common-prose

Night will fall on all of us and the carriage will arrive. I enjoy the breeze given to me and the soul given to me to enjoy it and I ask no more questions, look no further. If what I leave written in the visitors' book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that's fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that's fine too.

We know only too well that every work is doomed to imperfection and that there is no aesthetic contemplation less assured than the aesthetic contemplation of what we ourselves write. But everything is imperfect; there is no sunset, however lovely, that could not be more so, no gentle breeze lulling us to sleep that could not lull us into a still deeper sleep. Thus, equally contented contemplating mountains or statues, poring over the days as if they were books, above all dreaming everything in order to convert it into something intimately ours, we, too, will write descriptions and analyzes which, once written, will become alien objects that we can enjoy as if they had simply arrived along with the dusk.

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.

We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don't know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and a little beyond the outworks of our intuitions, perhaps we should then bear our sadnesses with greater assurance than our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters into us, something unknown to us; our feelings, shy and inhibited, fall silent, everything in us withdraws, a stillness settles on us, and at the centre of it is the new presence that nobody yet knows, making no sound.

I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other.

I can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who I am not, and learn to savor the sweetness of who I am.

I want to live and I am living, even though that defies logic. Even if I don't believe in the order of things, I still love the sticky leaves as they open each spring, the blue sky, and some people whom you love, do you believe it, and don't know why; I love some great deeds performed by men, in which, perhaps, I no longer believe but which I still treasure in my heart for old times' sake. Look, they've brought your fish soup: eat to your heart's content.

I have always experienced actual sensations less intensely than the sensation of having those sensations. I have always found my awareness of suffering more painful than the suffering itself.

" ... When I wrote something that finally had it, I would say it aloud and it would come alive, become real. It would start repeating itself and I'd know, that's struck, that's true. Like a bell. Something struck true. And there the words would be."

If you don't attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right path, and make every effort not to stray from it. The main thing is to avoid telling lies, all kinds of lies, keep from telling lies to yourself in particular. Watch out for your own deceitfulness, and do so every hour and every minute. Avoid indulging in disdain, too, for others and for yourself; whatever seems bad within you will be purged simply by virtue of the fact that you have noticed it yourself.

Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

If it can't be resolved in the affirmative, then it will also never be resolved in the negative; you yourself know the nature of your own heart, and that's where all your torment lies.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are - until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.