[Video: high-definition trailer for the wordless 1992 film Baraka, a sequel of sorts to the better-known Koyaanisqatsi (and directed by that film’s photographer). According to Roger Ebert’s review of the restored DVD edition (2008), “‘Baraka’ is a Sufi word meaning ‘a blessing, or the breath, or the essence of life, from which the evolutionary process unfolds.’ In Islam generally, it is ‘a quality or force emanating originally from Allah but capable of transmission to objects or to human beings.’ In Judaism, it is a ceremonial blessing. In Swahili, it means ‘blessing.’ In French slang, it means ‘good luck.'”]
From whiskey river:
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.
(Jeanette Winterson [source])
…and:
The Ninth Elegy
(excerpt)Why, if it’s possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf-edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it?…Oh, not because happiness,
that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practice the heart,
that would also be in the laurel…
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.
(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])
Not from whiskey river:
It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.
(Kenichi Ohmae [source])
…and:
Hug
The older I get, the more I like hugging. When I was little, the people hugging me were much larger. In their grasp I was a rag doll. In adolescence, my body was too tense to relax for a hug. Later, after the loss of virginity—which was anything but a loss—the extreme proximity of the other person, the smell of hair, the warmth of the skin, the sound of breathing in the dark—these were mysterious and delectable. This hug had two primary components: the anticipation of sex and the pleasure of intimacy, which itself is a combination of trust and affection. It was this latter combination that came to characterize the hugging I have experienced only in recent years, a hugging that knows no distinctions of gender or age. When this kind of hug is mutual, for a moment the world is perfect the way it is, and the tears we shed for it are perfect too. I guess it is an embrace.
(Ron Padgett [source])
…and:
The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie in New York City
In case there’s a line, I show up at seven
but the man at the counter says the cookies
won’t be ready until eleven and by then
I’ll be on the train, nearly halfway back
to Providence. He and the dozen people
behind me are waiting, so I quickly choose
a ham croissant and a blueberry muffin
glittering like a hotel lobby chandelier.
The shop’s a dab of yellow on the block,
its only seats along the front window
where I sit and look at bleary people stopped
at the bodega across the street, touching
apples and mangos until they find the ones
most untouched. With my first bite,
the croissant comes undone, its shawl
falling to the floor. I break off the peak
of the muffin and hear the sugar overfill
the valleys of my back teeth. I’m trying not
to think about how it must taste, the best
chocolate chip cookie in New York City,
how big, how warm, how it would’ve
collapsed in my mouth, traveled my blood,
made wild pinwheels of my cells.
How much time have I lost
hunting perfection? Once, before cell phones,
before the days when cars couldn’t linger
outside the airport doors, my plane was
delayed on the runway for four hours,
and my husband, before he was my husband,
waited for me in his cramped Plymouth
battered from years of lake effect snow.
He just waited, reading a book, turning on
the car every so often to listen to the radio.
When I finally arrived, he was surprised
that I thought he’d be gone. He said
no one asked why he was there so long
or what it was he was waiting for.
(Julie Danho [source])
____________
Aside: When I tagged this post with the names of the writers cited, WordPress noted I had tagged at least one other post Kenichi Ohmae. Surprised, I searched for the other references to him. There is exactly one, from 11½ years ago. (Furthermore, it’s the same quotation. Of the post itself, I remember only the title: one of the earliest, and one of my favorites, in the “Is this cryptic, or does it only seem so?” mini-genre.) Back then, I apparently included with each of these Friday micro-anthologies some sort of explanatory note; that Friday’s said, “This is a tribute to people who’ve recently shot off the edge of a personal or professional cliff, with plenty of forward momentum — and who know better than to look down.” I guess today’s post is another such tribute… at a time when not looking down so often feels like a practical impossibility.
Still learning, see?
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