Some Nobody


Dear Eugene,

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain

I often ask God, Why would you give such wise words to someone as stingy with love and frequently downright mean-spirited as Bob Dylan?  I sing these lines at least once a day and that's only counting my being conscious of singing them.  Bless this sonuvabitch.

Of course everybody feels pain.  So it is a simple irony, isn't it?  But wait a minute: How do you know?

You say you feel pain in you and I can accept that, but to say I am feeling pain and you know it too is a bit of a stretch.  I often don't even have words to describe how I feel; so who are you to say you know my feeling, give it the same name you have given yours and assume they are siblings, comrades, lovers?

It's more than a loss in translation. It's a lack of common language, speechless, wordless, loneliness.  Like standing inside the rain...what else does a person need to say, what more can be added to...standing inside the rain?

Yours, Alex

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Every Dog

Image
Dear Eugene, Have you seen a three-leg dog?  I have seen a couple, in real life, six legs I looked at, all common. Dogs are common.  Missing a leg draws a deeper common doggishness out of them.  Like an aging man sitting at the edge of his sick bed, an a-dime-a-dozen sight.  Seen it once, seen it all.  All gray hair is gray and finally speaks of death. The bouncing with three legs looks ridiculous.  Sumi just scraped her right front paw again, the second time in a month or so, now bouncing around the same ridiculous way as before.  Two days ago she was the crazy teenager pulling me down the hill (never up, that would be my service to her); now there is no energy gained or lost in our genteel tug-of-war.  The leash languished in a lethargic balance of power, diplomacy exhausted between the willing and the disabled. Seems like I've always been Looking for some other place To get it together Where with a few of my friends I could giv...
Keep reading

The Order of the Soul

Image
Dear Eugene, Yesterday I was talking to my friends about Trump, and this is what I said: "Trump is like a mirror, or magnifying glass. He didn't make people turn into this or that. He simply helps to reflect, magnify what is already there. So what was already there (or not there) in this 'Evangelical Christianity' (that helped to put him there)? Do we find trace of such things (or absence of others) in our own particular brand of Christianity?" I shall begin to answer my own questions. Trump shouldn't surprise us. A fertile soil is cultivated to give growth to what we see today, and let me say my hands were in the soil too. Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world Has crossed the threshold And it has overturned The order of the soul A certain Canadian prophet told us a while back already. We don't have to go far; we don't even ha...
Keep reading

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua...
Keep reading