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Diciembre 25, 2007
How do we become whole by being rent?
I do not want ever to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and fascination there is love.
In the midst of what we are going through this summer, battling my husband's cancer, I have to hold on to this, to return to the eternal questions without demanding an answer. The questions worth asking are not answerable. Could we be fascinated by a Maker who was completely explained and understood? The mystery is tremendous, and the fascination that keeps me returning to the questions affirms that they are worth asking, and that any God worth believing in is the God not only of the immensities of the galaxies I rejoice in at night when I walk the dogs, but also the God of love who cares about the sufferings of us human beings and is here, with us, for us, in our pain and in our joy.
I come across four lines of Yeats and copy them down:
But Love has pitched her mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
The place of excrement. That is where we are this summer. How do we walk through excrement and keep clean in the heart? How do we become whole by being rent?
This summer is not the first time I have walked through the place of excrement and found love's mansion there. Indeed, we are more likely to find it in the place of excrement than in the sterile places. God comes where there is pain and brokenness, waiting to heal, even if the healing is not the physical one we hope for.
Madeline L'Engle, from Glimpses of Grace
Posted by sarita at 10:46 PM
Diciembre 24, 2007
"The door is half open..."
The door is half open,
The sweet smell of limes . . .
On the table, forgotten,
A whip and a glove.
The lamp's yellow glow . . .
Things rustle all round.
Why did you go?
I don't understand.
More clearly I'll see
Tomorrow with fresh eyes
That life is beautiful.
Heart, just be wise.
You're completely worn out—
Beating sluggishly . . .
You know, I read somewhere
That souls do not die.
17 February 1911, Tsarskoye Selo
Anna Akhmatova
Posted by sarita at 10:35 AM
Psalm and Lament
Hialeah, Florida
in memory of my mother (1897–1974)
The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad.
One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours.
And the grass burns terribly in the sun,
The grass turns yellow secretly at the roots.
Now suddenly the yard chairs look empty, the sky looks empty,
The sky looks vast and empty.
Out on Red Road the traffic continues; everything continues.
Nor does memory sleep; it goes on.
Out spring the butterflies of recollection,
And I think that for the first time I understand
The beautiful ordinary light of this patio
And even perhaps the dark rich earth of a heart.
(The bedclothes, they say, had been pulled down.
I will not describe it. I do not want to describe it.
No, but the sheets were drenched and twisted.
They were the very handkerchiefs of grief.)
Let summer come now with its schoolboy trumpets and fountains.
But the years are gone, the years are finally over.
And there is only
This long desolation of flower-bordered sidewalks
That runs to the corner, turns, and goes on,
That disappears and goes on
Into the black oblivion of a neighborhood and a world
Without billboards or yesterdays.
Sometimes a sad moon comes and waters the roof tiles.
But the years are gone. There are no more years.
Donald Justice
Posted by sarita at 10:32 AM
Diciembre 6, 2007
From "Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer"
This was a time when,
in the universities, everyone was reading Derrida.
Who'd set out to write a dissertation about time;
he read Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Augustine, and found
that there was no place to stand from which to talk about it.
There was no ground. It was language. The scandal
of nothingness! Put cheerfully to work by my colleagues
to dismantle regnant ideologies. It was a time when,
a few miles away, kids were starting to kill each other
in wars over turf for selling drugs, schizophrenics
with matted hair, dazed eyes, festering feet, always engaged
in some furious volleying inner dialogue they neglected,
unlike the rest of us, to hide, were beginning to fill the streets,
'de-institutionalized,' in someone's idea of reform,
and I was searching in the rosebed of a rented house
inch by inch, looking under the carseat where the paper clips
and Roosevelt dimes and unresolved scum-shapes of once
vegetal stuff accumulate in abject little villages
where matter hides while it transforms itself. Nothing there.
I never found it.
Robert Hass
Posted by sarita at 3:27 PM