scruta

Perhaps it goes like this:

Passion is the thief who accosts you in the night, suddenly, and without warning.

Love is the one who robs you in broad daylight, in front of witnesses gasping, “You let it happen. You let it happen.”

What these onlookers don’t know is that you let it happen because you were in shock. It was the same person who robbed you in the night.

I don’t believe in vampires anymore, but I still think there are people trying to suck the life out of me. And if I let them do it enough, I’ll become one of them too.

There’s this place in my heart. A house, really. It’s constantly under construction, and every woman I’ve ever loved has a room, and she is free to do with it whatever she wants. Most of the time the rooms are vacant. Although every once in a while I find a message written on the walls, or an article of clothing haphazardly lying on the floor.  The writing is always in a language I do not understand, and the article of clothing never bears any resemblance to anything I would have known her to wear. These vestiges are fresh, but I don’t understand them. I’m not sure if I can, or if I want to, but still I go walking through my house and see them.

This is how old lovers live in your heart.

Heh! Is this really the key to happiness? Not thinking about whether you are happy or not? Eliminating the question entirely?

How strange life is! Holding something closest to our hearts when we think about it least…

…Our thoughts are like limbs, too. Extensions of ourselves. Although they are functional, we are only aware of them when we want to be.

So you’d ask:

What’s the best metaphor to describe what plaid is like? I mean, the essence of it. Irrigation canals? Chicken wire? Warps through space and time? Fabrics on a loom? Mathematical grids in Euclidean space?

I would say:

No, no. I can’t say. They’re all good, but really, I mean, do you expect me to be able to take our friend plaid out of its context? Chicken farmers, jailers, carnies working at a glass bottle shooting range all wear chicken wire plaid. Farmers, civil engineers, ditch-diggers wear irrigation canals. Astronauts, tripping professors, and forward minded novelists all wear warps.  Minervan mermaids, spinster grannies, looming threats of men all wear looms. Devotees of Descartes, reckoners, and city planners wear grids…

You’d respond:

But you fail to see what I’m saying . We’re talking about the essence here.

I would say:

No, we are grasping at it, touching its edges, its corners. This is the best we get, we humans, a taste of the essential.

I have come to the realization that we monger ideas through the desires in our hearts, but we birth ideas though the desire in our minds.

You asked me my thoughts about vagabonds and wayfarers. Bold men and women who would stake the claim of their life upon wide-eyed wandering and slack-jawed free floating throughout the world.

I responded that a man’s life is like planting a seed, and seedlike, the wayfarer rolls in the surf and blows upon the wind, toils in the underbellies of swallows and escapes the notice of kernel crunching rodents. The wayfarer’s seed will not rest until it has seen every ground where it might take root, every sky where its leaf might feast upon an unbashed sun.

Of course, while a seed’s journey might be great, and its knowledge of the world wide, it will never know the heights of the seeds that took root early and grew tall, seeing the world from a commanding height, reaching for the sun.

(I quickly assured my friend that this analogy was rather plain, and like all analogies, was probably rooted in something I read, something someone had mulled over before. Poets always live in our brains.  Yes, even the unread ones.)

At night, I will sit on the beach of my desire, thinking: How many books to bend? What languages to learn? How many songs to warble off against the darkness? What fine beauties to baste myself upon?

They are all glowing ships on the horizon, their lanterns burning fast towards the shore. To see them better, I climb the nearby lighthouse. There I see more ships from the better vantage. I am happy, and overcome by this sudden increase. I can guide more ships home, their cargoes already swelling in my soul.

I am about to murmur a sign of my contentment until there in the distance, almost out of sight, I see a bigger, taller lighthouse.

I suddenly fancied myself a wise truffle hunter, and I spoke these words: “You know the secret of love, lust, and self. You are a hunter; the pig is lust; your love is but a truffle – precious and easily consumed.”

An underdog only knows successes as something singular, abnormal, but incredibly sweet – an oasis in the desert, the sudden respite of a long journey. Unlike the champion, they can never know the spoils of success or consistent victory – the verdant valleys, settlement and prosperity. The underdog will envy the champion for the continuity of his excellence, seeming effortlessness in the face of adversity; the champion will envy the underdog for that sweetness of victory after a great struggle no-one, not even they themselves thought they could win.