Divorce

I take some words for granted. Divorce is more than splitting rings. Although it is mostly used for ending marriages, Dictionary.com says it can be: total separation; disunion: a divorce between thought and action.  Could they serve up divorce papers between mind and body? The mind would always be too smart to sign, though; mind needs body to live. Mental calculations need smooth running blood and a full stomach. But the body needs a mind that will not interfere will that delicate internal machinery. My body has been breathing before my mind knew what would happen if it didn't. 

But mind and body are not in harmony. Every day is a constant count of calories and food intake, an obsessive need of the mind to limit the body to an equation that adds up to 1200. Recounting, recounting, running over everything all day. Going to sleep empty. Forcing the body to quiet itself when it is hungry but the 1200 has already been reached. 

But divorce is not quiet. It is forceful. It calls up images of broken hearts and torn photographs, belongings loaded up into two separate trucks. Divorce is not casual; it is ordered and made of hard lines, x’s, and inked signatures. If only all divorces could be signed, slipped in envelopes, and shipped away. I wish I could divorce myself from the numbers in my head, the constant counting. Serve up a paper, point me to the x and I will set myself down in ink forever if it will give me total separation from this number-rut in my head. How many hours is the counting running in the background, going back and forth between all the calories I’ve eaten in a day, making sure I am still on track for my daily equation? This companion is tiresome. I don’t want to share a house with it anymore. I want to take my body to court and have a judge give the numbers a restraining order. I can’t do it myself. And that is something about divorce, too. Divorce is not something you can do for yourself; you need an outside force. You need someone else to help you cut away what’s weighing you down. 

Ryoshu

Sometimes I’m startled to find myself where I am. Happy, sitting on the grass with ____’s head in my lap, I suddenly thought, How did this happen? I thought of how disoriented the past-I would be if I pulled the her from two months ago and set her in my place. She couldn't exist here. You don’t notice the little changes, the way decisions link with each other, replace the old and build until you are a structure unlike what you were before. We shed ghosts like exoskeletons everywhere.

The little changes don't fall into place perfectly. They can't, as the idea of a perfectly formed person is ridiculous. We are too fluid for something like that. But those defining moments, when you are suddenly aware of what you are now thanks to those accumulated little changes, feel like this:

As if everything has fallen in some sort of form, even though you couldn't connect it as it was happening. At that moment of beauty, it seems a shame to break that form. You want to cling to that clarity, that feeling that everything is as it should be right now. You delude yourself into thinking that this form is best; there is no other way you can be arranged. Why should things have to change?

But all around, the trees are shedding their leaves. Part of Japanese aesthetic beauty lies in the impermanence of things, which is why autumn is the loveliest season. The changing leaves and their flash of brief color before winter is a reminder of the perishable nature of everything. The beauty of autumn wouldn’t be the same if leaves were that color all the time; that beauty is inextricably connected to its brevity. I am overwhelmed with this idea as I play with ____’s hair.

Later, while researching for a paper, I read about the Japanese concept of ryoshu. It’s one of those moments when a piece of writing illuminates an idea you're trying to come to terms with, and I can think of no better way to articulate the shadowed stirrings at the back of my mind.

“Ryoshu…is  an  intense  emotional realization  that you  have  found  a  home  of  your soul.  The  purity  and  intensity  at  the  moment  of this  discovery colors  the  whole  experience  with a  sense  of  sorrow.  Yet  this  sorrow  differs  from  a  sheer feeling  of depression  or  loss.  Rather  it  is  warmness  rising in  your  heart  when  you feel  you  have  discovered  a  genuine  sign  of  life  in  nature and  human  beings.”



--Tsukimura, Reiko and Kawabata Yasunari. “A Thematic Study of the Works of Kawabata Yasunari.” The Journal-Newsletter of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 5.2 (1968): 22-31. Print.

Bravery

I'm all about the abstracts lately. About a week ago, _______ and I talked about bravery. What does it mean to be brave? Is it something you should even be proud of? To _______, bravery is doing what is right even if it is the more difficult choice. I am more selfish. To me, a brave person is someone who commits to a decision enough that she never looks back with regret. Bravery is more than deliberating between thought-out choices, though; sometimes it is the courage to go limp and let the current take you where it will. Admitting that you can't control or know everything; you can only live with what you have now. My bravery belongs to me, not others.

peace

I'm thinking about peace.

Peace as a sound we have decided to designate for a silence, for an absence of war in countries and bodies. That quiet homonym for piece. And then I think about all the peace we piece ourselves together with, all those spaces of quiet we stitch together to try to create something out of nothing. It's more of an absence than a state of being, really.

Peace isn't active. You can't search for peace anymore than you can create silence. It's not like water, something transparent sloshing in your body and on your taste buds, something that's supposed to be tasteless but always has a tangible flavor nonetheless. Something like peace isn't part of a solid, restless body like mine, with all its cells fighting and dying every second. My body is painted in red tones. Close my eyes in the quiet, in the dark, and I'll still see red on the backs of my eyelids.

Dali painted burning giraffes as a symbol for war. I find reality in him. I don't think you can ever really find peace; you can only outrun war. And you can run in empty spaces until that fire creeps up the back of your legs, thundering up the length of your spine, distorting everything in its heat.

I think Lao Tsu understood:

"Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there."




Peace is shaping ourselves to hold an emptiness. 

transcription (blackout poem)

the steps of music are different 
from our own well-tempered octaves.


transcriptions into strictly set-off 
lines and spaces
distort the character of music 
and matter, both.


all our efforts to script existence
cannot convey what we want
and need to know;
we are not interested in intervals, but rather in distances.


the problem: transforming into a system of cents,
our clanking ankles weighed down,
drowning out that tonic hum,
those wholetones whistling through our bones
in quiet moments.


somewhere there is a distance found 
without walking--
a red closing of eyelid skies,
a harbor laced with vessels,
shipping cells like notes to the heart. 

Work

_______ believes in the knives he sells, which makes it easier to work for him. But easier does not imply ease, and this job relies on the poisonous scripts I've been working to run away from for months. 

Sacred

My father and I drove down to Lexington to see my sister graduate. We were on the road by 5 a.m. The two-and-a-half drive didn't affect me until we turned onto New Circle, and I directed him to my sister's house, reciting those turns, that liturgy I'd learned by heart last summer. His unfamiliar tires rolled past the path on which I used to run every morning. It was new to him, but I could remember my skin burning with the sweat I shed like poison, the sun-bright air I took into my lungs, swallowing fire with every step like the xiezhi as I listened to Florence and the Machine ('I must become a lion-hearted girl'). Now, shyly stepping back into this place as if I'd never left, it seemed that I was traveling through time like the xiezhi, as well. But the simile ends there. I cannot prevent violent change, not when I run to it with an instinctive need like hunger.

We stepped into my sister's house. It had never been mine, but now that they were selling it, it was even less so. I was a stranger. I didn't belong to the ghost of the girl who lived here. That I and I were parallel.

We drove past the bookstore where I used to work, with its seafoam-green, pointed dome rising out of Lexington Green like a basilica. I have now traveled to St. Peter's in Vatican City and San Marco's in Venice; the sight of that seafoam-green dome filled me with more spirituality than either of those breathtakingly beautiful places; it reminded me of all the places that had filled the space between me and last summer. I could never explain how important that time was, just as I could never tell you how I exited my mother's womb; I can only ever know and feel it afterward, can only then explain to you how I exist.

My holy ground is not the same as yours. Sacredness is more than humble, bloodless faces carved from marble, dappled with red, yellow, and violet light from stained glass. Birth is quieter than white, more fluid than water.


Xiezhi