Whole of hOly

The Whole of Holy


We live in it; we eat from it; we screw from it or in it; and we are born from it, and die to it. It is a form of transportation: psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. It is a transformation, transcendence: a motion, an action, an entity, a love, a loss, an answer, a void, a wanting. It is a geographic location, a connection between space and time, desire, infinity, closure.
The Beginning:
I was pacing the walls of a dim, curtained space. The walls were pale and gray, but white. The room was lined in closed cupboards without handles to open. There was a metal- framed bed with pink paper sheets, and cotton-slippered stirrups. I paced: back and forth, around and back. A paisley-print hospital gown flapped open. There was a chill. I held my lower back, gritting my teeth, hissing under my breath. Sit down, the nurses said. Calm down, do your breathing exercises. I didn’t know any. I paced for forty-five minutes, while my lower back contracted. They did not think I was in labor. Two freshly admitted medical students had examined me and declared I was only four centimeters dilated, when the previous day I had been dilated to eight. I knew she was coming. Give me drugs, now. But, it was too late. I was dilated to ten, plus two, cursing like a mad woman. She was fast, I split, my vaginal space eroding into blood and mucus and new flesh, to life.
From a hole emerged a fresh being. A clean slate of person in utter perfection, from nothing and from everything. So close to God, or what may be, I had thought of her. And into the void of living and circumstance, the unpredictable, the unavoidable, the earth of the black hole, she was planted, a tiny stalk of potential.

“…to plug up a hole means originally to make a sacrifice of my body in order that the plenitude of being may exist…” - Sartre

Jean Paul Sartre wrote that the hole in and of itself is an existentialist entity in being. He felt that the hole, presented, was an empty image of him, an excavation to be carefully molded about his flesh. Sartre felt that the emergence through a hole at birth was correlated with the human tendency to indulge orifice. On the most basic level, orifice indulgence is for one to put their finger in their mouth or ear or nostril, or to put food in one’s mouth. Sartre also compared women to that of a hole. He found them to be a gaping wound, with their power relying predominately on that they contain this empty space between their legs, a void expecting fulfillment. The male desire to complete the hole, he feels, is largely related to the idea of castration, as men lose power in their instinctive drive to feel whole, imbedded in the recesses of their minds from birth with their initial emergence. The Middle- Exchanges:
There was always that saying, about men, you know? About how they spend the first part of their lives trying to escape from it, and the rest of their lives trying to get back in. Assumably, they try both literally and figuratively. I know. I am a single mother. I tend to date men who have lost their mothers. It is an odd coincidence.

Darren wanted to keep me in a box, under lock and key, to encourage and maintain only as he desired. He mourned his mother’s death into my life. Charming his way into a world he did not belong, he was a rigid type, sharp to a point, never wavering in his morals or expectations. He was an immediate father for my young daughter, but always so strict and cold. He hurt to his bones. Eventually, though, his sincerity became disenchanting, as I learned that he had sucked me dry of my desire and ambition. Books harden people to the real world, he would argue. You don’t need an education, as long as I am supporting you, he would say. I had become a housewife, minding at all times my p’s and q’s. Covering my mouth when I coughed, excusing myself when I burped, attending to my specified duties, and ultimately dying inside. I became someone I never wanted to be.

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in
time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Einstein

Albert Einstein explains black holes as regions of space with an excessive amount of concentrated mass, so much so that any nearby object could never escape its gravitational pull.
Greg called to tell me I was going to die. You’re going to die, he said, they did. He was talking about the women before and after me. They had died. The first was of a broken heart and then a stroke. The second was from an accident. She had been drinking and had asked him to pick her up. He didn’t. He loved them. He had never loved me. Years later, one phone call sucked me back into his world and the void, the wanting, the black hole. Love me, please. Want me, please. But, he was lost to the black hole of pain and self-pity, depression. Just like Darren, he was drowning and wanting to take me with him. I found a wormhole.

