Ruminations of a Bud, Emerging From a Long Winter

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Peter Callesen

if there is justice in some other world, those like myself, whom nature forces into lives of abstinence, should get the lion’s share of all things,
all objects of hunger, greed being praise of you.

~ Louise Glück


Yearning is not possible without hunger, and religiosity can be described in one way as spiritual hunger. The plump and content, who have had ample opportunity to gorge on the unimaginable apricot and fragile peach, are not intimate with passion... after all, there is nothing left to want. The slender and the voracious, on the other hand, feed themselves by making their privation voluptuous, consecrating their desire as the immortal, perishable fig.









Giuseppe Penone

noah says depressives hate the spring,
imbalance between the inner and the outer world.
i make another case—being depressed, yes,
but in a sense passionately attached to the living tree,
my body actually curled in the split trunk, almost at peace, in the evening rain,
almost able to feel sap frothing and rising:
noah says this is an error of depressives, identifying with a tree,
whereas the happy heart wanders the garden like a falling leaf,
a figure for the part, not the whole.


~ Louise Glück



A tree is more alive than a depressive. This the depressive senses, latching on like a branch of mistletoe, sucking sap like a sort of nectar, and thus feels itself the kin of the tree, even though a tree is no such thing: everything in the world is painfully separate and unknowable to each other. Happiness—that which has survived deciduous flowers and dampening rains—knows this, and does not seek to merge the whole or merge with the whole, but is content to let a tree be a tree, a heart be a heart.




A Deceit of Lapwings

All happy people are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy people are more or less alike.