Loneliness is like the rain.
It rises from the sea toward evening
and from distant plains moves into sky
where it ever belongs.
And from the sky it falls upon us in the city.
It rains here below in the twilight hours
when alleyways wind toward morning
and when lovers, finding nothing,
leave the failure of each other’s arms,
and when two who loathe each other
must share the same bed:
Then loneliness flows with the rivers….
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Images
Some accuse me of morbidity, their assertion supported by a scaffold of dark twigs; my fondness for cemeteries and storms, my ubiquitous clothing choice in the color without color, my reliance upon heavy literature, my collection of dying words. I wish that I might lend them my lens, an owl bestowing her nighttime sight to the worshippers of the sun, that they might see beyond the limits of labels to the radiant core of all—Beauty.
Who is it? Who is it?
~Billy the Kid
Does nobody understand?
~James Joyce
The sadness will last forever.
~Vincent van Gogh
“Hello, I’m a fat person, fat, fat, fat,” gibes a six-year-old girl playing with the new concept curvy Barbie doll at Mattel headquarters. The girl’s focus group peers bolster her audacity with laughter.
“She didn’t like going to school because she was bullied. She was telling me that girls were saying she was fat and talking about her scars from her transplant.” The mother of Nicole Lovell, a thirteen year old girl murdered by an accused Virginia Tech student whom she had met online, added that Nicole often cried, asking to stay home from school.
We have been duped. The usurpation of Beauty by our obsession with physical beauty is insanity. We have bowed to the moon and proclaimed it the Universe, living in darkness sans perspective, worshipping the tiny moon of a single planet, unconscious of stars and galaxies, estranged even from the warmth and light of our own Sun. We have made the temporal flesh our master and under its relentless rule our children suffer; we all suffer.
