I have changed worlds more than once. At least twice. This is not my home. :}
What It Is
I'm just overwhelmed.
This place takes my breath away.
I can't quite make out
the reality
here. The colors are too bright
to be real, too red
reds, too green, and smells
and sounds beyond bearing, so
sweet, so true. So harsh.
It's savage, and you,
you are savage, and your love's
a savage love. Lord
I don't know if I
can take this life very long.
I know it began
in mystery and it will
end just the same way.
March 9, 2009 7:40 PM
Contraction
1 week ago
Ok. Ok. OK. My new favorite. Holy shit, do I know/have I known/will I know - this.
ReplyDeletexo
erin
Of course we really do belong here. We agreed to come. Shit.
ReplyDeleteI like to pretend that I was tricked though.
Another beauty(i mean the poem).
ReplyDeleteThis world is not your home? how so?
It's been mine, i like to dwell in that kind of overwhelming world :)
It's savage. And then i don't know if it's because you're a man and i am a woman, or if it's just me. But i am the savage in loving, i devour. i know that's not very good.
And for me i too would say it all starts mysteriously, but the endings are in that clearness, but then my loving never ends, i think i can honestly say i have never stopped loving someone, but you always say that too, so I hope we are talking about the same thing.
Jozien, :) You sound like my last lover, the way you puzzle this. She was the same, "of course you belong here! Don't be silly!" There is a divide in the world, perhaps many, but this is one of them. Erin says this is her favorite poem (of the moment) so for her there is no question.
ReplyDeleteYour question is legitimate, 100%. There is a way if you ask it then I am silly, full of fantasy. But if you let it be then I am the stranger I say I am, here by agreement. This willingness to let that be instinctively is the divide.
As for the rest of it. You are like my last lover that way too.
Thanks for the compliment, being like your last lover :)
ReplyDeleteWell, before you go back, you might as well make the most of it... ^_^
ReplyDeleteAh so, Joseph, the rub is just what is "make the most of it"?
ReplyDeleteWe are all in exactly the same boat that way however we got here...
Everyone's forced to be a friggin philosopher whether they admit it or not. This is as philosopher's very well know. It chaps their collective asses that they are picked on by people who do exactly what they do, assign values and meaning to events, make assumptions and draw conclusions.
Great poem, first just a joke, if things disrupt you so much you can use sunglasses trough life. And I liked a lot the ending you never end up really knowing what is or was up.
ReplyDeleteTake care C
Mariana, thank you. Yes. The bit about glasses as you offer it is not really a joke.
ReplyDeleteMy mother was a dramatist. There was a tool that she had, a color selector for gels. These are squares of color to be placed in front of stage lights to achieve lighting effects in the old way before computers. To be a stage lighting specialist in those days was a complex challenge of a very different order than the computerized and digitized version of today. The modern specialty is both successfully much more complex and versatile, and much more specialized in its computerized form.
As a child I would be fascinated with the way the world was transformed looking through the gel samples, how each sample would raise and lower the brightness of certain colors and transform other colors to a different color entirely. It was like magic, and in fact from the staging point of view can actually be dramatic magic.
So there is a reality to a different pair of glasses. We speak of a person wearing "rose colored" glasses and mean he is not entirely realistic. One vision of Hollywood is the movie star appearing in public wearing a kind of costume that includes glasses so dark you cannot see her eyes behind them, while the frames are dramatic in nature. And so whether it is seeing through them or being seen in them, the glasses can define the character.
And of course, there are people among us who are prescribed tinted glasses by their eye specialists to ease their way for exactly this kind of problem. Here is another mundane solution to the problem of a fit with the world.
Or as Jesus said, "If thy (right) eye offends thee, pluck it out." Thus it has been known well and known for a long time that a person may not see the world in a healthy way, and that it may be better for living well to be at least half blind. Some texts had it the right eye, which means the strongest and most righteous eye, the "dextrous" (right) eye rather than the "sinister" (left) eye. This raises a cultural bias built in to the Latin (Roman) cultural root of the European world view.
It means "it is better to steal the power out of the vision".
That raises a problematic question of who judges a visual "error". And that judgement comes upon us in a similar fashion as that with how we judge the Hollywood star, not by the actuality of vision but by the visual clues, the appearances and effects of the vision.
