January 2010
She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma - that repetition - maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next...”
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
“But if you’re happy here, why are you leaving?” Catherine had asked. “There’s a risk of being loved, little Catherine, and that would keep me from being happy.” Coiled on the couch, her head down, Catherine stared at Patrice. Without turning around he said: “A lot of men complicate their lives and invent problems for themselves. In my case, it’s quite simple. Look…” He spoke facing the world, and...
Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen – these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. But there...
“But the problem with me was that as soon as I started thinking about getting it...”
I thought, there is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand, but I’d rather be here. The majestic ruins of Machu Picchu? I’d rather be here. A hillside in Cuenca, Spain, sipping coffee and watching leaves fall? Not even close. There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting...
I am the man sitting naked in the desert. My hands are clasped at my ankles, knees drawn to my chest to make my body small and simple. A flash of lightning sparks from a thunderstorm miles off. I breathe and listen. No thunder. Below me, around me, cliffs and canyons swim in a litany of moonlight and shadow.
“You and the word ‘beautiful’!” he would say disdainfully, holding his nose and imitating my voice. “Tell me–what does ‘beautiful’ mean?” “It’s something you want,” I would say.
“When you’re cold, don’t expect sympathy from someone who’s...”
Sometimes one feels free speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that? “Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.”
Like every experience that marks us for a lifetime, i found myself turned inside out, drawn and quartered. This was the sum of everything i’d been in my life- and more: who i am when I sing and stir-fry vegetables for my family and friends on Sunday afternoons, who i am when i wake up on freezing nights and want nothing more than to throw on a sweater, rush to my desk, and write about the...
My heart is weak and unreliable. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut, for example, or my lungs. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I’m at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, “Who smells shit?”—small daily humiliations that are par for the course—these I take, generally speaking, in my...
She adored all beautiful things in their every curve and fragnance, so that they became part of her. Day by day, she gathered beauty; had she had no heart (she who was the bosom of womanhood) her thoughts would still have been as lilies, because the good is the beautiful.
The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written. I recently found this fragment in one of my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn’t have known what would happen: how time can hold itself against you, how a voice hollows, how words you once loved can wither on the page.
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.
“She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and...”
I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house - garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep, I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing, Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion […] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this, this endless slumber that makes...
The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.
But in the end, back she comes. There’s no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
There are only so many times that you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.
I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.
“I smell you on my skin
I say the word
I say your name
I cover you
I shelter...”
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
“Even if I now saw you
Only once,
I would long for you
Through worlds,...”
Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words it cannot ignore.
