Twice recently, in the evening, after eating, people have remarked on my physical condition, saying I was “tired” or “frail.”
First reaction: hackles up, because we all want to be strong.
Second reaction: Interest, because it is during the fast I feel tired or frail. But these comments both came after I had eaten.
And the second time it was said to me I was feeling tired. But not because I had been fasting. I was tired because I had been eating.
The sun is lying across the road outside in a vertical stripe. The leaves of the big white flowering dogwood–the one planted for MLK–are bit by bit turning red.
Bodies and trees change, sure, but roads do as well. I saw it. Last year when we were looking for houses we went to see an 1860s era farmhouse on the edge of town. The owner was taking us into the backyard behind the barn and there were these big slabs of flat stone making a path on the property.
“That used to be College Street,” she said, gesturing to them. “Those are the old stones. The previous owner bought them and brought them here when they repaved the road for cars.”
Every piece of matter moves, whether by human design or not, we are in an enternal process of shifting molecules around one from the other. Streets shed their skins, humans do as well.
When you stoke a fire, by eating for example, it burns hotter, faster.
It can tire you out.
And fasting isn’t about denial anyhow, not about severing or exploring severing a connection between mind and spirit.
In fact, it is exactly the opposite: it is about playing with that boundary, exploring the relationship with the individual mind, the spiritual substance of the body, and the material, carnate locus for that awareness.
One fasts in order to know that the outlines and limits of that connection. By knowing the outlines and limits of thing, by know precisely here it is that it fails, writes Walter Benjamin, you might start to know something about the thing itself.
After all, if everything is moving at a different speed the farther away from the individual body you get, then perhaps somewhere inside–a deep somewhere–there is a place that is barely moving at all.
First day of classes. Today I meet my new students. We’ll transfer thoughts, ideas, theories, fictions, ideas, and poems in between us.
At the end of each class I always say something like, “This might be the last time in our lifetimes that we are all together in one room at the same time, talking about literature.” I’m probably right about that but someone always gasps in horror.
And that someone is probably right. Why mark the signs of impermanence and intransience? We think we need to be reminded of it–and perhaps be do–but we oughtn’t.
We only need look down at our own hands, feel our body under our palms.
All bodies are frail. All bodies are weak. Or are a wink away from weakness, from age, from diminishing of ability.
There is a rule, a rule of all matter in the universe, not just the fleshly human one.
We love the garden, it is heaven, but we can not stay.