I Know This World is Killing You



Dear Eugene,

November it is, still early, a time that I would always look back on, always with regret, by the time Christmas is over.  The longing and anticipation, I would say in my saying goodbye, I want them back.  More than I want back Christmas herself, that's how petty my love for her is.

So here you are, Alex, right in the thick of longing and anticipation, high hopes and impatience, How do you feel?  What would you choose to do differently this year to finally regret not as deeply?

Well, it's a rainy November morning: what's one to do about and with that?  I need faith to see good creation out of bad material.  And yes, I have long given up doing away with regret; the irony is if I ever can it's because I've never cared for her and would see no opportunity to care for her any better, to prophesy my missing her and fulfill precisely that.

Christmas, my Alison,

Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking
When I hear the silly things that you say.
I think somebody better put out the big light,
'Cause I can't stand to see you this way.

 Alison, I know this world is killing you.
Oh, Alison, my aim is true.
My aim is true.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. KateNovember 10, 2018 at 10:21 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    "How do you feel? What would you choose to do differently this year to finally regret not as deeply?… I know this world is killing you.”

    A November night it is, still young, a time I would look back on the aging of 24 hours. Around the clock in full circle my path has encircled buildings trees bodies, crossing the paths of three women I barely know. They differ in voice and form but echo in oneness, longing and anticipating Christmas.

    The first one came to my office, muttered regret and dropped her gaze to the floor, her rhythm of duty and desire dissonant. Words recoiled from emotions to bear the loss of things of time with family remote. Petty misses seemed stickiest to dismiss - laundry toast slippers at home 200 miles north. And there her baby with Mom. Too much work here now to return.

    Then another woman brushed by me in the lounge with donuts. Not hers. She longed for sweeter indulgence in freedom. Fourteen pounds lost in a week and more weight to unload and regain more of herself in this vanishing year, her aim true and fixed. I am going to lose it all, her words ringing in something deeper to replace hollowness.

    She was the last I met with a sign on her window ledge yesterday: Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute way. Our dialogue coasted within the absolute practicality of nearly an hour about new projects, our anticipation entwined seamlessly with the love of structure and timeline. Then something cracked vaguely in the shape of her question for me. Do you meditate to lose stress, gain control of life in sparks? There would be a full-week resort for meditation, an oceanic arc to bypass in flight and gather on foreign land in oneness to defend from the world’s killing.

    So here you are, Kate, right in the thick of mulling over these encounters intimately dazzling and transient like tinsels and ornaments. What’s one to do about and with that?

    Well, a new book has just arrived in my mail. I can’t resist turning its pages. Rowan Williams’ Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons. "Each of us has a presence or a meaning in someone else’s existence. We live in another’s life.”

    Christmas, she is now living among us in the clockwork of 45 days to come. In my iTunes I have one Christmas song by George Michael about a lost gift, nothing more to care for her in the cadence of carols.

    Let me do it differently this time “‘cause I can’t stand to see you [or me] this way… my aim is true.”

    Yours, Kate

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading