Whatever it takes...

Oh, I forgot to mention ... perfection of effort is not required, by the way. It is the consistency of attempting to work your tools that brings progress. It’s like anything else. If I want to tone muscle, lifting a ten-pound weight a few times every day will move me toward my goal much quicker than hoisting a fifty-pound barbell once a week. Yes, it really is true; slow and steady wins the race. Just try a little, every day. You’ll see.

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another man, who kept his notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, he wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. That's why I write this thing that is not a blog, in order to see life in its true dimension and to defy my own poor memory.

One, two, three they run back to me...

Coming over mountains and sailing over seas...

He wanted to be like the birds. He wanted their songs to flow up through his throat and burst out of his mouth. He wanted their feathers to bud from his flesh. He wanted their wings, he wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so he consumed them. He speared them, he clubbed them, he tangled their feet in glue, he netted them, he spitted them, he threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because he loved them. he wanted to be one with them. He wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when he was young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, he did not want the mess of being born, and so he crammed the birds into his gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, he couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, he can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs ... he didn't stand a chance. For he is mired in gravity, he's earthbound. He's ankle-deep in blood, and all because he ate the birds, he ate them a long time ago, when he still had the power to say no.