[Image: the caption at Flickr says only: “Reversed (original): OM AH HUNG, Mind Speech Body, blessing letters on the reverse of a Tibetan Buddhist Thankga, red ink, Seattle, Washington, USA: written in reverse so they are correct from the deities (sic) point of view.”]
From whiskey river:
But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
…and:
Empty me of the bitterness and disappointment
of being nothing but myself
Immerse me in the mystery of reality
Fill me with love for the truly afflicted
that hopeless love, if need be
make me one of them again —
Awaken me to the reality of this place
and from the longed-for or remembered place
And more than this, behind each face
induct, oh introduce me in-
to the halting disturbed ungrammatical soundless
words of others’ thoughts
not the drivel coming out of our mouths
Blot me out, fill me with nothing but consciousness
of the holiness, the meaning
of these unseeable, all
these unvisitable worlds which surround me:
others’ actual thoughts — everything
I can’t perceive yet
knowknow it is there.
(Franz Wright [source])
…and:
We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
(G. K. Chesterton [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Leaves
He was cleaning leaves for one at a time
was what he needed and a minute before the two
brown poodles walked by he looked at the stripped-down trees
from one more point of view and thought they were
part of a system in which the dappled was foreign
for he had arrived at his own conclusion and that was
for him a relief even if he was separated,
even if his hands were frozen,
even if the wind knocked him down,
even if his cat went into her helpless mode
inside the green and sheltering Japanese yew tree.
(Gerald Stern [source])
…and:
The Halls
Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car;
your office door closes behind you and at that moment
you turn invisible—not even a ghost in that hall
from the hall’s point of view.
If the halls don’t know you, the halls and the rooms
of the buildings where you worked for seven years—
if the halls don’t know you,
and they don’t—
some new woman or two new men come clattering
down these halls in the month after your departure, indeed
just two days after you left forever
they come clattering with ideas about
the relation between mind and body or will and fate
filled with hormones of being the chosen workers here
and they feel as if the halls and rooms begin to recognize them,
accept them, as if there is a belonging in the world—but these new workers are wrong, the halls don’t know
who is working under the unobtrusive fluorescent panels:this is appalling and for a minute you are appalled
though your being so now is not an event
in the life of your new rented house or even
your new condominium…
So if they don’t, if they don’t know you,
the halls, the walls, the fixtures,
then what? Then there is for you
no home in that rock, no home in the mere rock of
where you work, where you briskly walk, not even
in the bed where your body sleeps alone or not—so if there is to be a place for you, for you
it must not be located in plaster and tile and space,
it will have to be in that other house,
the one whose door you felt opening just last night
when you dialed from memory and your friend picked up the phone.
(Mark Halliday [source])
…and:
The Students
The students eat something and then watch the news,
a little, then go to sleep. When morning breaks in
they find they have not forgotten all: they recall
the speckle of words on certain pages of
the chapter assigned, a phrase of strange weight
from a chapter that was not assigned, and something
said almost flippantly by a classmate on the Green
which put much of the 18th century into perspective.
Noticing themselves at the sink they are aware
the hands they wash are the “same” hands
as in high school—though the face is different.
Arriving in the breakfast hall having hardly felt
the transit, they set down their trays on one table;
presently, glance at another corner of the space:
that was where we mostly sat two years ago,
that was where Gerry said what he said
about circles, the concept of, and Leonardo da Vinci.
(Mark Halliday [source])
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