(no subject)
Happy Canada day.
I really don't have time to write, or say anything meaningful. I want to write stories and weave tapestries, like Penelope, for those I love. I would stain them with pomegranates, sacred fruits of Arab fortresses and delight of their supple mistresses and daughters. The Greeks ate pomegranates too, and my Penelope's hands would bear their reddish-brown stains.
But, just as Penelope discovered, the tapestry exists only as long as the loved one, the one it's meant for, is absent. (I'm on the verge of giving my Odysseus his tapestry, and I wonder whether it will desintegrate the moment he touches it.)
Being here, without him, is like living without myself. I've kept pieces of him, and lost pieces of me, and all that remains is a helpless jumble of body parts and identities, fragments of a tree in bloom, a peach pit in a November sky as summer bathes the cafes in sweat and loneliness.
Enough of this. It's sweltering hot in Romania, and I can sense a thunderstorm. I'm off to drink an irish coffee, and search for words.
There is nothing worse than having a feeling you can't express, not because you're censoring it, but because you haven't figured out how to contain it in language. We seem to have agreed on the term love, which is both all-inclusive and completely inadequate. How can one word explain all of this? Isn't there some sort of parallel language, some alternate set of coordinates, some invisible map that traces the lines of a different world, a different language and grammar and series of sentences that allows us to explain what this feeling is? Is it even a feeling? What about self, thought, word, sight, touch, tree, rock? When I see the sunset, it doesn't look the same: is that just a feeling, or has the sunset changed? Perhaps I have changed and the sunset remains the same. Fourth grade comprehension question: what does this tell us about the sunset? How can we understand the character after chapter five? Write a conversation between the girl and the sunset that illustrates this perspective. (15 points).
My feet are the roots of an olive tree and my forehead bears an ancient moon. A crescent of silver, like pagan necklaces, and I have become an enigma, a reenactment of an old mystery, a repetition of the spiral, a serpent at the base of the earth. Dragons didn't always have legs, tomatoes weren't always safe to eat, and once the world was paved in rituals. Once, I did not see this hidden language, and ate tomatoes without a sense of wonder.
But now, everything is different.
I really don't have time to write, or say anything meaningful. I want to write stories and weave tapestries, like Penelope, for those I love. I would stain them with pomegranates, sacred fruits of Arab fortresses and delight of their supple mistresses and daughters. The Greeks ate pomegranates too, and my Penelope's hands would bear their reddish-brown stains.
But, just as Penelope discovered, the tapestry exists only as long as the loved one, the one it's meant for, is absent. (I'm on the verge of giving my Odysseus his tapestry, and I wonder whether it will desintegrate the moment he touches it.)
Being here, without him, is like living without myself. I've kept pieces of him, and lost pieces of me, and all that remains is a helpless jumble of body parts and identities, fragments of a tree in bloom, a peach pit in a November sky as summer bathes the cafes in sweat and loneliness.
Enough of this. It's sweltering hot in Romania, and I can sense a thunderstorm. I'm off to drink an irish coffee, and search for words.
There is nothing worse than having a feeling you can't express, not because you're censoring it, but because you haven't figured out how to contain it in language. We seem to have agreed on the term love, which is both all-inclusive and completely inadequate. How can one word explain all of this? Isn't there some sort of parallel language, some alternate set of coordinates, some invisible map that traces the lines of a different world, a different language and grammar and series of sentences that allows us to explain what this feeling is? Is it even a feeling? What about self, thought, word, sight, touch, tree, rock? When I see the sunset, it doesn't look the same: is that just a feeling, or has the sunset changed? Perhaps I have changed and the sunset remains the same. Fourth grade comprehension question: what does this tell us about the sunset? How can we understand the character after chapter five? Write a conversation between the girl and the sunset that illustrates this perspective. (15 points).
My feet are the roots of an olive tree and my forehead bears an ancient moon. A crescent of silver, like pagan necklaces, and I have become an enigma, a reenactment of an old mystery, a repetition of the spiral, a serpent at the base of the earth. Dragons didn't always have legs, tomatoes weren't always safe to eat, and once the world was paved in rituals. Once, I did not see this hidden language, and ate tomatoes without a sense of wonder.
But now, everything is different.