Idealization and envy are antipodal twins. Idealization produces colossi that bestride the psychological world and can produce claustrophobia. Adoration mingles with envy, so that the result can be a secret desire to escape that can manifest itself as a feeling of being so hemmed in as to want to make a jail break. A wife who over idealizes her husband may be moved to seek affairs to liberate herself from the tyranny of her adoration. This is passing strange and also...
I am my own true fit and counterfeit, true gold and fool’s gold, their opposition not surviving this life’s intricacy, neither driving out each other’s other What am I to make of myself but ceaseless forming of unresolvable formlessness, sometimes shameless in its heated heaving sometimes weighted with patient blind waiting? In possessing myself, I dispossess myself of myself, pass into passing, leaving behind trinkets that mark a path beyond my own way of remembrances “Am I or am I not?” becomes the sea of “was” or “was not,”, time’s own shoreless “be” ...
Slant is how best it goes when it knows not wither or why it goes, truth or not ruth, entertainment or catastrophe, yet slant’s elusive as firmament’s first fire was there a first photon or were all and awe then self-entangled, then, as now , caught in the net of nothing stretched impossibly to bear being beyond themselves, ah, light yes light, this light, slant, makes sight and shadow the worrisome wisdom of our delight, the fierce fervor of our burgeoning fright as climate changes, so our climax, too my self, illusion, to itself is slight and slant as well, star, lost in its own...
In Brazilian Portuguese the samba is the sonnet, lovely lazy lively lilt slipping through shoulders, hips, lips, toes, hands to be breath and so smooth how time flowers Before there were any words, Jobim made sun, sand, sea, saudade, me, and the girl who was completely sound without need of flesh, she of the slightest stirrings of our air No knowing now, ever, how samba means outside itself, except it lilts us let go grip of grasping selves, dance with shadows sculpted from blocking light of this, this… life ah, sway, syncopated, counting deeper sweeter than any beat, more…less...
What is our responsibility to the dead? Only the care of all that lives. This is a sentiment that strikes me as strange but true, not one that I would have expected to discover within my breast in my heart when I was younger. It connects me with the ancestor worship that is so fundamental because we owe everything to our ancestors without whom we would not be. The sun, too, is our ancestor, that young star by whose light we...
“The Russian likes to remember, he does not like to live.” Chekhov Living is fraught with uncertainty. Living is fraught with peril. Living is nothing if not a stew of ambiguities. Living demands effort. Living is work. Living is always poised near the cliff of annihilation even on a sunny spring afternoon of a near ideal temperature. Living is fleeting, always charged with the dynamic bodily necessities of tomorrow and the day after. Living involves real other people who are endlessly disappointed and disappointing and who are never quite what they seem, so we are always shaking our heads over what poor judges of character we have been I think that I may be more Russian than I have ever realized. The one who remembers fashions the memories according to his nature, his predilections, his whims. Viridical memory may be an oxymoron. Memory can smooth or exaggerate bumps and lumps, as suits its purposes. Memory is gossamer. Memory can counterfeit pleasures and pains and passions so perfectly as to make them pass for real, even to the point of supplanting other claimants to the mantle of reality. Memory is a vamp and a tramp. It helps weave the dreams that live us. Memory is a river whose shifting banks we are so that we can choose its course until it drains into the sea of conceit and deceit. Who can fault the Russian for preferring to remember what never was around a warm campfire rather than to live? Yet live he must and does and so must we and do we. Liking is another matter. ...
