was afflicted
And he did not open his mouth,
Like a sheep led to the slaughter,
Like a sheep before its shearers is silent,
He did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away—
Who could have foreseen his fate?
He was cut off from the land of the living,
Stricken from the transgressions of my people.
They made his grace with the wicked,
And his tomb with the rich,
Even though he had done no violence,
And there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of God to crush him by disease
To see if his life would offer itself in restitution,
That he might see his seed, prolong his days,
And that the will of God might prosper through him:
Out of his anguish he shall see light:
Who, by his knowledge, shall justify
The righteous one to the many,
And he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion with the great,
And he shall divide the spoils with the proud,
Because he poured himself out unto death.
And was numbered with the transgressors,
And still bore the sin of many,
And made intercessors for his transgressors.


Wednesday October 19th, 2022
Cape San Martin, California