We’re here. Where the story of our lives takes place. Nowhere else. We have no lover but those in our sleep. We have no human desires. All we know is the faces of animals, the form and beauty of the forests. We’re afraid of ourselves. Our bodies are cold. We are made up of cold and fear and desire. They used to burn us. They kill us still in Kuwait and the wilder parts of Arabia. —Marguerite Duras
Posts tagged "sadness"
Acts of Helplessness
Here are the miracle-signs you want: that
you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking,
that in the absence of what you ask for your day gets dark,
your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away
is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings,
sleep, health, your head, that you often
sit down in a fire like aloes wood, and often go out
to meet a blade like a battered helmet.
When acts of helplessness become habitual,
those are the signs.
But you run back and forth listening for unusual events,
peering into the faces of travelers.
“Why are you looking at me like a madman?”
I have lost a friend. Please forgive me.
Searching like that does not fail.
There will come a rider who holds you close.
You faint and gibber. The uninitiated say, “He’s faking.”
How could they know?
Water washes over a beached fish, the water
of those signs I just mentioned.
Excuse my wandering.
How can one be orderly with this?
It’s like counting leaves in a garden,
along with the song-notes of partridges,
and crows.
Sometimes organization
and computation become absurd.
— The Essential Rumi, Jalal Al-Din Rumi; Coleman Barks
A Grief Observed
A deep hole had opened up in front of me. I looked in but the hole was so deep and so dark that I couldn’t see the bottom. I thought, What’s down there? So on purpose I fell in. I fell and I fell, over and over as if I were an old suitcase. On the sides of the deep hole I could see things written but perhaps it was in a foreign language because I couldn’t read them. Still I fell, for I don’t know how long. As I fell I began to see that I didn’t like the way falling made me feel. Falling made me feel sick and I missed all the people I had loved. I said, I don’t want to fall anymore and I reversed myself. I was standing again on the edge of the deep hole. I looked at the deep hole and I said, You can close up now and it did.
~Jamaica Kincaid, Paris Review
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No wonder. No wonder.