Diminishing returns

It just happens. Only you realize it later. You're taller then, and not as fresh. Your eyes have learned to expect less, and things get mingled with everything else. Ideas run into other ideas and become new ideas, but none lead to grace. Each road taken leads back eventually to the middle. And looking back you see a man, a grain of sand, a leaf even. And that's your life. What would you have done differently with it?

rabbit at rest

With John Updike's passing I was reminded of an old notebook I used to keep of notable passages from books I was reading. Below are some of my favorites.

 ******* 

While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the center and let life come to him - so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments. - Updike 

When I thought back to our hectic, somehow sacred heyday, it was, as I say, less in terms of the women closest to me than of those in the middle distance, relatively virginal, who had taken the siren call of the unknown with them as they disappeared over my horizon. - Updike 

I felt in her presence the fear of death a man feels with a woman who once opened herself to him and is available no more. - Updike 

Why I was intruding I have forgotten, but I remember receiving a genial welcome, as if I were already one of these men who had filled the glass ashtrays to overflowing and whose coffee cups had left a lace of brown circles on the card table top. As a teachers' child I was privileged to peel behind the formal stage-set of education's daily theatre. It was slight shock to see, on the stained table, a deck of worn pinnacle cards, held together by a rubber band. Teachers were human. I was expected to become, eventually, one of them. - Updike 

Anything, just to put something there, some bliss, to live on later for awhile. If he goes empty now he won't last at all, because we only get emptier. - Updike 

The wish to be held as a passive spectator by some work or sight of greatness. Not to make it, but to accept it; not to begin, but to respond; not to create, but to admire. I need it to let me go on, because joy is one's fuel. - Ayn Rand

... the dream of belief can be more real than the reality of disbelief... 

Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other. - Herman Hesse

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to asset itself. - Herman Hesse 

He in his madness prays for storms, And dreams that storms will bring him peace - Kipling 

The Island beyond reach, Lilia lost, his every hope beaten, why should the invisible Orange Dove not be transformed into the Golden Medulla, the philosopher's stone, the end of ends, volatile like everything passionately wanted? To aspire to something you will never have: is this not the aime of the most generous of desires? - Umberto Eco 

I shall surely die, he said to himself...What illusion was I harboring? I would die, perhaps later, even if I had not arrived on this wreck. I entered life knowing that the Law requires us to leave it. As Saint-Savin said, we play our role, some long, some not so long, and then we leave the stage. I have seen others go before me, others will see me go, and they will give the same performance for their successors. For that matter, how long was the time when I did not exist, and for how long in the future will I not be? I occupy a very small space in the abyss of the years. This little interval does not succeed in distinguishing me from the nothingness into which I shall go. I came into the world only to swell the ranks. My part was so small that even if I had remained in the wings, everyone would still have declared the play perfect. It is like a storm at sea: some drown immediately, others are dashed against the rocks, still others are cast up on an abandoned ship, but not for long, not even they. Life goes out, on its own, like a candle that has consumed its substance. And we should be accustomed to it, because, like a candle, we have been shedding atoms since the moment we were lit. It is no great wisdom to know these things. We should know them from the moment we are born. But usually we reflect always and only on the death of others. Ah yes, we all have strength enough to bear others' ills. Then the moment comes when we think of death because the illness is our own, and we realize it is impossible to stare directly at the sun and at death. Unless we have had good teachers. I did. Someone said to me that truly few know death. As a rule it is tolerated through stupidity or habit, not through resolve. We die because we cannot do otherwise. Only the philosopher can think of death as a duty, to be performed willingly and without fear. As long as we are here, death is not here, and when death comes, we have gone. Why would I have spent so much time conversing about philosophy if now I were not capable of making my death the masterwork of my life? - Umberto Eco

Jealousy doesn't show how much you love someone. It shows how insecure you are. - Margaret Meade 

It's not goodbye, and what magic in those dim things to which it will be time enough, when next they pass, to say goodbye. For you must say goodbye, it would be madness not to say goodbye, when the time comes. If you think of the forms and light of other days it is without regret. But you seldom think of them, with what would you think of them? I don't know. - Beckett

The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle. - Beckett 

What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not. - Beckett 

But more he felt sorry for that old figure of himself, waiting for grace to descend, afraid when it left him. No one could live that way, not forever. It was too much to expect from life. Always waiting. - Michael Byers 

Your separate parts are not unknown but the way you assemble 'ems all your own - Pat Boone 

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury - sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal - it drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of fury comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The fury pursues us... This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise - the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from fucking limb. - Rushdie 

And if he failed, then he failed, but one did not contemplate what lay beyond failure while one was still trying to succeed. After all, Jay Gatsby, the highest bouncer of them all, failed too in the end, but lived out, before he crashed, that brilliant, brittle, gold-hatted, exemplary American life. - Gatsby 

Goodnight, you princes of Maine... you kings of New England. - Irving 

Goodnight you too, Mr. Updike. - me

And the band played...

