Opening Books at Random

 

Sometimes in my abstract moments I pity the ancients. The scholars of Alexandria couldn’t open a scroll and discover the gift of an unanticipated page. (Opening a scroll is much like taming a lion: the whole matter must be handled with extreme delicacy–one needs an assistant or two and equal parts rigor and patience, perhaps even the right body language for papyrus has a mind of its own.)  

There are many great books on the history of literacy. Human kind was transformed first by written language and then by the book with its stitched pages and its articulated, transitive planets of mentation. Open a book at random and there before you is a rising moon, the summer moon of Finland, thin as an old woman’s ear.

I adore opening books somewhere in the middle–anyplace really, just to find wiser hopes than the customary seconds routinely afford. Here are some examples just now:

“I think and I do believe/we know the way to glory, or to what can be/glory for this worn-down bedraggled race–/peace, freedom, losing, and passing on. And place/We know it if anyone would listen.”

–Hayden Carruth from Brothers, I Loved You All

“sometimes I feel like an idiot boychild/longing for mama ocean”

–Anselm Hollo from No Complaints

“But there are beds and beds in this life. Beds of pain, beds of procreation, the irresistible beds of printing presses.”

–Marvin Bell from Old Snow Just Melting

“I thought I heard the sky squeak./Oh, it’s Nothing, it’s Uncle

Nothing/coming down from his tree.”

–James Tate from The Lost Pilot

“Inside me there is a confusion of swallows,/Birds flying through the smoke,/

And horses galloping excitedly on fields of short grass.”

–Robert Bly from Silence in the Snowy Fields

“In summer/come the old dreams of living on a boat/and walking home to it as the evening/

is beginning”

–W.S. Merwin from The Compass Flower

“The stars fatten like pearls./Not enough light to read your face by./And useless to wish on,as restless/

As we are, growing or shrinking./All we can do/is lend our bodies to life.”

–Deborah Tall from Come Wind, Come Weather

“Heavy for you, I hear the futile speech/Of air in trees, of shadows in your hair.”

–James Wright from Saint Judas

“The soul is driven by the hierarchical perspective of spirit into regions it considers even more distal and low, the organic body, where the soul makes its presence known as symptoms.”

–James Hillman from Healing Fiction

“There is nothing so scary/about grasshoppers sharpening scythes./

But when the troll’s flea whispers,/

be careful.”

–Olav Hauge Trusting Your Life to Water and Eternity

(translated by Robert Bly)

And so I open books at random and feel the rings of Saturn, the ghosts of my dogs, the atavistic organs of sensation whispering from their jars. This is a shy, unrehearsed and daily pleasure, a small thing, but maybe not so small, maybe not…

 

S.K.