Yeast Hand Path
The yeast is a strange, foaming mother. The yeast is a sea of bitter water. The yeast is the womb in which angels commune. The yeast is bounteous beyond the others. (God help me, for I fear this post is liable to be my strangest yet.)
The yeast is—I do not know what the yeast is—sitting in the red plastic bowl, the whole container of yeast, a hundred grams of allegedly expired yeast, dumped into water and maple syrup, foaming and breathing out an acrid scent. You are mostly foam that once was water. You are warm with lives beyond all number. You are—
The seed of the failed bread, whose failure, and dry husk and deadness, I put down to the lack of water and living yeast. That dry husk lies at the bottom of the compost now and you live, the product of my afterward experimentations, guided by my wasteful, excessive inclinations.
The whole bowl is alive, and I am a yeast shepherd. They live in their countlessness in the bowl in which the fatal bread was made, that failure to attain a Single Edible Bite now bites and bites. They tremble and shiver when I touch my keys. I consider expanding their realm to the other artefacts of failure, the pan, and the measuring cup, to devour my utter lack of attainment with their—how many mouths? What order of magnitude? Where is the hem of your sacred border—
I have communed with the yeast, placing my hand in their multitude. Yeast hand path. Foam hand path. For long enough that my skin stings and aches. I take out my fingers and they’re prunes. Yeast stigmata. What? Nonsense. Gibberish imported from the fungal realm. Bungled my bread straight into the fungle jungle.
What?
What the heck am I even writing this for? Just to commemorate—what, exactly? What exactly even is this? My weird foam and wetness. I guess it just takes me back to the—prokaryotic sea? The original rising yeast, the original leaven of this world, as Sadie Plant has said. Before the Fall came into the world. On the Second Day of Creation, when the waters above and the waters below were like mirrors to one another. The Earthly, middle spirits, our original stock, the prokaryotes fizzing and bubbling, out of which all the life of this world, whether that life which fled to the spiritual or that which took flesh in the eukaryotic-physical, has been fashioned. The Earthly spirits in that time were no different from the Heavenly, which remain in that warm wet intertwining undivided state even now, in their innumerable multitudes in Heaven, the angelic and sainted sea, harmed only by the defection of some of their kin, the Lower Spirits, descending to this world to profit off our sin, the bite of Adam and Eve, to set up their despotates and tyrannies of hatred and delusion and craving and violence and power and status and wealth, and we being all the while willing to let them and to believe that we are the ones eating when in fact our bread lies mouldering in the grave, and it is only the yeast of the Heavens that lives, the Greater Spirits who feed off of God, and the Lower Spirits who live in our stead. Even now they find more sap to feed on in my heart than any yeast that I can feed in a bowl, and their congregation is without number and prone to bubbling beyond all control.
What I am saying, is, I guess, that the yeast is my brother of the second day. Of course we are all siblings on the first day: every statement, everything that conceptually is or is not or both is and is not or neither is nor is not feeding on the love of God without limit, the grand leaven. On the second day we are divided in an amicable order: the Heavenly Spirits and the Earthly Spirits, what are now the Higher/Lower and the Middle. On the third day we remain amicable: now there is land and sprouting life, but the land loves and is loved by the sea, and the sprouting provides ample opportunities for middle spirits to dwell therein. On the fourth day we remain amicable: now there are the stars of Heaven, and the single Planet is now many planets, and yet we are all in accord and diversify our powers by the influence of the stars. And on the fifth day we remain amicable: the second day is recapitulated, for Animalia is born as flying and swimming life from the stock of sprouting life, like the second day from the first, and they pleasantly agree and “all things were to them in common” see the copyright notice below and each shares and inhabits the lot of the other. And on the sixth day we REMAIN amicable: land is made to teem with life that crawls and life that walks, the one the mirror of the skies and the other the mirror of the oceans (for the mammals are like unto the whales, made, according to God’s order if albeit not by chronological evolutionary time, on the fifth day), and between them, HUMANKIND, the governor of all, given the image of our own governor and so, by mimesis, to share that image with all things, as all things have always been shared, and all things held in common. Separation is the source of no ill (proof of concept: I have divided the waters from the waters, and now have two bowls of yeast), so long as I’ll always be with you—as of course we were meant to be, my gut microbiome and my spirit-haunted mind being filled with two forms of Earthly Spirits, and myself participating in the Animal, the Vegetable, the Mineral.
