Blue Drop

"Why can't you ever let anything just go?" Cora cried.  "Just let it go."

"You think I like remembering everything?" said Tom.  "There's this deep well--dark, dark blue with no edges that I can see--and I just keep dropping deeper and deeper."

"What are you talking about now?  Can't you just finish an argument, for once?"

"Finish it?  There's never an end, don't you get that?  That's what hollow, what empty, means.  It still hurts.  You blink, and I can roll out this anger at what happened before, at what you did or didn't do, at what I did and didn't do, like it happened yesterday.  And it's been years.  You know all that.  Of course, I still get mad.  Getting mad hurts less than being sad.  Sad's like this grip that squeezes and squeezes and never lets up.  The only way to breathe is to roar."

"Roar, roar, roar!  The past--let it go!  You need some help."

"Why do you think I'm still talking?  What do you think I'm doing here?  Throw me a goddamn rope."

"No!  No, you . . . coward!  Swim for it.  Swim out of your goddamn imaginary blue hole yourself!  Or drown.  Drown, drown, drown, drown."

Draft in motion, from "The Devil's Acre."

Watershot

Cloudy day from a fathom or so below.

Identikit

Water, salt;
paper, bound;
clay, wet;
forest, kelp;
beach, jade;
whiskey, Irish;
friends, true.
--April 9, 2008


I just rediscovered this note on a bulletin board in my office. Old notes can pull you into the labyrinth of the past, much like anything -- perhaps everything -- else. (Amongst a myriad of landmarks and turnings, Keith was still alive, for example.) I do have "Identikit" posted in the column to the right, but I realized that this doggerel of self-description lacked a specific place in the body of the blog.

As Keats said in a fragmentary identikit of his own, "See here it is -- I hold it towards you."

Passages: True or False?

1. "All we want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life." Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

2. "To judge prematurely is often to cripple. To refrain from judging is sometimes to impoverish." M.R. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person

3. "If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't even believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living." Katherine Paterson, quoted in Terri Windling's The Wood Wife

True or false?

I hold my past dear, though I understand the psychological burden quite well.

I wonder if shifting "history" for "past" wouldn't be possibly medicable and not mere shuffling.

(In a particular context, Lord Byron used "immedicable" to describe the "world", and I've always found that a short step to despair, as he meant it.)

I'm not sure my life would make much sense
without the past and its explanations, without that vortex
to keep me moving forward,
even if such movement includes a broad reach or a brutal jibe.

I offer the first quotation in part to prompt thoughts
about how much any part of the past
matters to you, to your sense of self.

What did O'Neill say? "The past is the present, isn't it?
 It's the future too."

True or false?