Passing predictably along the plain
Ignoring arpeggios as they come
Passions subsiding at each refrain

Heartbeat steady as the bass drum
Pacing the chorus of the everyday
The simple tune the laymen hum

Diatonically governing the arrangements way
With adagio building to crescendo
Dictating the notes in yeas and nay

The pulse quickens as the trumpets blow
Signaling the end of this lament?
And what comes next I do not know

A harsh bagatelle of dishevelment
The sound of crashing brass
My ears distrust the dissonant

A trill consuming and so crass
Pounding, beating, pounding, pounding
Hoping, knowing this too shall pass...

The great unknown

He lived high above a concrete city. Streets of concrete, buildings of concrete, sidewalks of the same. It was a city of grays and blacks and off-whites. From his perch, day was a texture of concrete against concrete, a mosaic, blended together by the unifying idea of being a city. At night, the concrete faded and lights remained. A grid of dots, white, yellow, red, green. The grid outlined the concrete structures that enveloped the day. At first his view was breathtaking. Actually, that hadn't changed. The view was still breathtaking. But at first he noticed it more. Now he'd lose himself in his work, in his books, in his thoughts, and the view would go on without him.

The night clouded his view of the city. His windows were clear, yes, but his thoughts of night when night came were too much. Alone in the day and alone in the night were two different perspectives. Each one contrasted so much with the other, that the view, though the same, was so different. High atop a perch looking at a world, at the city, in such a way, the night cloaked the living and a new living awoke. This life of the city at night, this grid of lights, was so vague. The idea of what he was missing, or his own thoughts of what the city was capable of, consumed him, and the sense he had of himself. It suffocated him in the reverse way. It pulled the breath that he'd already breathed back through his lungs, not as a reprieve, but as a sigh. The life he'd imagined, the one he'd seen so clear so many times, became illuminated by the moon. And its crevasses and craters were far deeper and far more impenetrable than he originally thought or could believe.

The path of his life he had drawn in ink. It never occurred to him that pencil was more forgiving. His life of ink was bleeding. Lead would have better prepared him for the bleeding, prevented it even. Ink was finality, death. Thinking back to his original ink plan, he tried to determine where it went wrong. And each time he did, it occurred to him that it began right where it started. His plan had not accounted for the unexpected. What remained was an abstract mess of scribbles and cross outs that could really use an erasure.

So who was he? He was a writer, a great writer. His words were poetic and his thoughts grand. His use of language and prose and tone and imagery and honesty was beautiful. He had written in his thirty five years enough to substantiate these claims. His writing was beautiful, yes, and he knew it, and he appreciated it. He did not take it for granted, and each word he wrote evoked an idea or thought not by chance, but because he dealt with each word painstakingly to evoke each idea or thought. His was not a life of chance. He had spent it preparing himself for exactly where he was. His was a culmination of every decision he had ever made.

From a young age he knew he was a writer. Not because of what he wrote or the reactions to what he wrote, but because of what he felt. The words were a compromise between his true vulnerable honest feelings and what he was capable of capturing in words. Anyone who has ever felt anything could relate. The writer captured emotion, yes, but true honest emotion, the greatest writers were only capable of coming closest to. His ideas weren't new, his thoughts not so original, but his voice, his voice penetrated even the heaviest of armor. This was no accident. His was a voice learned over time, fine tuned to sound the loudest of trumpets.

New York had let itself so easily to so many others, but he felt void. His cutting words, his yearning even, had become dull. And atop his perch he saw a world unto itself, and he felt incapable. To capture even the simplest moment of the bustle of this place was an enormous task. In the past his truest words captured the simple moments of life. He spoke of childhood love, not true love, but the rationale for wanting to feel true love. He wrote of longing and loss. But these feelings were hollow here. In a city where love and longing and loss were the everyday, here in a city were so many were feeling so much so often, he was overwhelmed. That others had come before him was of no consolation. The struggles of each of us, of everyone, is internal. He was as exposed as a hermit crab in transition between shells. And what he had found was that it is not easy to breathe in the recesses of the living.

Bedtime Stories

While I don't remember all the details, there were always these funny little stories my mommom used to tell us kids. I'll do my best to recreate...

