Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 36

CarrollBlog 4.26

"What is life? we ask, knowing that the answer will come not as a headline but as an aggregate. Life is dewclaws and corsages and dust mites and alligator skin and feathers and whale's whiskers (as mammals, whales do have hair) and tree-frog serenades and foreskins and blue hydrangeas and banana slugs and war dances and cedar chips and bombardier beetles. Whenever we encounter something that is rare, we mentally add it to the seemingly endless list of forms that life can take. We smile in amazement as we discover yet another variation on an ancient theme. To hear the melody, we must hear all the notes."

Diane Ackerman, The Rarest of the Rare

CarrollBlog 4.22

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.

Osho

CarrollBlog 3.21

" . . some moment happens in your life that you say yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen. laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks. waking up to the first snow. being in bed with somebody you love... whether you thank god for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, it may lose you the ball game. if you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul."

Frederick Buechner

CarrollBlog 3.20

We spend our lives learning how to rationalize our imperfect behavior, but let me tell you something: It all boils down to the three sizes of guilt.

When it is small, we can slip it into our pocket and not think about it for the rest of the day. Didn't do your exercises? Or write that letter to your mother? Make the call? Fix the nice soup for the family you had planned? Screw it--the day was hard enough and you did your bit.

Medium-sized guilt doesn't fit into the pocket and must be carried awkwardly in the hand like an iron barbell or, when it's really bad, a squirming live animal. We know it's there every minute, yet still find ways to lessen or shift our discomfort. Having an affair and aren't so nice to your spouse because you're spending too much energy on this new love? Go buy the old love some obscenely expensive, thoughtful gift and what time you do spend together, be so passionate and concerned about them that you glow in the dark.

Large sized guilt either crushes you or bends you so far to the ground that, either way, you're immobilized. No shifting *this* weight and no getting out from under it.

CarrollBlog 3.19

One Saturday while eating a tuna melt sandwich and staring out the kitchen window he realized memory is not a stable friend. Too often it lies, distorts, or frequently forgets many things both important and trivial. Memory steals parts of your life that should have belonged to you forever. It's like entrusting the only complete copy of your history to an erratic, frequently scatterbrained, sometimes irascible person who doesn't always do their job well and can't be bothered keeping the records straight. Unlike you, they don't care what the name of that wonderful French restaurant in Amsterdam was or the name of your high school enemy's sister.

In trying to remember the details of the time he'd shared with his lovely girlfriend, it was both disturbing and disheartening how much he couldn't recall beyond a certain point. What had they done on their first date? What was that great funny thing she'd said after they slept together the first time? What was the name of the childhood dog she loved so much and was always telling stories about?

One of his colleagues used the phrase "convenient history" to describe the way people remember their lives or specific events. Facts are superfluous; most people live in self-created convenient histories made up of unreliable memories-- some true, some distorted, some altogether false. They do this for peace of mind, to keep a kind of daily balance, and even sometimes to maintain sanity.

from a new short story

CarrollBlog 3.15

from an interview with Leonard Cohen:

I remember Marianne and I were in a hotel in Piraeus, some inexpensive hotel and we were both about 25, and we had to catch the boat to Hydra, and we got up and I guess we had a cup of coffee or something and got a

>taxi, and I've never forgotten this. Nothing happened, just sitting in >the back of the taxi with Marianne, lit a cigarette, a Greek cigarette that had that delicious deep flavor of a Greek cigarette, that has a

>lot of Turkish tobacco in it, and thinking, I'm an adult. You know. I have a life of my own, I'm an adult, I'm with this beautiful woman, we have a little money in our pocket, we're going back to Hydra, we're passing these painted walls. That feeling I think I've tried to recreate it hundreds of times unsuccessfully. Just that feeling of

>being grown up, with somebody beautiful that you're happy to be beside and all the world is in front of you.

CarrollBlog 3.14

"People don't want things to make sense. Know why? Because if they did we'd all be in trouble. You drive too fast down the street because it feels good or you're in a hurry. If things made sense, a cop would stop you every single time and give you a ticket. But what happens when a cop *does* stop you? You get angry and say that's not fair! But sure it's fair. It also makes sense. If life made sense we'd either behave ourselves a hell of a lot better or be walking around scared, waiting for the punishment due us for all the bad things we do every day.

"We want life to make sense only when it's to our advantage. Otherwise, it's interesting not knowing what's coming next. Maybe you'll get heads, maybe tails. People do wrong things all the time and get away with it. Good people get their neck broken. Would you prefer it if only the good people got rewarded? How often are you good? How often do you deserve the good *you* get? Wouldn't you rather have an interesting life that a fair one?"

CarrollBlog 3.13

"Yeah Yeah Yeah"

by Roddy Lumsden

No matter what you did to her, she said,

There's times, she said, she misses you, your face

Will pucker in her dream, and times the bed's

Too big. Stray hairs will surface in a place

You used to leave your shoes. A certain phrase,

Some old song on the radio, a joke

You had to be there for, she said, some days

It really gets to her; the way you smoked

Or held a cup, or her, and how you woke

Up crying in the night sometimes, the way

She'd stroke and hush you, and how you broke

Her still. All this she told me yesterday,

Then she rolled over, laughed, began to do

To me what she so rarely did with you.

CarrollBlog 3.12

Not having seen each other in many years, they met one day by chance and had a nice but superficial conversation on the street. Both knew there was so much more that could have been said but it wasn't because once *those* floodgates were opened, who knows what might have happened. When they were saying good bye, he reached in his pocket and brought out a roller ball pen. Taking her hand, he turned it over and writing something on her palm, told her not to look until later. When he was finished he closed her fingers over what he'd written, kissed her on the cheek and walked away. Of course he must have known she would look immediately at her hand. There were seven numbers, seven very familiar numbers. But it took her a moment to realize why they were familiar: it was her old telephone number from back when they were together. These thousands of days later, he had remembered.

CarrollBlog 3.11

One night at a hotel bar in Texas, someone told me the story of a man who for years made audio recordings of all his favorite sounds: trains passing through town at night, wind in the trees, crashing ocean waves, fire crackling in a fireplace, certain birds, rain on the roof... He did it so that if he ever became very sick and incapacitated, he could listen to those sounds to remind himself of the things in life worth loving and holding on to.