Thursday, January 26, 2012
So we've had some setbacks lately. Lost a few babies, a pretty significant organ, and another piece of our faith in the grace of the universe. The gift of all this loss is the flood of affection that tries to hold it all back. It's not really enough--better would be to not lose these things at all--but it's enough for now. There is a lot of work to be done now. (I think I'm planning a going away party for a thyroid, if anyone has any ideas for decorations.) The triumph of the human spirit is my favorite thing, right? So there's really only one option.
Last night I went to see Pico Iyer speak. He was talking about all the artists who tell you your stories while they're telling you their own, since his latest book is about a lifetime of encountering Graham Greene and his characters all over the world inside his own head. Greene struggled his whole life with the space between faith and reality, and found that the only common ground was the need for and the use of kindness. Iyer talked and talked about using his feelings of being on the outside to cultivate a persistent sense of wonder about the world, and the need to see other places in order to see ourselves, and as he stood there and told my stories by telling his stories the world collapsed for a moment into someplace safe and warm and purposeful. Afterward I walked in the rain for a while, trying not very hard to find a cab home, feeling calm and clear and a little sad. We tell our stories in order to find our stories.
Last night I went to see Pico Iyer speak. He was talking about all the artists who tell you your stories while they're telling you their own, since his latest book is about a lifetime of encountering Graham Greene and his characters all over the world inside his own head. Greene struggled his whole life with the space between faith and reality, and found that the only common ground was the need for and the use of kindness. Iyer talked and talked about using his feelings of being on the outside to cultivate a persistent sense of wonder about the world, and the need to see other places in order to see ourselves, and as he stood there and told my stories by telling his stories the world collapsed for a moment into someplace safe and warm and purposeful. Afterward I walked in the rain for a while, trying not very hard to find a cab home, feeling calm and clear and a little sad. We tell our stories in order to find our stories.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Sometimes I wonder if Chamfort wasn't speaking in hope and possibilities instead of warning. A man who shoots off his own nose has to maintain some sense of humor, right? No matter how sad and bloodstained and heavily guarded his eventual end. Maybe when he talks in his last words about this world where the heart must either break or become hard as bronze he is giving us choices, where we can remain warm and sore or hard and cold. Nietzsche, who introduced me to Chamfort when I was 15 and impressionable, called him someone who almost considered himself lost on a day in which he hadn't laughed, which certainly feels like somewhere in there Chamfort was my people. In the last weeks we've had miscarriages and breakups and a terrible illness in my urban family, and it seems like the choices are slim but the bad ones are to avoid feeling any of it. Breaking seems superior to bronzing, if only in the long run. Chamfort doesn't ssound like a guy who believed much in hope, but sometimes it's easier to believe that he did. Se brise ou se bronze. Nose or no nose.
This hope is the currency I trade in, what Cummings called "the dangerous looseness of doom". I could build you a clown car made of love and cotton candy and gremlins, but you don't really believe in the romance of adventure. The only thing I can be sure of is that each time my heart is ripped free of its moorings it is leaving space for something new and bigger. Somewhere in these new holes is a genie in a bottle with wishes that I could waste, and I might lead you to genies but I can't make you understand in time. You either believe in magic, or you don't.
This hope is the currency I trade in, what Cummings called "the dangerous looseness of doom". I could build you a clown car made of love and cotton candy and gremlins, but you don't really believe in the romance of adventure. The only thing I can be sure of is that each time my heart is ripped free of its moorings it is leaving space for something new and bigger. Somewhere in these new holes is a genie in a bottle with wishes that I could waste, and I might lead you to genies but I can't make you understand in time. You either believe in magic, or you don't.
Monday, January 23, 2012
The winds showed up in the middle of the night, wuthering around the corner, shouting so loudly they woke me up. All of December's babies have been lost in January, and all of our days are turning into bear traps and quicksand. I only have so many limbs left.
I was drinking with an old flame who has reappeared again (they almost all come around again and again and again; it seems I am about as hard to get over in retrospect as I am to appreciate appropriately when it counts), feeling the power shift back to where I am more comfortable, stretching all of those muscles and having a familiar kind of fun. Feelings are lined with spikes and monsters and I am tired of walking so carefully around them. We've never had much of anything in common but heat, and given how badly things have spiraled away from me lately it was nice to fill my hands with fire and nothing else. Fire is uncomplicated. I will take light where I can get it in these heavier times.
I've been tearing through town in the old ways lately, cold and charming and mean, making lemons into hand grenades. Not a single little bit of this is the way that I would choose for things to be, but at some point you have to look at the options you're given and walk forward from there. Mostly, I do not get to pick. Brambles and wolves and the cold expanding heart of the universe, and all. The lights at the ends of our tunnels could be sunshine and puppies, but it seems to me they're just as often only the beginning of more tunnels.
I was drinking with an old flame who has reappeared again (they almost all come around again and again and again; it seems I am about as hard to get over in retrospect as I am to appreciate appropriately when it counts), feeling the power shift back to where I am more comfortable, stretching all of those muscles and having a familiar kind of fun. Feelings are lined with spikes and monsters and I am tired of walking so carefully around them. We've never had much of anything in common but heat, and given how badly things have spiraled away from me lately it was nice to fill my hands with fire and nothing else. Fire is uncomplicated. I will take light where I can get it in these heavier times.
I've been tearing through town in the old ways lately, cold and charming and mean, making lemons into hand grenades. Not a single little bit of this is the way that I would choose for things to be, but at some point you have to look at the options you're given and walk forward from there. Mostly, I do not get to pick. Brambles and wolves and the cold expanding heart of the universe, and all. The lights at the ends of our tunnels could be sunshine and puppies, but it seems to me they're just as often only the beginning of more tunnels.
