Sometimes

Sometimes you think you are a caterpillar.
That you have the benefit of me-ta-mor-pho-sis.
That you can start afresh.
That wings will grow out of your back.
That you will have visions of tree-tops.

Sometimes you think you are a worm.
That you will always crawl among dead leaves.
That you can never escape.
That you will never be of the sky.
That this is it.

Sometimes.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Love after Love
Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Why you cannot lie to an aphasiac

This is just so stunning!!!!

Context: "Aphasia is an acquired language disorder in which there is an impairment of any language modality. This may include difficulty in producing or comprehending spoken or written language."

"....Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily....

We recognize this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose - to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we - so susceptible to words - cannot trust our own instincts.

...In this, then, lies their (the aphasiacs') power of understanding - understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. (AM: Context here - they are watching the President's speech on TV, at the hospital) Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.

This is why they laughed at the President's speech."

Page 86, 'Losses', from the book 'The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat' by Oliver Sacks

may my heart always be open to little birds

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

e.e.cummings

The space for hypocrisy

"...In a village, the difference between what is known about a person and what is unknown is slight. There may be a number of well-guarded secrets but, in general, deceit is rare because impossible. Thus there is little inquisitiveness - in the prying sense of the term, for there is no need for it. Inquisitiveness is the trait of the city concierge who can gain a little power or recognition by telling X what he doesn't know about Y. In the village X already knows it. And thus too there is little performing: peasants do not play roles as urban characters do.

This is not because they are 'simple' or more honest or without guile, it is simply because the space between what is unknown about a person and what is generally known - and this is the space for all performance - is too small.

That is why the village's continual portrait of itself is mordant, frank, sometimes exaggerated but seldom idealized or hypocritical. And the significance of this is that hypocrisy and idealization close questions, whereas realism leaves them open."

Essay: The Storyteller
Chapter 2: Leaving Home

from 'The Sense of Sight' by John Berger

Till then my windows ache

Matilde, where are you? Down there I noticed,
under my necktie and just above the heart,
a certain pang of grief between the ribs,
you were gone that quickly.

I needed the light of your energy,
I looked around, devouring hope.
I watched the void without you that is like a house,
nothing left but tragic windows.

Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens
to the fall of the ancient leafless rain,
to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned:

so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.

Pablo Neruda

Asymmetry

In a perfectly symmetrical world, we wouldn't exist. In the beginning, creation consisted of almost equal doses of matter and antimatter. When these two substances came together, they annihilated each other. Had the balance between the two been exact, the universe would have destroyed itself.

'Lucifer's Legacy - The Meaning of Asymmetry
Frank Close

Adventure

"……but the greatest sorrow of our lives is the absence of adventure. Ulysses fought at Troy, came back crossing the seas, guided his ship himself, had a mistress in each island- no, our lives are not like that. The odyssey of Homer has moved inwards; it has been internalized. The islands, the sea, the sirens who seduce us, Ithacca that calls us back, these, now, are only the voices of our inner being…."

Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Bridges

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."

Tom Stoppard

Terminal

For every departure
there is an arrival.
It is the law of the axe
Whose handle was a tree
It is the secret
The fire caves in upon
Whose smoke disappears
Along its own trail....
The leaves push off again-
A whole fleet of small sails-
And no one knows where they land.
Children wave from train windows
Their years growing
Heavy on their backs.
But somewhere a cloud is forming
That will flower here in petals
Of snow
And light from a star
That started towards us
A million years ago
Arrives at last........

Linda Pastan

Can you hold out?

Questions

By Bertold Brecht

(-From the collection written during the second world war
-translated from the German)

Write me what you’re wearing. Are you warm?
Write me how you sleep. Is your bed soft?
Write me how you look. Are you the same?
Write me what you miss. Is it my arms?

Tell me: are they letting you alone?
Can you hold out? What will their next move be?
What are you doing? Is it what should be done?
What are you thinking of? Is it of me?

Questions are all that I can give you, and
I take what answers come, because I must.
If you are tired, I cant give you a hand;
Or hungry, feed you. Thus, it is as though
I’m not in the world; did not exist;
It is as though I had forgotten you.........

Place

Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don’t seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your own inner nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don’t belong. One man’s food is often another man’s poison, and what is glamorous and exciting to some can be a dangerous trap to others. An incident in the life of Chuang-tse can serve as an example:

“While sitting on the banks of the P’u river, Chuang-tse was approached by two representatives of the Prince of Ch’u, who offered him a position at court. Chuang-tse watched the water flowing by as if he had not heard. Finally he remarked, “I am told that the Prince has a sacred tortoise, over two thousand years old, which is kept in a box, wrapped in silk and brocade.” “That is true” the officials replied. “If the tortoise had been given a choice”, Chuang-tse continued, “which do you think he would have liked better- to have been alive in the mud, or dead within the palace?” “To have been alive in the mud, of course,” the men answered. “I too prefer the mud”, said Chuang-tse. “Good-bye”.

The Tao of Pooh & The Te of Piglet
Benjamin Hoff

Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary.

Margaret Atwood

Changes

Whirl me
Like the leaf I would like to become
Borne on a constantly changing wind
Let’s not dwell in the past
The layers of vanished dreams
have vast striations
Of fossilized bones
Crushed in with memory.
Not that we should live for the moment
But let’s at least
Feel it go by.

Gwen Davis

Living a story

"In all pre-industrial societies people have believed that living is a way of living a story. In this story one is always the protagonist and occasionally the teller, but the inventor of the story, the designer of the plot, is elsewhere. People who believe this, and who lead the story of their life in this way, are often natural storytellers.

Just as, if they happen to be shepherds who spend a great deal of time alone, championed only animals and the spirit of the landscape, they are often natural poets: poetry being that form of language which addresses itself to that which is beyond speaking."

Page 261, Sicilian Lives

John Berger, The Sense of Sight