The King deputized for the Queen at many sacred functions, dressed in her robes, wore false breasts, borrowed her lunar axe as a symbol of power, and even took over from her the magical act of rain-making. His ritual death varied greatly in circumstance; he might be torn in pieces by wild women, transfixed with a sting-ray spear, felled with an axe, pricked in the heel by a poisoned arrow, flung over a cliff, burned to death on a pyre, drowned in a pool, or killed in a pre-arranged chariot crash. But die he must. A new stage was reached when animals came to be substituted for boys at the sacrificial altar…
–Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 1
In man, unlike the apes, the impulse to use some sort of language is overwhelming.
–Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings
This vision of someone, sitting alone in a room somewhere two hundred years ago, something of me moving in his blood, something maybe in the way he squints and puzzles, in the way his mind changes directions, the way words fall from his lips almost unbidden, the way they fly from his fingers like shavings he is whittling from the truth.
A relative, some pause on the long, crooked road leading to this moment, this old aching confusion and these persistent, nagging questions, this huge desire.
You, world, I imagine you sleeping and wish you sweet dreams, wish you love, wish you every wish of your darling heart. May you never find yourself leaning on a windowsill at four a.m., somewhere in the bleary midst of a stretch of sleepless nights you’ve completely lost track of, staring out into the dark streets of your neighborhood and trying to will something to move, if only to prove to yourself that you’re not dreaming.
Can I just tell you how much I hate it when someone says, “On the one hand”? It just means the other hand is coming, and I cannot balance the contents of two hands in my head at one time. How much better when someone –even some old pervert trying to ingratiate himself by offering sweets– offers me the choice of one hand or the other.
This guy in the elevator today, he’s talking into his cell phone, and his face suddenly gets bright red and he erupts in a spasm of almost alarming laughter. “God damn!” he says to the person he’s talking to. “What did I tell you? Show me a man’s weakness and I’ll break him down like a goddamn card table!”
At a dusty roadside stop somewhere in Montana, where there was a statue of the Virgin Mary and vases full of bleached, plastic flowers, an old man, who was leaning against the front of a pickup truck and having a smoke, pointed with his cigarette towards the range that ran all the way down the valley and addressed one sentence to me: “A choir’s rumored to be lost in them mountains.”
Remove one thing, let one thing go missing, and life can become a mighty painful and confusing business in a hurry. We aren’t simple, but we’re full of holes, and this world is full of things that do nothing but make those holes bigger and bigger by the day.
“It makes me feel like messin’ up.” (Lowman Pauling)
Books take me away and break my heart in a way different from the rest of the world. It’s the most beautiful, most wrenching sort of heartache: longing.
Those sad dishes have been sitting there in the sink for months now. Maybe I’ll never get around to washing them.
Anonymous: wanting a name, or so Samuel Johnson decided. And is that ever beautiful.
I did receive my telegram, in fact, and it was a lovely thing. I’ll remember it to the end of my days.
I intend something, dammit.
Why the hell did I put that calculator in the refrigerator?
What happened to that old woman who lived in my basement and made me such elegant and astonishing shoes? Gone, like so much else, without a trace.
The middle of the night, and morning still a long ways off.
It’s later than I think, I think.
Shit, it hurts. It still hurts. It hurts all over.
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