Heart's fire

There're certain things you can't bring to admit to yourself, certain memories that are ageless and changeless, locked away like a prisoner within a circle of heart's fire. These are the things that have sculpted you, formed you into the person you are; you see it in your hands, your eyes, the shape of the words that come from your lips. These are the things that dance like fingertips across your visions of the present: the twitch of recognition, of recognizance, of recollection that flickers across your face like the shadow of an osprey, like the shiver of water as memory blossoms slowly upon the pool of your consciousness.

The answer of the hills

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.
_________________
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

But somehow I think all that doesn't quite hold true these days; one man's pain is all too often another man's pleasure, and this is the schadenfreude that is woven into the texture of all relationships. It is the double entendre that echoes behind all men's laughter, like a silent chuckle hidden into the darkness behind one's palm.

Life as we know it

Some evenings when the sky turns golden and the clouds begin to lift, you can feel a strange sense of uncertainty as the day peels away and the sky is revealed to be a starry, cosmic emptiness, and you can feel the way the bits of the world are clinging together for dear life, for a sense of validation under the vaulted heavens. You can feel the way stuff swirls around in the air, undetermined, like the dust in the cosmos that isn't yet a comet or a planet or a star, and you begin to think about the way people lean on each other like a vast perfect circle of dominoes, each bearing the weight of the whole human world, a burden of entirety and of infinity. You think about how we place our woes on each other's backs and watch the generations topple with a rattle, and how anguish has been perfectly balanced in a world where we accept one another's grief so they may suffer our own. For in an unblemished world we would have no need for companionship, nor to lift each other from the dirt; life would not be as we know it.

Choosing directions

Sometimes you sit back with a heart full of expectation and you wait, and life with all its colour and sound and bright lights whizzes by and surrounds you with a million thrilling opportunities and glorious promises, and you simply sit back in the knowledge that when the time comes, the right current will release you from your moorings and sweep you into an ocean where you can part the waters and walk on the waves, where every footfall wells up with a little shimmering pool of your destiny. And on that ocean there will be nothing on the horizon but clouds shaped in every form of your fancy.

Sometimes the current doesn't come and you continue waiting for the waves even as the sky grows dark, feeling the tug of the water on your hands, on your feet, refusing to yield to what is not irresistible and inexorable. Sometimes we forget that we must immerse ourselves in the water and choose a direction in the dimensionless deep before the current can find a hold, before life will take an interest.

Possibilities

It's quite possible, actually, that we don't understand each other at all, that the sentences we hurl like javelins at each other miss their mark completely and come apart in a flurry of mistimed, misused words. It's possible also that the conversations were built on misunderstanding and so began to fall apart, like all formations without foundations, an unfinished work erected on dangerous ground. But times have changed and possibly I have changed. I am no longer willing to pull in one direction and trust that you will pull in the other, to keep whatever has been built in balance. It is possible that planting one's feet firmly, that standing one's ground, that being down-to-earth have become cliches. It is possible to step away, to walk off and let the towers lose their balance and crash mightily to pieces, because the persistence of gravity will be the only force left when I let go.

What a day

Sometimes life just conspires in little ways to make you ridiculously happy, a kind of happiness that comes not with the calm satisfaction at what life gives you, but the sort of delirium when life gives you exactly what you want.

Knowledge

To have knowledge is to discover, to discern what was previously unperceived, and perhaps the parts of the word itself carry a warning about the nature of such a realisation – that the moment one comes into knowledge of something, one crosses a line, one steps over an edge into an unfamiliar darkness the dimensions of which only slowly become apparent, a "ledge" beyond which gravity loses its certainty and after which we may be free to fall.

To have knowledge, then, is to subject oneself to considerable danger, to the whim of fact that may come either as a dawn of realisation or a discovery that plunges one into an abyss. This is because hope lies in the indeterminate, the ambiguous and the unknown. It is curiosity that places us at the rim of the precipice, yet ironically it is also hope that makes us take the step into space.

To want to have knowledge is therefore a leap of faith. We stand at the threshold with our hearts wildly beating, our breath faltering, our souls rigid as the firmness of faith fights our fear of falling, and the struggle might lead to a standstill if it were not for a lingering doubt in all things human. We fall forward finally with the weight of a question mark on our backs.

Falling, is therefore about the loss of innocence, and if we fall what rushes toward us with the violence of reality is then the hugeness of consequence, the inevitability of The End because ignorance is no longer a defence and the one invisible force we can believe in turns out to be gravity. It is about Adam and Eve, but it is also about Abraham and Isaac.

Knowledge, then, is as much about knowing the lines we are about to cross as it is about knowing the truth. To have knowledge is also to know the ledge we cannot step over: the dreams we should have never have lived in, the memories we should never have lived out, the words we should have left unshared. We will fall hard and fast when we step unknowingly over that ledge, if we do not have the faith to walk on air.