[Video: Ten Things I Have Learned About the Sea, by Lorenzo Fonda. (Identified as the inspiration for the second whiskey river excerpt below.) For an interview with the filmmaker, see this brief interview in The Atlantic (August 3, 2011).]
From whiskey river:
Explaining the Attempt to the Doctors, Beginning with Two Lines from Darwish
They asked: How would you like your death?
Blue, like stars pouring from a window.
I took the blue pill, and then
another. It was easybut still my ghost, here, tethered.
I have been living such a long time
for someone my age.
I have been living in pain, etc. etc.Yes I have tried
the hard labor of joy. Yesmost days I do not want
to die and too take pleasurein sparrows, splashed sun.
Sadness has a long tongue and wide mouth and hounds
me wherever I go.
There are women
who hold the door open, beckon.They are blue and it is blue where I am not.
The thing about stars is they are dead,
or some are and there is no discernible difference.Do you understand? Something calls my name
like my mother used to.I am tired
and something is calling, calling.
(Leila Chatti [source])
…and:
Ten Things I Have Learned about Life
1. Life will lure you into oblivion.
2. Life is inconceivably bigger than me.
3. Life is a mirror. If I am happy, it will be happy. If I am sad, it will be sad.
4. Life doesn’t know what time it is, since time lies in life itself.
5. Life is a living creature, and no breathing movement of it is equal to the previous.
6. Life will kick your sorry human ass, no matter what, anytime.
7. Life will bore you to death.
8. Or it could make you feel like a six year old kid again.
9. Life is both heaven and hell, and the living soul can only guess what awaits beneath.
10. Life knows something that we don’t.
(“adapted from Lorenzo Fonda’s Ten Things I Have Learned About The Sea“; otherwise unsourced)
Not from whiskey river:
All Summer Long
The dogs eat hoof slivers and lie under the porch.
A strand of human hair hangs strangely from a fruit tree
like a cry in the throat. The sky is clay for the child who is past
being tired, who wanders in waist-deep
grasses. Gnats rise in a vapor,
in a long mounting whine around her forehead and ears.The sun is an indistinct moon. Frail sticks
of grass poke her ankles,
and a wet froth of spiders touches her legs
like wet fingers. The musk and smell
of air are as hot as the savory
terrible exhales from a tired horse.The parents are sleeping all afternoon,
and no one explains the long uneasy afternoons.
She hears their combined breathing and swallowing
salivas, and sees their sides rising and falling
like the sides of horses in the hot pasture.At evening a breeze dries and crumbles
the sky and the clouds float like undershirts
and cotton dresses on a clothesline. Horses
rock to their feet and race or graze.
Parents open their shutters and call
the lonely, happy child home.
The child who hates silences talks and talks
of cicadas and the manes of horses.
(Carol Frost [source])
…and:
Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.
(Samuel Johnson [source])
…and:
In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung
to the dark of it: the legs of the spider
held the tucked wings close,
held the abdomen still in the midst of calling
with thrusts of phosphorescent light—When I am tired of being human, I try to remember
the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them
central in my mind where everything else must
surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.
There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose
there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.
Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.
When I am tired of only touching,
I have my mouth to try to tell you
what, in your arms, is not erased.
(Mary Szybist [source])
…and:
The relationship between cause and effect within the domain of physical objects and phenomena reflects a dynamic that is not limited to physical reality. This is the dynamic of karma. Everything in the physical world, including each of us, is a small part of dynamics that are more extensive than a five-sensory human can perceive. The love, fear, compassion, and anger that you experience, for example, are only a small part of the love, fear, compassion, and anger of a larger energy system
that you do not see.
(Gary Zukav [source])
Leave a Reply