In the End the Mystery Is All There Is

[Image: “the SMILES MYSTERIOUSLY in DA VINCI GALLERY,” by user “RANT 73” on Flickr.com. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) The caption, in Dutch, alludes to a computer-based analysis of the painting — described here and elsewhere — which determined that “she is 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.” I leave it to your judgment whether such an analysis is useful as an exercise in art appreciation.]

From whiskey river:

Wait for an Autumn Day
(from Ekelöf)

Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly
weary sun, for dusty air,
a pale day’s weather.

Wait for the maple’s rough, brown leaves,
etched like an old man’s hands,
for chestnuts and acorns,

for an evening when you sit in the garden
with a notebook and the bonfire’s smoke contains
the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.

Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete’s breath,
for a truce among the clouds,
for the silence of trees,

for the moment when you reach absolute peace
and accept the thought that what you’ve lost
is gone for good.

Wait for the moment when you might not
even miss those you loved
who are no more.

Wait for a bright, high day,
for an hour without doubt or pain.
Wait for an autumn day.

(Adam Zagajewski [source])

…and:

If it happens that the human race doesn’t make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned, and in the end the mystery is all there is.

(James Howard Kunstler [source])

…and:

Catchpenny Road

Summer ends tonight.
Air cuts into our lungs
as frost cuts the field
into flowers. Stars catch
in the pond’s dark water
drawing us farther
from the lighted houses.
We catch our arms
in circles round our chests
as if this were protection
against darkness.

Spiked firs border the road.
Behind each one are ghosts
whose names we don’t know,
who watch us, who
withhold themselves,
who’d never hurt us.
They come to you in your sleep,
sit in a circle round your bed,
saying the things the living
want to say and can’t.
You try to move your head, try
to move into their world of light
where the lace on the child’s
white dress burns your skin
like a kiss. But no,
touching their lips to yours,
they go, wordlessly and without cause,
as only the dead might.

Mist spills from the trees
as you talk and we walk
from valley to hill, hill to valley,
till we come to the place
where we left off, unmarked road
crossing itself in the dark.
Blackened by frost, leaves
blow over the pond,
absorbing the water’s stain,
sinking towards the stars’ reflections.
You kneel, smooth the water
with your hands, and say nothing.
Perfect in their pain,
the dead surround us, holding
stones in their hands like coins.
Money they would lend us.

(Elizabeth Spires [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Letter from Swan’s Island

The island’s dark tonight.
The radio crackles with static, news
of a blackout, the voice
coming through first loud, then soft,
as if a storm were moving
to cut all lifelines off. My one-room
cabin has a bed, a table, a chair.
Living this way, I understand better
that scene by an anonymous
illuminator: a row of monks
eating at a rough table, diagonals
of light slicing across the room
to fall, as if by accident,
on their simple meal. The black
and white tiles on the floor
a symbol of the formal repetitions
of the simplest life, or maybe
an oblique allusion to a paradox
of theology: the complementary nature
of good and evil. Is evil possible here
where everyone lives so individually
and nature appears to be neutral
toward everything but itself?
Some mornings I wake too suddenly,
the light on the wall
brilliant and unfamiliar, and wonder
for a moment, where am I?
I answer myself, my disembodied voice
high and far off
like what I imagine saints and martyrs
heard in moments of ecstasy: Swan’s Island.
Lightheaded, I rise, make coffee,
settling into the simple ceremony
of another morning. Outside the sea birds
pick the clam flats clean, fly off,
returning late in the afternoon
looking for more to scavenge.
Good days, I swim in the quarry,
sun myself on the rocks, and plan
a diary. One entry: I feel
this place to be a rough approximation
of heaven, the heaven of the lost…
But then I wonder if a diary
would be superfluous and put it off.

Days pass here, weeks slip away,
and even when it isn’t,
it seems to be Sunday,
irreal, subdued, the queer, slowed-down
feeling of late afternoon
spreading through the hours
of an entire day. Impersonal, yet benign,
the sun rains indiscriminately down
on everything, instead of singling out
particular objects, so that
even the rocks out by the tide line,
normally gray-brown, become heightened,
false, and I have to turn away.

Sometimes the lobstermen wave to me.
I must seem frivolous to them,
an outsider, with my pants rolled up
to the knees, standing knee-deep in water,
a shell or rock in my hands.
We have a code. I wave a white
handkerchief above my head,
they blow their foghorns back.
Once means the mail’s in,
twice, a storm by afternoon,
three times, the weather
will clear by evening.
But really, after a month
in a place like this, there’s no use
to wonder why the sea does this or that,
what time it is, or whether
the approaching storm will be a bad one.
If I think of anything here,
it’s the peculiar way
the sea gets into everything,
softening the crackers I seal
in an airtight jar, rotting the armchair
where I sit in the evening,
looking into the evening’s afterlight.
It smells peculiar, damp,
as if it had been tossed overboard
from a dory, thought better of,
and hastily retrieved.

I have a fantasy: to walk on water.
Not eastward, the Atlantic far out
scares me, but long, island-hopping
giant steps up and down
the coast the way as a child
I’d make my “two-legged” compass
walk the map. Walking to school
a thousand winter mornings,
I imagined each thought, each step,
an exercise in good and evil;
or, after confession, I’d cup
my hands around my breath,
saved for an hour, knowing I’d sin
again, the scars on my soul
whitening like the scars on my hands
where I burnt them on the stove.
Swan’s Island. A world
existing side by side with yours,
where love struggles to perfect
itself, and finally perfect,
finds it has no object.
The waking dream’s intact—
the world continues not to change,
and staying the same, changes us.

(Elizabeth Spires [source])

…and:

Stalin wrote and thought much about the science of controlling and manipulating human nature, and, as we saw in his enthusiastic support of Lysenkoism (and also Pavlovian psychology), he felt that behavior in animals was completely determined by the environment, which in turn offered the prospect of fundamentally controlling it. This did not work out well. Historians estimate that at least three million people (and probably more than nine million) died because of Stalin; this included roughly eight hundred thousand executions, over 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag, and hundreds of thousands of deaths related to the resettlement of ethnic minorities. A notable aspect of Mao’s philosophy was an analogous confidence in the malleability of human behavior, on both individual and collective levels. Mao felt that the state must directly intervene to shape the beliefs and actions of human beings because the transformation of society “depends entirely on the consciousness, the wills, and the activities of men.” Mao did not think highly of notions of an innate, shared human nature…

We should be humble in the face of temptations to engineer society in opposition to our instincts. Fortunately, we do not need to exercise any such authority in order to have a good life. The arc of our evolutionary history is long. But it bends toward goodness.

(Nicholas A. Christakis [source])