The Weight of the World

No! I refuse! My heart shall be a tower
and I must set myself upon its edge
and in that nothingness must be once more
all world, all pain, all that cannot be said.
A solitary thing, still lost in huge excess
time after time darkening and lightening-
the last surviving image of all yearning,
cast out into infinite restlessness.
And still this fixed, ultimate stone face,
consenting to endure its heaviness...

---Rilke


It's great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say: 'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod.... And to drink and eat.... [i]t would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper.... To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'
--Wings of Desire.



They have been set there as if left behind

by the gigantic forces of the tides

which carved them out and then again retreated

but generous and lavish, openhanded,

left attributes to them which were the sea's ;

they are distinguished from the natural

configurations from the rock because

they wear a bishop's mitre or a halo

or, like a clock with its own time to tell,

a face will sometimes even show a smile-

the sum of all its hoarded, peaceful hours:

once, intricate as ears and listening,

they caught the city's sounds, heard every groan:

they guard the entrance now and keep its shadows.

A whole dimension is intended here

as in a stage whose backdrop and whose boards

are understood to represent the World-

which, clothed within his part, the Hero enters.

Their hearts are motionless. They stand so tall,

removed from time and in Eternity.

Sometimes a gesture upwards, vertical

as they , emerges from the drapery

but is abandoned, only half complete

and overtaken by the centuries

while they stay poised above the carved stone brackets

on which a teeming world they cannot see

swarms with a wildness till not trodden down

----------------------------------------------


Singing and silence. But mostly it is silence. Every day the same. What does it mean to say 'day'? We learn nothing, and forget nothing. We accumulate and store things up. Everything that could have happened has. Plenty Coups was right after all: after that nothing happened. How strange, how strange our life here. What do we want: heaviness or lightness?