Travel? One need only to exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from Paris to Mumbai. The people are the same and always different, just like scenery. If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme poverty of imagination justifies having to travel to feel. So why travel? In Madrid, Seoul,The Maldives, Nairobi, or the South Pole, where would I be but in myself, and my particular type of sensations? Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.
One of my better verbal moments in my unbearable interiorizing :
From the lap of the sleeping grandmother falls the orange thread of the soul. The stealthy striped cat peers at the abandoned embroidery in her hands. He gnaws at it. He passes it between his paws. Orange shreds rest on the worn carpet. The cat rolls it under her chair out of sight. His life is a ball of yarn that he tangled up. It would make sense if it were rolled up tight and impenetrable. It would make sense unrolled and completely stretched out. Such as it is, life is a problem without shape, a confusion of yarn leading nowhere.
Parking lot
Where the curb was smoothed and sloped
Contours redefined by erosion
As a manmade barrier crumbles
Contorted mineral warmed by presence
Shadow beside
Adjusted naturally
Shadow on the gravel
Particles of artificial solidarity
I'm feeling very long winded this evening.
Literature- which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality-seems to some the end towards which all human effort would have to strive. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of imagination, will have colors with a durability not found in cellular life. What moves lives. What is said endures. There's nothing in life that's less real for having been well described. Small minded critics point out that a specific poem, with its cadences, in the end says only that it is a lovely day. But to say it's a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It's up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinking new flowers, new stars, and brighter colors over the field and skies of the fleeting outer world. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.
You turn typical wisdom on its head, which in my opinion is almost always justified. I have to admit though, I've often thought that words are a poor medium for life's photographic artists. But I do agree with you. Everyday beauty is lost forever through the laziness, ambivalence, and ineptitude of life's scribes (us). Sadly, guilt was my first reaction to your post.
ReplyDeleteOh, and its worth mentioning that you have strong comrades backing your ideas. Shakespeare's fifty-fifth sonnet comes to mind.