[Video: “Die gut gemeinten Fesseln,” by Bernhard Riedl, on Vimeo. The title translates as something like “The Well-Meaning Ropes (or Bonds, etc.).”]
From whiskey river:
Pillow
There’s nothing I can’t find under there.
Voices in the trees, the missing pages
of the sea.Everything but sleep.
And night is a river bridging
the speaking and the listening banks,a fortress, undefended and inviolate.
There’s nothing that won’t fit under it:
fountains clogged with mud and leaves,
the houses of my childhood.And night begins when my mother’s fingers
let go of the thread
they’ve been tying and untying
to touch toward our fraying story’s hem.Night is the shadow of my father’s hands
setting the clock for resurrection.Or is it the clock unraveled, the numbers flown?
There’s nothing that hasn’t found home there:
discarded wings, lost shoes, a broken alphabet.Everything but sleep. And night begins
with the first beheading
of the jasmine, its captive fragrance
rid at last of burial clothes.
(Li-Young Lee [source])
…and:
The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.
You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.
(Wendell Berry [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Fox Sleep
(excerpt)What I thought I had left I kept finding again
but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered
as anyone could have foretold it was not there
when I went away looking for what I had to do
I found that I was living where I was a stranger
but when I retraced my steps the familiar vision
turned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places
and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me
to be where I had been at home called by name and answering
getting ready to go away and going away
(W.S. Merwin [source])
…and:
Returning
Angles against lavender sky
Flung far across heaven’s vault.
Unfettered, swallows
Circle back to the nest.Swallows are famous for their daring speed and the unpredictable paths that they take in flight. Yet no matter how far they fly, they circle back to their nests.
The idea of returning is significant for all of us. We must work, explore, travel, and make our achievements in life. No matter how much we strain and how wide we wander, we all need some lodestone, some center from which to operate. For some of us, this is a place, a home. For others, it is merely withdrawal into our own hearts.
Followers of Tao believe that there is a core spirit to which each of us should return. This core spirit is increasingly obscured by our own thoughts and the complexity of civilization. All education, while a necessary evil, is a stain upon the primal soul. Therefore, returning is a process of simplification that throws off the unnecessary problems of socialization. One gradually peels back the layers and makes one’s way back to the unsullied, pure inner person. The time to do this is long, and one needs a great deal of guidance and self-cultivation to achieve it, but until one returns to the natural state, one cannot truly hope to be one with Tao.
(Deng Ming-Dao [source])
…and:
After church tonight [on Christmas Eve], back home again, The Boy and his sisters and brother had been bundled off at once upstairs to their bedrooms, their parents’ eyes feverish with some mysterious variety of adult distraction. As he lay in the bed, The Boy could hear, beneath him in his parents’ room, the frenzied rattle of wrapping paper, the soothing zzzzzziiiippp of tape being pulled from the roll. The Boy imagined his father carrying armloads of gifts out the back door, tramping in the snow around to the back of the house and handing them up to Santa, who was tapping his booted foot impatiently on the roof, waiting to convey them (as required by law) down the chimney…
Here, upstairs, The Boy’s siblings slept peacefully, their breathing slow and measured like the imagined sound of all the massed snowflakes now sifting down outside the windows. Even the ghoul beneath the toy chest was quiet tonight, the clicking of his awful claws on the floor replaced, tonight, by the click of reindeer hooves slithering about for a foothold on the icy shingles…
He lay back against his pillow finally, his eyes shuddering closed with the weight of a hundred anticipations. Outside, the snow continued to fall, picking up pitch and rhythm as The Boy’s soft breathing joined that of his brother and sisters. And in his now-dreaming mind fluttered the slow easy snow angels of ten thousand memories past and memories yet to be, pressing into the deep drifts of The Boy’s imagination all the permanent outlines, the wonderful forms, of how it always and forever was.
(JES [source])
Froog says
The topic of home reminds me of a couple of passages I quoted ages ago on my old blog, from John Banville’s novel ‘The Book of Evidence’:
“Surely this is a universal, this involuntary spasm of recognition which comes with the first whiff of that humble, drab, brownish smell, which is hardly a smell at all, more of an emanation, a sort of sigh exhaled by the thousands of known but unacknowledged tiny things that collectively constitute what is called home.”
And a little later, this:
“I was thinking how strange it was to stand here glooming out at the day like this, bored and irritable, my hands in my pockets, while all the time, deep inside me somewhere, hardly acknowledged, grief dripped and dripped, a kind of silvery ichor, pure, and strangely precious. Home, yes, home is always a surprise.”
John says
Wow — that was from 2007! (We were young once.)
In my reading about Wales over the years, I kept encountering the word hiraeth, which is generally rendered, simply, as “homesickness.” But that doesn’t seem remotely to approach the depth of wistful longing which the discussions about the term more or less demand. An essay at the Paris Review site, from a couple of years ago, calls homesickness “hiraeth-lite.” (Ha.) The author says:
A deep incompleteness: I can’t speak truly of hiraeth, but I certainly know the feeling!
It’s good to see you, my friend. I hope you are well — on whichever continent you currently call home — and preparing to enjoy the holidays somehow?
Froog says
That is a wonderful word/concept. I don’t think I ever heard it in my childhood, though. Welsh isn’t really a spoken language any more – not in my part of the world, anyway. I gather it clings on tenaciously in a few enclaves in the northern part of the country, but down south things are pretty thoroughly Anglicized.
I wonder if that closing reference to “a national history that may never actually have existed” suggests the dominant strand in the word’s usage today. The Welsh, like the Scots, have a bit of a national inferiority complex, a resentment and frustration that they are no longer a ‘real’ country and don’t receive the attention or respect around the world they feel they deserve; this is mainly manifested in the romanticization of a distant past of heroic rebellion – William Wallace and Owen Glendower – and in being generally contemptuous of the English.
I have kind of been on holiday for a couple of weeks already – long holidays are the major perk of being a schoolteacher. But I say only ‘kind of’ because the first couple of days of that were leading kids on a trip away to Wuzhen, a reconstructed ‘water town’ south of the Yangtze; and then last week I had to spend a couple of days catching up with various colleagues at the parent school in Hong Kong.
Since Thursday, though, I’ve been properly on holiday – my first time in Cambodia, loving it, thinking seriously about staying forever, kicking myself that I didn’t come here ten years ago. I spent last evening in the company of a rather beautiful German art photographer who has conceived a plan of doing a portrait series of the expats she’s met here: on the basis of her entourage last night, these seem to include a drug runner, a cage fighter, a former CIA man, and a fugitive armed robber. I see why writers have always loved this part of the world…