“Ballet in the air…
Twin butterflies until, twice white
They Meet, they mate”
Matsuo Basho, Japanese Haiku
(I studied Matsuo Basho’s poetry in college, and there is one poem that left an impression on my soul, but I’ve lost it along the way. I am searching for it. In the meantime, I’ll post new favorites, like this one.)
Pixabay photo by claude05alleva
In his book, Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote about the first time he left Poland in 1958 (3 years after Stalin’s death) for his first journalistic assignment abroad:
“We flew in darkness; even inside the cabin the lights were barely shining. Suddenly, the tension which afflicts all parts of the plane when the engines are at full throttle started to lessen, the sound of the engines grew quieter and less urgent – we were approaching the end of our journey. Mario grabbed me by the arm and pointed out the window: “Look!”
I was dumbstruck.
Below me, the entire length and breadth of the blackness through which we were flying was now filled with light. It was an intense light, blinding, quivering, flickering. One had the impression of a liquid substance, like molten lava, glimmering down below, with a sparkling surface that pulsated with brightness, rising and falling, expanding and contracting. The entire luminous apparition was something alive, full of movement, vibration, energy.
It was the first time in my life I was seeing an illuminated city.”
Photo by xuuxuu on Pixabay
Talking to a friend recently, he told me that one of his wealthy buddies, divorced for the fourth time, was simplifying his life.
I immediately pictured a man cleaning up his act, eating lean meat and more vegetables, maybe hitting the gym a few more times a week.
“He sold his plane and his boat,” my friend confided, “and he’s having sex with prostitutes.”
Before I could think of a suitable rejoinder, my friend chuckled and said, “He has a new motto in life: if it flies, floats, or f$@&#s – rent it.”
Typically tongue-tied, I managed to grimace and flee from the conversation, but here are my witty and clever retorts, over twenty-four hours later. Which one should I have used? Can you think of something better?
a. I’m going to cross-stitch that onto a pillow.
b. Impressive alliteration. Is your friend a writer?
c. With that financial acumen, he should be selling Ponzi schemes.
d. If he buys, rents or rapes to f$@&#, ARREST him because it’s ILLEGAL.
Like the film Six Degrees of Separation and the parlour game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, sometimes even writing a blog can be a journey that comes full circle:
1. Starting with my own blog, I wanted a quote from an author about writing about characters.
2. My search led me to Goodreads, where I found a lot of good quotes, including this one that I didn’t use: “By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You’re sort of a predator, an invader of people.”
― William Trevor
3. The quote I did use, from John Rogers, led me to his website and blog. Since I’m a fan of TNT’s show Leverage (Mr. Rogers is a writer and exec producer for the show), I read his blog, “Leverage #509 “The Rundown Job” post-game“, in which he writes about a scene inspired by his friend who’d recently died, which was moving and not at all maudlin.
4. Reading his recommended list of blogs, I checked out Jon Swift’s blog. The last post here was from March 19, 2009, but it had a link I could not ignore, so I followed it…
5. To Chuck Butcher’s blog, and his post about his son, Nicholas Andrew Butcher’s, suicide. Already moved by John Rogers’ blog, Chuck’s honest, tragic account brought me to tears.
6. I noticed Chuck’s “About Me” sidebar, in which he wrote: “If you think you’ve figured a niche for me, you’ve no clue.” At first, this struck me as ironic because, for the past 3 blogs, I’ve been writing about figuring people out, striving for understanding, walking in each other’s shoes, etc. And here Chuck is telling me I’ll never succeed. But then I realized that wasn’t his message – like most of us, he doesn’t want to be labeled, pigeon-holed, or limited – which is a lovely and fitting post-script to this Secret World series. Strive for understanding of your fellow human beings but, please, no niche-ing.
6.5 Bonus Discovery: Kevin Bacon took the silly parlour game with his name on it and created something worthwhile – a charitable initiative: SixDegrees.org – check it out!
Books don’t make me cry the way sad movies and humane society commercials can, but the well-written word has impressive staying power, forming snapshots in my brain that I will never be able to forget, for better or for worse.
There’s a suicide, for example, in Martin Amis’s novel Night Train, that will never get out of my head, no matter how much I yell at it to leave. Same thing with one of the holocaust stories in Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum.
But here’s one of the beautiful ones: a passage from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities that is so evocative and profound, it can stay in my head for as long as it wants. It’s what inspired my last post, and my next one (stay tuned).
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city at night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!”
“Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this….My friend is dead, my neighbor is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?”
(Image from PublicDomainPictures on Pixabay)
KIMBERLY SAVAGE 