labanakt

All the contemporary writing these days is about loss, Robert has said once. There’s not enough time to be unafraid. 

Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner's every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured. Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked.

'The way the animals live, everybody envies them, because look, a cat, when it walks--did you ever see a cat making an aesthetic mistake. Did you ever see a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever miss-arranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes. And we're worried about that. So there came this point in human evolution when we lost our innocence' - A.W.

swimming.

st. thomas kirche In yesterday's garden I wanted to preserve the way night allowed darkness to form a secret entryway out of the trees. My eyes struggled to see their outlines against the dirt path leading into dimness, but I didn't try too hard anyway. I'm limited to what I know, and what I know is that I ache at the sight of things fading. Look at you next to me, fading against the muted lushness of 9pm. I remembered while writing this that there was a single star that night, just above the darkest head of one tree, which may not have even been there, instead a dusty blue. All the contemporary writing these days is about loss, robert hass said once. There's not enough time to be unafraid. But efforts to think beyond that which I know are only compliance with that which I am afraid of. What comforts me is that I could barely make out the hue of your skin against the sand. How it stretched underneath us, a path between two slopes of green. It seemed it would always be there. by Joan Lee