Things

Slowly, steadily, who wants to win the race. As long as one gets there, what's the worry, what's the hurry...

A song from my childhood-written, no doubt, by a Kashmiri! This was not so much about doing things at the right time like the rest of the 'things' in the universe or being in the right place, sliding effortlessly into the spaces in the arc of history that were reserved for you, but a refusal of system altogether. Slowness, like lightness, as a way of avoiding the gravity of the world. Like a snail without a care in the world, aimlessly zig-zagging through life, following the tracks that no-one else sees. Or like a star that caroms through the night skies in defiance of the mathematics of an abstract universe. Were we the only ones to break out into freedom as the others slumped back into Being, are we alone in nature with a finitude and imperfection that itself is a kind of perfection?

Profiting from the reciprocal distance which prevents coasts from linking up with each other except via the sea or by torturous twists and turns, the sea allows every shore to believe that it is heading towards it in particular. In reality, the sea is courteous with all of them, actually more than courteous: it can show maximum enthusiasm and successive passions for each shore, keeping in its basin an infinite store of currents. It only ever marginally exceeds its own limits, it imposes its own restraint on its waves, and like the jelly-fish it leaves for fishermen as a miniature image or sample of itself, it does nothing but ecstatically prostrate itself before all its shores.

On trees:

They have no gestures: they simply multiply their arms, hands, fingers-like a Buddha. And in this way, doing nothing, they get to the bottom of their thoughts. They hide nothing from themselves, they cannot harbour a secret idea, they open out entirely, honestly, and without any restrictions. Doing nothing else, they spend all their time complicating their own shape, perfecting their own bodies towards greater complexity for analysis...Animate beings express themselves orally, or with mimetic gestures, which however instantly disappear. But the vegetable world expresses itself in a written form that is indelible. It has no way of going back, it is impossible have a change of mind: in order to correct something, the only thing it can do is to add . Like taking a text that has been written and already published and correcting it through a series of appendices, and so on. But one has to say that plants do not ramify ad infinitum . Each one of them has a limit.

But what counts more is ..the proportion between the shell and its mollusc inhabitant, as opposed to the disproportion of man's monuments and palaces. This is the example the snail sets us by producing its own shell' : What their work consists of does not involve anything that is extraneous to them , to their necessities or their needs. Nothing that is disproportionate to their physical being. Nothing that is not essential and necessary for them. Saintly in their precise obedience to their own nature. Know yourself, then, first of all. And accept yourself as you are. Along with your flaws. In proportion with your own measure.

(citations from Francis Ponge in Italo Calvino's 'Why Read the Classics')

My Favorite Things - John Coltrane