Ps. 102.9 (ashes and tears)

Ashes / I eat for my food
with my drink / I mingle tears. 

What we witness in these verses is the psalmist’s literal consuming of himself in grief. This type of ‘canabalism’ we have intuited already when the psalmist described his bones as “aflame” and his life “consumed in smoke”. In that image, the psalmist is the fuel to his own self-conflagration. Here, the psalmist actually devours of his own remainder. The image of ‘ashes and tears’ should be interpreted together. As to ashes—we have already pointed out that previously the psalmist was ‘aflame’. There, the ‘smoke’ of the flame was his life. Here, what we should probably see, is that these ‘ashes’ are his own being after everything useful has been consumed—these are the utterly useless remnants of himself after his burning. They are utterly devoid of life. As such, the fact that they are being used as food is laden with contradiction on many levels. For one, flames have already consumed the ‘useful’ part; ashes are useless. Second, the ashes are himself. This compounding of the utter vanity of the psalmist’s situation is devastating. As to tears—like ashes, they are ‘remnants’ of himself. Moreover, they are, like the ashes, parts of himself that is now consuming. There could be no more troubling image to describe the psalmist’s inability to find sustenance. Even in his attempt to eat and drink, he is only contributing more and more to his own destruction. Everything has become grotesquely inverted. We need to see in this the fact that the psalmist own misery results in his needing to stretch the boundaries of language. He cannot convey the depth of his plight without reverting to conflicting, and unstable, images. In other words, this is not the psalmist ‘not being literal’. Rather, in order to ‘literally describe’ his situation, which is itself fraught with instability and entropy, the language must convey ‘instability and entropy’. In order to literally describe chaos, language must become chaotic (the same holds true in the order of grace, where language must become liturgical, among other things; as we will see).