Hayan Charara

[Image: sculpture in black iron, Durante o Sono (“During Sleep”) by Rui Chafes. (Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, found on Flickr and used here under a Creative Commons License — thank you!) The photographer’s description of this work says, among other things: “The equilibrium is presented as being solid, but unexpected; the ratio of the image of weight to that of fragility is inverted, the question of gravity is raised. Might the title, Durante o Sono, refer to a nightmare moment? Does this organism represent the dream itself? Or a frightening perception of its strangeness?”]

From whiskey river:

There’s more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You’d think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we’re going to join.

(Meghan Daum [source])

…and:

As for this reclusiveness — I think of it as profoundly helpful to my work. Darkness, silence and solitude, by throwing their heavy cloaks over my shoulders, have forced me to recreate all the light, all the music and the joys of nature and society in myself. My spiritual being no longer comes up against the barriers of the visible world and nothing hampers its freedom…
When by chance a thin ray of sunlight manages to slip in here… my whole being, like the ancient statue of Memnon, that gave out harmonious sounds when the rays of the rising sun struck it, bursts with joy, and I feel myself transported into realms of radiant light…
I have tried to follow life itself, in which unsuspected aspects of a person suddenly reveal themselves to our eyes. — We live alongside people, thinking we know them. All that’s missing is the incident that will make them suddenly appear other than we knew them to be…
Throughout our lives we have alongside us like a fellow prisoner shackled by the same chain, a man who is different from our physical self — You see, when you think of yourself, you create a certain idea of yourself. And when one looks in a glass, the mirror reflects our real image. — The other was a stranger — It was the spiritual self. — Well, it is this one alone that matters to me.
I only consider my objective self (take this word in the sense meant by philosophers) as an experimental instrument which has no inherent interest but that links me to my spiritual side so that I can penetrate certain realities and especially the shadowy areas of consciousness on which I try to throw light —

(Marcel Proust [source])

…and:

The Bookstall
Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were
freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open—that one
and that—and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.
For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read—these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to the earth.

(Linda Pastan [source])

[Read more…]

[The StoryCorps project takes as its mission simply to record people’s personal stories, via interviews, and make them available to anyone who wants to listen to them. The organization has won numerous awards for its work — one of those “simple” ideas (like the similar one behind the Humans of New York photo project) which it’s great to see rewarded with praise.]

From whiskey river:

In summer, waiting for night, we’d pose against the afterglow on corners, watching traffic cruise through the neighborhood. Sometimes, a car would go by without its headlights on and we’d all yell, “Lights!”

“Lights!” we’d keep on yelling until the beams flashed on. It was usually immediate—the driver honking back thanks, or flinching embarrassed behind the steering wheel, or gunning past, and we’d see his red taillights blink on.

But there were times—who knows why?—when drunk or high, stubborn, or simply lost in that glide to somewhere else, the driver just kept driving in the dark, and all down the block we’d hear yelling from doorways and storefronts, front steps, and other corners, voices winking on like fireflies: “Lights! Your lights! Hey, lights!”

(Stuart Dybek [source])

…and:

The End of Science Fiction

This is not fantasy, this is our life.
We are the characters
who have invaded the moon,
who cannot stop their computers.
We are the gods who can unmake
the world in seven days.

Both hands are stopped at noon.
We are beginning to live forever,
in lightweight, aluminum bodies
with numbers stamped on our backs.
We dial our words like Muzak.
We hear each other through water.

The genre is dead. Invent something new.
Invent a man and a woman
naked in a garden,
invent a child that will save the world,
a man who carries his father
out of a burning city.
Invent a spool of thread
that leads a hero to safety,
invent an island on which he abandons
the woman who saved his life
with no loss of sleep over his betrayal.

Invent us as we were
before our bodies glittered
and we stopped bleeding:
invent a shepherd who kills a giant,
a girl who grows into a tree,
a woman who refuses to turn
her back on the past and is changed to salt,
a boy who steals his brother’s birthright
and becomes the head of a nation.
Invent real tears, hard love,
slow-spoken, ancient words,
difficult as a child’s
first steps across a room.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

[Read more…]