Month: March 2018

Press(ure) button: love

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Sometimes the squeeze you feel is like being in a trap, and all the mind can focus on is running – both figurative and literal. Running away, to anywhere, and literally … running there. Being unable to focus and fix oneself to one place, one destiny – to commit to one nature, one path. Jenny Erpenbeck writes in Visitation, which focuses on one single property that has changed hands over many decades:

“Someone who builds something is affixing his life to the earth. Embodying the act of staying put is his profession. Creating an interior. Digging deeper and deeper in a place where there is nothing.”

I thought about this a lot after reading the book, feeling closer to the idea that I could, rather than dig deep and plant roots, fill holes and run toward ever-greater nothingness. It could well be a case of feeling down, and thus inappropriately feeling sorry for myself. This will pass.

For a long time, my idea of running toward nothingness, or possibly emptiness, was to numb my mind with television. I mostly quit this vice, but there are still things I consume in this way – either as a process of multitasking or to disconnect briefly. Part of distancing myself from the unmemorable haze of visual opiates was the sense that I should reconnect with feeling, wherever that took me.

Perhaps, though, this sometimes makes me feel too much. Sometimes this is not a bad thing, and oddly, the ‘messages’ delivered are entirely unexpected. A show I am currently viewing, Counterpart, is a kind of sci-fi-ish thing that, while enjoyable and entertaining, has not offered a single episode that hasn’t in one way or another dealt with the concept of love and how unconditional love should be. Many characters have been playing roles with each other, hiding significant aspects of who they really are, and living lies. The recurring theme, though, is that to truly love someone, maybe you have to (learn to) love the lie.

The person you love is someone you may not truly know at all. Maybe you love the person they wanted you to love, the person they want to be, the person you want them to be. You may know the whole truth, live with some variation on that, but (choose to) love anyway.

“She’s human. She made mistakes. We worked through them. … I love her. I love her for everything she is and I love her for everything she isn’t. An in the end that capacity for love, the ability to love someone unselfishly is the only thing that will separate me from you.” (Counterpart)

This theme, weaving itself persuasively into the body of the show, is what makes me keep coming back for another episode. It’s thinking about this ability to love – and commit – to someone no matter what – and stick around for what happens, whatever unfolds, that brings me back to my first points. I do love unselfishly and unconditionally, but my own selfish desire to run, not to dig deeper and deeper into one place, keeps me from sticking around for what happens.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

hold firm

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The Disappearing Island
–Seamus Heaney
Once we presumed to found ourselves for good
Between its blue hills and those sandless shores
Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil.

Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth
And hung our cauldron like a firmament,
The island broke beneath us like a wave.

The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it in extremis.
All I believe that happened there was vision.

Photo by Enrapture Media on Unsplash

wrong turn

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The Immortal
–Charles Simic
You’re shivering my memory.
You went out early and coatless
To visit your old schoolmasters,
The cruel schoolmasters
And their pet monkeys.

You took a wrong turn somewhere.
You met an army of gray days,
A ghost army of years on the march.
It must have been the slop they ladled you,
The ditch-water they made you drink.

You found yourself again on that street,
Inside that narrow room
With a single dusty window.
Outside it was snowing as in a dream.
You were ill and in bed.
The whole world was absent at work.
The blind old woman next door
Whose sighs and shuffles you’d welcome
Had died mysteriously in the summer.

You had your own breath to listen to.
You were perfectly alone and anonymous.
It would have taken months for anyone
To begin to miss you. The chill
Made you pull the covers up to the chin.

You remembered the lost arctic voyagers,
The snow erasing their footprints.
You had no money and no prospects in sight.
Both of your lungs were hurting.
You had no intention of lifting a finger
To help yourself. You were immortal.

Outside the same darkening snowflake
Seemed to be falling over and over again.
You studied the cracked walls,
The many water-stains on the ceiling
Trying to fix in your mind each detail.

Time had stopped at dusk.
You were shivering at the thought
Of such great happiness.

