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The Oyster’s Autobiography

January 16, 2016 in Sabboytical, Spirit Matters

He had oysters waiting for me. I keep thinking about it. I showed up late for dinner and he had oysters waiting for me and I threw them in his face. But if he wasn’t going to come around when it counted that’s what he was going to get. I know this as my ugliness slays me. We cannot be in touch. We want different things. I want him to be the friend of my heart, and he wants me as his sometimes companion. It boils down to that. I do not blame either of us but know I need something else. Someone else. I act badly because he never stays; he never stays because I act badly. We have been in this cycle for more than five years and during that time I’ve learned all too well to live without him–to live creatively and tenaciously with a broken heart. So I know I’ll be okay, will pick myself back up, will put on the red lipstick I bought so hopefully only a few days before. Maybe someday even stop waiting for that pearl. Today, though, I’m having a hard time moving. Forget about eating. He had oysters waiting for me and I threw them in his face.

The Jazz of Herstory and History

January 12, 2016 in Book Matters, City Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

Two quotes I didn’t know I needed until I encountered them in my reading marathon last weekend. They speak to my heart, which clamors for mending; they fuse its two sides with a resolution I could never achieve alone. This is one of the many reasons I read so copiously. I am always searching for blueprints undetectable in my regular life.

She knows that her name will find its way into his speculations. So will his. Because there are things you do for people you’ve known your whole life. You let them save you, you put them in your books, and you let each other begin again, clean.—Erika Swyler, The Book of Speculation

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one make some dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible—like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: here comes the news. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, y’all, and everything’s ahead at last.–Toni Morrison, Jazz

The Thrills of Life: David Bowie, 1947-2016

January 11, 2016 in Age Matters, Music Matters, Spirit Matters

It feels so typical of David Bowie that he died when he was already on all of our brains, not only because of his birthday but because he’d just released an album that inclined us to especially celebrate his birth. He had a beautiful–and increasingly elusive–knack for keeping relevant through his art rather than his personal life. A few times I saw him out and about in New York, once by himself and once with Iman, the one woman who could so graciously overshadow him. Each time it was like glimpsing a ghost who would never entirely pass over, which is a fact I cling to today. We’ll miss him terribly but will have all the blueprints he gave us for as long as we listen to music alone and together. As usual, he said it best: “It’s the darkest hour and your voice is new.”

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy