Lost time

We stand, in wonder, and look at the time that has been lost, with empty hands.

~
'The unlimited cannot be attained by organization.'

---Rosenzweig.

What is given, is accepted, with empty hands.

~

What would it mean if that one hour on Sunday morning, the one hour of aimlessness and detachment, was carried over into the week, gave it order?

The small impulse to look around, without the need to grasp at anything. The small pictures we carry with us that we can still hold up to the light. Most questions have ceased to be important, or questions, even. Things grow and decay; the old way of being passes like an evening shadow in the long grass. This, too, is a way, you think. 

'She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstacle in the way'

Each blue morning you think: someone grows a little, someone else is diminished; some star is on the rise, as someone else, in some distant land, trips and stumbles. There are other stars, at least one.  

If each person's soul is an aspect of revelation, then what of the blank spaces between the words?

`

In the old country we moved into a house with many layers of the past still only half-buried. Great rattling windows and creaking floorboards, the house alive in the silent, small hours of the morning. Old 78s in a dark, dank room under the stairs, crackling voices from a bygone era filling the stunned room. The dark cellar in which we kept cartons of malt vinegar. How did we end up here, of all places? Why this town, where all those who lived there lived as if they had already disappeared or knew someone who had? The old people visiting each other, as if on a last visit, some last rite, as if to say, "yes, now we understand" or "forgive us". November, a time of forgiveness, said the poet. 

Stop. Listen. Look both ways. 

Old Mr Baldwin, born before the War, in thick brown tweeds, a childless teetotaller with boiled sweets in his deep coat pocket for spoiled nephews and nieces. He would sit there, alert, blind to the world, resting both hands on a wooden cane as he listened to stories from a country even older than his, knowing something of what it meant to be stranded.

The Sunday papers sprawled on the floor. You sit arranging silver emblems in your scrapbook as you wait for the roast beef and mint sauce to be done. 

And on faded tapestries, the chill certain sunlight from those childhood hours'. What you write today, is that also not another kind of arrangement of silver, one that has inherited the black? The room filled with warmth, the unplayed piano-apart from 'Once in Royal David's City'- to one side, simply forgotten. The hands, always lacking skill. The slanting rain pelting the rag-and-bone man for the last time, the coal smoke, the crumbing fires. This flame-like image..brief, brief our hearts..and then it is gone.

{words borrowed and mangled from Rilke}