“Every Second of Every Minute”

September 12, 2012.

Still Sundays.

This morning if I did have a photo of stillness it would be that of soft eyelashes resting on the skin of thoughts, a skin that is so sensitive to all contact. Thoughts like skin are our first line of defense. We want things to make sense pronto!

But I realized the photos, in words or otherwise, are truly through a lens within the individual. I actually state this with some heaviness and not pride reserved for those in the “magical seeing” club of stillness.

Last night the wind picked up as if it was an old lady  having a hard time walking through the terrain upon which there were all these tall skyscrapers in her way.

No one ever pays attention to a half moon.

I have been very self-absorbed this past week. No wonder Stillness is staring back at me without reflecting anything. It says: how can you try to understand yourself through yourself alone? Look around! But I was busy making plans, large & life altering plans! In stillness I am reminded life changes course in the small plans that may appear magnified because there is no map.

These perpetual waves of understanding and questions, understanding and questions: what a wild body of water this living.

Last night I realized that as much as some people enjoy this stillness, others precisely try to find an abode in or near the opposite of quietude. They want to live in neighborhoods where the bustling to and fro from restaurants and bars never stops. They want to be able to complain about no parking so as to share how “happening” their neighborhoods are. My favorite thing about Upper West Side neighborhood is that it rests and on the weekends it sleeps in. I don’t live exactly in that area like I once did but the area I have lived in for over nine years was even better until a few years ago. Whenever small businesses want to focus on being part of trends and the buzz for tourists and magazines and not the community they are in, they can’t last. And when they can’t last, the bigger corporations can readily and easily take over given their interests don’t have any boundaries.

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Bernard Hirsch, “Bud”, was the only college professor I came across in my college years who had been very happily married–as in goo-goo-gaa-gaa-eyes-for-the-beloved. And it continued even after he lost his wife to cancer.  Then some years later (I can’t recall the exact time, perhaps ten or fourteen years) he too passed on. He was in the best physical shape of his life (he had taken on weight training as a way to deal with the loss of his wife) but it still wasn’t good enough to beat a brain tumor that sealed the deal to the other side in four months in 2006.

I recall my discussions with him and other professors in the English Department of University of Kansas about the characters in literature and this thing called love. Some of the professors in a round about way admitted to having had affairs, either with graduate students or just an exhale out of personal unhappiness that had nothing to do with the spouse, and were very forthright. And although all the professors I had were extremely passionate about literature and teaching literature (regardless of their personal styles) they remained aloof to love as way of living, unlike Bud. Bud’s lectures were poetry for his wife in some ways. He so badly wanted us to understand the depths love can take those who are willing to really partake in real love. That yes, it makes one so vulnerable (not just in terms of feelings being “crushed” if it doesn’t quite work out but the idea that one’s beloved can be taken away from another on universe’s terms) but otherwise you have not really loved if you have never made yourself that vulnerable.

The conversations would always begin with, “Why do I get B’s on the midterms, the papers, the essays, whereas before, during and after class I am told, “Those are some excellent questions!”. The reply would be some variation of because the midterms, the papers, the essays want answers and you are not willing to accept the answers and that is great but you must find a way to make the connections in words. 

It was in Bud’s classes that I learned through the variety of literature that love was a chariot of questions. The feeling is an answer but love itself always presented questions.

This Sunday morning I woke up thinking how it is because of love that we are able to live forever. I don’t think there is anyone I have ever met with whom I have not, at one point or another, brought up Bud Hirsch, my college professor. And when not directly, he finds his way in my writings and questions indirectly.

Most people want to be famous so as to not be forgotten. How odd! The ribbons of love are so much better instead.

I share these photos of dedications on benches in Central Park.

Every second of every minute

romance with life, a loved one, or even ourselves, is art

for noodling.

Who is this generation before me and after me  and of me that thinks of art as anything more than really living your life in the most inspired way?

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