[Image: Jazz pianist Ellis Larkins. (I haven’t been able to track down the artist who created this drawing/painting/etching/whatever, but this seems based on the cover of Larkins’s album, A Smooth One. For one of his signature recordings, use the little audio-player thing just below this caption.]
From whiskey river:
For us there are always shackles, cages, constrictions. We are not pure beings, not whole selves; not animals, not gods. For all the purity of our aspirations, we live, as Kafka did, in the middle of things, in a room between other rooms, a self among other selves, in what literary types call a “liminal space.” Trapped between two realms, the earthly and the heavenly, we’re unable to fully inhabit, or escape, either one, but can only gesture longingly in both directions, flailing our useless limbs, like an upended beetle trying to get out of bed.
(Robert Cohen)
…and:
Elegy
What to do with this knowledge
that our living is not guaranteed?Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.All above us
is the kingdom of touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching
the touches of the disappearing, things.
(Aracelis Girmay [source])
…and:
That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armor, and the naked child is flung out into the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells — he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realize you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenges, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
(Ted Hughes)
