You cannot

life, writing
Edited version of a painting of a dream: plugged volcanoes with a cresting wave beyond them, poised to fall.

Edited version of a painting of a dream.

End a life, end a world.

Replace the irreplaceable eye, the singular perspective, the experience of
loving joyful bored stalwart fearful brave angry mean kind hateful cool excited passionate
people breaths blinks touches hands grasping music-hearing whispering shouting standing
filled with skies words inmost dreams sensuous interactions and each other’s ideas and the patterns only we see,
replace all that I
with—nothing.

Negative space makes a space, filled by vacuum-abhorring nature with
the attention of more
Worlds.

worlds, not
units in Venn diagrams
tagged by our characteristics, falling into slots as
predictive analysis charts soulless identity probabilities,
pitting us against each other, pitting us against ourselves, because
we are many-layered and our tags are not reasonable, they are us,

each not a unit in a mob of units with concentric permission levels but

a world entire, interacting and seeing and regarding and thinking and reacting and caring,
the appetitive psychosomatic unity a universe entire,
bumping up against and overlapping the worlds around us.

You cannot choke a world
You cannot chase and shotgun a world
You cannot kneel on a world

Without rousing the world of worlds against you.

Save a life, save a world.

 


Originally posted on Medium.com on May 31, 2020. Black lives matter.

The Panther, Rilke

writing

One of my all-time favorites. This German-to-English translation was written by my beloved, Bart Odom:


The Panther

From going through the bars, his gaze has become so exhausted
that it holds nothing anymore.
To him it is as if there are a thousand bars,
and beyond the thousand bars, no world.

The easy swinging of that lithe, potent stride,
which turns in on itself in ever-smaller circles,
is like a dance of power around a center
in which a great will stands benumbed.

Only at times the curtain of the pupils
rises silently – then an image goes in,
goes through the tightened stillness of the limbs,
enters the heart and is no more.