Feeling Your Way

[Image: cartoon by David Sipress, from The New Yorker (July 31, 2000). Original here.]

From whiskey river:

Goods

It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

298

A monk said, “In the day there is sunlight, at night there is firelight. What is ‘divine light’?”

The master said, “Sunlight, firelight.”

(uncredited [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Night Dive

Down here, no light but what we carry with us.
Everywhere we point our hands we scrawl
color: bulging eyes, spines, teeth or clinging tentacles.
At negative buoyancy, when heavy hands
seem to grasp & pull us down, we let them,

we don’t inflate our vests, but let the scrubbed cheeks
of rocks slide past in amniotic calm.
At sixty feet we douse our lights, cemented
by the weight of the dark, of water, the grip
of the sea’s absolute silence. Our groping

hands brush the open mouths of anemones,
which shower us in particles of phosphor
radiant as halos. As in meditation,
or in deepest prayer,
there is no knowing what we will see.

(Samuel Green [source])

…and:

The Reverend felt his housekeeper’s fingers tapping a senseless braille against his pajamas. Why did he allow her to awaken him like this? Her face, grooved and flat as a gas pedal, looked down at his. He grimaced up to signal he was awake and rolled over. Satisfied, Mrs. Gump limped to the window. Grasping the cord by its plastic bell, she jerked back the curtains.

The Reverend pitched over again and lay back, helpless as an invalid under her peevish ritual, waiting for her to go before he could turn back the bedspread and set his feet on the floor. But she stood steady as a flagpole, her maroon kimono with its iridescent green butterflies pinned around her. What was keeping her? The Reverend sat up cautiously. She was peering out the window, her lip jutting in and out like a pump. With a prophetic face, she turned to him.

“What is it, Mrs. Gump?”

She rolled her eyes until they seemed to disappear like dark pits into her face.

“Storm, Holy Reverend.”

(Melissa Pritchard [source])

…and:

Bread
for Wendell Berry

Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching

somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch

have they forgotten the pale caves
they dreamed of hiding in
their own caves
full of the waiting of their footprints
hung with the hollow marks of their groping
full of their sleep and their hiding

have they forgotten the ragged tunnels
they dreamed of following in out of the light
to hear step after step

the heart of bread
to be sustained by its dark breath
and emerge

to find themselves alone
before a wheat field
raising its radiance to the moon

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and (the characters are aboard a train):

Something stirred again in [Webster’s] lap and he pressed his own legs together, shivering with a sudden confluence of fright and pleasure. Mary moved in sleep against his arm, murmured, “Mmmm.” Opened her eyes and tilted her head back, grinned incongruously at him. Looked out the window and back at Webster. “The fuck are we?” she asked dreamily, grinning.

As though anticipating the question, the PA system crackled to life and blared the name of Webster’s own station. He grinned back down at Mary, and said simply, “We’re, uh, there.” Mentally flailing his arms, pinwheeling, slapping fecklessly at the encroaching ever-deepening blackness whose enormous fingers were reaching through the walls for him, for Webster, and simultaneously reaching toward them with his own fingers, with his entire arms, grinning, embracing the darkness, grinning, sucking up every last molecule of her aroma of vanilla and clover until there was no more to suck up, grinning, terrified, sated but not satisfied, swallowing and being swallowed up, lurching, lunging, plunging, never and always, here and there, light and dark, the train shuddering to a halt by the platform, Webster standing and then leaning over to take Mary by the hand and lead her to his car. His face grinning, a petrified rictus of terror.

(JES, “The Dark”)