[Image: “The Greatest Transformation in My Life,” by Irmeli Hasanen. (Found it on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The title of the photo is an excerpt from a quotation ascribed to William James. For more about this quotation, see the About the image note at the bottom of this post.]
From whiskey river:
Transformation
I haven’t written a single poem
in months.
I’ve lived humbly, reading the paper,
pondering the riddle of power
and the reasons for obedience.
I’ve watched sunsets
(crimson, anxious),
I’ve heard the birds grow quiet
and night’s muteness.
I’ve seen sunflowers dangling
their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman
had gone strolling through the gardens.
September’s sweet dust gathered
on the windowsill and lizards
hid in the bends of walls.
I’ve taken long walks,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
(Adam Zagajewski [source])
…and:
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment. We all got to face the nothingness before us and behind. Call it sleep. We all begin in sleep and that’s where we find our end. Even in between, sleep keeps trying to claim us. To stay awake in life as much as possible—that may be the point…
Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don’t know why. It lives and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion…
There is no trace where we were. No arrows pointing to the place we’re headed. We are the trackless beat, the invisible light, the thought without a word to speak. Poured water, struck match. Before the nothing, we are the moment.
(Louise Erdrich [source])
…and (third stanza):
Leaves
1
Every October it becomes important, no, necessary
to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded
by leaves turning; it’s not just the symbolism,
to confront in the death of the year your death,
one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony
isn’t lost on you that nature is most seductive
when it’s about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its
incipient exit, an ending that at least so far
the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)
have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe
is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception
because of course nature is always renewing itself—
the trees don’t die, they just pretend,
go out in style, and return in style: a new style.2
Is it deliberate how far they make you go
especially if you live in the city to get far
enough away from home to see not just trees
but only trees? The boring highways, roadsigns, high
speeds, 10-axle trucks passing you as if they were
in an even greater hurry than you to look at leaves:
so you drive in terror for literal hours and it looks
like rain, or snow, but it’s probably just clouds
(too cloudy to see any color?) and you wonder,
given the poverty of your memory, which road had the
most color last year, but it doesn’t matter since
you’re probably too late anyway, or too early—
whichever road you take will be the wrong one
and you’ve probably come all this way for nothing.3
You’ll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won’t last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You’re on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won’t last, you don’t want it to last. You
can’t stand any more. But you don’t want it to stop.
It’s what you’ve come for. It’s what you’ll
come back for. It won’t stay with you, but you’ll
remember that it felt like nothing else you’ve felt
or something you’ve felt that also didn’t last.
(Lloyd Schwartz [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change
Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change
is train tracks. She’s sure of it.
The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery
by the side, but not the tracks.
I’ve watched one for three years, she says,
and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.
Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track
near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train
is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.
The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.
Every Tuesday on Morales Street
butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.
The widow in the tilted house
spices her soup with cinnamon.
Ask her what doesn’t change.Stars explode.
The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.
The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.
The train whistle still wails its ancient sound
but when it goes away, shrinking back
from the walls of the brain,
it takes something different with it every time.
(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])
…and (the narrator here is a polar bear who has learned to write):
I have to admit: my life changed because I’d made myself an author. Or to be precise, it wasn’t exactly me who did that, I was made an author by the sentences I’d written, and that wasn’t even the end of the story: each result gave birth to the next, and I found myself being transported to a place I hadn’t known existed. Writing was a more dangerous acrobatic stunt than dancing atop a rolling ball. To be sure, I’d worked myself to the bone learning to dance on that ball and actually broke some bones rehearsing, but in the end I attained my goal. In the end I knew with certainty that I could balance on a rolling object — but when it comes to writing, I can make no such claims. Where was the ball of authorship rolling? It couldn’t just roll in a straight line, or I’d fall off the stage. My ball was supposed to spin on its axis and at the same time circle the midpoint of the stage, like the Earth revolving around the sun.
Writing demanded as much strength as hunting. When I caught the scent of prey, the first thing I felt was despair: would I succeed in catching my prey, or would I fail yet again? This uncertainty was the hunter’s daily lot. When my hunger grew too strong, I was incapable of hunting…
(Yoko Tawada [source])
___________
About the image: The “William James” quotation from which the photo takes its title is apparently a widespread misattribution to James, per Wikiquote. I haven’t yet found the definitive source of this misattribution. However, I did find it ascribed to him in Chapter 2 — on page 48 — of the best-selling 1980s New Age book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, by Marilyn Ferguson. (Ferguson’s “Readings and References” chapter at the end of the book cites no William James work for this passage. It does cite his Varieties of Religious Experience as a source for a different quotation in the chapter which follows; I checked the text of that James work, too, but found nothing using any of the key phrases. I’m wondering now if the quotation in question might’ve come from a foreword/introduction by a different author in a later edition of Ferguson’s book — or, for that matter, by a different author in an edition of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience.)
Wherever the passage originally came from, Aquarian Conspiracy was so popular that it’s easy to imagine that book’s mistake as the ultimate source for all later citations.
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