Cold. Delicious. Illusory.

[Image: “On Ice,” by Michael Pardo. (Found on Flickr; using it here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!) As the title suggests, this is not a high-speed photo of water splashing, but (as the photographer says) a “strange formation” in his freezer. He adds: “This one looks a bit like a supine gecko holding an Allen key in its foot.” Not sure I get the gecko, but the Allen key: yeah!]

From whiskey river:

Happiness

A state you must dare not enter
with hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marshes, and all

the roads leading to a castle
that doesn’t exist.
But there it is, as promised,

with its perfect bridge above
the crocodiles,
and its doors forever open.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and:

I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature — as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

…and:

We’re told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It’s possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there’s nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.

(Arundhati Roy [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Not Knowing Why

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings,
lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger.
What danger on this island in the middle
of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel
the lift of wind under their iridescent wings,
because they were born to fly,
because they have nothing else to do,
because wind and water are their elements,
their Bach, their Homer, Shakespeare,
and Spielberg. They wheel over the lake,
the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes.

In autumn something urges
them toward Texas marshes. They follow
their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles
creeping along geometric roads, going toward small boxes,
toward lives as narrow or as wide as the pond,
as glistening or as gray as the sky.
They do not know why. They fly, they fly.

(Ann Struthers [source])

…and:

To Judgment: An Assay

You change a life
as eating an artichoke changes the taste
of whatever is eaten after.
Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat—
not objectively present at all—
and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:
to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.
The piano, that good servant,
has none of you in her at all, she lends herself
to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.
Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot
whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.
Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow,
coldly delicious.
For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn’t mind,
not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes.
Judgment decrees what remains—
the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment
of a boy-king entering Persia: “Burn it,” he says,
and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner
of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle
fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children.
The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments—
judged beetles especially loved by God,
“because He had made so many.” For judgment can be tender:
I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever
carries the quail. Yet however much
I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you:
you are too much in me, weighing without pity your own worth.
When I have erased you from me entirely,
disrobed of your measuring adjectives,
stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns,
when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter—
not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter—
then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not.
As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk,
find it sweet.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

#48: Why do we so love the state of mind we call “nostalgia”? Not purely — or at all — because what we remember of the good old days was in fact good. (At any given moment, much of what we know is not good in the slightest; why would that change simply because we regard the moment in hindsight?)

No: we love nostalgia because it presents our minds with malleable experience. No matter what actually happened back then, no matter how it made us feel or what caused it or what it caused to happen, we love our memory of it exactly because we can shape the memory to suit us.

Our senses of the present and the future differ from nostalgia primarily because we cannot shape them to our liking. The present is what it ineluctably is; the future has a bad habit of second-guessing us — of making fools or liars of our hopes and expectations. (This may explain why people cling so stubbornly to ridiculous, even dangerous, political opinions — because such opinions turn the present moment into a simulacrum of itself, into a toy doll amenable to manipulation. It’s the only way to make the present “be” what we want it to be.) But the past, ahhh — if a blemish existed then, rub the spot now until it disappears; if an ugly stray hair sprouted there, pluck it out; if something got in the way of an ideal, remove the obstacle. See? There. What a simply perfect moment that was!

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)