Thursday, April 7, 2011

The skies are made of diamonds

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.
-ERNEST HEMINGWAY, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (courtesy this awesome site)
I bought a pair of shoes today.

I thought about an elegy for the pair they were to replace, about the materialist instinct that mourns the passing of consumer goods.

It mourns the lieu de memoire that is my pair of shoes. I remember: there were scary dogs and sleeping dogs and stray dogs that lie in the middle of the street. There were rivers' tides and riptides and voices that sounded from the deep. There were hills and fields and shadows. Puddles. Corn and grass in wild sunlit hues of burned and parched and life. Quotidian snippets. Hills and forests and graves. So many graves.

There seemed always to be graves.

Maybe I'll give the shoebox to the Vegetarian Veterinarian, for the next animal he has to euthanize.

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