The afternoon has gently passed me by
The evening spreads its sail against the sky
Waiting for tomorrow, just another day
God bid yesterday good-bye

Bring on the night
I couldn’t spend another hour of daylight
Bring on the night
I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight

– The Police

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Landscape with Distant River and Bay

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A heartbreak need not be caused by some kind of grievous injury to the soul. If properly placed, a slight tap will do it, if upon a particularly precarious hope the shield is set that one fractures. And we wonder why we hurt so much from it. As Pascal said, that the heart has its reason that reason knows not of, yes: love is logic, and who is to know why, when one brings that up in the tiniest of applications? But the surprising thing is that we will still be surprised. We are all of us so jaded, that such a thing that is sung by a thousand people in the five ways that it can be sung about — why would anything be new to us in the ways of love? Yet the hope is met, that thing we dare not even whisper, perhaps that if to say it would be to render it powerless, or that one scarcely believe it is so: we can fall in love. And it is this hope which is so very vulnerable, and susceptible to the slightest damage, and break our heart — without us ever suspecting that we could believe in such things, anymore.

I am persuaded that some have scarce any better or more forcible argument to satisfy their own minds that they are in the right in religion than the inclination they find in themselves to hate and persecute them whom they suppose to be in the wrong.

Who of us is to wonder at the secret lives of trees?
To wonder if in the susurrus there is an eldritch whisper?
Otherwise in constant dictation of the Book of Silence.

We are each of us alone, though many conversations do make us forget that — and a few remind us of it.

Through much dreaming, I have traveled to these distant shores. And something always presses me on, on, when sometimes I would like to stop and look at all the things that surround me: such is the curse of mortality, it would seem. I dine on the barest scraps of meaning, anything that will fuel me towards some end I have only a vague idea of what it might be. Much dreaming I imagine is yet to come, and many of them I cannot make sense of, and I shrug off, wondering for a moment if it could be some sort of warning. Where I am, I see no footprints around me, but I notice I leave very little traces of myself here, as well: the rarefied landscape swallows much in just the grandness of its expanse, for not many can have been here, and the few (if that many) could go around simultaneously and never meet one another, I might think. Then, too, I believe myself to be completely alone, from time to time, a thought that can terrify me if I let it, or send me to bliss at the notion….

“As if from some fluid metainferences about this becoming, and that, my imagination’s muse has washed down from the specter of these, my considerations, all the ulterior renderings of purpose that I had girded up — and which were only sand, piles of deteriorating and futile fortresses, fantasy that had no extension in any viable future.” … And so, what did I say? It was as if I moved my mouth and things came out, didn’t it seem so? It was about loss, if I remember, what has just passed, about some water that was not specifically stated. It was about illusion, which was mentioned as sand — about illusions of what was thought to be, about what I understood as what was meant to be for me. And there it is, beginning with the made-up word, starting with “meta”, and which one supposes could have meaning as it may have been intended: possible answers about the answering itself, about how things change.

But what was I trying to say? I forgot to mention the inspiration, and perhaps it had to do with the statement itself that I was making, if one were to put it under a psychoanalysis of verbiage — but let me not start again with the flowery prose. I was inspired to deconstruct what I had been thinking, about where I was going, and implicitly, I was wondering to what end I was doing what I do. For it is such with many of the castles we erect to house the dreams that propel us: that they are made of such stuff that the most casual of cleansing thought (any pure stream of reasoning) will carry off with its current all that we thought was bearing the load. And all we have left is the ghost of our decisions. But I suppose the one thing that is missing from all this is the hope: so let me end it with something I leave you to figure out on your own, that picks up right after the word “future”, above (with humor): “Or so it seemed.”

