are any of us whole?
our very defenses wound us
triage: the injured, the crippled, the dying.
- - -
(Red leaves fell off, a handful, at a brush (i dare not touch anything harder). The size of a child's fingernail.)
- - -
A woman in skirts, head uncovered, stands facing west in a fenced yard. Slowly she squats down, placing her hands around a dandelion as if to shelter a flame from wind. Then: she does not move.
- - -
Walking deliberately, as if balancing a brimful glass of water in some inner cavity.
- - -
I have to come to terms with Rilke's essentialism when it comes to women. I have, until now, brushed it off as obsolete, a bit of dated material in otherwise eternal text.
Nothing will outlive loneliness. But if it is integral - what then?
("here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.")
- - -
I recognize in a character in a book perhaps the one i am looking for. It seems perhaps cruelty is what is desirable. To be outmatched, unneeded, undesired. Doesn't matter, i know, but the mind picks at it like a scab; if this makes me parallel Justine, does this mean that i too embody her faults? Or is it, after all, just a book?
I do not believe there is a "the One". But. There is this desire to immerse myself in a novel, a coherent world, without the distractions of sloppy diversity. Even if the novel is heartbreak, it is as a city with one designer - unified, lovely, strangely inhuman. So too, to invent a life of completeness, with just one other, to fill myself with the textures and rhythms of that one universe, and pretend there is nothing else in the world. Messy, the world, sloppy, the world. Billions and billions of cooks.
- - -
"English has two great forgotten words, namely 'helpmeet' which is much greater than 'lover' and 'loving-kindness' which is so much greater than 'love' or even 'passion'." - Percy "Ludwig" Pursewarden
Do you know what i mean by immerse? to lose everything else. Self. You, too, i would give that up.
- - -
"Consistency is all we ask."
"Give us this day our daily mask."
- - -
Something about the way that branch let go its leaves in my hand touched me. I couldn't drop them, but held them like strange currency with which i had been temporarily entrusted.
- - -
There is no one counting our kindnesses to strangers. Perhaps helping to keep them alive is an indirect cruelty.
It is impossible to say.