CXXXIV - just for once i'd like to see it

this is a passage that is for me, special. i leave you to make of it what you wish.

Jorge Luis Borges, Inferno, I, 32

From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal's rude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.

...

i had a glorious weekend. it was a childhood weekend, a golden age weekend, and also a here-and-there kind of weekend. i was truly happy. does it matter what i did? no, absolutely not. einmal ist keinmal. i was happy then, and that is all. the future may portend happy weekends for me, or it may not; the present tells me that one happy weekend is over; the past holds nothing more for me. this is sufficient. if i have given my all, and if i have been part of a moment, then i am glad. for to be in this moment, this now, one must, perhaps, with deliberate delicacy, reject nostalgic evocations. it is a special balance, that, between the (gritty, ruddy, forcible) present and the (tender, wistful, illusive) past.

it is true that i have followed my own paths in things of love. it is possible that i may have been with somebody earlier (which is not to imply an existing prospective interest) if i had not been so single-minded. it is possible, of course. but love is, for me, nothing like a game, nothing like something i try my hand at. what it is, i think, more or less, it is a matter of destiny. i say this without carelessness, without carelessness absolutely. you must forgive me for not elaborating; there would be much to say (the same-old loves lost and won), and not much value in the retelling. so i say, i would like to be master of my own destiny. now, by that phrase i do not mean a lot of things, for example, i do not mean that destiny has no power over me. contrari-wise (to borrow a term i have seen in Alice in Wonderland), it means merely that i am certainly going to struggle with it, it means merely that i shall refuse to avoid this difficulty.

but my rejoinder, of course, is the titular phrase of this entry, viz, just for once, i'd like to see it. yet, that would be, i think, not treating my philosophise-applications fairly.

CXXXIII - always be reconciled

song of the week: joe bonamassa, driving toward the daylight
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTG-bCMG05E

know this, the time for reflecting is not yet ended.

People commended unto Zarathustra a wise man, as one who could discourse well about sleep and virtue: greatly was he honoured and rewarded for it, and all the youths sat before his chair. To him went Zarathustra, and sat among the youths before his chair. And thus spake the wise man:

Respect and modesty in presence of sleep! That is the first thing! And to go out of the way of all who sleep badly and keep awake at night!

Modest is even the thief in presence of sleep: he always stealeth softly through the night. Immodest, however, is the night-watchman; immodestly he carrieth his horn.
No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.
Ten times a day must thou overcome thyself: that causeth wholesome weariness, and is poppy to the soul.
Ten times must thou reconcile again with thyself; for overcoming is bitterness, and badly sleep the unreconciled.
Ten truths must thou find during the day; otherwise wilt thou seek truth during the night, and thy soul will have been hungry.
Ten times must thou laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise thy stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb thee in the night.
Few people know it, but one must have all the virtues in order to sleep well.
...

When night cometh, then take I good care not to summon sleep. It disliketh to be summoned—sleep, the lord of the virtues!
 But I think of what I have done and thought during the day. Thus ruminating, patient as a cow, I ask myself: What were thy ten overcomings?
And what were the ten reconciliations, and the ten truths, and the ten laughters with which my heart enjoyed itself?
Thus pondering, and cradled by forty thoughts, it overtaketh me all at once—sleep, the unsummoned, the lord of the virtues.

i think, when one looks back, that it is easy, shameful and forgiveable to assume, to manifest, to be sentimental. it is a struggle not to do so, not to lapse, not to plumb the abject depths of self-pity and self-reproach. it is between borges and marquez, between kundera and murakami. one must choose to do well.

so it is with writing, as with writing on this blog. i call on you to understand. many things that i have written of are recurring motifs with me, and i call on you to understand. i do not wish to be vulnerable, and thus i do not wish to revisit.

but, as it must be with you, the time for reflecting is not yet ended. therefore be reconciled to yourself.