You Shall Know Our Velocity

Love is implicit in every connection.  It should be.  Thus when absent it makes us insane. It breaks our equilibrium and we have to flounder for reasons.  When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it's cruel and wrong and we all know this.  We live in a constant state of denial and imbalance.

Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity

Which would you rather smell?

"The night was clear and his head felt as clear and cold as the air. He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs. Pilar, he thought. Pilar and the smell of death. This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of the cactus flowers, mimosa and the seagrape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven? You must be hungry, he thought, and he lay on his side and watched the entrance of the cave in the light that the stars reflected from the snow."

-Ernest Hemingway, passage from "For Whom the Bell Tolls" p. 260

the straightforward mermaid

The straightforward mermaid starts every sentence with "Look..." This comes from being raised in a sea full of hooks. She wants to get points 1, 2, and 3 across, doesn't want to disappear like a river into the ocean. When she's feeling despairing, she goes to eddies at the mouth of the river and tries to comb the water apart with her fingers. The straightforward mermaid has already said to five sailors, "Look, I don't think this is going to work," before sinking like a sullen stone. She's supposed to teach Rock Impersonation to the younger mermaids, but every beach field trip devolves to them trying to find shells to match their scales. They really love braiding. "Look," says the straightforward mermaid. "Your high ponytails make you look like fountains, not rocks." Sometimes she feels like a third gender--preferring primary colors to pastels, the radio to singing. At least she's all mermaid: she never gets tired of swimming, hates the thought of socks.

-Matthea Harvey, as seen in the New Yorker

Why
do the
fingers
of the lit
tle once beau
tiful la
dy (sitting sew
ing at an o
pen window this
fine morning) fly
instead of dancing
are they possibly
afraid that life is
running away from
then (i wonder) or
isn't she a
ware that life (who
never grows old)
is always beau
tiful and
that nobod
y beauti
ful ev
er hur
ries

e.e. cummings.  I am obsessed with him right now.

barefoot and wet and salty.

"Yet wide as it was, it was still his beach and at the center of the circles in which his mind revolved when he remembered the best of boyhood. But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of his boyhood? What about enjoying the best of old age? Or was the best of old age just that--the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow's shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells and pulverized seashells at the edge of the shore and he hustled to his feet and hurriedly turned and went lurching through the low surf until it was knee high and deep enough for him to plunge in and begin swimming madly out to the rising breakers--into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future--and, if he was lucky, make it there in time to catch the next big wave and then the next and the next and the next until from the low slant of inland sunlight glittering across the water he knew it was time to go. He ran home barefoot and wet and salty, remembering the mightiness of that immense sea boiling in his own two ears and licking his forearm to taste his skin fresh from the ocean and baked by the sun. Along with the ecstasy of a whole day of being battered silly by the sea, the taste and the smell intoxicated him so that he was driven to the brink of biting down with his teeth to tear out a chunk of himself and savor his fleshy existence."

- passage from "Everyman" by Philip Roth, Vintage International p. 126-7

The Ocean Moving All Night

Stay with us. Don't sink to the bottom

like a fish going to sleep.

Be with the ocean moving steadily all night,

not scattered like a rainstorm.

The spring we're looking for

is somewhere in this murkiness.

See the night-lights up there traveling together,

the candle awake in its gold dish.

Don't slide into the cracks of ground like spilled mercury.

When the full moon comes out, look around.

-Rumi

Soul and Body

"It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother's womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two from a basic situation. Tomas was born of the saying, 'Einmal ist keinmal.' Tereza was born of the rumbling of a stomach.

The first time she went to Tomas's flat, her insides began to rumble. And no wonder: she had had nothing to eat since breakfast but a quick sandwich on the platform before boarding the train. She had concentrated on the daring journey ahead of her and forgotten about food. But when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it. She felt terrible standing there in front of Tomas listening to her belly speak out. She felt like crying. Fortunately, after the first ten seconds Tomas put his arms around her and made her forget her ventral voices."

-Milan Kundera, p. 39 "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"