we are not static

We are not landscapes, skyscrapers, monuments. We are not static. In the silences between the words said and the words unsaid, the real silences - the truth gently rises to the top. The truth we are all too terrified to face. Maybe some of us have known the truth, some of us might have tried to believe in other truths, appropriate them, make them our own, crush the blue prints and gulp them down with soda.

There are no blue prints for this life. There is no map, no matter where you have booked your tickets to. There is no certainty, no matter what marriage vows you have made. There is nothing but you and I and this moment. Time, he is restless. He will not stand still, he will not wait. This moment, it is. It is. Ephemeral.

Then we close our eyes. The ceiling, the now. Tomorrow, we will be other people. Wearing other masks, feeling someone else’s hurt, lightening someone else’s load. But tomorrow, with certainty, we will other ourselves from ourselves. In somnolence, we disintegrate, sand through fingers - only to reintegrate, molecules intact, but never the same.

Tomorrow will come. And maybe, many other tomorrows. And maybe yesterdays will come to naught. And memories, faded polaroid pictures. Or plastic, burning; emitting that distinct smell that seeps into you and stays within you.

But now, Time will tell you. He is running to the door. And he is winking at you. He is mocking you. He is telling you things you do not want to hear.

You shut your ears, and pretend not to listen. Time is a clown, and we are all laughing our way through one big joke.


(via)

To the Present Tense

By the time you are
by the time you come to be
by the time you read this
by the time you are written
by the time you forget
by the time you are water through fingers
by the time you are taken for granted
by the time it hurts
by the time it goes on hurting
by the time there are no words for you
by the time you remember
but without names
by the time you are in the papers
and on the telephone
passing unnoticed there too

who is it
to whom you come
before whose very eyes
you are disappearing
without making yourself known?




To the Present Tense, W.S. Merwin

The visible carries all the invisible on its back

Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe.
The visible carries all the invisible on its back.
Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses,
                                                                    what touches me
As though I didn’t exist?
What is it that keeps on moving,
                                          a tiny pillar of smoke
Erect on its hind legs,
                               loose in the hollow grasses?
A word I don’t know yet, a little word, containing infinity,
Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass.
Under the tongue is the utterance.
Under the utterance is the fire, and then the only end of fire.


A Short History of the Shadow, Charles Wright

new shapes from old

Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old.
Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives.

In all creation, be assured, there is no death—no death,
but only change and innovation; what we people call birth
is but a different new beginning; death is but
to cease to be the same.

Perhaps this may have moved to that and that to this,
yet still the sum of things remains the same.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Pythagoras (via)

meanwhile, the world goes on

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting---
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


Wild Geese, Mary Oliver (via)

A feeling like all the surfaces inside you have been rubbed raw

It starts in the morning as soon as you wake up. You see the sun through the curtains, it’s a beautiful day maybe, it doesn’t matter. You turn over to see if you can sleep some more but it’s already too late for that. The day is upon you. You want to hide, to curl up in a ball, but that’s not what you really want either. After all. It doesn’t stop your mind, does it? It doesn’t stop the ache. It’s not an escape. The whole day in front of you. How will you bear it. You want to escape, but there’s no place you can go where it won’t be with you.

The Dogs of Babel, Carolyn Parkhurst

the present is forever

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone, it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second, you have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand…hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.


Journals (1950-1955), Sylvia Plath (via)

hi again, familiar feeling.

A solidão envolve-o, encerra-o dentro de si mesmo, e com isso vem um terror pior do que tudo o que conhecera até então. Causa-lhe perplexidade mudar tão rapidamente de um estado para outro, e durante muito tempo alterna entre os extremos, não sabendo qual é o verdadeiro e qual é o falso.

Fantasmas, A Trilogia de Nova Iorque, Paul Auster

to begin the day

You go downstairs and prepare a pot of coffee, the strongest, blackest coffee you have made in years, figuring that if you flood yourself with titanic doses of caffeine, you will be lifted into something that resembles wakefulness, a partial wakefulness, which will allow you to sleepwalk through the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon. You drink the first cup slowly. It is exceedingly hot and must be swallowed in small sips, but then the coffee begins to cool down, and you drink the second cup more rapidly than the first, the third more rapidly than the second, and swallow by swallow the liquid splashes into your empty stomach like acid. You can feel the caffeine accelerating your heart rate, agitating your nerves, and beginning to light you up. You are awake now, fully awake and yet still weary, drained but ever more alert, and in your head there is a buzzing that wasn't there before, a low-pitched mechanical sound, a humming, a whining, as if from a distant, out-of-tune radio, and the more you drink, the more you feel your body changing, the less you feel that you are made of flesh and blood. You are turning into something metallic now, a rusty contraption that simulates human life, a thing put together with wires and fuses, vast circuits of wires controlled by random electrical impulses, and now that you have finished the third cup of coffee, you pour yourself another - which turns out to be the last one, the lethal one. The attack begins simultaneously from the inside and the outside, a sudden feeling of pressure from the air around you, as if an invisible force were trying to push you through the chair and knock you to the ground, but at the same time an unearthly lightness in your head, a vertiginous jangle thrumming against the walls of your skull, and all the while the outside continues to press in on you, even as the inside grows empty, ever more dark and empty, as if you are about to pass out. Then your pulse quickens, you can feel your heart trying to burst through your chest, and a moment after that there is no more air in your lungs, you can no longer breathe. That is when the panic overwhelms you, when your body shuts down and you fall to the floor. Lying on your back, you feel the blood stop flowing in your veins, and little by little your limbs turn to cement. That is when you start to howl. You are made of stone now, and as you lie there on the dining room floor, rigid, your mouth open, unable to move or think, you howl in terror as you wait for your body to drown in the deep black waters of death.