...Things are well. Just today I saw a sugar plum fairy climb a street sign to grab a red, yellow and green taffy. It was quite the spectacle, and stopped traffic for miles. Oh, and all the tiny men that moved into my closet finally moved out because I refused to iron my dress shirts. It turns out that they can be pretty unforgiving. They told the Queen on me and she sent her favorite umbrella as a sign that if I didn't learn to behave then I would soon find myself wet behind the ears. I took the umbrella, only to be nice, and decided to use it as a table when I am eating. I figure that whenever it gets dirty I can clean it off in the rain. So it wasn't all bad.

And if you were wondering, my refrigerator decided to stop running and returned after three years of living off the coast of Nova Scotia. We came to an understanding. And despite the warranty I had on his head, he promised to turn the light off when I shut the door, as long as I would talk to the salad about dressing in front of everyone. Apparently it was all a terribly embarrassing situation and the mustard kept turning red and getting mistaken for ketchup, which really upset the tomatoes that had spent so much time getting ready. I talked it over with the corn and they told me it would be ears before things would be normal again. But like I said, it all seems to be coming to an end...



That's all for now, but I'm sure you get the gist..

Wanting (draft)

Her bracelet was a shimmering slinky, crawling up and down her slender wrist. She had this way of talking with her arms, painting big broad portraits in the summer air. Ordinary stories painted in extraordinary detail with a delicate, freckled brush waving erratically like the high grass on top of the sandy dunes. Richard worried for the bottle of beer she held carelessly as tiny rays of sunlight reflected brilliantly off her slinking bracelet.

His older brother, James, and he hadn't spoken much since their mother died. It wasn't so much a conscience decision, more it was growth. Like any old, bad habit, Richard had simply outgrown his brother. But since moving back east, back to the coast of their childhood, a certain fog of guilt had settled on Richard's horizon. Memories of afternoons spent with his mother alone on her porch, after she was sick for the second time, hung thick like the salty air.

***

"Richard," she'd say, slowly, thoughtfully, "your brother has never had the same privileges you've had growing up. You have to allow him that, Richard. And you've got to try to understand."

What she meant was education, though she was never that specific. Their father had passed away during Richard's junior year of high school, three years after James had graduated. Where James went to work with their father as a carpenter, building decks and additions for affluent weekenders, the money that came as unexpected as their father's passing was enough to put Richard through college.

The air in his mother's enclosed porch was damp and humid no matter how many windows were propped open. Richard would start to interrupt her and she'd wave him off, like she'd waved off so many greenheads, the big ones that really stung when they bit, in her day.

"Listen to me," she'd continue, "he really needs to know that you like him. That you approve of who he is. It's something he's always needed." Her concerned, tired eyes would watch him now as he considered her words, which really were nothing new. She'd been pleading James' case since Richard had gone away to school and James had started getting into trouble. Always telling Richard how it wasn't James' fault, how he'd struggled with the death of their father.

***

James called him not three months after Richard moved. Richard didn't recognize James' voice at first, it'd been over a year since they'd last spoke. James heard that Richard was back from some of the guys around town, and he wanted to see him. He had changed, James promised. He had met someone, settled down even, and he wanted to see Richard. He said they would have wanted it.

Richard put him off at first, explaining that it was a big move and that he was still settling in. But like the gray clouds that would gather over the bay before the first grumble of a storm, Richard knew it was only a matter time. Eventually they agreed on a weekend in late August.

***

They arrived together late at night, not long after Richard had given up waiting. The lights on the deck were off, and the moonlight cast a pale, broken shadow across the wooden stairs leading up to the front door.

Richard was in the kitchen, clearing the remains of the evening he had prepared when he heard a gentle knock. The sound was soft enough that he dismissed it as the dull thud of shells being dropped from above by hungry seagulls. As he reached to turn off the kitchen light, however, he again heard the sound.

At the door he was met by a light-haired stranger, her arms weighed down heavily with bags, as she offered an awkward smile.

"And you must be Richard, I can see the resemblance." Richard stood, unsure. "James has told me so much about you."

At the mention of his brother's name, Richard looked over her shoulder, down the driveway, and saw his brother unloading the rest of their luggage from his car. In the darkness Richard could make out very little of him.

"I'm sorry," Richard reached from her bags and she accepted. "I had expected you both some time ago."

"Oh, no need to apologize, we were running late. Actually it was my fault. I got held up at work." As she spoke she made her way past Richard and into his home.

