Zoso
Under Construction
“Don’t let the behavior of others disturb your inner peace.” I try to remember this while driving. It’s not working yet.
One of my all time favorite quotes…..Buckle in a moment of deep reflection says ” I never envisioned my life like this. I don’t know how to get out.”
“When, from a long distant past, nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering in the tiny almost impalpable drop of essence the vast structure of recollection.”
From . . . Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past
For some reason I’ve carried this poem around in my wallet since I first read it at the age of fifteen. . .
To Those I Will Never Meet.
She
sits over there;
on the bus
on the train
on the tube.
She
makes reading the Evening Standard
a difficult task.
She
is aware that I am reading
in between the lines and far beyond the margins.
She
adjusts herself
for better presentation.
I
gain an interest in No Smoking signs
and obscure shadows in the window.
Obstructing the door causes delay
and can be dangerous.
A station foreman can earn up to 28.40,
more with overtime
She
notices my noticing.
I
give her profile left,
a good one.
My attitude, disinterested . . .
harder to catch than most men.
Do you, How far have….ever wished?
Our gazes met like billiard balls that
fall into opposite pockets.
The best Jobs are to be found in the
Evening News. Wimbledon got off to a good start.
A girl on the tube, on the train, on the bus got off
at Golders Green.
She left me wondering, whether I left her wondering,
a poem like this
about me.
After watching Hearts of Darkness, the story of the making of Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, I learned that Dennis Hopper just ad libbed these lines . . . yeah he was baked but still….
“Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll… uh… well, you’ll say “hello” to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you. He won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you”… I mean I’m… no, I can’t… I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s… he’s a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas… (he goes on) Do you hear what the man is saying? Do You? This is dialectics. It’s very simple dialectics one through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can’t travel in space, you can’t go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions – what are you going to land on – one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That’s dialectic physics okay dialectic logic is there is no love or hate, you either love someone or you hate ’em.”
“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
Julius Caesar Act IV Scene III – Brutus