Once I dreamed about a beautiful woman, “Selah.” Very emotionally unstable. I held her even though she tried to pull away, I held her and loved her. But it was a spiritual, not a carnal love.
An incredibly powerful love for this small frail beautiful thing. Later in adoration I realized that this is the love Christ has for the human soul, man’s love of woman is an image of that love. What a blessing that we can even bear an image of it…
My mother hates me, she hissed, and I saw her face descend backwards into boiling sand, like the circle of wrath in Dante’s Inferno.
Our “matter” comes from the latin mater, mother.
But I loved her. I loved her and I healed her.
I was enveloped in love, in pure healing love. I really felt like I had it.
To me, “Selah” means something unknown: an element in the whole which has a place, but no meaning.
The word “Selah” appears seventy-three times in the book of Psalms, but nobody knows what it means. Even the ancient commentators don’t seem to have known. In the Septuagint (which was put together somewhere between one to three centuries before Christ) it is translated as “apart-from-the-psalm.”
In a book written by God where everything has its place and means much more than we can ever know, there is this absence. A word whose meaning is impossible to retrieve. Was it some musical notation? An instruction to praise God?
Irrespective of what it once meant, it survives as this strange absence. Like a hole in a piece of paper.
God never makes any mistakes; the absence must have been purposeful. So, to me, it means “unknown.”
I also remember that Selah killed whoever she touched… a little blue bolt of electricity would come from her finger, like a static shock, and kill whatever it came into contact with. The whole room would flash blue, like there had been a lightning strike nearby.
Once I knew a girl named Selah. A long time ago I stumbled upon an image of a woman who looked just like her, only more beautiful. Like if the real girl had gone to heaven and come back as an angel.
That is Candace, above.
Later by chance I saw the movie the image had come from, “Carnival of Souls,” a movie about (spoilers) a dead woman who lingers on this earth for a while before she is damned to hell.
I believe that, if ghosts exist, they are the way they are because they do not know that they are dead. Or if they know, they do not accept it. Or God lets them linger on as a punishment, or a blessing, or for some inscrutable purpose we cannot possibly understand.
Carnival of Souls was director Herk Harvey’s only feature film. A very spiritual movie. Lyrical, as well. And like a dream — more than most movies, and certainly more than most movies of its time.
It’s one of those rare movies which is full of a mythical purity. Not even many paintings can say that.
