Turn up the volume while you're reading -- or not:
I took a break from the life and stood on the rooftop of our outdoor mall this evening and looked out on the city, the suburbs glimmering, the Hollywood hills shrouded in haze, the hot day dying. I thought about pulling Sophie, naked, out of the tub the other night while she seized, her beautiful body draped in my arms when it was over, my own strength, quivering, on the edge of the porcelain. That porcelain tub, so different from the one I sat in, naked, long ago, words typed on paper creased and folded into transparency, and we both vanished for a moment from each others sights which we thought took so long yet back again we were but this time we were hunched in the porcelain tub in the complete darkness where we had nurtured the hunger until it was flicked on light and again we vanished (I fold it back, just so, square by square). What's it all for? Oliver asked, his eyes filled. What is the meaning? Later, when I cried into the phone to a friend, I wondered how I could continue to do these things, the lunches, the pedicures, the combing down of cow-licks, the reading of another novel, the changing the hose from jet to shower and sprinkling the flowers in their parched pots. I should be dressed in black, like those old women in Zorba the Greek, I cried. I should be screaming in the streets, my hair on end, my hands wringing in step with my wails.
Am I not a man? Of course I've been married!
Wife, house, kids, everything ...
The full catastrophe!
Anthony Quinn as Zorba the Greek
What's it all for? The existential question to which there is no answer and so we make them up, answers, and some people do believe in them but I am not so sure. I think it's all just because it is.
ReplyDeleteThe whole catastrophe.
I wish I knew, Oliver. I was wondering this morning how it's possible to cope when things look the same stretching out into the future without much change. I think that holding the line is the only way to do it until something shifts. Today I will hold all of us in love and light and trust that some insight will show itself.
ReplyDeleteLove.
Many times I've marveled that we do anything OTHER than grieve, rending our black garments, screaming in the streets. I have no idea what it's all for, still we keep showing up. This morning I'm happy there is red - not just mourning black - and that Zorba's music tells us we must dance. It has never been anything but one moment at a time. xo
ReplyDeleteI don't know anything but I love this. Keep asking. I don't think we'll ever get an answer though.
ReplyDeletei don't know what it is for. but it is for something. i am sure of it.
ReplyDeleteYour posts move me. All of them.
ReplyDeleteI don't know. But I try to remember the cycles. Everything passes. Everything returns.
ReplyDeleteAmen, sister.
ReplyDeletethe hot day dying. the cold white tub. the whole catastrophe. i'm brokenhearted. and yet, there are those yellow leaves, snow on your sidewalk. friends across the continent and on computer screens all around, who love you. who need your words. your beautiful words.
ReplyDelete