Monday, October 13, 2014

Brisk Footsteps

The world feels so dangerous, in so many ways, right now. This is not a state of mind I have inhabited much, certainly not in the last few decades, and I'm finding it unpleasant. I have withdrawn from almost everything and everybody. It all seems fraught with waste and risk. I don't believe that most people's benevolence is more than temporary and conditional. Maybe it's a sea-change, maybe it's a reversion. But it's strange. I leave communications unanswered. I feel like Richard II in his prison cell: finally coming to full awareness of his situation, at the precise moment when he no longer has power to change it. 

And yet, nothing has happened. My life continues, as pleasant as ever. The Fall is lovely.

Jack Gilbert wrote:

Innocence has gone
out of me.
The song.
The song, suddenly
has gone out
of me.


("And She Waiting.") It's a condition caused, he said, by the return to love with perspective. An undeception. And so it is, yet I glimmer that it's actually, and more deeply, a deception. Just because I do the same thing over and over, start the same scene over and over, doesn't mean that the world has only that one scene in it. I need to open my hand and turn it over, palm to the sky.

Too much time indoors, too much time online, too much time checking empty nets for fish. And in the meantime, brisk footsteps in the hall outside: death, wearing sensible pumps, checking to make sure that I'm keeping my parole. Not to worry, Ms Death, I'm still in here.

4 comments:

Joyce Ellen Davis said...


Too much time indoors, too much time online, too much time checking empty nets for fish.

Yes.

Lori Witzel said...

A moment for art and a friend during the Massive Conference. I saw Ms. Death on my way past and told her to piss off for now. We have work to do.

rbarenblat said...

Too much time spent checking empty nets for fish -- yes, I have had that feeling, too.

Sending love.

Lucy said...

I think I recognise much here. I don't really expect to get much of it back again, and probably not to get much else instead either, but presumably it doesn't matter, I'll get by without, I have enough. And yet I wouldn't really change, or go back to, anything.

I too feel like the fisherman checking the nets, but also like the fish that takes a look inside and then swims past!