“One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.”
“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”- Lao Tzu
I thought it would be good to write. I don’t sit like I used to, don’t feel the need to as much as I used to. The writer’s block that came up around 2012/13, never really seemed to let go of me and so I didn’t feel the sense of hammering ot words that meant little to me.
This can be about impressions. I caught myself thinking about how riverbeds form and how innumerable impressions need to be made in the earth to carry a river forward. These are mostly invisible lines, indentations that matter but appear outwith our experience. One would have to be the river, step inside its flow to understand that every fissure, every cavity and silted bottom is part of the flow.
I keep reading texts which undermine the things I had took for granted, things that were never my own in any case. The purported European “enlightenment”; enlightenment for whom? Theories about past civilisations that project contemporary experiences on historic time. Another case of seeing the shimmering surface, glistening, glistering, without appreciating the myriad flows beneath.
To think we have a language speckled with Latin, rough, vulgar possessive terms. There is romance but there is also violence. A knotted and pulsing left over from a cruel Empire, aching to start its striations, its indentations once more. I am reminded of the bombed out German cities after the European wars, factories all still intact, still ready to go. Our machines clamber to get on top of us, and even our language is a little machine, driving our impulses against our deeper will.
Heraclitus famously wrote that you can’t step in the same river twice. And plenty of other not so famous people probably said otherwise. A word is powerful, a name perhaps more so. Back to the river. To properly embody the river, to truly step inside the river is not just to place your feet in it but to experience it as flows, depth, indentation, silt and sand, flora, fauna, deep pulverizing eddies. I’m not done yet. To be made aware that the only constant is change.
The sort of non linear experiences that derive from a deep feeling or empathic connection derive very different answers. To see that our own two feet are limitations upon ourselves, that when we sense only peripherally we see only the appearance of flow, bit when we get a little deeper, even allowing ourselves to step inside the flow, we experience a continuity, a deep sense of stability that we cannot feel without dropping our initial impressions.
It is rather us who need to be worries about ourselves, about our discontinuity of experience, how language shifts us, tells us we are machines, even tells us that the world is a machine. When we dredge rivers we lose the ephemeral, but quite nuanced language of flow, of a river’s soul. And we also lean more and more into that notion that nothing persists, when the truth couldn’t be more different.
“I dreamt you, and when I awoke I was sure your spirit had just fluttered from the room. I have yanked you from your sleep before–into the dream I was dreaming. Twisted you like a spiral of hair around a finger. Love, you arrived with your heart full of birds.”
— Sandra Cisneros, from “Eyes of Zapata,” Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (eds. Bryce Milligan, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela de Hoyos (Riverhead Books, 1995)
