Today, in the coldest place in the universe (a couple of degrees
above absolute zero), 2 beams of protons collided at CERN,
Geneva. They approached, at a tiny scale, what happened in the
first split seconds after the Big Bang.
How can one, under a splendid sun, and with intimate news
about the universe, be desperate?
On one hand, yourself, only your self. On the other, the ocean,
immense, given to itself, and probably to you.
Pergolesi’s Salve Regina
In all innocence the fog is touching the tip of the trees. The forest
is silent. It doesn’t mind its invasion by such a light substance.
Lighter than a dance, than a hand.
This stepping out into the fog — this sudden coolness on the face,
this diffused environment … the body responds, then lets go.
The sum total of all human sufferings is civilization too.
Away from the ecstatic zone, it’s not rain or fog that falls on
their eyes, but blood. To each his/her tormentor, to each his/
her victim.
A rainbow is making a shield between me and my thoughts.
Au fur et à mesure
We’re left with a panic fear. If we had wings we would have
flown, but airplanes have become versions of the living-room.
The dying-room.
Regularly, only the fog can change the world.
But the fog is cruel. Its sponginess absorbs one’s inattentiveness.
Stepping out from the Night Palace, Joanne Kyger comes face to
face with the Pacific’s depth in that obscure journey.
Into that fog and not to “where and what.†Any life is too short
to matter. Earth sweats humid air. We’re summoning bits of love
in order to float in this weather-event whose silvery substance
engulfs San Francisco regularly…
Prisoner of his wife’s madness, a man remains in his room until
daylight comes to hurt his eyes. Later, heavy masses of fog move
over a beginning sunset.
If you’re willing to reach the divine through memory’s workings
— go through that fog. Let time run its course. Listen. If nothing
happens, it would mean that you reached the invisible.
My eyes liberate a flat and moving surface that wants to travel
along my decisions.
I say the sea is overwhelmed by its waves. Breathe into it your
thoughts, and it will remember you.
Death and life are similar in so far that they’re each a thin layer
that hides the incomprehensible.
Would mind dominate Being where gods failed?
Invisibility reigns supreme. Why do we ignore the reality of the
given and need to look beyond it?
Archeology is the recurrence of the past into the present. We
didn’t leave the gods, they did us.
There’s no tension in a late sleep on the beach. The world
penetrates the lungs and elevates the mind to the only rest it can
experience.
In the meantime, the waters beat against an alien construction
and the heat invades the city.
The forest spreads its thickness on a map. Entering head-on to
where each tree has a shadow is to enter the future.
A forest is equally a little universe of solitude where one’s
impulses grow tall as trees, but also are as imprisoned in
immobility.
When time is new and over here an ill-fated tide advances on the
mind … tomorrow has nothing to do with what preceded it.
We spend a life-time running after our life, running into that
soft wall, looking for the energy to die.
But sometimes we’re distracted … we’re visited by Nature’s own
doings, by her capacity to absorb our will, to give us oblivion.
I am immortal not because I have been, but because I am.
The sea is beating like a heart, heading into a sloppy moisture.
At this encounter’s frontier, a turbulence from outer-space asks
to participate.
I would — as I usually do June and July, when the weather is
warm, and deeper California hot — come to the Pacific shore to
join the cosmic fog-event in its transfiguration.
A steady fog has sent fishermen to harbor, coastal birds into
hiding, the foghorn, to silence.
To be trapped in the fog is different from being lost in the forest.
Breathing is most concerned.
We are the world reflecting on itself, a medium, exalted,
discarded.
Love enters the arteries and speeds up the heart.
Only in the fog do I feel complete.
Time and fog escape our grasp. But when I drive through a
visiting cloud, though limited to a (blissful) moment, I negotiate
directly with a cosmic happening. I domesticate an impersonal
part of nature.
Time is my country, fog is my land.
~Etel Adnan
