Eye-Openings

[Image: “Awakening in the Snow,” by user InnocentEyez on Flickr.com (photograph of sculpture, The Awakening, by J. Seward Johnson). Reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Franz Kafka is Dead

He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down. “Come down!” they cried to him. “Come down! Come down!” Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. “I can’t,” he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. “Why?” they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. “Because then you’ll stop asking for me.” The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children’s hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers’ shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn’t wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.

That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone.

They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It’s said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself — to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed & then to find yourself still in bed.

(C. S. Lewis [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Sloth

If you’re one of seven
Downfalls, up in your kingdom
Of mulberry leaves, there are men
Betting you aren’t worth a bullet,

That your skin won’t tan into a good
Wallet. As if drugged in the womb
& limboed in a honeyed languor,
By the time you open your eyes

A thousand species have lived
& died. Born on a Sunday
Morning, with old-world algae
In your long hair, a goodness

Disguised your two-toed claws
Bright as flensing knives. In this
Upside-down haven, you’re reincarnated
As a fallen angel trying to go home.

(Yusef Komunyakaa [source]).

…and:

Morning

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso—

maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins—
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Now Emrys approaches the rise from the top of which, for the first time in a lifetime so it seems, he may look west and down into the valley: the valley formed by the meeting place of the Rivers Twrch and Tawe, the confluence for which [the village of] Cymer Bach is named.

His heart thuds in his chest and his eyes swim. For too long, he thinks, has he lidded the pot in which simmers his one true home, and now it threatens to overspill and to blind him. He pushes a clutch of black hair behind one ear, and that is when the sun at last breaks through the cloud cover.

For one glorious moment a golden shaft of great width pours down from the sky, and Emrys pictures the villagers at that moment, on the far side of this hillock. They are stopping in their day’s occupations, looking up into the sunlight, pushing their own hair back, smiling, and perhaps some of them are even at this moment regarding the hillock from the far side and will see Emrys as he reaches its little summit. Then the sun ducks back again under its autumn coverlet, and a slight breeze kicks up.

Chilly, Emrys thinks, and he follows this thought immediately with another: Smoke? Or rather, No smoke?, for in that brief moment it strikes him oddly that he sees no threads of smoke rising from the chimneys of Cymer Bach.

And then he is at the summit — and then, at last, he is looking down.

(JES, Seems to Fit)