Tag: anecdotes

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
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

Theory in practice

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

– Albert Einstein

This morning, listening to blues. I know what you’re thinking about the blues. But I mean the kind that makes you want to dance with slouchy legs and melting hearts across dim rooms. So I’m dancing across the wooden floors at the office. And I can see him start to grin, wanting to dance with me. And I nod slowly, grinning back, playing air guitar to the music.

In the kitchen, she watched me grab the almond milk from the fridge. “Wow, I was looking for that. I feel like I am always looking for (and never see) the thing that is right in front of me.”

I laughed, “I think that is a general human thing.”

Today’s random tea mug has the silhouette of a wild deer, stately despite its inherent vulnerability, with antlers cradling the sky. These mugs are in rotation, and I choose one daily according to how I feel. That’s a theory, anyway. Maybe the selection is really just subconscious and doesn’t mean anything at all. More on this later.

***

There were the colors of Rothko and what I saw as the sea and the reflection of color of the sky when it is dark. Not black, necessarily, but something that doesn’t impose a color at all so that we may fill it with our own hues. My friend has a tattoo on her wrist. It’s a Chinese character that means “emptiness” but it’s idiomatic because it connotes “a space waiting to be filled,” which is arguably different.

There was you — afraid (or preferring not) to be alone, or maybe just overly accustomed to access and affection, or maybe just as a matter of coincidence, or maybe existing in another life or universe, or maybe just doing without thinking, or maybe really wanting something different — holding another woman. There are always theories about these things.

I hardly ever understand theories in practice. How things should (in theory) be possible but aren’t, or even more so, how things have never seemed possible but suddenly become so (in practice). Like how if someone uses the same ingredients as my mother does in her cooking, the end result should taste the same. But it doesn’t. Like how, even before now I should have always been able to wake up overwhelmingly sad next to someone on a Sunday morning and yet talk rationally, with love and respect, about matters of the heart. And then by the same afternoon, risk delight. Risk falling deeper into the space waiting to be filled.

There were empty highways. Rain, the kind that makes the temperature drop 30 degrees in a few hours. The kinds of blankets and the kinds of looking-into-eyes that make irrelevant the potential (and temporary) discomfort of things, like inclement weather. Like vulnerability. Almost makes them beautiful. In an absolute (because you claim not to be a relativist) way.

And at the end, there was you, grinning, because we got to dance together to the blues. Proclaiming with the kind of excellent danger in your voice that has tried to warn me since I met you: “Well, at the very least it’ll give you something great to write about.” And there is me, writing in run-on hopefully-lyrical phrases. Paying attention to the facts. Being joyful in spite of them.

But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now.

Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That’s the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live.

– Eileen Myles

Just in time, Stevie Ray Vaughan croons in Texas Flood:
Well it’s floodin’ down in Texas
And I’ve been tryin’ to call my baby
Lord and I can’t get a single sound
Well dark clouds are rollin’ in
Man I’m standin’ out in the rain