I take a step in a desert. Where am I? In each direction you, the moment, can be blown around, turned sharply away or steeply downwards. You walk, with an inner compass that has rusted with time. There is a small corner of truth, loosely held together in your memory; or it is a line you cannot find in a book of poetry.
Human beings are full of many shadows. I remember.
A word, a thought, a feeling comes to the surface: one against the world; the myriad roots lie hidden.
A spring light in winter, time stitched into the fabric. The gentle warmth on our backs, like a child holding on; each step I take makes me wonder: is there somewhere else?
'In New York it was winter still
But the wind was full of Spring.'
At the talk a clumpish student asks: if you find God will all dualities be eliminated? Thought has a way of killing things, neatly placing things in a coffin/box. Everything is seen from the outside: the smoothness of the wood and not the decaying body. Tick the boxes, complete the ritual: we are in thrall to our evasions.
"I'll tell you when I get there!"
The folly of thinking one can or should talk directly or publicly about what one holds dear. Every second line must be skipped, erased. Unloosen and untie. One has to have lived more intensely to reach any precision.
'Beyond the house, open ground. Once a garden, now grown over. Stationary breakers of weed, pagodas of weed, welling text, upanishads of weed, a viking fleet of weed, dragon-heads, lances, a weed-empire!'
---Transtromer.
What paths our lives take is a mystery. A bright clear patch is soon drowned out, remembered as held still in the mind's eye. The road out is not the road back. That first step takes you down two universes. In your diary the blank pages are accumulating and fewer words are shared.
'The darkening leaves
in autumn are as precious
as the dead Sea Scrolls.'
You sit in the car, between two white lines, and switch off listening to Lark Ascending, the drum of the world suddenly stopping, the gravel quiet by the warm engine.
An empty space, a tree, bird shit like a Pollock painting richly illuminating the dark floor.
~~~
[A, in California: are you still around? Knock once for Yes...
Human beings are full of many shadows. I remember.
A word, a thought, a feeling comes to the surface: one against the world; the myriad roots lie hidden.
A spring light in winter, time stitched into the fabric. The gentle warmth on our backs, like a child holding on; each step I take makes me wonder: is there somewhere else?
'In New York it was winter still
But the wind was full of Spring.'
At the talk a clumpish student asks: if you find God will all dualities be eliminated? Thought has a way of killing things, neatly placing things in a coffin/box. Everything is seen from the outside: the smoothness of the wood and not the decaying body. Tick the boxes, complete the ritual: we are in thrall to our evasions.
"I'll tell you when I get there!"
The folly of thinking one can or should talk directly or publicly about what one holds dear. Every second line must be skipped, erased. Unloosen and untie. One has to have lived more intensely to reach any precision.
'Beyond the house, open ground. Once a garden, now grown over. Stationary breakers of weed, pagodas of weed, welling text, upanishads of weed, a viking fleet of weed, dragon-heads, lances, a weed-empire!'
---Transtromer.
What paths our lives take is a mystery. A bright clear patch is soon drowned out, remembered as held still in the mind's eye. The road out is not the road back. That first step takes you down two universes. In your diary the blank pages are accumulating and fewer words are shared.
'The darkening leaves
in autumn are as precious
as the dead Sea Scrolls.'
You sit in the car, between two white lines, and switch off listening to Lark Ascending, the drum of the world suddenly stopping, the gravel quiet by the warm engine.
An empty space, a tree, bird shit like a Pollock painting richly illuminating the dark floor.
~~~
[A, in California: are you still around? Knock once for Yes...
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