snow

found and lost in an instant

It happened one day, at a crossroads, in the middle of a crowd, people coming and going.

I stopped, blinked: suddenly I understood nothing. Nothing, nothing about anything: I did not understand the reasons for things or for people, it was all senseless, absurd. I laughed.

What I found strange at the time was that I had never realized before; that up until then I had accepted everything: traffic lights, cars, posters, uniforms, monuments, things completely detached from any sense of the world, accepted them as if there were some necessity, some chain of cause and effect that bound them together.

Then my laugh died. I blushed, ashamed. I waved to get people’s attention. “Stop a moment!” I shouted, “there is something wrong! Everything is wrong! We are doing the absurdest things. This cannot be the right way. Where can it end?”

People stopped around me, sized me up, curious. I stood there in the middle of them, waving my arms, desperate to explain myself, to have them share the flash of insight that had suddenly enlightened me: and I said nothing. I said nothing because the moment I had raised my arms and opened my mouth, my great revelation had been as it were swallowed up again and the words had come out any old how, on impulse.

“So?” people asked, “what do you mean? Everything is in its place. All is as it should be. Everything is a result of something else. Everything fits in with everything else. We cannot see anything wrong or absurd.” I stood there, lost, because as I saw it now everything had fallen into place again and everything seemed normal, traffic lights, monuments, uniforms, tower blocks, tramlines, beggars, processions; yet this did not calm me, it tormented me.

“I am sorry,” I said. “Perhaps it was I who was wrong. It seemed that way then. But everything is fine now. I am sorry.” And I made off amid their angry glares.

Yet, even now, every time (and it is often) that I find I do not understand something, then, instinctively, I am filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp the other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.

(The Flash - Italo Calvino)

come healing

Behold the gates of mercy

In arbitrary space

And none of us deserving

The cruelty or the grace

O solitude of longing

Where love has been confined

Come healing of the body

Come healing of the mind

O see the darkness yielding

That tore the light apart

Come healing of the reason

Come healing of the heart

(Leonard Cohen)

..

sitting in quietude

Winter has a message of its own

When the cold is like a flower-

Flowers have their fragrance, winter has its handful of memories.

The shadow of withered branch, like lean blue smoke,

Paints a stroke across the afternoon window.

In the cold the sunlight grows pale and slanted.

It is just like this.

I sip the tea quietly

As if waiting for a guest to speak.

Li Jinfa

easy

Easy is what we must be — 

holding and taking, holding and letting go.

Hofmannsthal

without the body

Otherwise, it would not matter

that my fingertips

start just under your ear

and move with impossible

luxury, almost undetectable touch,

down the side of the breathing

throat, over the collarbone

and the supreme smooth paleness

of the shoulder,

down the inside of your arm,

finding the slight blue veins

of the wrist, and lingering

long in the palm.

Without the body,

why would i want

the gesture to consume a thousand years?

Without the body, where

would memory knot

us to the world?

from Sense (James Owens)

in this almost

Oblique life? 

I am well aware that there is a slight detachment between things, they almost collide, there is a detachment among the beings that lose one other amongst words that almost don’t say anything more. 

But we almost understand one other in this light discord, in this almost that is the only way to stand full life, since a sudden face-to-face encounter with it would frighten us, scare off its delicate spider’s web threads.

(Clarice Lispector)

the act of surrender

but if i hope to understand in order to accept things— the act of surrender will never happen

(Clarice Lispector)

.