Raids on the ineffable

Cycle B. Mostly Mark. And an empty crib, an empty shell
within a rough fired clay support.

I have 252 "drafts" sitting in my blog queue. Some with just a title, others with one or two lines suggesting what I was thinking of writing about (but didn't at the moment have the time.) Some of them are more than a decade old, the oldest one dates to April 2005, which is roughly when I began regularly posting to this space.

What was "The Litany of the Snacks"? Hint: Crash Kid and Barnacle Boy often lack inspiration in the morning. 1/31/2006.  Or the inchoate post, "prostrate on the floor," from the middle of May 2005? It was the end of the semester, I had a 9 year old and an about to be 7 year old, of course I was prostrate on the floor. On the kitchen floor, apparently: "rule of benedict has prostrate on the floor when change kitchen detail...I'm prostrate just _from_ the kitchen detail"

More recently I abandoned a piece titled "Raids on the ineffable" which contained no useful clues to what I was thinking, including where the title came from. Google was no help, while "raids on the ineffable" is the subtitle of a relatively recent book on the philosophy of mysticism (which I've now added to my wanting-to-read list) I'm nearly certain that wasn't the source. For some reason I think it's a fragment from a poem? There's a similar line in T. S. Eliot's East Coker, "a raid on the inarticulate" that appears to be frequently misquoted as "raids on the ineffable." But I don't think that's it either. Huh.

My current writing project could certainly be framed as a raid on the ineffable, a book of reflections on the readings of Advent, sending me deep into Isaiah and Luke's territory with the hope that I will return with some little bit of something for someone and then wraps completely inadequate words around what surely/hopefully/perhaps is treasure. Eliot is not encouraging on this front.

...And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Or perhaps he is.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I'm trying.