Standing on the threshold, both arms full, Richard surveyed the distance between himself and his brother, and past it. The pattern of the night flowed gently from his yard, to that of his neighbor and his neighbor's neighbor. It flowed in broken, tranquil patches down to the dancing, shimmering water, and beyond that, into the horizon. Richard turned and followed this new woman into his home.

***

By the Water's Edge

Sitting alone on a deck of wood
Lay below a pool of ocean flood
Night's rays iridescent tinkling unruly
Promising something that they're never truly
A day of light, a night of less
Shadows uncovering our hopelessness
Moon makes peace with darkness toiled
But nothing brightens the dreams they soiled
Offering hope to whomever would dream
Upon a deck overlooking a stream

Pages and Memories

The image is of a table by a windowsill on a summer's early evening. The yellow glow of the setting sun paints a beveled texture of light and shadow. 

Sitting alone on the tables rounded edge is a lone book; it’s binding worn thin, open to some unspecific page. The air of the summer’s evening has grown listless, restless and has begun to stir about quietly. 

As the light slowly fades, the listless air dances and flirts with the pages of the open book. The book, unresponsive at first, begins converting the restless energy of the evening’s air. 

In shadowed yellow a page begins to ruffle and rise. The motion is a struggle as it falls back down and rises again. 

Words and sentences bend and curl with the hesitant page and with a frustrated gust the page is blown over, and several others quickly follow. 

New words and sentences reveal themselves, and are again blown. The book now is alive, with syncopated flipping. It all rushes together at times, individually at others, all in the dimming yellowness of the slanting lights gaze.

And that is my drifting thought in the cab as it makes its way across town and then down. 

Streets flip by slowly, individually, and then suddenly together. And moments of my previous days are revealed to me. 

The streets blow by and pages bunch together, and then a vivid moment glows through the opaque. And as we approach our downtown destination, the pages flip less quickly, the memories more slowly, and the yellow light becomes hidden by the horizon.

The Dance

and that's the dance
the constant movement of you and I
as we become us
the spinning
and circling
and spiraling
in which you and I blur
your textures
and curves
and colors
and lightness
complimenting
my coarseness
and angles
and hues
and heaviness
with you I float away
and with me you fly
we a mesh of lifeness
and moment
and hopeful
we a couple
we a one
the breath we breathe
binding us
as close as two can be
senses dripping and groping
for sensations of you
and sensations of I
heat a reaction
of closeness and light
exhale,
inhale,
exhale
we drip
as candle drips
slowly,
provocatively,
distinctly,
painfully
our salty wax
and you come
and i come
and we've came.

To Past Lovers

I just wanted to let you know that I think about you.
And not because I want it to change anything,
but because it's good to know when you're thought about.
How a little bit of you rubs off on someone else,
and then how you're forever with them.
It's exciting how life is like that.
Things are stirred about,
sometimes fast
and sometimes not so fast.
And in the end,
little bits of everything,
get mixed up with everything else.
And there's a life.
Your life.
My life.
And it's never,
ever,
what it seems.

Simple pleasures

A quiet beer.
The anticipation of it fills my days,
and I wait anxiously,
like the head of a beer,
spilling over onto the bar.
I can taste it.

Change

Winter 

The cold is beginning to recede, 

retreating as gradually as it came. 

Allowing our frozen bodies time to thaw, 

regain the warmth that sustains us. 

Longer days of lasting light 

illuminating the darkened corners of this town. 

Layers of clothing being shed, 

revealing others like ourselves. 

Having retreated from the cold, 

ready to embrace the warmth. 

Colors come alive with nature. 

Hope is renewed with every bloom. 

A heavy burden slowly dissipating with the winter. Promising a new life, one long overdue. 

Spring 

Summer 

Happiness subdues as the clouds thicken, 

overwhelming the masses. 

To bloom in a desolate land of grays and blacks.

Individual spirit fighting to survive. 

Drowning in the sorrow. 

Helplessly, hopelessly sinking. 

I've had a vision of a far away place, 

a world of color, a world of light,

a momentary glimpse of possibility. 

Fall

Q & A

Question:
What are you to me?
Answer:
An image,
or thing,
one-dimensional,
serving the purpose of the object of my affection.
Not really who you are,
more who I want you to be, it seems.
And countless thoughts have made their way around
to resemble something like yourself.

To begin, a toast...

to do
to be
to have been
to have done
to past
to present
to future
myself
i behold you
to give
everything of yourself
be generous
as lovers
as friends
be generous
with love
and with life
be generous
with moments
and pleasures
and immerse yourself
so fully and sweetly and overtly
cover yourself in the honey of it all
of the day and night
drown in it
the sticky residue of living