Fascicle

When is a metaphor not a metaphor? When it is a parallel meaning.

It is the fate of a fat man who wants to live as long as possible that be must use his body. So I do. Since I was 40 (and leviathan), I have spent every (minus a day or 2 a month) (but every day in Lent) working out. In old person terms that means various machines, low impact, minimal damage.

But every day, for over an hour.

So I am no longer leviathan, but a fairly fatty tuna

But in Lent, that daily workout extends to this. What you are reading. Now. I do this, while I do that.

These last three years I have been working out with Emily Dickinson. “Oh, everybody likes her” dismisses a literary friend. Well, I love her as much as I can love anyone who has been dead for 140 years.

She toiled in silence too. Increasingly in her years. When her life ended, a few anonymous poems had been published, but there were zillions of words shared with those she knew, or wanted to know.

She came to organize her words in poetry into what she (and I guess other literary types) called Fascicles. Parts. Sections. Upon her death, years were spent protecting and releasing her words. The dead shall be raised.

Whether metaphor or theft, “fascicle” also means a bundle of muscle cells.

So in the parallel meanings in this life in darkness, on death defying machines or writing, we both used fascicles. Mine are bundles of muscle cells, right now as I type this. Hers were folios of collected life in words.

Mine by rote. Hers by miracles. Our fascicles were not made by us, but we use them. Or we do not. I know that I would be sooner dead if I did not tend to my fascicles. Emily lives after death because of hers.

Connected in effort, her words are my deeds.

“Your thoughts don’t have words every day

They come a single time

Like signal esoteric sips

Of the communion Wine

Which while you taste so native seems

So easy so to be

You cannot comprehend its price

Nor its infrequency”

I benched, pulled, butterflied on the Bowflex, cycled on the recumbent for an hour, both at highest resistance, this day and every day in Lent. These things come from places neither Emily, you nor I can ever understand. We work because we do not know. Ourselves. Our time of death. What it means. It is just what God has given us, and we choose to do.

A great coach once said to his broken players after a crushing loss, “All that is left to us is work. We cannot win what we just lost, but we can get better. Every day. We can work.”

There is no reward in work, unless you can do nothing else. Emily could not. I cannot. I think Jesus could not either. That is what Lent (and writing) can help understand. We all work in the fascicles God has made for us.

Working is not making, it is the effort that creates what we can only hope for.

So I push. 485 calories and counting.