It is a judgement and correction of the alien.
Ok, here first thing in the morning after reading your poem at my place and I came to comment back on it's lovliness and the beauty of gray pay and then I got here and every word I've read, again, is loaded, and the exchanges too. I have tail spun and am sticking head in a snow bank, ass out to the world. So much thought that consumes me every step of the way here.
ReplyDeleteYes, my favorite one of the moment. It will change. It always does.
And your poem, What It Is, I've just read again and today it read completely differently than last night. And I got a chill, for if I were to have read it Friday night it might have been my undoing, as I was then in a moment of being utterly overwhelmed. Do you see, just how often, I change my glasses?
Have a beautiful Sunday, Christopher.
xo
erin
Erin, you send me. :)
ReplyDeleteLife is like dark chocolate. Each time you try the same chocolate, it's just different - makes you fall in love with it.
ReplyDeleteAnd the mystery unravels itself real slow - melts like only the love of taste can make it. And even if you died in the process, the taste remains. ;)
Hmmm. There's a risk in this. Life is like so many things. Some of the grunts in Viet Nam as they came back from the darker places married the children of the street. They said, "Life is like a shit sandwich."
ReplyDeleteLife is like a lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet, but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat. Actually that old song was Love is like a lemon tree.
We have all these different colors.
Life is like Indra's net, no? Wait. Life IS Indra's Net.
In some ways, this makes me think of an old Robert A. Heinlein novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Do you know it?
ReplyDeleteKaren I read that novel in high school. So I am familiar with the fact that I read it, but not the details of it. I remember Heinlein having small patience with religion but feeling fairly spiritual. He was grokking alot, I think.
ReplyDeletei like it here. it's as good if not better than anytimeplace else as far as i know.
ReplyDeleteI read the book in high school too, so I remember little about it except that the main character came to Earth from Mars and though he was human, he had to learn to live in this strange land. Mostly, the title of the book came to my mind when I read this, but I think even a reference to the Bible - the way Moses described himself.
ReplyDeleteHeinlein I don't know much about except that he was a bit of a subculture hero in the 60's.
'Course I was just a babe back then! Ha! ;-)
Ghost, it does seem that this place is as good as it gets if you're a material girl. I am a little surprised that you think so with yer ectoplasmic mind.
ReplyDeleteI heard that CS Lewis got it from the horse's mouth that this here place is the insane asylum for antisocial behavior in the galaxy, that we were all exiled here from many different places for remedial sanity lessons.
Karen, I bet you were a babe ;)
Oh.
ReplyDeleteOh oh oh!
YES!
*grin*
xxx
And I agree with ghost.....this is just the best 'between' place I have ever been :)
ReplyDeleteWe are nothing if not passionate on this blog :D
ReplyDeleteMade me remember Doris Lessings 'Canopus in Argos' series, which has never really left me. The agents of Canopus undergo the torture of being sent to Shikasta - Earth - again and again even though, or perhaps because, it's a failed and broken place. They say that Shikasta in colour is almost unbearable to them, and needs special preparation for it.
ReplyDeleteThe Roman emperor Domitian had a special polished emerald he used to watch the killings in the Arena through.
True this blog is a specially intensely coloured place !
Lucy! I love it that you know Domitian viewed those killings through an emerald.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the Doris Lessing.
The idea is more common than I knew. There is something about it that rings true to some of us, I guess. It's a real divide in the world, between those who would never say such things and those who love it that someone does.
And with distance
ReplyDeletethese things
lie down.
I marvel at life
and how we are swept up in it.
xo
erin
Yes, you cannot recapture the passion that once was obviously here. On the other hand what is happening now is perfect for now. I have a problematic friend, but we see eye to eye in this:
ReplyDeleteWe both belong to the church of "What's Happening Now". If we should ever be swept up, it is not on yesterday's current, nor can it ever be tomorrow's. Today's current is all we have.
Thank you for bringing the past back to the present. To revisit is a touching thing.
ReplyDeleteThis is so commonly a ploy of spammers that there is a secondary layer of protection in place now that Blogger demands of me that I approve from the email before your comment actually posts.