secretfragileskies: Teaching a Stone to Talk

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Teaching a Stone to Talk

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.*

What happens to us

Is irrelevant to the world's geology

But what happens to the world's geology

Is not irrelevant to us.

We must reconcile ourselves to the stones,

Not the stones to us.**

*Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
**Hugh McDiarmid, Selected Poems, eds., Alan Riach and Michael Grieve (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1992), 183.

melting glaciers/image

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“Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.”

—	Queen-Anne’s-Lace, William Carlos Williams (via sketchofthepast)

Then there was someone else I met,

whose face and voice I can’t forget,

and the memory of her

is like a jail I’m trapped inside,

or maybe she is something I just use

to hold my real life at a distance.

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower

plucked from a river of lava

and held aloft on a tightrope

strung between two scrawny trees

above a canyon

in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it

everywhere, for years,

while right behind you,

the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes

falling

Damiel;

It's great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth. I'd like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say "Now." Now and now" and no longer "forever" and "for eternity." To sit at an empty place at a card table and be greeted, even by a nod. Every time we participated, it was a pretense. Wrestling with one, allowing a hip to be put out in pretense, catching a fish in pretense, in pretense sitting at tables, drinking and eating in pretense. Having lambs roasted and wine served in the tents out there in the desert, only in pretense. No, I don't have to beget a child or plant a tree but it would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat, like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever and blackended fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck by an ear. To lie! Through one's teeth. As you're walking, to feel your bones moving along. At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say "ah" and "oh" and "hey" instead of "yea" and "amen."

Catherine Hessling, La fille de l’eau, Jean Renoir, 1924.

secretfragileskies

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Teaching a Stone to Talk

No comments:

august

an altered space

“The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.”

Dead men make such convenient Heroes

falling

secretfragileskies

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Teaching a Stone to Talk

No comments:

august

an altered space

“The world is airtight yet held together by what it does not house, by the vanished. They are everywhere.”

Dead men make such convenient Heroes

falling

“The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.”