Matthew Zapruder, from a poem on the nine varieties of suffering (besides purely physical): “suffering that others suffer less than you; suffering that others suffer more than you; suffering that there is suffering at all; suffering for “no reason”; suffering that there can be suffering for “no reason”; suffering that there are logical connections but no god or vice versa; suffering that you have in the past suffered and thus “wasted time”; suffering that you will again in the future suffer and thus “waste time”; and suffering that those you love have, or are, or will in the future suffer from any and all of the varieties.”
Mark Doty, on intimacy: “why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it? A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection; we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate peak of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world. A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles.”
March 23, 2007
1 comment:
This mark Doty passage perhaps sums up, quite concisely in fact, my seeing of the human condition. Places us all squarely in the same boat, be it safely moored or adrift. Perhaps the boat of humanity is one that comes and goes with the tide and only by overcoming remarkably powerful sea states, can remain moored to our deeply rooted desire for intimacy.
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