What the head makes cloudy
The heart makes very clear
The days were so much brighter
In the time when she was here
But I know there’s somebody somewhere
Make these dark clouds disappear
Until that day, I have to believe
I believe, I believe

In a new york minute
Everything can change
In a new york minute
You can get out of the rain
In a new york minute
Everything can change
In a new york minute

– The Eagles

Henri Rousseau: The Dream

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Rumbling

The flight of my desire
across the airy lights of dreaming,
across the starry dreaming of wonder,
fire that consumed me without pain,
where I reached out into the expanse of imagining,
hand wet with the dewy dawn I touched
where beginning began,
where ending fluttered away,
and I was nowhere and everywhere
in the prophecies of stardust,
understanding in a stream of inklings
why meant to be meant me.

I say the purpose of all doubt
is lost to those who have no wish to be wise,
and the houses of our souls
overlooks such grand chasms
between even the empathy and experience,
but I believe that we are similar sounds
in some of the deeper notes,
for I, too, am oft skeptical
that any of us ever had any hope,
that any of us in truth ever won:
even when he had it all and a half,
how many the times when the love was empty sugar,
and success merely a cookie shell
of a house that crumbled open to a hollow echo?

In stupid reaching, splendidly have I failed,
and though spit into the spillway rocks like contagion,
such heartbreaks I recommend to anyone,
for glorious they can be,
that kind of headlong tragedy,
for in such dirty ovens hearts are forged,
in such stark waters steel spirits tempered,
and I could not dream to cook
music sweeter than the scales of gravity measure
if I did not know that from so far down
can one lurch forth with the barest knuckles
and with the greatest of heaves
take wing above it all,
to sing like the Star of Bethlehem itself.

We may look into a church, almost any church, and discover someone who, though he is offered a gospel of love, must subtly convert it into a gospel of hate before he can receive it. The gospel of love — with its emphasis upon brotherhood, equality before God, the dignity of every human being, and man’s social responsibility toward man — does not satisfy the lack that he urgently feels. That calls for something altogether different, for an assurance that he is superior, that he is right where others are wrong — a kind of cosmic teacher’s pet.

I search for elusive things, and imagine that they are worth chasing because of their rarity; and I wonder if I will know when I find them the real reason why I go in the first place on their trail. For I know enough that I realize I know very little, and every time I am sure of something, that with such pride cometh the fall — though too, I never do stop conjecturing why a certain thing is, or might be. Or shall I put it another way: when will I get a clue? Is it that we are fated never to truly know why, not while we bumble and stumble around upon this bare earth; is giving up trying to understand the true understanding? Seems like a lot of work just to throw in the towel. There are those who have been as if they had some higher order of understanding, but I imagine that I am not like them, I am not the one in a billion who grasps the wispy secrets of heaven. But then again, nothing will stop me from those moments that come, and they do come: when I look up at the stars, and in a childlike sense of wonder, feel among everything around me as if I belong….

For we do not know how little deserving we are of the tender mercies of Heaven. For we have had the protection from on high from the very first. Such is the nature of the world that to realize what things were given us would be a cruel deprivation of the very basic, for it would mean to do without them, the smallest comforts of life. We are not thankful because we have no clue that we are blessed, most of us. Though it would probably do us good in our understanding, some drastic deprivation for a short time (perhaps three days without food?), we are further blessed by being able to understand such things just by thinking. It is something akin to growing up, which not all of us will do. The child, in an average middle class, has no thought to the roof over his head, or the meals at his table. So, too, are we about the grander things of this world. Consider the things we usually never think about, for we have such power. Just look around you, any day, anywhere. And be very, very thankful.

Being busy dying is not so much being busy. Busy being born usually doesn’t know what that means.

Dreams will come true in unexpected ways, but it happens,
or at least, dreams are made of such stuff as to make us believe it:
else such species of ideation would have evolved out of us.

And in these days
When darkness falls early
And people rush home
To the ones they love
You better take a fool’s advice
And take care of your own
One day they’re here;
Next day they’re gone

I pulled my coat around my shoulders
And took a walk down through the park
The leaves were falling around me
The groaning city in the gathering dark
On some solitary rock
A desperate lover left his mark,
“Baby, I’ve changed, please come back.”

– The Eagles

Juan Gris: Man in the Cafe

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