[Image: “Discontinuities,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.

Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

(Mark Strand [source])

…and:

One spring, as peach blossoms filled the valley below with a spray of white fragrance, an ancient sage wandered the Heights of Shang. There on a hillside stripped of everything else, he saw a large and extraordinary tree. So huge it was, the horses that drew a hundred chariots could be sheltered under its shade. “What a tree this is!” he thought. Imagining the amount of timber it must contain, he marveled that the tree had never been cut down.

But as he sat beneath it and looked up into the tree’s branches, he saw how twisted and crooked they were. Turning in every direction, none of them were large enough to be made into rafters or beams. He reached up and broke off a twig, tasting the sap. It was sharp and bitter. “This tree would be useless for tapping,” he concluded, “producing no syrup of any worth.” The leaves, too, gave off an offensive odor as he broke them. They were too fragile to be woven into mats or braided into baskets. They would not even make good mulch! Even the roots, as he studied them, were so gnarled and knotty that one could never carve a bowl or fashion a fine decorative box out of them.

The sage said at last; “This, indeed, is a tree good for nothing! That is why it has reached so great an age. The cinnamon tree can be eaten; so it is cut down. The varnish tree is useful, and therefore incisions are made in it. We all know the advantage of being useful, but only this tree knows the advantage of being useless!” The wise man sat in the shade of that great tree for the rest of the day, as a light wind drifted up from the valley below. He breathed the scent of distant peach blossoms and sat in studied silence, happily contemplating his own uselessness.

(John Chang McCurdy and David R. Brower (foreword), adapted from a poem by Chuang Tzu [source: the book itself is here, but I didn’t find this text within it, or anywhere but in an unrelated (?) book, here])

Not from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The Seven Selves

In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whisper:

First Self: Here, in this madman, I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night. I can bear my fate no longer, and now I rebel.

Second Self: Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given to me to be this madman’s joyous self. I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts. It is I that would rebel against my weary existence.

Third Self: And what of me, the love-ridden self, the flaming brand of wild passion and fantastic desires? It is I the love-sick self who would rebel against this madman.

Fourth Self: I, amongst you all, am the most miserable, for naught was given me but odious hatred and destructive loathing. It is I, the tempest-like self, the one born in the black caves of Hell, who would protest against serving this madman.

Fifth Self: Nay, it is I, the thinking self, the fanciful self, the self of hunger and thirst, the one doomed to wander without rest in search of unknown things and things not yet created; it is I, not you, who would rebel.

Sixth Self: And I, the working self, the pitiful labourer, who, with patient hands, and longing eyes, fashion the days into images and give the formless elements new and eternal forms—it is I, the solitary one, who would rebel against this restless madman.

Seventh Self: How strange that you all would rebel against this man, because each and every one of you has a preordained fate to fulfill. Ah! could I but be like one of you, a self with a determined lot! But I have none, I am the do-nothing self, the one who sits in the dumb, empty nowhere and nowhen, while you are busy re-creating life. Is it you or I, neighbours, who should rebel?

When the seventh self thus spake the other six selves looked with pity upon him but said nothing more; and as the night grew deeper one after the other went to sleep enfolded with a new and happy submission.

But the seventh self remained watching and gazing at nothingness, which is behind all things.

(Kahlil Gibran [source])

…and:

Robinson’s Telephone Rings

the Tuesday after he was last seen.

A policeman is there to pick the shrill thing up.

Who is it? the couple of friends present ask as he cups it to his ear.

Then hangs up. There was no one there.

They have come to recon a vacant property—a mise en scéne:

Knoll butterfly chairs—a pair of them—

two red socks soaking in the white bathroom sink,

a saucer of milk for the cat to drink,

a stack of reel-to-reel tapes,

a matchbook from the Italian Village where he ate his last spaghetti dinner,

& two books he’d been re-reading, or wanted someone to think he had:

The Devils & The Tragic Sense of Life.

Preoccupation & a certain mode of self-presentation.

Even when absent, Robinson has a style.

No wallet, though. No watch, no sleeping bag, no bankbook.

The apartment looks the way it feels to read a newspaper that’s one day old.

The policeman wants to go back outside, among the lemons & fog & barking dogs.

Out where the sun can copper their faces.

Writing takes space, recordings take time.

The place puts the policeman in mind of something he read recently, about the collapse of a dead star.

About how it takes ages for the light to become motionless.

Seven years after a disappearance, a person can be pronounced dead.

But that’s nothing compared to the size of the ocean.

(Kathleen Rooney [source])