You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Remember too: not all saying is true.
I have heard another story: how the Pont de l’Archevêché groans with the weight
of hundreds of padlocks, etched with promises made to eternity. What happens
when the language of the promise is wrong, when the word for “expensive” is
used instead of “love?”
the temporality of things that happen ‘one after another’ (JR)
The rationality of the horizontal unfolding of time is based on a vertical hierarchy that separates two forms of life, two ways of being in time – as we might simply put it, the way of those who have time and the way of those who do not.
The justice of time …
Aristotle’s Poetics: the justice that causes active men to pass from good fortune to misfortune and from ignorance to knowledge.
Plato’s Republic. It consists in an orderly distribution of times and spaces, activities and capacities, and is based on a precondition stated by Plato at the very outset of the narrative about the foundation of the city. This precondition is that artisans, who must not have time to go elsewhere, time to do anything other than the work which cannot wait, should be kept exclusively in the space of the workshop.
Ranciere, Time, Narrative, Politics
????
Nymph, Stephanie LaCava
There had to be a word for that, when something makes you uneasy because it’s familiar and correct, and everything else is not.
I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray vinyl seats linked like
unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall
be summoned to the gate, soon enough
there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers
and perforated stubs—but for now
I can look at these ragtag nuclear families
with their cooing and bickering
or the heeled bachelorette trying
to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s
exhausted mother waiting to be called up early
while the athlete, one monstrous hand
asleep on his duffel bag, listens,
perched like a seal trained for the plunge.
Even the lone executive
who has wandered this far into summer
with his lasered itinerary, briefcase
knocking his knees—even he
has worked for the pleasure of bearing
no more than a scrap of himself
into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late,
they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning
—a little hope, a little whimsy
before the loudspeaker blurts
and we leap up to become
Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.
Vacation, Rita Dove
How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel’s end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!’
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed, being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide;
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his ide;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind;
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.
How heavy do I journey on the way (Sonnet 50), William Shakespeare
Friend or no friend,
darkness or light,
vowels or consonants,
water or dry land,
anything more from you now
is just gravy
—just send me down forgiveness, send me down
bearing myself a black cupful of light.
To the Black Madonna of Chartres, Jean Valentine
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!
And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me
But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.
How like a winter hath my absence been (Sonnet 97), William Shakespeare