Saturday, January 28, 2023
Fall. Stand. Go on.
Standing on a relatively high hill above Berkeley again (nightly), viewing S.F. miles away across the bay, the tiny presence of everything distantly lit up is about itself, displayed without regard for being seen—and without regard for what’s adjacent.
Things are there; buildings are there. Lines of cars (ants of light), apparently inch across the Bay Bridge, drivers and passengers oblivious to other ants in other bubbles of self possession.
Here in Berkeley, life goes on, like any town. Structures persist. Strangers pass on sidewalks as if each is passing no one. If you suddenly face emergency, someone may stop to notice, maybe help because they’re hit with risk of guilt about their general lack of care. Otherwise, the stranger doesn’t exist.
This time of month, the moon shows itself, as if there’s to be some full significance of being there.
I may know so much about the times, it all melds into mere singularity of being alive among others who don’t want to know much beyond what’s required for satisfying near-term want, sustaining attachments, orienting days by light of comforting fabulations, and facing too little time for passive leisure, for a life avowed to be active, realistic, independent,
and farsighted.
“You just don’t want to know us,” one might say, in a tone of insult.
Phony is as phony does.
And living in denial persists because it believes in itself as is: being as if no “as if” prevails.
“You’re a paucity of good faith.”
No. I’m an archive of jaded wishes left to savor conceivability, such as
I can.
Long wakes of loves who died or wandered away give me resort to love in abandon, highly, long, and fulfilling, really.
I stumbled and fell, a few nights ago, while walking back from the hill. My knee was shoved into a lower rib such that later movement which contracts muscle under that rib caused a stab of unbearable pain.
Gradually, the days are healing.
I knew they would. The pain is my penalty for reverie under the stars without due attention to my elderly walking with legs that don’t pick up my feet as strongly as decades of habit happily presumed.
In the minutes afterward, I actually recalled the folkism about Thales, pain notwithstanding. (For days after, a rare sneeze was torture.)
It’s what I get for loving conceptions of belonging in conceiving what
I can creatively prefer, as if life can prevailingly be art of conceptual faring which matters.
The stars say, “endure with trust and hope—and savor minding highly.”
