Again and again we put our sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed them back into their death, each moving slowly into the dark, disappearing as our hearts visited and savored, hurt and yearned.
—Jack Gilbert, from “Kunstkammer”
Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight
can never pass away.
—William Blake
What then is required? Light! Light! Light in floods!
–Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
A shattered mirror, I’ve discovered, really is bad luck.
I stare into the fractured reminder of this fact every morning, and it’s as if entire continents of my face have broken free and drifted out into the dark sea of who I once was and who I thought I was going to be.
Still, I thank god or someone, some big over-thing that lives above me or in my head –it doesn’t matter; whatever and whoever it or he or she is, I thank them. It could be a consortium or a cabal for all I know or care, just so long as they don’t forsake me.
It’s a big something, that’s all I know. It shoves me. It calls my attention to the sky when the sky is deserving of attention, which is often. It stirs things in me, and keeps moving words from my skull to my fingers and tongue, even when I am –or should be– too weary and brain-fogged to speak my own name, let alone form complete sentences.
It keeps shooting off bottle rockets, flares, and the occasional full-blown fireworks display. Time and again it drills its way through the murk to the place where my laughter and wonder are stashed, and calls them forth in bursts and spasms.
For all these gentle miracles I thank God or someone, some big over-thing, etc. I give thanks also for Otis Redding, for E.B. White, for Czeslaw Milosz and Stanley Kunitz, for the Brothers Grimm, for Tom Waits and Ornette Coleman, for sweat and love and tenderness and compassion, for human hands and hearts, for the companionship of dogs, and for Nat Kendricks and the Swans’ version of “Mashed Potatoes.”
And for mashed potatoes. And for fried potatoes at the Band Box. And for potatoes in general.
Because of this gratitude, I want, like Zbigniew Herbert, to make of my imagination “an instrument of compassion.”
Like Tolstoy (I think), I want to learn to believe that people are more important than art.
I want to believe that.
I want to offer love, understanding, and compassion to the troubled and broken people I come in contact with. I want to hear their stories, to listen to how they hurt and how they got hurt and how they got lost. I want to understand if I can their strange logic and imagine the unreal places that have become so terrifying and so real to them.
I know I will fail and fail miserably (I have failed and failed miserably), but these are things I want all the same.
I am trying very hard not to be sad in this world.
Last night, after midnight, I took my snow saucer over to the big hill by the lake and plunged again and again into the darkness until I got what I came for: tears. Tears of sorrow. Tears of joy. Tears of gratitude.
Lord, grant me the strength and agility of those who build sentences
long and expansive as a spreading oak tree, like a great valley; may they
contain worlds, shadows of worlds, and worlds of dreams.
—Zbigniew Herbert, from “Breviary”
I could write a treatise
on the abrupt change
of life into archaeology
–Zbigniew Herbert, from “Abandoned”
People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.
—James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
