Rabbit
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I have a hunger for beauty. My eye craves it like a drug addict. A day at the Getty or the Met or the Frick or the De Young and I am undone and breathless as a farmgirl behind a haystack.
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In a bid to save younger girls, 13 year old Marian asked to be shot first..."
I can't get the image of this shooting out of my head. This room, these girls and this man. It is one of those moments where the whole mass of the known and unknowable condenses into a single point, a black hole of the human condition.
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One of the things I can't get right in my head. How one person can choose to act and wipe out the lives of so many others. Innocents.
You got a grudge against the world?
Why don't you go fuck yourself and leave the rest of us alone?
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I don't know, though. I got a certain itch in my own hands. I got a bad fever. I pretend its a righteous one.
Don't they all though. Especially the worst ones.
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I got this picture of myself in ten years or twenty, all bald-headed and wearing a robe and walking around not talking to anyone and just sitting under a tree or on a rock in the middle of a river or writing by the light of a oil lamp in a tiny cabin somewhere in the middle of some dark and forgotten forest. All "Kung-Fu" David Carradine/Dali Lama/Thomas Merton'd out...blissfully engaged in silent meditation of the real and actual world.
I don't know why, but it gives me a kind of comfort, that picture.
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Meantime I drink too much. I eat too much. I hit too hard and too often. I curse and I blaspheme. I mock and I ridicule without mercy. I covet. I am prideful. Slothful. Mean.
Sometimes I feel like a big ol' bag of contradictions.
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Which is the way I like it.
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My prayer for you today is that you find a small and unexpected joy in some everyday object you've overlooked for too long.
My prayer for you today is that you love yourself with a fierceness that will scare away the faint of heart.
Also, if you could win the lottery, that would be nice.
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posted by tearful dishwasher at 7:02 PM
6 Comments:
I was deeply moved by your post. I think my boys wonder why I hug them so much and so fiercely, why I tell them every day that I love them.
I do it to anchor myself in a world that is like an enormous tornado--amoral, distructive, capricious.
I cried when I heard what that 13 year old girl said.
My son is 13.
This world scares me more than I like to admit.
Keep writing. I promise I will too.
best,
Lisa
I like your rabbit alot, sir.
Makes me think of one of my very favorite stories from childhood, The Velveteen Rabbit.
I'd like to believe I could love something until it became real.
I start the day with the news - NY Times online. Then I often go see if you or Yolie have written something new - reminds me of the artistic realm - the creativity at our fingertips. Your line about the "black hole of the human condition" is powerful - perhaps because of its economy of words. I am sending you a link to a letter published on cnn/time's website - the writing style in the letter reminds me of your writing. His writing also has a purpose of trying to remain intact as he encounters those black holes. It's strange to send something that is not more uplifting - but it is powerful. Mary
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1543658-1,00.html?cnn=yes
Lisa-
Thanks for posting this. I don't know how we can get through any of this except together.
Together.
All best to you, always.
Laurel-
This is a little metal rabbit that I stole from one of my co-workers. Her daugter made it for her!
It really is incredible.
And you know, the whole thing about the Velveteen rabbit is that it is exactly, exactly right.
How love makes us, and undoes us all.
yrs-
Scott
Mary-
Thank you so much for your comment. I read that letter and felt an immediate kinship with the writer. Of course, I have never come close to the kind of sacrifice and difficulty that he faces on a daily basis, but maybe I have seen enough to be able to at least relate to what he's going through.
The thing about this kind of dispatch from the front lines, it's not depressing, it's uplifting. Terror and horror are woven into the warp and weft of our world, and we do ourselves a great disservice by failing to make room for them in our psyche's.
I think of you and your family often and fondly.
All best to you...
tearful
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