Working With What You Didn’t Expect

[Image: Dempsey and Firpo, by George Bellows. The reason for its inclusion here will be obvious once you’ve read through this post. The fight in question is covered by Wikipedia here.]

From whiskey river:

When you’ve lived as long as I have, you tend to think you’ve heard everything, that there’s nothing left that can shock you anymore. You grow a little complacent about your so-called knowledge of the world, and then, every once in a while, something comes along that jolts you out of your smug cocoon of superiority, that reminds you all over again that you don’t understand the first thing about life.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and not from whiskey river:

Sunday
(excerpt)

iii at the museum (bellows)
For Alexander Nemerov

The man in the left-hand corner
of Bellows’s picture of the Dempsey-Firpo
fight, the picture a dream, so not a real
fight — a picture of a fight — his flayed hide
just visible under his blue pinstripes,
the watcher and the fighter
indistinguishable, one inside

the other, lion and lion tamer,
the paint daubs faces or fingerprints
and the lights staring and staring across
the fretwork of the ring, and Bellows
himself, next to him, looking surprised,
as if to be there was to give himself up
without our noticing it, as we all do

in a gesture, or word, leaving something
behind we should have taken with us
or even guarded, a way of not letting
something be over and done with.
The fight was over in four minutes flat.
A curious thing about the painting
is that Bellows chose to show us

the moment when Firpo sent Dempsey
careening, with a blow to the jaw,
one of the two times he laid him out,
and we, with the spectators crammed
into the foreground of the picture
have to help push Dempsey back
into the ring where two-and-a-half

minutes later he will defeat Firpo,
who went down four times to his two.
In Assisi, at the Basilica di San Francesco,
in the panel in which Giotto depicts
the moment Francis gives away
his worldly goods, the palm that Francis
raises up to the hand that is reaching

down to him from heaven, a hand out
of the blue, open, ready to give or
receive wonders, is the same hand
in Bellows’s picture raised behind Dempsey
one wing of a dove, the impulse is
to press our own palms to it, and despite
our better judgment to hurl him back.

(Cynthia Zarin [source])

…and again from whiskey river (italicized passage):

I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now. I suppose life always ends badly for almost everybody. We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us.

(Tennessee Williams [source])

…and again, not:

To desire in the void, to desire without any wishes. To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. it is then that we touch the absolute good.

—

The good seems to us as a nothingness, since there is no thing that is good. But this nothingness is not unreal. Compared with it, everything in existence is unreal.

(Simone Weil [source])

…and, for that matter:

Taking that bite before leaving

I can’t remember how it started? As we strolled out of
the trees and onto the savannah, did I pick it carelessly
as we walked hand in hand, then with my lips on yours and
yours groping for mine, with that hunger did I take the bite
right there in front of God and everybody?

Or had I planned to take what was not mine?
It’s been long enough that my calculations
are lost to me, except for this: that the deed is done.

It was cold and hard, tart, dripping down my arm, such
a fine contrast to your warm mouth on mine, right after
that bite, you eating it with me, but my tooth marks on the skin.

I pack and leave after that, the place lost its thrill. No more
the sweet fruit of life’s tree, no longer crisp delights from
the tree of the wise, I have one child after another who can’t
get along but still sometimes
I dream

… we are back, we have not gone too far. We are still
pristine. Life is easy. We have all we need.
We still have the Other’s scent and luminescence.

I awake
with a start, and a weep, reach out for your
skin as I knew it then, uncovered, without all
these accouterments, minus all these layers.

(Susan Baller-Shepard [source])