[Image: “Self-Portrait: Me First, Safety Last #3,” by user MattysFlicks on Flickr (used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!). This is actually a composite photo — multiple exposures: “one of the scene, one of myself with the hammer, one of my pried open eye while leaning over my workbench and a bunch of photos of a pair of safety glasses that I cut up using a pair of cable cutters and lineman’s pliers… I brought everything into Photoshop, assembled the scene, and added some motion blurs, some blood, an umbilical cord, and some babes.” The photographer has posted several more of these staged accidents at Flickr — each capturing an apparent split-second while actually requiring hours of in-between time.]
From whiskey river:
Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.
(Emil Cioran [source])
…and:
Evening Talk
Everything you didn’t understand
Made you what you are. Strangers
Whose eye you caught on the street
Studying you. Perhaps they were the all-seeing
Illuminati? They knew what you didn’t,
And left you troubled like a strange dream.Not even the light stayed the same.
Where did all that hard glare come from?
And the scent, as if mythical beings
Were being groomed and fed stalks of hay
On these roofs drifting among the evening clouds.You didn’t understand a thing!
You loved the crowds at the end of the day
That brought you so many mysteries.
There was always someone you were meant to meet
Who for some reason wasn’t waiting.
Or perhaps they were? But not here, friend.You should have crossed the street
And followed that obviously demented woman
With the long streak of blood-red hair
Which the sky took up like a distant cry.
(Charles Simic [source])
…and:
I want you to stop running from thing to thing to thing, and to sit down at the table, to offer the people you love something humble and nourishing, like soup and bread, like a story, like a hand holding another hand while you pray. We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day. But I’m coming to believe it’s in the in-between spaces that our lives change, and that the real beauty lies there.
(Shauna Niequist [source])
