Another Lifetime

Thursday, April 16, 2009

You can call me a porcelain doll and I will smile and nod and you will be right. You will be right about the stillness even though this body ran over girls like a truck and propelled its muddy self through air to connect with a ball. You will be right about the order even though my socks never match and the clothes on the floor grow into mountains and the perfect meal never makes its way to the table. You will be right about the quiet even though my heart never sleeps and it won't shut the hell up and my thoughts perseverate in order to be heard over the raucous. It's all true, as every fibre of this living thing contradicts its neighboring ceramic particles.

7 comments:

What About The Girl? said...: Wow, a spot-on juxtaposition of words.
And the photo is a metaphor.; April 16, 2009 at 9:00 PM
Beverly Ash Gilbert said...: Aren't we all complex contradictions? Our outer self not always meshing with who we are, or who we want to be?

In my 20's I was a pretty, little girl who drove a huge, beat-up pickup in Los Angeles to my job as an engineer on a high tech aerospace project. I loved that no one seeing me could figure out what I did nor who I really was. No-one understood why I preferred my pickup to a fancy little sports car, or loved playing football, or loved getting dressed up to go to the symphony. But even then, all of what I portrayed wasn't who I really was.

Now my life, and my looks, are so different - I look like a middle aged housewife / mom and drive a minivan - yikes! And yet I still don't look like who I am and I'm not sure I know.; April 17, 2009 at 6:44 AM
Unknown said...: Porcelain never did smile or cry or hurt or laugh the way you do and that is what makes the difference. Your are alive and your writing makes it very evident!; April 17, 2009 at 7:17 AM
kendalee said...: You have such an incredible talent for capturing the nuanced inner world. Beautifully and succinctly. I'm in awe.; April 17, 2009 at 11:26 AM
david mcmahon said...: My first visit here and I think you are a very gifted photographer, having looked at some of your older posts as well.

Your writing is very powerful, too.

I came here from The Girl From Cherry Blossom Street ...; April 17, 2009 at 6:35 PM
in another lifetime said...: thank you all very, very much for your positive feedback!!; April 17, 2009 at 7:42 PM
Anonymous said...: Love the photo, and the words left me wishing you had written more. Congrats on POTD mention!; April 20, 2009 at 1:37 AM

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What I'm Reading

Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson

The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb

The Bookseller of Kabul, Åsne Seierstad

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O'Farrell
"Esme stares at the spiked rocks. She stares and stares until they begin to lose their third dimension, until they begin to look unfamiliar, insubstantial. Like the way words said over and over become just a slurry of a sound. She says the word 'word' over and over in her head until she hears only 'dwur-dwur-dwur'. She is aware of those numbers, the two and the eight, trying to find a place to slip back in. They have been lurking at the edges where she pushed them and they are mounting an assault, a break-in. She won't have it. She will not."

The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
"But as for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. So much of mankind's varied experience had passed there, -so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,- that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart."

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
"She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things"

The Life You Can Save: Acting now to end world poverty, Peter Singer
"In the United States, 97 percent of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV. Three quarters of them own a car. Three quarters of them have air conditioning. All have access to health care. I am not quoting these figures to deny that the poor in the United States face genuine difficulties. Nevertheless, for most, these difficulties are of a different order than those of the world's poorest people."

Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My search for love and art, Gene Wilder

Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
"I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glimpse of myself in a security mirror's reflection. In that moment my brain did an odd thing-it fired off this split second message: 'Hey! You know her! That's a friend of yours!' And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar......Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend"

The Kindness of Strangers, Katrina Kittle

The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho, translated by Alan Clarke
"'Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him,' his heart said. 'We, people's hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, towards its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them- the path to their Personal Legends, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place. So, we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. We never stop speaking out, but we begin to hope that our words won't be heard: we don't want people to suffer because they don't follow their hearts.'"

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
"For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves;"

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
"The room hovered around me with great gentleness, as if the chairs and the tables and the walls were witholding their weight out of sympathy for my sudden frailty"

Another Lifetime

Thursday, April 16, 2009

7 comments:

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