[Image: “Here and Now,” by Dako Huang. Found it on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license.]
From whiskey river (italicized passage):
I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the fingers of my hand, to hold my cup, to tap the table for me and fold themselves away when I do not wish to think. If I fold them away now, then I am sitting here, not because I am thinking. It is all indeed, I admit, rather horrible. But if I remain a person instead of becoming a point of view, I become a force and am brought into direct contact with horror, another force. As well set one plague of cats loose upon another and expect peace of it. As a force I have power, as a person virtue. All forces eventually commit suicide with their power, while virtue in a person merely gives him a small though constant pain from being continuously touched, looked at, mentally handled; a pain by which he learns to recognize himself. Poems, being more like persons, probably only squirm every time they are read and wrap themselves around more tightly. Pictures and pieces of music, being more like forces, are soon worn out by the power that holds themselves together. To me pictures and music are always like stories told backwards: or like this I read in the newspaper: ‘Up to the last she retained all her faculties and was able to sign cheques.’
(Laura Riding [source])
…and:
A Path In The Woods from A New Name
I don’t trust the truth of memories
because what leaves us
departs forever
There’s only one current of this sacred river
but I still want to remain faithful
to my first astonishments
to recognize as wisdom the child’s wonder
and to carry in myself until the end a path
in the woods of my childhood
dappled with patches of sunlight
to search for it everywhere
in museums in the shade of churches
this path on which I ran unaware
a six-year old
toward my primary mysterious aloneness
(Anna Kamienska [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Samurai Song
When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.
(Robert Pinsky [source])
…and:
What about this, from Emerson’s Journal: “The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, and the upheaving principle of life everywhere so incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer—an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me—cayman, carp, eagle, and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies.”
Strange, yes, this sympathy, clearing a space, preparing a ground for meetings to occur—but fragile, too. Terribly fragile. So why, why, I have been wondering, did my friend, standing at the shore one night this summer, watching the white breakers arc, curl and fall—why did she say, even as the chill spray hit our faces and we shivered in relief from the day’s heat, how could she say “it’s just like a movie”? And pull us from the evening damp, the woody, splintered boardwalk, sweet ache of leaning on the chest-high railing, rumble of the arcade fading, folding in and out of wind. Why break the hum and echo of the moment we were in? Why leave the moment just then forming, moment that would, some morning, some evening, return to her a quality of light or air or scene and displace the sadness she might be feeling?
(Lia Purpura [source])
…and:
I had a stick of CareFree gum, but it didn’t work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality.
(Mitch Hedberg [source])
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