a non-killer whale (for anton)

moon-whale:

Their music is immense
Each note hundreds of years long
Each complete tune a moon-age

So they sing to each other unending songs
As unmoving they move their immovable masses

Their closed eyes ecstatic.

---Ted Hughes.

The sea, like our lives, dark and light; it will rain and it will not rain. You carried with you keys, for different rooms and different houses. Moving from one room to another silently, re-imagining some sort of habitation, warmth, loss, lies, the stories that will be fabricated, binding generations. I will leave a coin under the cupboard, in the dark and the dust, so that something of mine grows old. What moves the heart, except this unending song that falls, like rain, and not like rain?

Walk out into the sun's dying shadows, cast on blank walls and blank faces with perfect, symmetric equality-the sign of our forgetfulness; shield your eyes from the low-angled flickering light, bright like a knife. These, the last days, were like the first in their mystery, and this house of mine, vast and incomprehensible as the sea, this house like a creaking raft in the sea, an empty shell. The vanity of our lives. To think of belonging, and possessing, of the even flow of time, when in reality only a tent of scattered stars. We drift, we drift, without anchor, points of light, full of heavy songs, songs of longing for the moon.

~~~

Today I was driving with someone. At a turning the car next to us suddenly accelerated and screeched in front of us, blocking our way. A well-built young man came out and said to the person sitting next to me: "Don't look at my family or else I'll rip you to shreds." Which was sad, really, since he disrupted a very nice train of thought...

The winter sun, deep shadows after a brightly-lit afternoon. You look around at all the new houses coming up. This idea of beginning. But also: who knows how things will be in ten, twenty years...A doctor said something to me: you can't plan everything in your life...you have to leave some things to God. That's so true! Tawaakul. The most incredible thing-if you've got it.
You can think: in the whole history of humankind so many things have gone wrong; but that doesn't really get at it (I really must apologise to the long suffering readers of this blog for all these gloomy thoughts!). It's this: in any individual life anything, at any moment, can go wrong and you can't really stop it or foresee it. You can see the appeal of Utopias, of idylls, Arcadias...'the Garden,' the protective home, shelter, refuges from the fierceness of the world.

But these houses, in the fading light, you look on them with a sense of awe. The laughter, the heartaches..it's all there. In the morning you read these lines from an ancient text (Xenophon):

[8:18]How good it is to keep one's stock of utensils in order, and how easy to find a suitable place in a house to put each set in, I have already said.

[8.19] And what a beautiful sight is afforded by boots of all sorts and conditions ranged in rows! How beautiful it is to see cloaks of all sorts and conditions kept separate, or blankets, or brazen vessels, or table furniture! Yes, no serious man will smile when I claim that there is beauty in the order even of pots and pans set out in neat array, however much it may move the laughter of a wit.

[8.20] There is nothing, in short, that does not gain in beauty when set out in order. For each set looks like a troop of utensils, and the space between the sets is beautiful to see, when each set is kept clear of it..."

Order in our lives. How we long for it. But not just any old order: has to be the right type.And yet you know, you can spend your whole life thinking it's just around the corner, or that if you did this, rather than that, then things would somehow slide into order. But it doesn't work like that. Not for most of us, anyway.