[Video: Ten Things I Have Learned About the Sea, by Lorenzo Fonda. (Identified as the inspiration for the second whiskey river excerpt below.) For an interview with the filmmaker, see this brief interview in The Atlantic (August 3, 2011).]

From whiskey river:

Explaining the Attempt to the Doctors, Beginning with Two Lines from Darwish

They asked: How would you like your death?

Blue, like stars pouring from a window.

I took the blue pill, and then
another. It was easy

but still my ghost, here, tethered.

I have been living such a long time
for someone my age.
I have been living in pain, etc. etc.

Yes I have tried
the hard labor of joy. Yes

most days I do not want
to die and too take pleasure

in sparrows, splashed sun.

Sadness has a long tongue and wide mouth and hounds

me wherever I go.
There are women
who hold the door open, beckon.

They are blue and it is blue where I am not.

The thing about stars is they are dead,
or some are and there is no discernible difference.

Do you understand? Something calls my name
like my mother used to.

I am tired

and something is calling, calling.

(Leila Chatti [source])

…and:

Ten Things I Have Learned about Life

1. Life will lure you into oblivion.

2. Life is inconceivably bigger than me.

3. Life is a mirror. If I am happy, it will be happy. If I am sad, it will be sad.

4. Life doesn’t know what time it is, since time lies in life itself.

5. Life is a living creature, and no breathing movement of it is equal to the previous.

6. Life will kick your sorry human ass, no matter what, anytime.

7. Life will bore you to death.

8. Or it could make you feel like a six year old kid again.

9. Life is both heaven and hell, and the living soul can only guess what awaits beneath.

10. Life knows something that we don’t.

(“adapted from Lorenzo Fonda’s Ten Things I Have Learned About The Sea“; otherwise unsourced)

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