silences and meditations.
reading and chewing the words, carrying them to the world, throwing them over the anvil, ting, ting…
here’s a quote of recent, (from “The Great Philosophers,” pp. 267)
…”to own up means, for Heidegger, to hold on to anxiety rather than flee it. If you CHOOSE (ital.) to do that–and, in anxiety, your normal unreflective pressing into possibilities has broken down, so you do have to make a reflective choice–you will be thrown into an entirely different way of being human.”
hooooooaaa.
what is this “choice”? it is involved with becoming oneself, with becoming a creator, rather than a reactor: (as opposed to “the decider” as Mr. bush says)… the choice is to look away from established norms, trends, spoon fed values, and DWELL in the region of the unknown, in that region where one sits, pondering the shape of clay, letting the brush rest on the back of her leg, walking over that steep butte on the off chance the next shot is just beyond your scope of experience, where the light may be magic…
i love nothing more than this expression of being thrust into an entirely different way of being human… this man or woman, strong enough to sit with anxiety, not to “flee into inauthenticity”, is masterful in being and can embrace fortune and misfortune as the groundwork for strength, the strength to dwell, the strength to be weak.
a favorite poem (i read it for the first time eight years ago, sitting in the sun porch of a farmhouse in walla walla) by derek walcott (1948):
I, with legs crossed along the daylight, watch
The variegated fists of clouds that gather over
The uncouth features of this, my prone island.
Meanwhile the steamers which divide horizons prove
Us lost;
Found only
In tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars;
Found in the blue reflection of eyes
That have known cities and think us here happy.
Time creeps over the patient who are too long patient,
So I, who have made one choice,
Discover that my boyhood has gone over.
And my life, too early of course for the profound cigarette,
The turned doorhandle, the knife turning
In the bowels of the hours, must not be made public
Until I have learnt to suffer
In accurate iambics.
(end quote)
AWAY, now!
this represents to me the hunger to see the sky open, to see the words of fire written along God’s spine, experience the sex of diva, and having the fortitude to learn the skills, the world-honed technique of BEING in time, and how those become a single thing, to-be-time, one-is-time. i’m time… and the patience requisite to follow one’s craft, as craft writes us…. as we turn to the world for experience, for wisdom, for the shy tiger of being hiding below our scantlings.