[Image: “Heather Lane, ‘Falling, Failing’ performance still,” posted on Flickr by the staff of the Glasgow School of Art. Says the artist, per the caption to this photo: “Place is made up of consistent and organised structures that have a comforting reliability about them… I use weight as a force that alters the balance of us both; our equilibrium. I explore at what moment I stop holding on and start letting go, allowing weight and gravity to push me to ground.”]

For this week’s Friday post, a twist: an opening from Wikipedia:

In physics, a moment is a mathematical expression involving the product of a force and perpendicular distance from the point of action of the force. Moments are usually defined with respect to a fixed reference point and refer to physical quantities located some distance from the reference point.

And now to resume our regular programming, from whiskey river:

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make the final judgments and put everything together.

(Saul Bellow [source])

…and:

Nights When I Drove

from dark rural highways
into a city wild with light
I remember you in a rented car
in blackness, a loose map on your knees
both of us tense with sudden geography

Or in an airport bus after days of solitude
as if returning to this planet from another
with time pushed back into our bodies
only our eyes holding on to each other
with the danger of our love

(Michael Ondaatje [source])

Not from whiskey river:

One Kind of Hunger

The Seneca carry stories in satchels.

They are made of ?pounded corn and a grandmother’s throat.

The right boy will approach the dampness of a forest with a sling, a modest twining wreath for the bodies of ?birds. A liquid eye.

When ruffed from leaves, the breath of ?flight is dissolute.

What else, the moment of ?weightlessness before a great plunge?

In a lost place, a stone will find the boy.

Give me your birds, she will say, and I will tell you a story.

A stone, too, admits hunger.

The boy is willing. Loses all his beaks.

What necklace will his grandmother make now.

The sun has given the stone a mouth. With it, she sings of what has been lost.

She sings and sings and sings.

The boy listens, forgets, remembers. Becomes distracted.

The necklace will be heavy, impossible to wear.

(Lehua M. Taitano [source])

…and:

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves…

We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

(Milan Kundera [source])

…and:

Einstein’s Happiest Moment

— for Susanne

Einstein’s happiest moment
occurred when he realized
a falling man falling
beside a falling apple
could also be described
as an apple and a man at rest
while the world falls around them.

And my happiest moment
occurred when I realized
you were falling for me,
right down to the core, and the rest,
relatively speaking, has flown past
faster than the speed of light.

(Richard M. Berlin [source])