poolside

Intermission

They're feeding each other, two small birds
swiveling on a sea-stone, open beaks
kissing and closing—creatures seeing to each
other's needs without question, drawing
the big world into their brief circle
of wing-quiver, heart-shiver, quick cries
as if the nerves themselves gave tongue,
the path between desire and satisfaction
shorter than thought, the ground dividing
being from being—one flesh-protected
spark of life from another—covered
in no time, so even time, for the moment,
is a matter of no moment, smoke that
vanishes into air, into thin air, to leave
but a flaring thing behind—candescent,
burning its one good instant till all is ash,
redemptive breath recovering itself,
eyes seeking in eyes an answer
to what's happened. The fire at the heart
of things is what these two birds ignite
in their give and take, saying we live
in the one world—where some law of
loving exchange is what tends the blaze
and can startle us into a kind of intermission
of peace between two clamorous cliff-
crumbling waves that rear break roar and
rip to shreds a coast of stone, unsettling
the air we stand in with a surf-storm of
salt-light that bites our eyes, blinding them.

-- Eamon Grennan

Eamon Grennan's "the trip"

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stubborn desire

I turn you out of doors
tenant desire

You pay no rent
I turn you out of doors
all my best rooms are yours
the brain and heart

                                depart
I turn you out of doors

switch off the lights
throw water on the fire
I turn you out of doors

stubborn desire

-- Alain Chartier
Translated by Edward Lucie-Smith

Alain Chartier

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making the silence answer and the non-being be

When I am engaged in writing something important to me, I find that if I engage in the customary twenty-minute meditation period before writing, my universe has become too straightened out, too orderly. Then I have nothing to write about. My encounter has vanished into thin air. My "problems" are all solved. I feel bliss, to be sure; but I cannot write.

I prefer, therefore, to endure the chaos, to face "complexity and perplexity," as Barron puts it. Then I am impelled by this chaos to seek order, to struggle with it until I can find a deeper, underlying form. I believe I am then engaged in what MacLeish describes as struggling with the meaninglessness and silence of the world until I can force it to mean, until I can make the silence answer and the non-being be. After the morning's period of writing, I can then use meditation for its authentic purpose—namely a deep relaxation of mind and body.

-- Rollo May The Courage to Create

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the soul shudders

To have seen it only by day is not to know its effect: the brilliant Italian sun lends everything a holiday air, but the moon is the star for ruins. The Amphitheater seems to rise into the skies so that at times, seen through its apertures, some part of heaven's vault looks like a dark blue curtain placed behind the structure. The plants clinging to decaying walls, growing in solitary places, take on the colors of the night; finding itself alone with nature, the soul shudders and has tender feelings all at once.

-- Madame de Staël Corinne
Translated by Avriel H. Goldberger

Madame de Staël

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seeing

Astonishing. Getting older and older, I still stand here at this window, watching—as if never having watched anything like it before . . . Through my breath condensing into fog on the cold window pane, I still see bare branches chasing their shadows in the icy wind, black threads of water crinkling through fissures in the frozen river. I am aware that what I am seeing is no more, no less than the great Mystery, that of being here at all, that of seeing it—as from the other side of a mirror—snow, birds, my breath still condensing, that breath that started so long ago as my first cry.

-- Frederick Franck in "Behind the Mask" Parabola 20:2

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part of it

As you move through life your hope in miracles, in luck, in happy accidents, in immunity disappears, along with your dread of the opposite. The miracle is not something that happens to you—it is all around you, and you are embedded in it, moving through it, part of it.

-- Marvin Barrett, in "Climbing to Christmas" Parabola 22:4

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the reality

"So illusion, for you, is not the opposite of reality?"

"Absolutely not. It is rather the only method of penetrating reality. In the same way that untruth, as I said earlier, is not the opposite of truth but its transparent mask (as Nietzsche and Wilde both thought), so illusion is not the opposite of reality but again its transparent mask. Which is why the ages of illusion are childhood and old age. And those are precisely the times when we are nearer to reality, because we are nearer, it seems, to the frontiers of that nothingness from which we come and into which we go. But this word 'néant' doesn't mean anything because it means nothing, 'nada.' But that nothing, that nada, is everything . . . I once wrote a little poem in which I said that we don't return to childhood when we grow old, but that our childhood has in fact kept pace very slowly beside us, all through our youth, waiting to rejoin us when the bustle of our prime is past. That is what poets and mystics have continually told us: that this illusion of life is the reality."

-- Guy Saurès in conversation with José Bergamin, in Malraux Past Present Future
Translated by Derek Coltman

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the path home

The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. ("But you are home," cries the Witch of the North. "All you have to do is wake up").

-- Peter Matthiessen The Snow Leopard

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the little phrase

The year before, at an evening party, he had heard a piece of music played on the piano and violin. At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But then at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony-he did not know which-that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one's nostrils.' ...

-- Marcel Proust Swann in Love (from "The Little Phrase ...")