The Holiness Of Holes

Did you know that if you wear green on St. Patrick’s Day Krispy Kreme will give you a free doughnut?

I wonder what happens to unsold doughnuts. Do their bodies disintegrate leaving behind a hole? Where do holes go when things fall apart? They cluster together in holy places. There are four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire alone.

My eyes occupy two holes in a somewhat spherical skull, two holes in my nose, two holes in my ears, a hole in my rear, and a hole beneath my nose which only appears when it opens and words come streaming out in a spectral wavelength of ultraviolet frequencies.  

The biggest hole in the world is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in the Kola Peninsula of Russia, near the border with Norway. It descends seven miles deep in the earth’s crust.

The word ‘hole’ appears 26 times in 253 speeches within 39 works of Shakespeare.

As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney,

as your French crown for your taffeta punk, as Tib’s

rush for Tom’s forefinger, as a pancake for Shrove

Tuesday, a morris for May-day, as the nail to his

hole, the cuckold to his horn, as a scolding queen

to a wrangling knave, as the nun’s lip to the

friar’s mouth, nay, as the pudding to his skin.

 

-          All’s Well That Ends Well, Act II, scene 2. Clown.

 

Nun’s lip to the friar’s mouth. Whoa. What’s that about? What’s a nun’s lip doing on a friar’s mouth?

We originate from holes. Take a long sweet look at Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World. It is the holiest of holes.

Some physicists speculate that what we perceive as cosmic inflation – some sort of field that provides an energy inherent to space itself – an energy so robust and powerful it causes the universe to inflate, refusing to dilute even as the expansion of space continues – marks the creation of our universe from an ultramassive black hole.

I often fantasize walking into a wormhole and reentering the year 1966. The year Blonde on Blonde came out, and Aftermath and Sunshine Superman and Sounds of Silence and Fresh Cream and the Moods of Marvin Gaye. A hamburger, on average, cost 15 cents, and a two-bedroom house went for about $21,400.

The rock group Hole, with lead vocalist Courtney Love, disbanded in 2002. The hole itself, the idea hole, the many perforations and performances of holes, holes as a group, holes upon holes upon holes, echoing with tender invitations to be entered, to be filled, to be fulfilled, to be nucleated and nudged into interplay, is hunkered in a hollow somewhere, forlorn as a lover on a dock scanning the horizon for a ship, hollow as the hoop of hope on a chimney on a hill, fueled by nothingness and fire, crackling and alone.