Reset Forty-Seven, Day Sixty-One
Jan. 29th, 2023 05:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rejectomorphOdd how I've slipped imperceptibly into this pattern of multiple short naps each day instead of one or two longer sleeps, and spend part of each neither asleep nor awake, but wandering in some intermediate space where I dream seemingly awake and then imagine I sleep to forget. Deteriorating brains get so strange. I suppose I'll get to the point where I don't remember any other way and it will seem normal to me, assuming I have a concept of normality. I probably won't write about that when it happens, seeing how it's already getting more difficult to focus on writing anything coherent at all even at this stage.
Something I've wanted to focus on writing about lately is the discovery through Google maps street view that a building I remember very clearly from my early adolescence apparently did not exist. I've had other experiences with false memories, but this one is just so unexpected and inexplicable that it really has me quite upset. I keep looking for alternate explanations for what is probably actually quite straightforward error on my part. I just haven't been able to bring myself to believe it. I might have to launch a cult based on a belief in forces causing people to shift unwittingly between alternative universes. (They must be stopped! Visit my "Defeat the time-travelling lizard people" Patreon.)
But in whatever world I'm in at the moment it has been sprinkling off and on for an hour or so. This storm is expected to bring only about a quarter inch of rain to the mini-metropolis, but it's going to be the coldest of the series of storms we've had this year. More snow for the mountains will be good, even if it's only a little bit. Skiers like fresh powder, and farmers like snowmelt for summer irrigation.
Dinner Saturday was the other half of my can of tamales, which I heated with extra sauce and layered over crushed tortilla chips and cheese, and topped with more cheese and more sauce to melt the cheese, and then some sour cream, and I was surprised how good it turned out. I'm a terrible cook, but I'm sometimes really good at heating stuff up and assembling stuff into bowls. More recently, after a modest evening nap, I heated a can of butternut squash soup which went surprisingly well with the last two Lotus Biscoff cookies from the pack I got as a premium for buying two pints of quite good ice cream a couple of months ago. I like happy accidental discoveries. And the rain that's starting up again.
Sunday Verse
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then
have to be human—and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?...
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too...
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.
Trying to become it.— Whom can we give it to? We would
hold onto it all, forever... Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the act of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and long experience of love,—just what is wholly
unsayable. But later, among the stars,
what good is it—they are better as they are: unsayable.
For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower....But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. Isn't the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?
Threshold: what it means for two lovers
to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door—
they too, after the many who came before them
and before those to come..., lightly.
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can't impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. he will stand astonished; as you stood
by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a Thing—, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.—And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within—oh endlessly—within us! Whoever we may be at last.
Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn't it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over—one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.
Look, I am living. On what? neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller... Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
Something I've wanted to focus on writing about lately is the discovery through Google maps street view that a building I remember very clearly from my early adolescence apparently did not exist. I've had other experiences with false memories, but this one is just so unexpected and inexplicable that it really has me quite upset. I keep looking for alternate explanations for what is probably actually quite straightforward error on my part. I just haven't been able to bring myself to believe it. I might have to launch a cult based on a belief in forces causing people to shift unwittingly between alternative universes. (They must be stopped! Visit my "Defeat the time-travelling lizard people" Patreon.)
But in whatever world I'm in at the moment it has been sprinkling off and on for an hour or so. This storm is expected to bring only about a quarter inch of rain to the mini-metropolis, but it's going to be the coldest of the series of storms we've had this year. More snow for the mountains will be good, even if it's only a little bit. Skiers like fresh powder, and farmers like snowmelt for summer irrigation.
Dinner Saturday was the other half of my can of tamales, which I heated with extra sauce and layered over crushed tortilla chips and cheese, and topped with more cheese and more sauce to melt the cheese, and then some sour cream, and I was surprised how good it turned out. I'm a terrible cook, but I'm sometimes really good at heating stuff up and assembling stuff into bowls. More recently, after a modest evening nap, I heated a can of butternut squash soup which went surprisingly well with the last two Lotus Biscoff cookies from the pack I got as a premium for buying two pints of quite good ice cream a couple of months ago. I like happy accidental discoveries. And the rain that's starting up again.
Sunday Verse
Ninth Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then
have to be human—and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?...
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too...
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.
Trying to become it.— Whom can we give it to? We would
hold onto it all, forever... Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the act of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and long experience of love,—just what is wholly
unsayable. But later, among the stars,
what good is it—they are better as they are: unsayable.
For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower....But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. Isn't the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?
Threshold: what it means for two lovers
to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door—
they too, after the many who came before them
and before those to come..., lightly.
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can't impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. he will stand astonished; as you stood
by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a Thing—, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.—And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within—oh endlessly—within us! Whoever we may be at last.
Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn't it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over—one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.
Look, I am living. On what? neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller... Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
