Specialization be damned

Specialization be damned.  In his own language he made people laugh.  And it was so easy for his friends to laugh at his jokes; they swam in them as though in water, and the water bubbled and frothed and rollicked as they dipped in and out.  Where was I then?  Well, I was laughing too, laughing with them as best I could, swimming alongside them and playing with them in the water of their laughter, the water of what made them laugh, this strange, foreign water.  Never had I imagined that learning how to swim could be so infectious, that a talent or a skill could be passed on from one to the other, rubbed off on another, as it were, like a cold or a bad day.  Not until one of them splashed me, who was cautious to get wet at first, from the sidelines and got me thoroughly wet, drenched from head to foot.  Then I learned suddenly, as the coolness of the water suddenly teaches you a thing or two, and not only about coolness, that for some tongues it is not required that you become equipped with a special tongue, that you learn to move it in just this way, with this accent, with these rolls and these taps on the roof of the mouth.  It is only necessary that you have a tongue, if not a tongue then a mouth and breath, if not a mouth and breath then some preunderstanding of our human situation; a basic, everyday human tongue, a basic, everyday human mouth, a basic, everyday capacity to take in and exhale breath, a basic understanding before understanding, always-already understanding, with which we are given to understand the basic charge of things, their tonalities, the givenness of things, their thatness or suchness.  Basic as in the child can perform these maneuvers of the tongue, can mouth and breathe with the rest, with the best of them, can understand in that manner prior to understanding, as well, with the best of them, with the rest of them.  More basic still as in alive, so simply the tongue of the living, the mouth and breath of the living, the preunderstanding of the living as living, as sharing–life.  We shared this tongue as the living share the need to nourish themselves and feed on something, shared it easily once we realized this fundamental community and commonality, shared it like we shared the cool water covering our bodies, because of our willingness to dive in or our getting splashed somehow or other. 

            Why the hesitation to get wet, then?  And why say, as was said at the start, that in HIS language he made people laugh, that in HIS language it was made easy to laugh?  Why all this talk of sidelines and dividers between one atmosphere of laughter and another when in all reality, the one we share, have in common, the one that concerns US, concerns us most at least, there are no such separating lines and no such borders?  In ALL reality, the reality WE share, there is only sharing, spread like easy laughter everywhere, in froth and foam and bubbling, rollicking water.  Well, let us not condemn the man or woman who is not so easy to get wet, who steps with caution in all foreign damp zones, misses the swimming back home, and stays quiet, shy or a bit awkward or befuddled, when in the company of those who do not speak his ‘language,’ that particular tongue with its skill and deftness in the circumstances; it is rather difficult to admit that we are getting along just fine, splendidly, that we understand and know one another at least here, that we share something fundamental, when each of us does not know a lick of what the other is saying.  And how to we admit it, what means do we take in admitting such a thing, what means other than simply laughing or crying on, continuing what you’ve been doing, if you have been up to it, or if you were carried off into it somehow, say, if you were splashed from the sides, as I was, called into it as the one thing needful, the one thing I was capable of doing at that time, and therefore the one thing I HAD to do, a specialization in my lover’s mother tongue–for he was a lover, at least for a time he became a lover–be damned.

Circle of Thanks

Daisies cum Cosmos

For Louise Glück 

I love you
And love your voice
Despite never feeling the liquid of it
Pour from your throat
On my own aging wine skin
The whispers you most likely shared
With a love nearby
Who did, or perhaps did not
Hear what was within the whispers:
Fountains streams pools lakes rivers
Seas of wonder loneliness despair triumph
Joy all wrapped up in some splendor
Some unbearable subtlety 
That lasts as long as silence in worry
Leaving the listener, the one
Brave and cautious enough to lean in
The shy drunkard, thirsty
For what leaves them thirsty
Thirsty flowers, thirsty choking
Flowers not fit for too much sunshine
Thirsty flowers, some of them
With brambles and thorns unforgiving.

I should have said I adore you
Even having not known one true solid drop of you
For this.

What was I feeling, anyway?

What was I feeling, anyway? Was it regret? But regret does not feel the way I felt. Regret always has something of a clinging to it, but this feeling did not have any clinging. It was a feeling of being suspended above all the known and being uncertain in your deepest core. Or, it was a feeling of your core being exposed and peeled through so that the sun shone where you never thought it would shine. Or maybe like this: like the surprise you feel when you are expecting to be surprised. The only way to truly be surprised, according to an old philosopher who dressed in rags and ate raw plants, using the fire in his home only to warm his bones after wandering through forests and other abandoned places.

