the skylight of rock

"There's also a story that claims the city wasn't really destroyed at all. Instead, through a charm known only to the King, the city and its inhabitants were whisked away and replaced by phantoms of themselves, and it was only these phantoms that were burnt and slaughtered. The real city was shrunk very small and placed in a cave beneath the great heap of stones. Everything that was once there is there still, including the palaces and the gardens filled with trees and flowers; including the people, no bigger than ants, but going about their lives as before -- wearing their tiny clothes, giving their tiny banquets, telling their tiny stories, singing their tiny songs.

The King knows what's happened and it gives him nightmares, but the rest of them don't know. They don't know they've become so small. They don't know they're supposed to be dead. They don't even know they've been saved. To them the ceiling of rock looks like a sky: light comes in through a pinhole between the stones, and they think it's the sun."


- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

a series of sea pics # 2

pic of paris # 1

line of lyrics # 6

But I love
the bones of you.
That I will

never escape.


And it's you
and it's

May

And we're sleeping
through the day


And I'm
five years ago

and three thousand
miles away


And I

can't move my arm
for fear

that you will wake


And I'm five years
ago
and three thousand
miles

away.



(Elbow - The Bones of You)

nice cd cover # 19

Johan Johansson - And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees

the air had a bite

"I was beyond the traffic noise, the intermittent stir of factories across the river. So at least in this they'd been correct, placing the graveyard here, a silence that had stood its ground. The air had a bite. I breathed deeply, remained in one spot, waiting to feel the peace that is supposed to descend upon the dead, waiting to see the light that hangs above the fields of the landscapist's lament.

I stood there, listening. The wind blew snow from the branches. Snow blew out of the woods in eddies and sweeping gusts. I raised my collar, put my gloves back on. When the air was still again, I walked among the stones, trying to read the names and dates, adjusting the flags to make them swing free. Then I stood and listened.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."


- Don Delillo, White Noise

an end, once more. a start, even more.

happiness # 61:

no matter what has happened, no matter what happens -- i'm still here. i'm always here. it's the one thing i can be sure of - to be here, to be now - and all else fades into oblivion. no, forget that. all else comes into existence, in the best way possible.

sadness # 9:

no matter what has happened, no matter what happens -- i'll always still be here. even though i sometimes want to be nowhere. (but that is just a responsability i have to take up.)

song of the day:

Goldfrapp - Clowns

nice words # 16:

hymn

nice cd cover # 18:

Pink Floyd - Meddle

nice words # 15

poplar

nothingness; infinity

"He is twenty-eight years old, and to the best of his knowledge he has no ambitions. No burning ambitions, in any case, no clear idea of what building a plausible future might entail for him. He knows that he will not stay in Florida much longer, that the moment is coming when he will feel the need to move on again, but until that need ripens into a necessity to act, he is content to remain in the present and not look ahead. If he has accomplished anything in the seven and a half years since he quit college and struck out on his own, it is this ability to live in the present, to confine himself to the here and now, and although it might not be the most laudable accomplishment one can think of, it has required considerable discipline and self-control for him to achieve it. To have no plans, which is to say, to have no longings or hopes, to be satisfied with your lot, to accept what the world doles out to you from one sunrise to the next--in order to live like that you must want very little, as little as humanly possible."


- Paul Auster, Sunset Park

learning to fly (lesson five)

"As I lay on the Tarmac, my leg twisted at a horribly inappropriate angle, I looked up at the sky and waited for the ambulance to collect me. Above was a thick, overcast Stratus just like the one today: low, grey, oppressive...

Not long after, my friend's father, Neville Hodgkinson, told me something that seemed pertinent. He practises the eastern religion of Raja Yoga, as taught by the Brahama Kumaris, an organisation established in Hyderabad in 1937. Neville told me that clouds have a symbolic role for some yogis: they stand for the times when the yogis lose track of their spiritual journey. They symbolise the distractions that come between the yogis and the 'Supreme Light' of God.

He didn't say what these distractions were, but given that the Brahama Kumari yogis are teetotal vegetarians who avoid garlic (which they consider inflames the carnal passions) and practise a strict vow of celibacy, a few possibilities came to mind. Anyway, these distractions occasionally become so profound and sustained that the yogis lose track of their spiritual path altogether. They call it a 'storm of Maya'. It is one in which illusory ways of thinking and feeling block out the Supreme Light altogether. At times like these, he said, the yogis remind themselves that, beyond the clouds, the Sun never stops shining.

This brought to mind the revelation I had in an aeroplane as a child: that for the pilot it was, without exception, always a sunny day at work. Not only that, but the view from his office window was one of constantly varied and beautiful cloudscapes. So what about the rest of us, stuck down here, terrestial in our jobs and distracted in our spiritual paths? On a bleak, grey February morning, it can sometimes be hard not to yearn for the limpidity of direct sunlight."


- Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter's Guide