shayna ♡ > Recent Status Updates

I had already risen in importance from my lunch with him ... Even the page-boy by the swing doors glanced at me with respect. My companion accepted it as natural, of course, he knew nothing of the ill-carved ham of yesterday. I found the change depressing, it made me despise myself. I remembered my father and his scorn of superficial snobbery.

(Cont)
… it will not matter. There would be no sense of strain.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, “never mind, come and sit down. We needn’t talk to each other unless we feel like it.”
We sat down, and he gave me the menu, leaving me to choose, and went on with his hors d’oeuvre as though nothing had happened.
His quality of detachment was peculiar to himself, and I knew that we might continue thus, without speaking, throughout the meal and … (cont next)

How young and inexperienced I must have seemed, and how I felt it, too. One was too sensitive, too raw, there were thorns and pin-pricks in so many words that in reality fell lightly on the air.

The scrubby vineyards and the crumbling stones become things of no account, for if I wish I can give rein to my imagination, and pick foxgloves and pale campions from a wet, streaking hedge.
Poor whims of fancy, tender and un-harsh. They are the enemy to bitterness and regret, and sweeten this exile we have brought upon ourselves.

I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire…. I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end. We have conquered ours, or so we believe.

These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved. They were memories that cannot hurt.

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it, and the lights in the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.
The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.

Page 40

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate —

What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?

…he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

At the top of the tree was what I wanted.
Fortunately I had read books:
I knew I was being tested.

perception of beauty, desire for knowledge.
And in the great minds, the two often configured as one.

This is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one’s ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

I’m my first dream the world appeared
the salt, the bitter, the forbidden, the sweet
In my second I descended

I was human, I couldn’t just see a thing
beast that I am

I had to touch, to contain it

I hid in the groves,

…

I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way

and like everyone I called that accomplishment
erotic freedom,
absurd as it seems

Under the full moon
Maria was folding the washing;
the stiff sheets became
dry white rectangles of moonlight.

Mother died last night,
Mother who never dies.

Winter was in the air,

had not my brother always been steering,
both himself and me, out of our bleak bedroom
into a night of rocks and lakes
punctuated with swords sticking up here and there—

The sky was black. The earth was white and cold.

Feeling has departed—it occurs to me
this would make a fine headstone.

My birthday (I remember) is fast approaching.
Perhaps the two great moments will collide
and I will see my selves meet, coming and going—
Of course, much of my original self
is already dead, so a ghost would be forced
to embrace a mutilation.

(From page 21)

Above our heads, the cherry blossoms had begun
to loosen in the night sky, or maybe the stars were drifting,
drifting and falling apart, and where they landed
new worlds would form.

Silence had entered me.
It was like the night, and my memories— they were like stars
in that they were fixed, though of course
if one could see as do the astronomers
one would see they are unending fires…

These were the moments I lived for.
I was, I felt, mysteriously lifted above the world
so that action was at last impossible
which made thought not only possible but limitless.

(Cont)

The night progressed. Fog
swirled over the lit bulbs.
I suppose that is where it was visible;
elsewhere, it was simply the way things were,
blurred where they had been sharp.

I shut my book.

The streetlights were coming on,
lining the sides of the river.
The offices were going dark.
At the river's edge,
fog encircled the lights;
one could not, after a while, see the lights
but a strange radiance suffused the fog,
its source a mystery.

(Cont next update)

so I assumed there would be, at some point,
a door with a glittering knob,
but when this would happen and where I had no idea.

My sincere apologies, she said.
I had mistaken you for one of my friends.
And she gestured toward the statues we sat among,
heroic men, self-sacrificing saintly women
holding granite babies to their breasts.
Not changeable, she said, like human beings.

I gave up on them, she said.
But I never lost my taste for circular voyages.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

Ah the capacious night, the night
so eager to accommodate strange perceptions. I felt that some important secret
was about to be entrusted to me, as a torch is passed
from one hand to another in a relay.

When I was young, she said, I liked walking the garden path at twilight
and if the path was long enough I would see the moon rise.
That was for me the great pleasure: not sex, not food, not worldly amusement.
I preferred the moon's rising, and sometimes I would hear,
at the same moment, the sublime notes of the final ensemble of The Marriage of Figaro. Where did the music come from?
I never knew.

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments…

I was content with my brooding.
I spent my days with the colored pencils
(I soon used up the darker colors)
though what I saw, as I told my aunt,
was less a factual account of the world
than a vision of its transformation
subsequent to passage through the void of myself.

Something, I said, like the world in spring.

Outside, night was falling. Was this
that lost night, star-covered, moonlight-spattered,
like some chemical preserving
everything immersed in it?