[Image: The so-called “Cosmic Bat Nebula,” officially designated Lynds’ Catalog of Dark Nebulae — i.e., LDN — 43 (photo credited to Mark Hanson and Mike Selby). Spotted this photo at NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” (APOD) post for October 27; the caption there notes: “Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.”]
This Only
A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here.
Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,
When the first snow fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.
(Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Robert Hass [source; not exactly canonical, but it’ll do for now])
…and:
I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.
(Roberto Bolaño [source])
Not from whiskey river:
There were dead children in every family, carried off by sudden incurable diseases: diarrhea, convulsions, diphtheria. All that remained of their brief time on earth were tombstones shaped like baby cribs and inscribed “an angel in heaven.” There were photos that people showed while furtively wiping their eyes, and hushed, almost serene conversations that frightened surviving children, who believed they were living on borrowed time. They would not be safe until the age of twelve or fifteen, having made it through whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, mumps, ear infections, and bronchitis every winter, escaped tuberculosis and meningitis, at which time people would say they’d “filled out”…
The blurred and damaged photo of a little girl standing on a bridge in front of a guardrail. She has short hair, slender thighs, and knobby knees. She holds her hand over her eyes to block the sun. She is laughing. Written on the back of the photo, Ginette 1937. On her tombstone: died at the age of six on Holy Thursday, 1938.
(Annie Ernaux [source])
…and:
Halloween
Some yellow sunflowers open down the street,
A ladder is open beneath someone’s apple tree.
Beneath a dead sky the contours are flattened.
So the land of the dead is closer today.The land of the dead, they say, is closer.
But what if my lot lies with the living?
Out in the yard a long-billed bird eats something from dust.
Its throat has a dark patch in the shape of a smile
But full, as if its throat had been slit open.But look, the bird is still pecking and alive.
Elsewhere, a sports game, ropes of rain come down and open the earth.
Here it’s so dry they’d just roll off the dust.But what if my loves, like the bird, are living?
What if my loves, like the bird, are living for now?Most of the apples have already fallen.
The sunflowers turn into dusty spiked balls.
But what if my land is the land of the living?
The bird from the dust takes flight
Then turns multiple—A handful of birds rising in the dead sky
Opened to receive them.
But my loves for now are here and living, and I want more of them.
Like the bird on the ground I pick what I need from the dust.
(Lindsay Turner [source])
…and:
#61: We vote (we insist) for the sake of a future we desire: a future peopled with laughing children, adults who validate or complement our own tastes and preferences with their own, strangers who wish us no ill (as we wish for them). Yet we vote also in rebuke of the remembered past: those horrors which haunt our minds from nightmares we experienced ourselves or witnessed in the lives of others, and never want to live through or see again. At the conjunction of those two impulses lies the empty oval we fill with ink, the switch we choose to throw, the thumb we turn up or down. To vote only from the one impulse — the smiling hope or the fretful anger — is to betray the holiness of the responsibility not just as citizens, but as human beings: to kid only ourselves (if not anyone else) that we are good.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
