Will conversion
be suborned by ambition?
God, give me fame!
Guide them
to you
to me,
Let them love me
in your name.
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Home > Monthly Archives: November 2015
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The phone says I took this photo in Cleveland Park. Here is Henry behind the Washington Ballet while we wait for his sister Claire. He asked to go outside. Later, I found him coiled in a seat staring worriedly at something. I don’t know what he was looking at. I’ve learned not to spoil these things with questions.
Cropped to square and filtered with ‘Instant’ on iPhone.
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contiguous (adj.) : took us one hundred million years to stitch these shorelines : another ten to reach the sky
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Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923
Almustafa, the Prophet, dispensed his wisdom to the people of the city of Orphalese after twelve years among them. Looking back at this book as a story, not a work of philosophy or theology, I wonder what he might have said had Almustafa not been a wanderer, a recluse, an outsider with the luxury of looking in. What would he have felt about these people had he been born among and had grown up on their streets? What if he had loved their daughters and had been spurned by them? What if he had felt the spit and fists of their sons? Or had toiled for the vain and small-minded merchants, had been the object of gossip, suspicion and disregard? What would Almustafa had said to them if he did not have the luxury of leaving? Like this, all things seem clearer and more manageable at a distance. It is so much easier to love the townsfolk as you are bidding them goodbye.
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We hated every day of our Golden Age. Just shat the cage. And blamed the helpless, the homeless for our rage.
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It’s hard to stop in the middle of the street and look up at the lights without feeling a little stupid. Try it.
Taken in the middle of Herrengasse, Vienna on November 19, 2015 at 10:03 pm CET. Cropped and edited with iPhoto.
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Who said the ambition’s gone? He’s trying to write psalms! Three white leopards beneath a tree. Lady of silence; lady of song.
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“From time to time, I’ve tried to be exhaustive, to follow the details of experience where they lead. … But it’s all too much to describe without launching into a scourge of debilitating minutia, clogging volumes without directions. So I prune this thicket into ‘stories,’ even the most sophisticated of which are, in the end, childish simplifications. We are not built to perceive, but to ignore, to filter, simplify and neglect. Try as I might to keep myself ‘open’ to the world—to see all of what is around me—I can’t even get from my bed to the bathroom without neglecting a universe of joy and horror and sorrow, life, death, pain and pleasure, triumph and failure—and that is just in my own hum-drum town. What must it have been like for Jesus to feel all this? To lack the luxury, really, of limitations?”
Jake Wilson Whitlow, 1999
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