“Deep in my body my green heartturns, and thinks of you. Deep in thepond, under the thick trapdoor of ice, the water moves,the carp hangs like a sun,
its scarlet heart visible in its side.”-Olds


A white hole is a reversal of the black. It is a hole into which nothing can fall. Theoretically, it is the wormhole that connects the two, serving as a tunnel in which travel between great distances is made considerably more convenient. Just as the implementation of a third party to a relationship can aid in the momentum at which things crumble. Einstein was well aware that the gravitational pull could not explain or define love, yet some part of him knew, to an extent, that they were connected. The Revelation:

I sat, once, on the tip of a limestone outcropping that jutted out, high above the deep colorful folds of a great fissure. There was a shaded crack, black, running deep through the green of the bottom layers. The shadows of clouds cloaked the earth in dark blue patterns. I watched a storm in the distance move closer, the lightning fierce, determined. My mind felt the grandness, the capacity of the universe, the possibility. I was small. It was Grand, indeed. In one moment, I could be gobbled up, in a great big hole.
I realized, then that pressed into that space that great big hole, the cavern, the abyss, was nothing but myself. I was and I am. The awe.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotionis a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Einstein

The End:

Death brought them to a resounding halt, yet not without expectation. In the elder years of two women, grandmothers, the end was delivered. Tenderness void, their last days were crude, raw, and ugly.
We called her Rose. She was of no relation. Five feet, eleven, withered, but still lanky despite her age. Long fingers and large feet, she was a sea of peach colored limbs, bone thin. When I knew her, she would sit, always in an orange chair, reading Reader’s Digest and watching Soaps. She thought I was her husband’s sister. I was her son’s stepdaughter. We loved to paint small ceramic-gnome figurines. Our paint was in tiny plastic vestibules attached much like the plastic rings keeping a six-pack of soda together. Always our talk was of her dead husband, of the after-life, and of her visitations from the otherside. I would catch her talking to it, to him, or to them. She knew when she was going to die. She told us all. She did. She left the known and drifted away, into somewhere; a void it is felt to us, here, still apart of the known, the side of birth and life.

My mother’s grandmother, we called her Georgene, lived in Alaska most of her life. Born on a reservation, she was a French Sioux, birthing three children before the age of twenty-one. Her skin was dark, her hair red; she was short and thick, with a passion for bickering and cooking. She lived to cause ruckus, and when I lived with her, I hated her, and it wasn’t until she developed dependency due to age that I learned to love her and all of her hardness. In her last moments, she screamed in denial. She didn’t want to go. She refused. Arthritis pained her joints, bloating her entire body. I visited her in the dank dark beige of a shared hospital room. Georgene was frightened. Don’t leave me, she begged, stay with me. I’ll haunt you, she said, if you don’t play the piano at the funeral. So you are dying? I asked. No, absolutely not, it’s not time yet, she said. But, she died anyways. I had believed that she wouldn’t. There was no resolve, a lack of acceptance. We mourned her ashes into the river.

Rose kept her body. She wanted a place in the earth for it. So next to the grave of her late- husband, Rose was buried. I watched as they lowered her. Stubborn roots poked through the sides of the red-brown dirt, scratching against the shined cedar of the casket. A crimson bouquet of roses, elaborate, almost ridiculous, was still atop. I don’t know if they ever removed it. It seemed as if they should. My stepfather dropped the first handful of dirt. We followed, dropping moist clumps of earth into the crease of petals. It was strange, her being put into that hole and covered with dirt. Her long thin arms crossed across her abdomen, limp, awaiting decay. Into the hole went the casket, topped with a swollen belly of dirt. In time, the brown mound turned green with grass, and eventually yellowed from draught.

Georgene’s body was burned to ashes. We took a tiny boat out into the Chesapeake and with rose petals, ash, and memory showered the waters. She showed up, clouded with ruckus, delivering a hailstorm and a broken boat to her family. We were helpless, stranded beneath her fury. We swam to shore. But, there in the sky, was a hole. Not into the earth had she dropped, but into the sky through fresh-water veins.


The hole is an ending, a break in life, perhaps, of something or for something else. The hole is the unknown for the before and after, the middle circumstance or indeterminable ground, a vacuous vacuum of time and space. In which do we resume, within or without? Is it coming or going? Are we traveling through it, always, in a systematic notion of presumption of what is and as it should be, or as we would like it to be? But it is a hole, and it may after all be then, void of meaning; unless, meaning is only what is prescribed, the individual’s associations. In art, the debate is often whether or not art should be left to the viewer’s discretion, or should art exist entirely within the artist’s intention. But, does it matter? In the end, in the vacuum of a whole of holes, does it truly matter? Is life fulfilling, or is it the before or the after? Why is it that “hole” is apart of the word “whole”. There may or may not be a grand master plan, but, indeed, there is a question.

“Coming home, an intersection,crossing of one and many,having all, having nothing-…this must be the edgeof being before the thought of itblurs it, can only try to recall it.”-Creeley