It was a wild type of joy, what I was feeling. For joy, joy is never what you expect. We expect joy to be a happiness and to readily paint a happy smile on our faces. We expect joy to stay with us throughout all the mishaps and happenstances of our lives. We want it to return to us as soon as it can whenever it leaves us. Joy, however, does not play by any of these rules, and makes sure through its wiles that we not forget this.

I stepped inside the shop like it was another day at work, but noticed in the first hour of the morning that the day was different than other days. We cannot expect one day to be like the others, and we are cruel to our days and curse them if we do expect that. This day was different, first because I was being watched more than usual. I knew it. I could feel it. Every time I snuck away from the front of the store to go into the bathroom and make myself forget about all the work we had to do out there, I knew, just knew that the cameras lining the walls were somehow extended into the bathroom, and that I would be spied on for whatever I did in the bathroom, whether fulfill by cravings and lusts or stand or sit there morose and unfulfilled.

But I didn’t care and did what I did anyway in the bathroom. After relieving myself of the greatest pressure in there, I suddenly felt this impossible feeling. It was a quick and sudden liberation, this feeling. This joy. For again, it was joy or like joy, and overwhelmed me with the satisfaction that it is indifferent whether I ever return to work again. When I walked out of the bathroom for the seventh time, I returned to the counter, my work station. I stayed there the rest of the shift, smiled to patrons when they came in, helped them lift shirts off the top rack, shared little stories with them and even smaller jokes. I had on the same uniform as usual, and appeared prepared to stay the day and many days to come. But in reality I was gone, gone gone, dissatisfied with the minutiae but all along affirming the whole.

Circle of Thanks

What was not certain

What was not certain was that she had any idea what she was really doing. Every gesture seemed certain and perfectly planned, the room was made up just as she had intended it, there were even flowers in the room wilted to just the degree she had imagined in her journals. There was still something oblivious about that final moment, like she was oblivious to the finality of it, how dramatic and severe it was, how meaningless.

Circle of Thanks

Of Responsibility

A: Why do you go around with such cold and eternal eyes? Why do you feel that you have such a heavy responsibility for the world?
B: Because I do.
A: Why?
B: Now you’re asking me why I have this responsibility? Well, that involves a whole–
A: No, I am asking you why you FEEL that you have this responsibility. If I were just asking why you have the responsibility, I would be assuming that you have it. Let me make myself clear: for me it is doubtful that you have this responsibility in the first place. Responsibility is like witchcraft and like guilt, real for a time, but only because of certain obsessions of ours, but then seen through and as unreal after a good while, after we have struggled with them awhile. I want to know what it is that gives you this feeling of responsibility, because I don’t think it is necessary.
B: I think you would be getting rid of a lot more in ridding yourself of the feeling of responsibility than you realize. Responsibility is tied to responding, being able to respond or having to respond. In German, it is tied to answering, being able to answer or having to answer. Look at all of our questions and answers now, our sayings and the responses to our sayings now…. What would we do with them if we felt we lived in the world without…responsibility?
A: Not much, or not anything really. It would be what it is, a play of expressions and counter-expressions, a play of posings and counter-posings, a play of riddles altogether, but without a player, and without the weight of the world and the viciousness of the world being put on this player. I think that feelings of responsibility are like and tied to feels of guilt and shame. Human beings have felt some wild pride in bearing this weight for so long, that the guilt and the shame have become part and parcel of the pride. We now live such that we cannot imagine life and the world without weight, as it gives us ourselves weight and importance among all the flitting things about us. The feeling, feeling guilt or shame or responsibility, reinforces and fulfills the desire that we mean something amid all the meaninglessness of things.
B: Even if the play is all insane frivolity, I do not see how beings like us, or any beings really, can be a part of the play without responding to it somehow. It can all be mirages and mirrors and dreamscapes as far as I’m concerned, and it would still be necessary to respond to it somehow. That is, if the being is present for the happening, if the being is to somehow be a part of the happening. You are seeing responsibility as something that we have given ourselves, something we are cultivating ourselves. Hence the tie to guilt and shame–although I am not quite sure whether these too might not be bestowed upon us, part of our endowment, as it were, a gift. I see it differently, I see responsibility as something given to us and at the same time something that gives us new passageways through and viewpoints of this life. When we respond to something, we are part of the making of new ways not only for us to respond to what comes next, but for all beings in their own responses to the future. Responses now open and shape further responses. It goes on and on in this way–
A: I gather. And I think I see: that freedom, or responsibility, can be different from something we have. Rather it is something we are. Something inescapable no matter how paradoxical. Something dreadful, but also the only hope we have at the leaving of dread. It is like we are responding always to the question posed to us, the question that we ourselves also are.
B: Exactly. Think of the man who never saw the edge of the town, but dreamed that he had. He told stories of the edge, even of what was past the edge, to all of his neighbors for decades, so that even the children in the town believed his stories and described the edge of the town in a way similar to him. These stories and descriptions then passed from generation to generation, and the townspeople even began to build their homes and their roads based on them. The world was transformed without their knowing it, notwithstanding the lasting few in the town who claimed to draw real and accurate maps of the town and its surroundings, who claimed to know the real rim of the world. Now these two factions, the one larger the one smaller, bicker on endlessly about the shape of things.

