The quality of light

 

The days of our lives

 

 There isn't much to say any more, I guess. 

In this last year it seems as if a hundred years have passed by in a flash. What is left of my old life seems like an inscrutable mystery to me. And now the shadows have lengthened and become more distinct I find myself wondering if there are only these islands of the heart that remain...

You find yourself more alone than you could have imagined. So much time has flowed under the bridge..the old stone bridge itself, Tu Fu might say, is nothing but a dazzling moment under the eye of heaven, a dim reflection of some other place and time that we witness darkly. The days of our lives like the days of the world now...

And so now your relationship is to one of absences. The past has not disappeared but changed shape and lives within you now in a different way... 

Loss: the point becomes a circle, the line a square; what grows in me day by day is my own diminishment. A part of me wants to cling on to the idol of the old days since the path that has now opened up before me leads who knows where? And who would this "you" be then? I have become a question to myself...

I need to weave fragments of texts, sentences that spontaneously emerge, into my thoughts as a way of establishing some kind of continuity; either that or face the prospect of silence, of coming to terms with the lack of words for the way I'm feeling. What kind of place is this...

There's that scene from Offshore where the tide turns and objects slide, move about, swap positions. Nothing's steady anymore against these interruptions that weave their way into a life. Thinking understands the limits of thinking and ceases to be 'thinking'. Like Drummer Hodge you're now a northerner living under a strange southern star. Or maybe that star, north by northwest, continues to flow glistening darkly like the Roding in its season of despair. How to find a sense of being at home in your homelessness...

This song reminds you so much of a time of your life that is so distant and yet, weirdly, all the more real for existing on the borders of your consciousness. You can't name it but it drifts your way...

You've been drifting for so long. Perhaps you need to be truer to this de-centering before "the drift find the drifter"?

When told by the doctors that nothing more could be done the swami, citing Knulp, said: "The desire to sleep overcomes all other desires." Only she could have said that, half wanting to communicate her feelings and half wanting to remain a mystery. 

One of those 'strange reversals' (Rumi). For so long you'd asked not to become religious and now you find yourself willing but unable! Taste and see!, said the poet. And yet the words of poets and novelists mean much less to me, strangely superficial..a shallow form of intelligence. Was I the only one who didn't grow up? 

These lines by Hadot deeply affected me: Cut out everything; welcome everything. Familiar -at one level-to any Muslim. The question, as always, at what level?

Too try and grow into simplicity. To be less, to speak less in the time that remains. But to speak is to allow stilled time to flow again. 'Allow' suggests too much agency when you know it's otherwise. Does it make any sense now to ask where?

There is just one thing I can say- and maybe it's all I've got left:

Nothing lasts forever

But I will always love you.