A Fate Like Totally Worse Than Death
I always mean to watch It’s A Wonderful Life at Christmas, but this was the first year I got a chance. I cried like a sap at the end, but had to laugh at a moment in the dramatic climax. George is seeing what life would be like if he had never been born – his friends and family have ended up dead, destitute, or in insane asylums, and his hometown has gone to wrack and ruin. But the one thing that tips him over the edge, which his guardian angel barely dares to tell him, is the fate of his wife, Mary.
What could prompt such horror? Without George in the world, Mary has become…
… an “old maid” who works in the town library! The horror!
Of course, George comes through and Mary is delivered back to her life of domestic, bookless bliss. PHEW.
Delicate are you, and your vows are delicate, too
No, I wasn’t meant to love and be loved.
If I’d lived longer, I would have waited longer.
Knowing you are faithless keeps me alive and hungry.
Knowing you faithful would kill me with joy.
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, trans. Vijay Seshadri (full text at Make Bright The Sparrows)
A line of poetry written with a splash of blood
“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
— Yukio Mishima
A Mighty Kindness
Zero Circle
by: Rumi (translation by Coleman Barks)
Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
Image from American Vogue, January 2011
To Seek A Great Perhaps
The End
By Mark Strand
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
Cookies & Cream, even
Watching American Gigolo.
Wearing Coco Chanel-esque silk pajamas.
And red lipstick.
And eating Haagen-Dazs…
Straight out of the tub.
Sometimes it’s nice to just embrace the cliche and take it as far as you can go.
The time for that
Staying After
I grew up with horses and poems
when that was the time for that.
Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky
in the Fillmore West when
everybody was dancing. I sat
in the balcony with my legs
pushed through the railing,
watching Janis Joplin sing.
Women have houses now, and children.
I live alone in a kind of luxury.
I wake when I feel like it,
read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva.
At night I watch the apartments
whose windows are still lit
after midnight. I fell in love.
I believed people. And even now
I love the yellow light shining
down on the dirty brick wall.
-Linda Gregg
Any Other Way
I love being introduced to drinks that shouldn’t work but do. Dancing in someone’s bedroom-disco, to dirty Italian pop. Watching strangers fall asleep on each other on the night bus, and wake-up, Britishly. The satisfaction of navigating myself home through unknown suburbs in the early morning. Wearing knee-socks and sneakers and a tattered tutu and spiky rings for Sunday morning brunch. Sitting in silk pajamas, surrounded by pillows, in a big white bed.
I’m so so alone, and sometimes that just makes me feel lucky.
Fashion Police
Had the following exchange at Border Patrol coming back into London today…
Fierce Female Official: What kind of visa do you have?
Moi: Tier Five
FFO: What are you doing here?
Moi, slightly intimidated: Working holiday
FFO: Where are you working?
Moi, worrying: <That which shall not be named>
FFO: Where did you get your jeans?
Moi: Uh, Zara?
FFO: I want some. Do they come in green?
I got the stamp.
The arrow that flies, the bow that is stable
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