Winter Journal, Paul Auster

Lightly, lightly

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.

Island, Aldous Huxley (via)

Neste mundo não existe a bondade absoluta nem a maldade absoluta.

O bem e o mal não são entidades estáticas e intangíveis, mas sim valores que estão sempre a trocar de lugar e de posição. O que hoje é considerado o «bem» pode transforma-se no «mal» enquanto o diabo esfrega o olho. O mesmo acontece no mundo que Dostoiévski descreve em Os Irmãos Karamázov. O importante é preservar o equilíbrio entre esse bem e esse mal em perpétuo movimento. O facto de um dos dois se inclinar demasiado para um lado dificulta a conservação da moral realista. Sim, o bem é o equilíbrio em si mesmo.


1Q84, Haruki Murakami

diabos em forma de gente

Quando não consideramos que o homem diante de nós é um ser humano, poucas serão as restrições que a nossa consciência imporá ao nosso comportamento para com ele.

Cidade de Vidro, Trilogia de Nova Iorque, Paul Auster

A Journey Through the Moonlight

In sleep when an old man's body is no longer aware of its boundaries, and lies flattened by gravity like a mere of wax in its bed... It drips down to the floor and moves there like a tear down a cheek... Under the back door into the silver meadow, like a pool of sperm, frosty under the moon, as if in his first nature, boneless and absurd.

The moon lifts him up into its white field, a cloud shaped like an old man, porous with stars.

He floats through high dark branches, a corpse tangled in a tree on a river.


by Russell Edson

O anjo de pedra

Tinha os olhos abertos mas não via.
O corpo todo era a saudade
de alguém que o modelara e não sabia
que o tocara de maio e claridade.

Parava o seu gesto onde pára tudo:
no limiar das coisas por saber
- e ficara surdo e cego e mudo
para que tudo fosse grave no seu ser.


As mãos e os frutos, Eugénio de Andrade


* mais uma vez, obrigada Ó

on silence

It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life.


Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

So many constellations

So many constellations that
are held out to us. I was,
when I looked at you - when? -
outside by
the other worlds.

O these ways, galactic.
O this hour, that weighed
nights over for us into
the burden of our names. It is,
I know, not true
that we lived, there moved,
blindly, no more than a breath between
there and not-there, and at times
our eyes whirred comet-like
toward things extinguished, in chasms,
and where they had burnt out,
splendid with teats, stood Time
on which already grew up
and down and away all that
is or was or will be -,

I know.
I know and you know, we knew,
we did not knew, we
were there, after all, and not there
and at times when
only the void stood between us we got
all the way to each other.



by Paul Celan

the ugliness completes reality

We all think a thousand thoughts every day that aren't our own, live out narratives not of our own invention, inhabit bodies preloaded with behaviors not of our choosing. Those bodies depend upon social and economic structures possessed of a psychology to which we either submit or suffer the life of an invalid. That's all pretty banal, boilerplate I'm-a-modern-human stuff, but its banality doesn't alleviate its problemness.

That said, I find the prospect of being alive, of having a life, cripplingly beautiful. The girl who bagged my groceries tonight at the Hy-Vee had a face that arrested me for a full second, long enough to provide the sufficient beauty for a great deal more suffering at my own hands or by the grip of history. I'm not indignant. I'm a little in love with how fucked up and strange everything is e.g., America, the Hy-Vee, its plastic bags swirling in the great Pacific garbage vortex. The ugliness completes reality, makes it worthy of love.

I think it's my nature to reject any prescriptions to tidy it up. I'm repulsed, on some level, by preciousness, by ploys to anesthetize the experience of life via beauties that aren't also very cruel. I guess the book was a love letter to experience, a thank you for not taking it easy on me.


Dylan Nice numa entrevista à Bookslut

Let Us Consider

Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....

Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....

Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora....


by Russell Edson

everything is beautiful except when we forget our own human dignity

The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, Gurov, soothed and spellbound by these magical surroundings - the sea, the mountains, the clouds, the wide sky - thought how everything is really beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.

The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904, Anton Chekhov

I knew something was wrong

the day I tried to pick up a
small piece of sunlight
and it slithered through my fingers,
not wanting to take shape.
Everything else stayed the same—
the chairs and the carpet
and all the corners
where the waiting continued.

by Dorothea Grossman (via)