Mount Fuji-Photo by Reza Pakzad

Keep doing this, and shake the proverbial salt every time on the wound, our wound, the less fortunate and the much too much given to judgment. Recite the old myth, sing the ancient lyrics, loud but with a different tongue, just so for us not to understand, but simply to repeat the accents. Hold a mirror and the candle to us to countenance ourselves in the faint flickering flame. Contradict us, deny us, time upon time, and every instant, so we confess our unsteady non-existence to our most constant being. Stare at us, from beyond the blue, from over the peak, from behind the meaning of grace, till our eyes are drunk with shame and soaked in stupor. Beat us to everything, precede us everywhere, so that when we arrive, always a little too late, we see that nothing can ever change but that you have already left. You keep doing this; we have the proclivity and passion is of our climes and to our taste. Pain is our only remedy; the itinerary of its motion mapped out into the face of our most beautiful and most innocent.

The Bridge

It was not, as I recall, a damp, drizzly November in my soul, and I was not finding myself growing grim about the mouth, that day, the day before I took the bridge to the other side. It was a lovely September afternoon, remember, that we took a long walk together, and although the dust was still not settled and the wound was still very very fresh, in the garden on the isle of Manhattoes, the scene was still a sight for the gardener, the geometer and for the surveyor alike. You, the gardener and my first geometry teacher, took me by the hand and showed me many things, showed me one of everything. You told me that once I cross the bridge, I will forget all, and then again, little by little, if I try hard and fortune is with me too, I might remember again, remember? And when we reached this, you made me stop and said, Look, look at THIS one carefully. You will see many made in the image of THIS, remakes upon remakes upon remakes, but to see THIS itself again, your own...And before you kissed my forehead good-bye and sent me off, you consoled me: Perhaps, perhaps not, but do not despair. You will belong to the generation of generators and destroyers, dynamos and dynamites, the dreamy generation of costless perpetual movement, and in that age, all images, all copies, all remakes, are almost (barring something of ZERO measure) as terrifying and as terrific as this original. And I crossed the bridge and soon enough, I forgot. And now, I do not know WHAT I remember, what is it that arrests my stupefied gaze into pre-eternity, which image it is that I now dumbfoundedly contemplate, in whose face I abashedly stare.