LEFT FOR THE FUTURE
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writers’ musings:
[Words} have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.”
Dave Eggers
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Left for the future…
The Beautiful World
Sun on pampas grass - you know, the way the light gilds the featheriness, bestowing the angelic as it becomes extra-ordinary.
Oil slicks in a filthy and fetid gutter – there it is, that panoply of color and light, a hint of peacock in the ooze.
As the plane lifts off, we can skate over the man-made, the grid, and there find the astonishment of order revealed; even the slag heaps have borders. There’s music in such precision.
The black depth of everyone’s pupils. Everyone unknowable. That has to be considered beautiful, in lovers, in mothers, and strangers.
The outpouring of a pencil into a drawing. A recognizable abstract of agency, of a hand, of an eye, of a mind.
A mindful room, hardly furnished. A place of beckoning. Calm. Like the pavilions of Topkapi Palace, the old palace of the Ottomans, low-slung, open to the outside, furnished solely with beautiful rugs and horizontal divans that stretched from one wall to the other. Inviting. Immanent.
A Swiss Army knife. A masterpiece of machine-tooled functionality. Surely decipherable to a caveman.
The scent of pine along a stretch of walking path in the middle of the otherwise overwhelming city, urbanized to the point of no return – and then, long pine needles.
The effect of wind on one’s face, if allowed. If the window is allowed to be open, allowed to rush into the hermetically-sealed, allowed to be experienced, allowed to be exhilarating.
The bond between a dog and an ordinary person, or maybe a wreck of a person, maybe a person wrecked on alcohol, maybe a person who doesn’t manage laundry – but there it is: the bond. Attachment.
The gaze of an infant. Tabula rasa. Eyes open to it all. Before even a smile.
Evidence from the classical world. The human form in marble. So fluid. So frozen. The eloquence. The elegance. Delivering unfailing uplift.
The madness. Bodies pressed together in a recreational pool in Las Vegas, hunting for connection.
Those striations in the very earth itself, ripples of red rock, compressed by the great weight of gravity and time, there to engage our minds and confer perspective.
Taking the very vibrations from the cosmos – finding rhythm and making music, with lyre, in Gregorian chant, on a harpsichord, on strings on a gourd… or rocking out.
And: ‘Water: the which is so humble, chaste, and pure.’ (St. Augustine)
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Hard copies of DIARY OF OLDING, Vol. 3 are now available: all the SubStack postings from 2025. Volumes 1 & 2 are sold out. You can order direct: jma@thetrak.com $25 postage paid
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Hard copies of DIARY OF OLDING, Vol. 3 are now available: all the SubStack postings from 2025. Volumes 1 & 2 are sold out. You can order direct: jma@thetrak.com $25 postage paid
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