[Image: “The 8th Floor,” by J. Michel Carriere (username “lazyartist”) on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) The photographer provides few details about the photo, other than that it was taken in New York City — its caption simply reads, “Wishing you were here.” Maybe that means something, after all?]
From whiskey river:
Place to Be
Days the weather sits
in the endless sky,
the clouds drifting byThe winter’s snow,
summer’s heat,
same street.Nothing changes
but the faces, the people,
all the things they do’spite of heaven and hell
or city hall—
Nothing’s wiser than a moment.No one’s chance
is simply changed by wishing,
right or wrong.What you do is how you get along.
What you did is all it ever means.
(Robert Creeley [source])
…and:
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.
(Henry Miller [source])
…and:
Ungodly
You want to flee, but flee where? The urban concrete elsewhere
does not seethe, does not breathe the scent of carob trees.
Flee, you hear it everywhere, the taxi driver, the farmer at the laiki
tell you, Go! and are puzzled that you are still here,
you who could actually leave with your American passport.
Pack your clothes, leave behind the ruined lives, translate home into
longing, elsewhere you might lift your chin, live unburdened.The government, the Americans . . . no one cares, the taxi driver complains,
and the farmer at the laiki selling you the sweetest pears, advises
to keep them fresh, Eat them cold, nearly frozen.
He shakes his head, murmurs Ellada . . . , this ancient land of rock cliffs,
seas that bleed their myths, Greece with its tales of flight
and light, returns and rebirths, keeps teaching the stubborn human lesson
still: the gods won’t save you, neither will you stop wishing it of them.
After all, you are human and they are not.
(Adrianne Kalfopoulou [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Washing dishes by hand, I give myself the chance to remember that this is wrong — that most of life is ordinary; that ordinary isn’t the enemy but instead something nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock upon which the rest of experience ebbs and flows. Embrace this — the warm water, the pruned hands, the prismatic gleam of the bubbles and the steady passage from dish to dish to dish — and feel, however briefly, the breath of actual time, a reality that lies dormant and plausible under all the clutter we pile on top of it. A bird makes its indecipherable call to another bird, a song from a passing car warps in the Doppler effect and I’m reminded, if only for a moment, that I need a lot less than I think I do and that I don’t have to leave my kitchen to get it.
(Mike Powell [source])
It Was As If a Ladder
It was as if
a ladder,and each rung,
real to itself,
round or slat,
narrow or wide,
rope or metal—and as you ascended,
real to yourself,
the rungs directly above
you solid,
directly beneath you, solid.Scent of peeled orange
mixed with gasoline,
sound of hammers.Farther below,
the rungs one by one vanished.Farther above,
the rungs one by one
vanished.And the side-rails’ lines
vanished, as into
a drawing by Brunelleschi.Scent of peeled orange
and gasoline,
sound of hammers.Grip now, night-dog, your barking:
this ladder in air,
invented by others, received by others.
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
…and:
William Condon did some lovely experiments which show, on film, that when we talk our whole body is involved in many tiny movements, establishing a master rhythm that coordinates our body movements with the speech rhythms. Without this beat, the speech becomes incomprehensible. “Rhythm,” he says, is “a fundamental aspect of the organisation of behavior.” To act, we have to have the beat.
Condon went on to photograph people listening to a speaker. His films show listeners making almost the same micromovements of lips and face as the speaker is making, almost simultaneously—a fiftieth of a second behind. They are locked into the same beat. “Communication,” he says, “is like a dance, with everyone engaged in intricate, shared movements across many subtle dimensions.”
Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action.
(Ursula K. Le Guin [source])
…and (the “Peck” mentioned here is a character in the novel, a messy, manipulative consciousness-raiser of the 1960s free-your-mind-via-sex-yoga-and-controlled-substances sort; “Marian,” a cancer-ridden young victim of Peck’s):
Allah kareem, an Arab leper had said to me once—nose-less, almost lipless, loathsome, scaled like a fish—Allah kareem, God is kind. I dropped coins and fled from his appalling visage and his appalling faith. My impulse is to do the same when I think of Marian…
I do not accept, I am not reconciled. But one thing she did. She taught me the stupidity of the attempt to withdraw and be free of trouble and harm. That was as foolish as Peck’s version of ahimsa and the states of instant nirvana he thought he could reach by sugar cube or nose or the exercise of the anal sphincters. One is not made pure by blowing water through the nose or by retiring from the treadmill. I disliked Peck because of his addiction to the irrational, and I still do; but what made him hard for me to bear was my own foolishness made manifest in him.
There is no way to step off the treadmill. It is all treadmill.
(Wallace Stegner [source])
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