Mika > Recent Status Updates

“I did not refuse to join the Army, but outwited it by a particular species of ruthless cunning. I was - I say now - prepared to go to jail. The Japanese had already been interned. I was not going to fight for the people who had interned them, who had also destroyed the Indians, who were in the process of destroying everyone I loved: I was not going to defend my murderers.”

“I had to agree because it is always possible that if one man can be saved, a multitude can be saved. But, in fact, it seemed to me that Christopher's options and possibilities could change only when the actual framework changed: and the metamorphosis of the framework into which we had been born would almost certainly be so violent as to blow Christopher, and me, and all of us, away.”

“But Pete and Barbara loved me. I was very happy to know that. I was happy to know I knew it. For people had loved me, after all, when I had simply not dared to know it, and I had hurt them, and myself, very badly.”

Mind you, this was written in the 60s:
“‘Do you know Im bisexual?’
‘Yes. At least, I supposed it.’
‘It doesn't bother you?’
‘Why should it bother me, Leo? I'm not in your body. I can't live your life. I only want to share your life. Anyway - what difference would it make if I did mind? It wouldn't change anything. It would just make you not trust me - I'm glad you know you're bisexual.’”

They saw themselves as others had seen them. They had been formed by the images made of them by those who had had the deepest necessity to despise them. exactly like those who had first maligned them, they saw what their history had taught them to see. I did not know if one ever sees more than that.
If one ever does, it can only be because one has learned to read one's history and resolved to step out of the book.

Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
… one does many things, turns the key in the lock over and over again, hoping to be locked out.
… And yet - one would prefer, after all, not to be locked out. One would prefer, merely, that the key unlocked a less stunningly unusual door.

"They have already seen my life. They have seen my most shameful moments." The pained look in his eyes quickly faded as he gazed into Keema's. "Why would I deny them one of my most beautiful?"

But where the Eighth Emperor or His sons might greet such a realization in terror, to have lost such control, such dominion, there was no fear, no anger in these warriors' hearts, for as they looked at each other in the full moonshine of that night, they saw that they did not need the power of a god to understand how deeply they were wanted.

»and i asked him if he would dance with me.«

The two men held each other against the coming end.

»And we thought the movements together, and we expressed with our bodies that same thought. We were not ourselves anymore but each other, speaking through our bodies to a wounded and grieving land. And what we said was this:
The body holds the body.
The arms hold the spear.
And the spear cuts through water.«

No thought stands alone. You once thought of pressing your finger into Jadi's eye until it popped.
It was not a thought born of malice, it was one of curiosity, of strange play, gone as quickly as it had come; harmless but for the fact that you held no dominion over such thoughts; that it called into question your own control over yourself. And sometimes you wonder, even now, if maybe your mind has a mind of its own.

There were times in your life when you wished your mind could be read, or tuned to like some frequency on a radio. Times when you did not want to do the work of speaking your piece.

„But you are young. You stand on the borders of possibility, in the shadowland, in the realm of the dream, and you hear the voice saying come. As I did once. But I am old, I have made my choices, I have done what I must do. I stand in daylight facing my own death. And I know that there is only one power worth having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept. Not to have, but to give.“