Circle of Thanks

It was a little sad…

It was a little sad when he brought the body to us
Even though the body was only of a cricket.
It was sadder when he started singing over the body
With shrill notes he learned from the cricket.

Saddest of all was when the boy spent the next few days
Building the casket out of miniature planks
Submerging the remains of his friend with three tears.
Unbearably liberating when he told us this fate is ours.
Circle of Thanks

The choir was silenced like a burnt speaker

The choir was silenced like a burnt speaker
When the godman walked into the room
The plates were not only stopped but shattered
The humans directing the show on the stage
Gave up the play and stared in dismay
As the godman made his way up the aisle
Stopped at the front fow of pews
Gazed up at the bronze icon bearing his image
And shook his head so that dust fell from his curls
Making other, unbearable images on the floor.

In terms of logic

Not all the sentences have to follow one another. In terms of logic, that is. You can say what you need when you need to say it. When the floods started that was the beginning of trauma, when they wouldn’t cease that was the endlessness of our trauma. Oh, and then all of the authorities cared nothing of the people, asked them to fend for themselves. Without asking, that is. The people were distraught and caught in agonizing, since there wasn’t any sense either in the cruelty or in the lack of it during those times when they felt more ignored than anything else. It was hard to live for anything else but cringing and crying during those times. They were times when you could cringe and cry all day long without anyone looking at you funny, or with a pity mixed with dark humor.

Then the floods ceased but the people felt that they no longer belonged on land. Building again felt like pure stupidity, and most of us simply laid down our tools for doing so. We spent the time instead groaning, groaning at the changing colors of the sky, groaning at the sky when it refused to change colors, groaning in unison with the notes groaning from all sides of the bay. First the land was ripped from under our feet, now the waters were torn from around our breasts, and we heaved but we no longer had the waters to match our heaving. Even the one who learned to walk on the waters stumbled, the waters left so quickly.

No one believed it when they saw it

No one believed it when they saw it
It was an animal somehow sent to warn us
An animal with wings and with a voice like hell's
The hell you dream of when you want to be terrifying.

Oh, those poor criminals right all along
About their lives of crime
Right to tell all of us that life
Is not what you think it is
Do not reach for the apple for life
Is spoiled and started out spoiled.

Darkness upon darkness, the only visible thing
Those wings lighting up the grounds
With sequins made of imagination
And anticipatory dreams of the bygone
The podium where it stsood adjusted itself
Like putty to the form of the bird.

They are content to eat dirt the rest of their lives
Because they know that dirt provides
The only nutrition left for their kind
When the world pauses all around them waiting
Waiting still with breathless sighs
For their next move.

Above our heads the voice of that flighty dancer
Ripped so as to tear the sky
But before it fell , we had time to decide
Whether we would listen to the creature
Or whether we should use this time to run and cover our heads.

They have to plod through the earth now
Full of uncertainty
All while being thankful for the most quesitonalbe things
Like the clock still ticking on the wall
Without any batteries and without any plug stuck into an outlet.

Before we had time to decide it was overwhelming 
The voices calling out to the humans
With speeches not meant for human ears
Being sent down to the humans
When above us all we saw was impossible emptiness.