With the preponderance of advertising and its focus on youth and sex
(easy selling points, to be sure),
age is becoming more and more of a negative in our cultures.
It is amusing to think that, as we buy into the idea,
we set ourselves up for logically inevitable failure…
But you’ve got to laugh, right?
I dislike contemporary fairy tales…
Not the folk tales they are often based on –
they were the tools for understanding the world,
and true to it.
They were about love and indifference,
loyalty and betrayal,
blood, sweat, tears, joy and laughter.
They were about making decisions and growing up…
Contemporary fairy tales are almost exactly the opposite:
fairy dust glitters,
wishes come true,
everyone remains infantile and lives happily ever after…
The only things they teach are entitlement and disappointment.
Have you ever met a bride whose wedding
lived up to her expectations?
I love train journeys, especially at night.
Lights, lights, lights – they conceal details and smudge shapes,
they fill my eyes – imprecise, beautiful, meaningless…
And the wind – its motion is the same,
it blows the lights through the night and away,
it fills my ears with noise and my skin with sensation –
indistinct, but directional…
It blows the stars out of the sky and memories out of my mind,
and I feel so light without the excess weight…
I find bare winter trees endlessly fascinating.
The branches lead my gaze with hypnotic power, and it follows on and on…
I think it is a visual equivalent of learning and gives the same joy of
discovery:
ordered enough for the mind to create patterns,
with enough chaotic variation to keep it interesting,
to forever suggest the possibility of better, more intricate organization…
Cherry blossoms – a staple of poetry,
they appear so briefly in such profusion…
What is the fascination?
Is it our slightly guilty,
maintenance-free
enjoyment
of the beauty of evanescence?
City at twilight:
its lights and shadows, its lost and self-absorbed…
people in a rush, with no time to stop and people with nowhere to go…
and, in the middle – a memorial to human kindness that makes it all worthwhile.
