always returning, always going

hold. the bright pieces in your hand. bright and clear, the last light of the sun still on them. a rabbi had once said, 'no heart is as whole as a broken heart'. who will think of you on empty pages. at the given hour, which way will you look? oh, how we come and go...

metaphor comes under suspicion at the hour of death.

we have our suspicions. that autumn was not a season, that fish lives on without the Tigris, that your silence was a kind of last word. to be religious is to think in images. your picture fades, the colours drained of strength by the hour, becoming softer, greyer, yellowing and curling at the edges like dying leaves.

'light is supposed to be fast

but it doesn't reach me'

the light within falters, fails. the eye forgetting its time-honoured role. so you take a step towards. what? in some direction. does it matter when in the mirror your face darkens, finds its final form, when your late-summer soul flourishes, ripens into a likeness unbeknown, when hands that would know your face fall...

'seeing in that mirror

a water without the life of water,

a face aging

to less generosity than it had'

today. no verb for tomorrow. rooted, for a while, that's true. but as nomadic as yesterday's vanishing snow. what sad clowns we are. and, after all, why should a jester mimic weakness, frailty, unreliable memory?

'we are things thrown in the air

alive in flight...

our rust the colour of the chameleon'

it wasn't always this way. do you remember when we were like children, when

'we could see clearly

before the glass hurt'?

(from Robert Lowell)

~~~

Why ought I to be moral? Does anyone really ask that question? We might want to know what could constitute an answer to such a question. But we might simply avoid the question altogether.

1. To think that one must first have reasons for acting morally strikes us as slightly odd. What purpose do reasons or theory serve here? To bind us, oblige us, to act morally, I guess. Otherwise, is the right act contingent on all sorts of details: the degree of sympathy one feels with the other person, the intensity of our identification with his or her plight, the conflicts with our own interests ...The vagaries of the emotions, the lack of imagination, all that means we far too often close our hands to our brother.

2. What guarantees can there be? Religion, reason? The 'face' of the other may not elicit a response if we're not attentive.

3. Is it a 'moral act' or moral character we're talking about? The need to move away from the notion of choice and the isolated acts of the will. What is the background fabric, so to speak, which allows us and encourages us to act morally, to refine our intentions through self-understanding during our lives?

4. Do we really seek the 'grounds' of morality or the specific content of it: how should one act, not why?

5. A life without rituals, sustained practices, the time and space for self-reflection leaves us with what? Abstract principles, rules, do not engage us unless they're already intuitively grasped-and how can they be unless they're-at least at some level-already lived. In any case, their appeal sounds too distant and too dry to our modern ears. We want to work things out for ourselves.

6. So, here we are, without any coherent picture of ourselves, or any central notion of human nature or our place in the universe. We stumble along.

This is fine. Only this groping for certainty is to be avoided...and can only be avoided if one is already in good health.

The remarkable thing. We do get on by. Each child that is born is another opening up of hope, a new, bright, fresh angle onto the world. A child extends her hand, and it is taken up. In some sense that is all that matters. We, the wise children, understand all that follows and precedes such 'acts'. The act is not mere outward behaviour, an empty gesture, but nor is it an "expression" of thought or one's intentions. It is an inscrutable bundle of all three, something that one learns and understands over time.

Finally, the eye sees what the hand did, and the human heart follows its trackless way...