Category: prose

To temper intellect with emotion

The first light snow, innocent and small, building and climbing. Sarah Ruhl contemplates, “A suspicion that lightness is not deeply serious (but instead whimsical) pervades aesthetic discourse. But what if lightness is a philosophical choice to temper reality with strangeness, to temper the intellect with emotion, and to temper emotion with humor. Lightness is then a philosophical victory over heaviness. A reckoning with the humble and the small and the invisible.”

He told me once that perhaps the automation of the decisions he has to make with his intellect will allow for more room in his life. “More room? To think more?” I wondered. “No, of course the goal is to make as much room as possible for feeling more.”

A month later, walking through the 30-feet high banks of snow, my eyes buried in a book. Accompanied by heaviness that trudges in with the cold and makes its home across the middle of winter. Heaviness, one could call it, or instead choosing to see lightness in it as a different response to the same thing.

Later, discourse on the philosophy of language and how it applies to water. His homemade shakshuka paired with my curious feeling of pursuing home, as if it were a thing with legs that could choose to dodge me. That there is divinity in the unknown. The acknowledgement of a thing versus an acceptance. The question of, “Are you interested in the way he would dance tango, if he learned? The kind of leader he would be, and how he would dance?”

I tempered intellect with emotion.
Not so much a need for knowing as a desire to experience, I realized.
Because I already know exactly how he would dance if he did learn.

Kinnell declared, “It’s the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a certain shape, that have a chance of lasting.”

I write because I’m chasing an immortality in the certain mortality of our love. You insist that it exists. I stand in awe of what those first tiny snowflakes became in such little time. Curiously, analogously, I know already that I must open my eyes (and myself) to find that mountainous immortality safely hidden within the tiny, humble moments that you have left behind for me as torch lights in the dark.

Only when I find it in the moments will I then be able to talk of decades. Only then will I find victory over heaviness.

As Kinnell suggests:

How many nights must it take

one such as me to learn

that we aren’t, after all, made

from that bird that flies out of its ashes,

that for us

as we go up in flames, our one work

to open ourselves, to be

the flames?

M train

I’m sitting on a train watching the night pass by, punctuated by glowing street lamps and the glittering, anonymous bodies of water reflecting them.

Reading excerpts from Patti Smith’s M Train. Is that meta? “It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” she proclaims.

A life is such a short time, and yet when he tells me to take it a day at a time the end of today always seems to be eternally far away. Some days I try to believe him when he tells me that there is something greater to it all, but this attempt at trust is not without a rising feeling of catastrophe. As Ben Lerner writes: “I felt, amid a general sense of doom, that other worlds were possible.”

I’m quiet in the mornings, thinking about how we will never truly land together. Not the way I imagined things would land. They warn me about it still: the sudden dropping, the letting go, the inevitable aloneness.

Do engineers plan for the details of exactly how the outcome looks? Or do they plan how to get there and stand surprised yet still admiring of the end result? Is there some disappointment? Most likely.

I remain in a state of anticipation (preparation?).

But I guess the moment we learn about gravity, we’re thinking again about how to achieve flight. And when already in midair, we’re looking for the safe fields in which to set down and tuck in our wings for a night.

The train is late arriving at the station. I was never meant to overstay.

falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror

Yesterday evening:

“I don’t need to assign you any homework. The possibilities of your already fluent mobility seem endless. It’s a rare thing.”

More rain. We stayed up talking about taxonomies. As I drifted off to meet you in my dreams, I felt the weight of soreness in my shoulders from attempting handstands. With satisfaction, I likened it to the soreness in my heart. That’s how muscles feel when they get stronger, so I’ve heard.

There are these moments of terror as you invert into a handstand: your head closer to the ground, your feet reaching towards the sky, your mind freaking out at the possibility of toppling over. The only way to reach beyond is to sit with the terror, practice being with it, realize how to exist with it and that you have the ability to rise above it.

We spend so much time trying to tame this world, to assign classifications, to understand taxonomies. There’s a world beyond definition, though. Below: two pieces on this strength to create openness even in the face of terror, to challenge the world as we know it by turning upside down. To maybe discover “what no one expects: the exquisite range.”