One of the best stories
of the early
Christian desert hermits
goes like this: Abbe Lot
came to Abbe Joseph
and said: Father,
according as I am able,
I keep my little rule,
and my little fast,
prayer, meditation
and contemplative silence;
and according as I am able
I strive to cleanse
my heart of thoughts:
Now what more should I do?
The elder rose up in reply
and stretched out
his hands to heaven,
and his fingers became
like ten lamps of fire.
He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?
--Annie Dillard
*
* Johnny Sixpack on Hermit Trail
** Bruce Springsteen: Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in
a cloud, formidable from
a distance.
--Beryl Markham West with the Night
Grateful Dead: Truckin'~~The Other One~~Morning Dew...12/31/72
All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf...
--Andreï Makine The Life of an Unknown Man
Allman Brothers w/ Jerry Garcia: Mountain Jam...12/31/73
"a cold coming we had of it,
just the worst time of the year
for a journey,
and such a long journey:
the ways deep
and the weather sharp,
the very dead of winter."
and the camels galled,
sore-footed, refractory,
lying down in the melting snow.
there were times we regretted
the summer palaces on slopes,
the terraces,
and the silken girls
bringing sherbet.
then the camel men
cursing and grumbling
and running away,
and wanting their liquor
and women,
and the night-fires going out,
and the lack of shelters,
and the cities hostile
and the towns unfriendly
and the villages dirty
and charging high prices:
a hard time we had of it.
at the end we preferred
to travel all night,
sleeping in snatches,
with the voices
singing in our ears, saying
that this was all folly.
then at dawn we came down
to a temperate valley,
wet, below the snow line,
smelling of vegetation;
with a running stream,
and a water-mill
beating the darkness,
and three trees on the low sky,
and an old white horse
galloped away in the meadow.
then we came to a tavern
with vine-leaves over the lintel,
six hands at an open door
dicing for pieces of silver,
and feet kicking
the empty wine-skins,
but there was no information,
and so we continued
and arrived at evening,
not a moment too soon
finding the place;
it was (you may say) satisfactory.
all this was a long time ago,
i remember,
and i would do it again,
but set down this
set down this:
were we led all that way
for birth or death?
there was a birth, certainly,
we had evidence
and no doubt.
i had seen birth and death,
but had thought
they were different;
this birth was hard
and bitter agony for us,
like death, our death.
we returned to our places,
these kingdoms,
but no longer at ease here,
in the old dispensation,
with an alien people
clutching their gods.
i should be glad
of another death.
A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, full of children and old people. The lion was loose. Either by the wind, or by malevolent human energy, which is the same thing, the cage had come open.
Suppose a child walked outside!
A child walked outside.
I knew that
I must protect him
from the lion.
I threw myself
on top of the child.
The lion roared over me.
In the branches
and the bushes
there was suddenly
a loud crackling.
The lion cringed.
I looked up
and saw that
the elephant was loose!
The elephant was taller than the redwoods. He was hairy like a mammoth. His tusks trailed vines. Parrots screeched around his head. His eyes rolled crazily. He trumpeted. The ice-cap was breaking up!
The lion backed off, whining. The boy ran for the house. I covered his retreat, locked all the doors and pulled the bars across them. An old lady tried to open a door to get a better look. I spoke sharply to her, she sat down grumbling and pulled a blanket over her knees.
Out of the window
I saw zebras
and rattlesnakes
and wildebeests
and cougars
and woodchucks
on the lawns
and in the tennis courts.
I worried how,
after the storm,
we would put the animals
back in their cages,
and get to the mainland.
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from
one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. --Jack Kerouac
Deep at the bottom of the well no warmth has yet returned,
The rain which sighs and feels so cold has dampened withered roots.
What sort of man at such a time would come to visit the teacher?
As this is not a time for flowers, I find I have come alone.
--Su Shi (1037--1101) Visiting the Temple of Auspicious Fortune Alone on Winter Solstice
What is true
of one man,
said the judge,
is true of many.
The people who
once lived here
are called the Anasazi.
The old ones.
They quit these parts,
routed by drought
or disease
or by wandering bands
of marauders,
quit these parts
ages since
and of them
there is no memory.
They are rumors and ghosts
in this land and
they are much revered.
The tools, the art, the building---
these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.
--Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