Friday, January 20, 2012
They say that a way to save Venice may be to fill the ground under it with water, which is funny because it's the water that's undermining Venice in the first place. While I was there a beautiful Venetian romanced me partly by detailing his vision of what the ruined future of Venice would look like, but mostly I think that Venice will look always in a state of decadent decay no matter how far above the water it stays. Late that first night I walked home and watched the crumbling bricks and hazy lights reflected in the puddles, feeling how the holes in Venice matched my own worn places. For the moment, sinking wasn't the worst thing either one of us could be doing.
They want to use the seawater to counteract the settling of the soil, to lift all of the place slowly becoming concave. But the high water doesn't bother the Venetians, who have long accepted it as a part of their lives. It's everyone who lives outside of the city that fears its eventual disappearance under the waves.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I prefer the idea that Venice would survive without our intervention, that the seas won't ever really take the town away. That the holes in it will not be its eventual undoing.
They want to use the seawater to counteract the settling of the soil, to lift all of the place slowly becoming concave. But the high water doesn't bother the Venetians, who have long accepted it as a part of their lives. It's everyone who lives outside of the city that fears its eventual disappearance under the waves.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I prefer the idea that Venice would survive without our intervention, that the seas won't ever really take the town away. That the holes in it will not be its eventual undoing.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
I sliced my finger open on the ice, playing in the snow on the way home and pretending for just a little while that everything was ok again, that faith and deservedness can sometimes work magic. These are still the things that I believe in, the small sad statues and the left behind places and the uncommon sacrifices. I was not unhappy to discover that I had paid a small tribute in blood for a momentary lifting of the crushing silence. Even if nothing important has really changed.
I was thinking again about the Golden Buddha in Thailand, how something so valuable was hidden in plan sight for so long only no one realized that it was there because they never thought to look. How its rediscovery was almost incomplete because of bad omens and inconvenient superstitions. It was only being dropped that saved it, and the luck that there was one monk who braved the omens to see through the cracks and the floods. And how unlikely it is that our statues may secretly be gold, but that the only way to know for sure is to take a leap and look closely. I was thinking about all the ways there are to be brave.
I was thinking again about the Golden Buddha in Thailand, how something so valuable was hidden in plan sight for so long only no one realized that it was there because they never thought to look. How its rediscovery was almost incomplete because of bad omens and inconvenient superstitions. It was only being dropped that saved it, and the luck that there was one monk who braved the omens to see through the cracks and the floods. And how unlikely it is that our statues may secretly be gold, but that the only way to know for sure is to take a leap and look closely. I was thinking about all the ways there are to be brave.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
I don't know. I guess I never really considered why the birds and the fish remain so far apart, how it would never really matter how hard I tried to lift if you hadn't yet evolved the lungs to stay there. How it was always going to be back to your depths because you haven't grown the strength for my air. My tiny hollow bones can only do so much.
And all that's left, really, is to retreat and try to polish what was so deliberately tarnished. Because there are more fires ahead, and now I know that I will walk through them while you will turn and find the easier path. Our hearts are the only currency we have, and I think that yours might spend easier while mine at high shine can be seen from space. Neither better or more useful, but it turns out we spend differently. It's probably true that no one could have guessed.
I believe in a life in the rarefied air, where fish and birds and things that haven't been invented yet all live in the same place, breathing something that none of us have ever known before. Later may be too late, but something is usually better than nothing at all.
And all that's left, really, is to retreat and try to polish what was so deliberately tarnished. Because there are more fires ahead, and now I know that I will walk through them while you will turn and find the easier path. Our hearts are the only currency we have, and I think that yours might spend easier while mine at high shine can be seen from space. Neither better or more useful, but it turns out we spend differently. It's probably true that no one could have guessed.
I believe in a life in the rarefied air, where fish and birds and things that haven't been invented yet all live in the same place, breathing something that none of us have ever known before. Later may be too late, but something is usually better than nothing at all.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
I don't know a thing about playing poker, so it shouldn't be a surprise how I lose everything each time all my chips are in, but I'm not sure knowing the rules would change my habits anyway. Luck and skill are never on my side, so it's always a losing game. All the other options are even less fun, and the rumor is that there is as much to be gained in this way as there is to be lost. I have yet to see the truth in that, but it seems to be as good a way as any to have faith in.
I fell off the edge of the map when I wasn't looking, and the main obstacle with ultima thule is that there's no way back to where the waters have already been charted. No way out but around the edges. I could handle some softer learning experiences, with my heart rubbed raw from scraping against the rocks and my bones all sore from the sudden stop at the bottom. Ultimately I saw what I have worked so hard to get in sight of, and though the ending was catastrophic it would be against the spirit of adventure to say that it was not worthwhile to have been so happy for some time. Perhaps it will turn out that the softer landing will have been the moments before, once my bruises have healed and I can look back up at what was once an open space. Maybe off the edge of the map time moves backward and forward just as easily as the water, as deliberately as the blue butterflies that live in all of the meadows.
Maybe the lesson to be learned is that sometimes there are no lessons at all.
I fell off the edge of the map when I wasn't looking, and the main obstacle with ultima thule is that there's no way back to where the waters have already been charted. No way out but around the edges. I could handle some softer learning experiences, with my heart rubbed raw from scraping against the rocks and my bones all sore from the sudden stop at the bottom. Ultimately I saw what I have worked so hard to get in sight of, and though the ending was catastrophic it would be against the spirit of adventure to say that it was not worthwhile to have been so happy for some time. Perhaps it will turn out that the softer landing will have been the moments before, once my bruises have healed and I can look back up at what was once an open space. Maybe off the edge of the map time moves backward and forward just as easily as the water, as deliberately as the blue butterflies that live in all of the meadows.
Maybe the lesson to be learned is that sometimes there are no lessons at all.
