Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way that you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way
But now it's just another show
And you leave 'em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away
Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I've looked at life that way
Oh, but now old friends they're acting strange
And they shake their heads
And they tell me that I've changed
Well, something's lost but something's gained
In living every day
I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
-Joni Mitchell
"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And what do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
-Sylvia Plath
I think that it is OK to change. I think it is OK to do new things and make new friends. I think it is OK to take certain of life's vagaries with a lighter heart than you once did. I think it is OK to "live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry" [as Kerouac would wisely say]. And I think I have been inspired by Bridget's grandma's advice in The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2 - something along the lines of: "Well, you might as well cause some trouble now while you can. Because later on, people will say that you're too old."
So I am learning to rock and roll dance with my dearest George, practicing the basic step to Happy Days...
...taking basic Italiano classes with charming English graduates, eating gingerbread and listening to Gabriel Garcia Marquez tales at the Short Story Society...
...and finding plenty of romantic diversions whilst going out dancing as much as I can!
A few of my old friends are unnerved, confused or disappointed...
But I say: Don't be afraid to change. You can never become a fake as long as you...
...Even if...
I begin to see them again as the twilight darkens.
Gathered below me and to the right under the tree.
Ghosts are by their nature drawn to the willows.
They have no feet and hover just above the grass.
They seem to be singing. About apples, I think,
as I remember the ones a children’s red in the old
cemetery in Syracuse where I would eat one each day
because the tree grew out of a grave and I liked
to think of someone eating what was left of my heart
and spirit as I lay in the dark earth translating
into fruit. I can’t be sure what they are singing
because no sound comes through the immense windows
of my apartment. (Except for the sound somebody
makes at two and four in the night as he passes
around what was the temple grounds hitting a block
of wood two or three times with a stick. I have
begun listening for it as I lie on the floor awake.)
I try to see in what is left of the light down there
the two I was. The ghost of the boy in high school
just before I became myself. The other is the ghost
of the times later when I could fall in love:
the first time, and three years after that for eight
years, and the last time ten years after. I feel
a great tenderness for all the dozen ghosts down
there trying to remain what they were. Behind each
pile of three boulders that are the gravestones
is a railing making an enclosure for the seven-foot,
narrow, unpainted planks with prayers written on them.
They are brought on the two ceremonial days each year
by the mourners and put with the earlier ones. But
in many enclosures there are just weathered old ones,
because they are brought only as long as there is
still someone who knew the dead. It puzzles me that
I care so much for the ghost of the boy in high school,
since I am not interested in those times. But I know
why the other one frightens me. He is the question
about whether the loves were phantoms of what existed
as appearance only. I know how easily they come,
summoned by our yearning. I realize the luminosity
can be a product of our heart’s furnace. It would
erase my life to find I made it up. Then I see them
faintly dancing in the dark: spirits that are the invisible
presence of what those women were. There once was
a Venezia even if there is not now. The flesh thickens
or wanes, but there was somebody I knew truly. Three
of them singing under the willow inside my transience.
-'Becoming Regardless,' Jack Gilbert
[I got this book for the camerado last Christmas!]
"Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions, and you wished for nothing so much as to change."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
[Like Sir Walter Elliot and his Baronetage in Persuasion, in Rilke I find "occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one," always]
Love, Letters To A Young Poet and pizza xx
