Tuesday, April 14, 2009

I'VE ALWAYS FOUND

I’VE ALWAYS FOUND


I’ve always found that it’s easier to be kind when I don’t care because I’m unattached. I’m not manipulating. Attaching strings for the good of the puppet. Without effort or perfection, I practise the generosity of everything that gives here. And everything gives. Without meaning. No giver. No recipient. Like a star. A gift. Light everywhere. Illuminating itself in what it reveals. Is anyone pleased? The fools make meteors of the cornerstones of joy and despise peace as the merest of consolations for their chronic unhappiness at never having made much of an impact anywhere. Dinosaurs. Let them knock themselves out. A coma’s as good as inspiration to a rock. And there’s never been an original point to anything. It’s all just talk. Seeding the sea with sand. Making a priest of the worm in the rose. Is it still morning if you don’t wake up? Or is something always missing?

      Stupid thoughts. Angry. Though I don’t know at what. If I didn’t let them up they wouldn’t let me down and neither me nor my soiled shadow would be advanced or disappointed. But I don’t slip a rudder in the river like a letter that knows where it’s going, and there isn’t the single blossom of a sail that I’ll take down just because the wind is blowing. I’m not the doing or the undoing of myself. When I sit still, the wind moves. When I move the wind is a rock. It’s that way with every breath, every death I take. Illusion is meaningless. Reality is meaningless. There are no oceans to cross between one dewdrop and the next. And time doesn’t give birth to anything so there’s no need to make a rosary of full moons and count the number of springs and autumns I have left to live, if that. Why school the unborn in the lessons of perishing when nothing can be taken out of context? I don’t look out upon the world, the beginning of the universe in atom or word, the history of being and not being this mystery of seeing that is neither wise nor absurd, and think that God misquoted me. I’ve never been a hidden secret that wanted to know myself because there’s never been anyone else to keep the secret from. So the silence talks all day long like a drunkard that doesn’t know when to stop. And when I really want to get down to the bottom of things, I drink the wine. And then I drink the cup.


PATRICK WHITE