Photo by Renata Fraga on Unsplash

cat magic

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in other words
–charles bukowski
the Egyptians loved the cat
were entombed with it
instead of with the women
and never with the dog

but now
here
good people with
good eyes
are very few

yet fine cats
with great style
lounge about
in the alleys of
the universe.

about
our argument tonight
whatever it was
about
and

no matter how unhappy
it made us
feel

remember that
there is a
cat
somewhere
adjusting to the
space of itself
with a delightful
grace

in other words
magic persists
without us
no matter what
we may try to do
to spoil it.

Photo by Bing Han on Unsplash

praise be

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Praising Opens
–Irving Feldman
I praise you and my heart opens.
You are admirable
–and small tender brave mortal.
I hide you in my praises.
I preserve you.
You grow in safety.
And, mortal, my heart opens.

Photo by Maira Gallardo on Unsplash

aimed gaze

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And so I think of the Glaswegian, who pronounces “glasses” as “glaises”, and continually breaks his own by sitting on them. Each time I see his face, the glaises sit lopsided, drooping where the reparative tape begins to fail.

For the longest time he didn’t know he needed glasses. He was blitzed-drunk every morning, noon and night and therefore had no idea that the blurry vision of his every waking moment was poor eyesight in addition to the side effects of drink.

Glasses
–John Updike
I wear them. They help me. But I
Don’t care for them. Two birds, steel hinges
Haunt each an edge of the small sky
My green eyes make. Rim-horn impinges
Upon my vision’s furry fringes;
Faint dust collects upon the dry,
Unblinking shield behind which cringes
My naked, deprecated eyes.

My gaze feels aimed. It is as if
Two manufactured beams had been
Lodged in my sockets – hollow, stuff,
And gray, like mailing tubes – and when
I pivot, vases topple down
From tabletops, and women frown.

Photo by 85Fifteen on Unsplash

“to vibrate color”

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Sign
–Marge Piercy
The first white hair coils in my hand,
more wire than down.
Out of the bathroom mirror it glittered at me.
I plucked it, feeling thirty creep in my joints,
and found it silver. It does not melt.

My twentieth birthday lean as glass
spring vacation I stayed in the college town
twanging misery’s electric banjo offkey.
I wanted to inject love right into the veins
of my thigh and wake up visible:
to vibrate color
like the minerals in stones under black light.
My best friend went home without loaning me money.
Hunger was all of the time the taste of my mouth.

Now I am ripened and sag a little from my spine.
More than most I have been the same ragged self
in all colors of luck dripping and dry,
yet love has nested in me and gradually eaten
those sense organs I used to feel with.
I have eaten my hunger soft and my ghost grows stronger.

Gradually, I am turning to chalk,
to humus, to pages and pages of paper,
to fine silver wire like something a violin
could be strung with, or somebody garroted,
or current run through: silver truly,
this hair, shiny and purposeful as forceps
if I knew how to use it.

Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash

secrecy

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Secrecy
–Margaret Atwood
Secrecy flows through you,
a different kind of blood.
It’s as if you’ve eaten it
like a bad candy,
taken it into your mouth,
let it melt sweetly on your tongue,
then allowed it to slide down your throat
like the reverse of uttering,
a word dissolved
into its glottals and sibilants,
a slow intake of breath—

And now it’s in you, secrecy.
Ancient and vicious, luscious
as dark velvet.
It blooms in you,
a poppy made of ink.

You can think of nothing else.
Once you have it, you want more.
What power it gives you!
Power of knowing without being known,
power of the stone door,
power of the iron veil,
power of the crushed fingers,
power of the drowned bones
crying out from the bottom of the well.

Photo by DJ Paine on Unsplash

marriage is …

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A Word to Husbands
–Ogden Nash

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you are wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

overstatement

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FromProverbs and Song Verse
–Antonio Machado
The language of love
was never the worse
for some overstatement.

Photo by Kristen MacAdams on Unsplash