Heavenly Sight

“Develop a sense of self. A solidness that can’t be attacked.”

I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.

“You want to have. You want everything. But having is forbidden to human beings. Having everything. And for woman, it’s even forbidden to hope to have everything a human being can have. There are so many boundaries, and so many walls, and inside those walls, more walls. Bastions in which, one morning, I wake up condemned. Cities where I am isolated, quarantines, cages, “rest” homes. How often I‘ve been there, my tombs, my corporeal dungeons, the earth abounds with places for my confinement. I’m here, the sentence is of a really unforeseeable type and duration. But I feel, after all, “at home.” What you can’t have, what you can’t touch, smell, caress, you should at least try to see. I want to see: everything. No Promised Land I won’t reach someday. Seeing what you will n(ever) have. Maybe I have written to see; to have what I never would have had; so that having would be the privilege not of the hand that takes and encloses, of the gullet, of the gut; but of the hand that points out, of fingers that see, that design, from the tips of the fingers that transcribe by the sweet dictates of vision. From the point of view of the soul’s eye: the eye of a womansoul.”

“But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning ‘to grow long,’ and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion. The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.”

“If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.”

This was expected. There are always those who fear the miracle when it comes.

“With a slip of the moon in her hair,”