A couple of weeks ago I read Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, and in it he describes a girl as looking "like one of the small gaudy statues in an ugly church...you could pray to her but you couldn't expect an answer." It comes back to me at odd times, maybe because of all the things I believe in that's the sort I believe in the most--the dim voodoo wishing stumps and underground temples and stacks of buddha. All of the left behind places and the weatherbeaten statues. In Herculaneum I was amazed at how the ruins blended in with the town, broken and yet still so perfect, found only through a complicated series of small signs pointing the way through the streets. Seems to me that since everything comes through the way we least expect it, we might as well hedge our bets and believe in the underdog, in the small sad statues and poetry and flowers while the soil is still hard. Any answer is always a surprise.
A friend was hit by a drunk driver this weekend, cut out of the car all smashed, and though she will ultimately be ok I am still afraid to move for fear that something will notice how lucky we are. I keep telling my plants all about it, in hopes that they will filter out all of the worst case scenarios in the same way they filter out all of the pollution. It worries me how easily we can be broken.
No comments:
Post a Comment