The problem is the seventh day struggling to be born! (Though accomplished already, in the image of the Cross.)
For all this was made that God might dwell therein in our midst, in our economy of perfect self-emptying, and participate in our self-emptying—but we have had a delay on account of the freedom we are given. God does not hold back of the waters of the first day with which he fashioned the second: all things and all spirits are open to us, the spirit of evil-doing in the Heavens and the spirit of evil-doing in the Depths; the seas and the fish and the skies and the birds and the plants in the oceans and upon the ground and the insects and mammals and humankind all having the option to Defect and hold back, the Defection having been accomplished through the will of some human consenting to be prey for the Lower Spirits, but being participated in, of course, by all creatures, such that the governor truly does pass on his gift to all creatures, albeit the gift of rejecting the gift. Therefore do the microflora kill and the spirits of the mind drive mad, the demons rave and the angels mourn, the land quake and belch fire and the seas throw up their waves, the skies storm with death, the birds torment each other, the fish murder each other, the insects violate each other, the mammals profane each other, and humankind—oh humankind, the worst of all, lies languishing with a heart of blood-fed sin, an inverted Heavens within!
And yet we continue to do that which we have done from the beginning! I do not hate the—I have heard them called—enturbulations (or demons, or Lower Spirits) that feast on my heart any more than I hate the bowl of yeast. Well, they torture me and hurt me and I find them very easy to hate, yet here they have merely found a niche in me to dwell, my Heavenly brothers, as much as I have my niche and every beast and bird and fish and crawling thing, the microflora in my gut, the Middle Spirits which pop into my head as “concepts” and “patterns” and “desires” and “habits” and whatnot or as actual visions and voices and encounters, and every human within society, finding the means of sapping requisite nutrients to construct Some New Thing in themselves and to give out a flow of waste that may be useful for someone else. These feast on my heart as much as any of the denizens of Earth feasts on some plant- or animal-matter or on the waste product of the sun, or the yeast in the bowl on the manna that is from my hand. Yet I desire—yet I desire—“Bring me my Spear: O Clouds unfold: / Bring me my Chariot of fire!”—
The new Heavens and the new Earth! The Bread of Life! The Maranatha! For it is good that we feast, we leaven and yeast, in the bowl, in my heart and in my gut/organs/skin and in my understanding, even on each other. That the bite is killing is our prerogative, and we shall grow out of it; neither are we dependent thereupon, for there is One who has swallowed up our killing and whose body and blood may be eaten and drunk in the peace of the true Seventh Day of Creation—but enough of that! This essay is not about that! This essay is about the yeast, which flourishes in the bitter heart of failure, of my horrible awful bread that lies like the dead in Sheol awaiting resurrection, which I feed from my own stock of sugar and water, which I commune with in the fungal realm, and which teaches me.
For I am a pot of yeast that has been fed and watered myself, and though I have participated in the pathetic evil of the unrising bread as we collectively have chosen to do, yet am I willing to flourish again, and to spread throughout the pots of the widow of Zarephath, or the jugs of the wedding at Cana, and I no longer fear. Neither shall I fear that my flesh be eaten, nor shall I fear the demons which feast on my soul, for I am so well-stocked that I might feed all the world’s privative hunger without running short, like a drop of mud swallowed in the sea by the powers of grace, for the Week draws to a close, the Seven Day joining with the First. The yeast is a strange and foaming mother. The yeast is a sea of bitter water. The yeast is the womb in which angels commune. The yeast is how I know we are all siblings and sisters and brothers—
—and I feel no discontent.
Happy Advent!