What’s the Matter?

[Image: ‘Jeu injuste’ (‘Unfair game’), by Rémy Saglier (user “doubleray”) on Flickr.
Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.

(Chuck Palahniuk [source])

…and:

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.

(Marcel Duchamp [source])

…and:

Concerning the Atoms of the Soul

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the center

of whatever everything is. And we don’t see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That’s what weight is, that communal process of falling.
Furthermore, these atoms carry hooks, like burrs,

hooks catching like hooks, like clinging to like,
that’s what keeps us from becoming something else,
and why in early love, we sometimes
feel the tug of the heart snagging on anothers’ heart.

Only the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres
with no means of holding on to the world
or perhaps no need for holding on,
and so they fall through our lives catching

against nothing, like perfect rain,
and in the end, he wrote, mix in that common well of light
at the center of whatever the suspected
center is, or might have been.

(John Glenday [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Humidifier

—After Robert Pinsky

Defier of closed space, such as the head, opener
Of the sealed passageways, so that
Sunlight entering the nose can once again

Exit the ear, vaporizer, mist machine, whose
Soft hiss sounds like another human being

But less erratic, more stable, or, if not like a human being,
Carried by one, by my mother to the sick chamber
Of my childhood — as Freud said,

Why are you always sick, Louise? his cigar
Confusing mist with smoke, interfering
With healing—Embodied

Summoner of these ghosts, white plastic tub with your elegant
Clear tub, the water sanitized by boiling,
Sterile, odorless,

In my mother’s absence
Run by me, the one machine

I understand: what
Would life be if we could not buy
Objects to care for us

And bear them home, away from the druggists’ pity,
If we could not carry in our own arms
Alms, alchemy, to the safety of our bedrooms,
If there were no more

Sounds in the night, continuous
Hush, hush of warm steam, not
Like human breath though regular, if there were nothing in the world

More hopeful than the self,
Soothing it, wishing it well.

(Louise Glück [source])

…and:

In a country the other side of tomorrow, an ogre who had eaten a clock and had fallen into the habit of eating clocks was eating a clock in the clockroom of his castle when his ogress and their ilk knocked down the locked door and shook their hairy heads at him.

“Wulsa malla? gurgled the ogre, for too much clock oil had turned all his “t”s to “l”s.

(James Thurber [see this post])

…and:

#72

When the man stepped from the shore of his life into the boat, the hooded boatman asked: Where to?

“Oh, no destination in particular! Maybe we can just sort of sail here and there for a while? Can you do that, or do you — well, you must have other passengers, right?”

I can do that, yes. And yes, you are not my only passenger. It helps to have a separate eternity for each of you.

They sailed for a long, long time, seeing many wonders. Light beyond light dazzled him; music beyond music made him laugh and weep. They visited places that the man had once thought of as galaxies, and other places too small to have interested him at all, and somehow they were all the same size, and equidistant from one another. And they all thrilled the man to his core.

Even so, eventually, he sensed that he had seen enough. He named a destination, and the boatman nodded and leaned into his tiller to set the boat on the new heading.

On this last leg of his journey, the man thought back on what he had always considered to be his life: the people he had known, the places he had lived and those he had wanted to visit, the arguments and love, the heat, the cold, the noise and aromas, the textures, the fantasies, the sunlight and moonbeams. He shook his head, and said to the boatman, “It all… it all seemed so real.”

To the man’s surprise, the boatman sighed. Yes, he said. It did, didn’t it?

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)