If home is our origin then home is our final longing as well.
You grew up all at sea, almost living in one large room, flooded with light, the golden light falling darkly from outside...one room and one story. A corner house, living in two worlds. And now? And now you live in many rooms, drawn to many varied stories...
The Dougal and I were crippled or paralyzed, I suppose, by too much love and a slow, provincial kind of life. Small-time people. All the old houses in our street had dark stairs. Now time seems only to move forward, a new kind of mystery into which you have not been initiated. Much of your life has been lived turning away. A path that is always walked on ceases to be a path. Nothing has been negotiated and yet it seems that so much has been settled. It is a wise man or woman who can accept the limits of their lives; only a saint can live without boundaries.
When one looks at a tree one is amazed to think that part of it lives "half in darkness". From a certain perspective all is continuity; from another the branches and leaves have taken many detours, are at a wide angle to the core, and the forgotten roots. To live in the open is not the same as living in the shade...I almost wrote love.
all the while
you are indwelling,
a gold ring lost in the house.
The curve of your life must return to what it's always known, some centre that has been lost, to what's always been prefigured but never grown and taken shape. That first light that is now a memory, locked and with the key missing. Stairways, corridors, hallways known only to the host. Resident? Date of arrival? Last port of call? Have you suffered...
A long cupboard mirror behind which we found an ancient camera. The early part of the century still lived on in a shadowed life throughout the house, even without its rightful owners. The mirror, there in its solitude, that knew you better than you knew yourself. We interpret eachother.
And now some "obscure directions", N by NW. There are no guide books, just the blind groping for a second chance, some deep impulse carried within that tells you you're lost. Write it down, slant, garbled:
You have come to the shore
There are no instructions.
What angel carried me thus far. Like a ghost I have lived many lives, all incomplete. Human experience whittled down to a bone, a random string of quotations, lives in parenthesis.
[..]
]
[
fall
[]
Gulp and take the sting, the nettles enclosing our hearts. Brief, brief though it was there was no understanding. And I wonder to myself, like a muslim wavering on belief and disbelief,
What magical denial
shall my life utter
to bring itself forth?
As you read this, dark pages are turning within me. If you find the word whisper it to me, as you once did when we were children.
(words by Denise)
You grew up all at sea, almost living in one large room, flooded with light, the golden light falling darkly from outside...one room and one story. A corner house, living in two worlds. And now? And now you live in many rooms, drawn to many varied stories...
The Dougal and I were crippled or paralyzed, I suppose, by too much love and a slow, provincial kind of life. Small-time people. All the old houses in our street had dark stairs. Now time seems only to move forward, a new kind of mystery into which you have not been initiated. Much of your life has been lived turning away. A path that is always walked on ceases to be a path. Nothing has been negotiated and yet it seems that so much has been settled. It is a wise man or woman who can accept the limits of their lives; only a saint can live without boundaries.
When one looks at a tree one is amazed to think that part of it lives "half in darkness". From a certain perspective all is continuity; from another the branches and leaves have taken many detours, are at a wide angle to the core, and the forgotten roots. To live in the open is not the same as living in the shade...I almost wrote love.
all the while
you are indwelling,
a gold ring lost in the house.
The curve of your life must return to what it's always known, some centre that has been lost, to what's always been prefigured but never grown and taken shape. That first light that is now a memory, locked and with the key missing. Stairways, corridors, hallways known only to the host. Resident? Date of arrival? Last port of call? Have you suffered...
A long cupboard mirror behind which we found an ancient camera. The early part of the century still lived on in a shadowed life throughout the house, even without its rightful owners. The mirror, there in its solitude, that knew you better than you knew yourself. We interpret eachother.
And now some "obscure directions", N by NW. There are no guide books, just the blind groping for a second chance, some deep impulse carried within that tells you you're lost. Write it down, slant, garbled:
You have come to the shore
There are no instructions.
What angel carried me thus far. Like a ghost I have lived many lives, all incomplete. Human experience whittled down to a bone, a random string of quotations, lives in parenthesis.
[..]
]
[
fall
[]
Gulp and take the sting, the nettles enclosing our hearts. Brief, brief though it was there was no understanding. And I wonder to myself, like a muslim wavering on belief and disbelief,
What magical denial
shall my life utter
to bring itself forth?
As you read this, dark pages are turning within me. If you find the word whisper it to me, as you once did when we were children.
(words by Denise)
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