🖤 03.24.21
I have always loved anecdotes about William Blake, born in a small flat above his father’s hosiery shop, this strange little boy who glimpsed angels in mulberry trees and was graced by wandering saints all his life. Perhaps spirituality isn't so much something to believe in as it is something to live through—perhaps spirituality exists where belief and experience coincide.
Today I am thinking about death because Dakota passed away this morning, and there have been two mass shootings in the last week, and I’m not entirely sure what I'm living through, only that it is ghastly, ghostly, a spectral plane, myself a mere spectator in the arena of tragedy, because to grieve is to watch loved ones die and not be able to do anything about it. I cried a lot. It helped but did not change the facts. That is the force of grief, too—wanting things to change, the immovable to be moved, and realizing that you are caught in this time-loop called agony, and that no amount of poetry or poise can prepare you for the way everything crumbles. Death, loss. These are the immovable. The way I stared at that space where wall meets floor and sank to my knees, eyes dried, unable to think, but remembering, simply, the soft thump of her tail against the door.
Teju Cole: “Unbelievable to be living through this? No, it’s believable. I believe it, the way you wake up in the middle of the night on a trans-Atlantic flight and believe: I am 35,000 feet above sea level, moving at tremendous speed through freezing air.”
—P