Umberto Boccioni
States of Mind II: Those Who Go

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I Remember

I remember fire dancing at my fingertips,
there, in the dream of my youth;
I remember simple things, unsubtle and sweet,
hot and cold, soft and hard,
actions that had no consequence,
immortal years that never would end,
except that alas, they did anyway. I remember
the girls, saving themselves
for a heartbreak, and the boys who bragged
about things that they imagined
they did, there in the
sunshiny morning of youth,
as pure as dew, as simple as a grassy park.
There was pain, too, but
that seems less real than the rest of it,
not that I pretended that I hurt,
but that I bounced back so easily,
back in the saddle to
ride toward the sunset
in our heroic derivatives of myth.
I do not lament that
forever seems to have come and gone,
for in my mind those years
hold an eternal place,
there in the springtime of the world
when our youth was
as infallible as a blue sky, and
so many impossible things happened.

the walls are sheets of parchment, they can bear no load
but for the words that are scrawled upon them
mysteries with no plot, too real to make sense altogether
underpinnings of mayhem deconstructed
the tenuous slip of destiny’s gossamer strand
if i wander far, i am only following the drift of love
if i should find home again, it is the house of love
and it is written, on these walls, it is written
the mystery of death i spend no time trying to solve
the mystery of love: unfolding, ever, now, awake

It is better to hope and to be wrong, than never to have hoped in the first place. It is like the notion that it is better to try, and fail, then to give up not having made the attempt. Better to go down swinging than looking. A noble attempt, that makes you the better meaning of the word human: it exercises the heart more than as a muscle. It is also a show of strength, especially when you have hoped before and been let down, that a certain courage is required to hope once more. And of course, there is even a patron saint of lost causes, one St. Jude. There is no saint of bitterness, no saint of cynicism. Of love, faith, and hope, love is the greatest and hope is most likely viewed as the least, but how powerful the smallest candle when shining in a vasty dark. There is always hope: just believe this, and it will be true. Light that candle.

“Not called,” did you say? Not heard the call, I think you should say. He has been calling loudly ever since He spoke your sins forgiven — if you are forgiven at all — entreating and beseeching you to be His ambassador. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull poor sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonised heart of humanity and listen to its pitying wail for help. Go and stand by the gates of Hell and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father’s house, and bid their brothers, and sisters, and servants, and masters not to come there. And then look the Christ in the face, whose mercy you profess to have got, and whose words you have promised to obey, and tell Him whether you will join us heart and soul and body and circumstances in this march to publish His mercy to all the world.

Robert Rauschenberg: Untitled

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song of a heart, a heart forged in a dream
the source of my fire is in interrupted darkness
where in the friction of today upon yesterday
fell from the sky the hope of a full moon
as the wires broke, as the ashes flew everywhere
to live as strong as the will can imagine
this stranded wolf sniffed the blood of new dawn
where the echoes broke into a deep beat
awake into the red of the city’s outer arteries
remembering the calls of far, far friends
and i carved the eldritch letters from the night
a howl that burned away the unbelieving past
a song i learned while in the depths of myself

I am small, held in a single thought, and I am never one thing or another, but constantly becoming.

I breathe in during the day, and I exhale it all at night, wondering if the dreams to come also come and go like the tide.

I have drunk of moonlight, when the pale glow poured into silent ponds, rendering stillness to the waters.

I am huge, of greater matter than the most enormous star, but in the darkness, how like nothing I am.

I leap in my dreams across the airy heights, and I walk upon the feathertop clouds — but even in my dreaming I return to earth.

I have stumbled and fallen, fallen, but I heed not gravity’s advice, and still I reach up toward infinity.

I am a cry, a whisper, a teardrop fallen into dust, and however much I change, this soul of mine keeps in the tune of “me”.

I do not know why, but I will keep hope alive. The taste of despair is perhaps bearable enough, and mayhap that I even deserve of my sins to suffer, but there comes from out of nowhere… something quite remarkable. And I cannot help but to listen to it. There shall be times, I know, when I can but hang on with the last erg of my strength, and the while, I may not know why I do it, why I do not merely give up — but there is a silence in me that understands something, something so fragile that to whisper it is to risk its fracture. This is what hope is like, I think, almost holy stuff: not some trivial side product of such and such desire, but a note in the key of a greater song, a greater logic of which it is entrusted of you to keep alive the simple meaning of some ephemeral truth. And I will realize, when the time comes, that it was never me that was keeping it alive, but that it instead was the hope that kept me alive — that made life worth living, the day worth seizing.

[On his experiences during internment by the Japanese during WWII] When I muttered “Forgive them,” I wondered how far I was being dramatic, and if I really meant it; because I looked at their faces as they stood round, taking it in turn to flog me, and their faces were hard and cruel, and some of them were evidently enjoying their cruelty. But, by the Grace of God, I saw those men not as they were, but as they had been. Once they were little children playing with their brothers and sisters — happy in their parents’ love, in those far-off days before they had been conditioned by their false nationalist ideals, and it is hard to hate little children. So I saw them not as they were, but as they were capable of becoming, redeemed by the power of Christ, and I knew that I should say “Forgive.”