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diaryland
one must always make room for the next ephemeral crystal
05 April 2008 - 10:05
The man studied the coming day. In the middle of my life, he said, I drew the path of it upon a map and I studied it a long time. I tried to see the pattern that it made upon the earth because I thought that if I could see that pattern and identify the form of it then I would know better how to continue. I would know what my path must be. I would see into the future of my life.
Every moment lately I have been gaining new insight into the movement of my life. It's so funny how we make so many decisions assuming we have enough information about the nature of our lives (and the nature of life, itself), but every few years brings a new stance towards life, a new perspective on everything we've done in the past.
The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future. At the core of our life is the history of which it is composed and in that core are no idioms but only the act of knowing and it is this we share in dreams and out. Before the first man spoke and after the last is silenced forever.
I can't help but expect my current view to change, but from here it looks like I began winding something in my youth, and I took this coil and wound it tighter and tighter through my young adult years, dropping each permutation of one idea for another one like it. And now I feel as though I have begun unwinding.
Unwinding, opening.
The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand. And yet I think he saw the world unraveling at his feet. The procedures which he had adopted for his journey now seemed like an echo from the death of things.
Sure, I am such a different person than I was when I was 20 it almost surprises me that people call me by the same name, but I can't for one second fault any of the other Donna's for choices I wouldn't now make. I can see that everything I did gave me something, each painful "mistake" gave me a little bit of freedom.
I love walking out into the lush green grass of a new world and knowing that every step I take, whether it leads me to Utopia or a terrible pit is necessary, will lift me up and make me more than I was. I know what I want to do more than I ever have, and yet I am less afraid than I've ever been of doing anything wrong.
This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else can by it be contained.
In other news, I love my friends and am grateful for them every day.
And I love Kale. Words of his that knocked me off my feet recently: "In the old days there were biologists who would take off all their clothes and walk into a swamp until they were neck deep in water and sludge, and they would hold their notebooks at chin level and spend the day writing and sketching everything they saw. That is me. The other day I lay motionless for so long trying to get a picture of something that someone thought I was dead and called 911." (True story, btw.)
From Kale's flickr page.
* Title is a Yukio Mishima quote.
* All italics are Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain. Original meaning (though not wording) somewhat violated through juxtaposition with my words, but what can I say, I am a bricoleur...