Coincidence

No Kidding.  

Last night I blogged/journaled about my dad's message to me, my "apparition" of him, my more careful driving as a result of the message to "watch my back" and my further looking for a possible metaphor in the incident/delirious episode...

Today I got rear-ended by two teenaged boys talking on a cell phone while pulling out of Wa-Wa. 

I love my life.  I really do.  

Odd Journey

It wasn't a dream: my father in the back seat of the car -- a sense as I turned and he said I should watch my back. 

He was the color of late January rain mixed with early February snow, ghostly, the color of bathtub steam. A blirp on my screen.  A non-happening, a blur in my vision coupled with a mind quick to figure -- and mine so full of him he couldn't not be the first explanation my mind met. I wanted him so to be there instead of dead.    

But "Watch my back?"  Where in my head did those words climb up out from?  "Watch my back?" was never my father's chant except maybe once when he taught me how to drive.  

So now I'm waiting.  I tell myself I don't believe in messages from the dead.  I tell myself that watching my back is going to solve something when I least expect it but I'm pretty sure I don't know how to watch my back.  I've been paying special attention to my driving, though, that's for sure.  

And I'm looking for the metaphor.  

Wish I'd been there.

Wish I'd been there: http://www.maniacworld.com/frozen-in-grand-central-station.html

Negative Capability

A friend's blog post made me think of Keats and his "Negative Capability" quote.


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Wikipedia reports:

"Negative capability is a theory of the poet John Keats, expressed in his letter to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, 21 December 1817.

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats was a Romantic and believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence."
--Wikipedia
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It IS scary to feel what doesn't bring us joy. What if we don't come back from that place? We wonder, and so yes, we try to avoid feeling and live in fear of sadness. But I do truly believe that it is impossible. I think we feel more than we even know. And that we need ALL that we feel, to some degree, the way everything else in the universe needs what it needs to survive and is equipped. We are all equipped. That we are also all imperfectly equipped makes us never really know when we'll slip. I think we just have to accept both failure and success knowing there is no rest between the two, that they/we are constantly in Keat's state of Negative capability (uncertainties, mysteries, doubts) because even though the clock appears to pause for us to read it, time doesn't stop.

It is, after all, Flu Season

Vertigo


Vertigo turns you inside out like
an inwardly curled flower falling back
into the seed it was but even the seed
in wind has support, a boundary, is
bound by. You -- without a spine
because your head mis-tells it's so - it's so
like walls falling in but without any ground
to fall down to so the falling doesn't end.
To cope with vertigo you become
tiny stone and you hope the wind doesn't blow.

Written/Spoken Word

Written/Spoken Word


Writing the word down, or speaking it, it becomes enormous. Suddenly you can see, on the page, all its connotations, and you feel your own assumptions about whatever that word is, or the group of words you've written. And you begin to question your assumptions, and then the word. You begin to question the world that invented the word, the universe in which the word exists. You want it to exist in a way that you designate. It has to be exact. It has to translate into the meaning you intend. It's a sickness, this. Absorbs you, or tries. But it is not the kind of sickness that kills you. Not one that seeps from your pores and dampens your sheets and head with its fever. No, you are soaked in this sickness like Rilke was soaked in his sickness. Like Poe. Dickinson. Rich. You breathe under the water that writing is. You do not drown, you swim through. You breathe better under writing. You breathe deep and enormous and you expand.