scrapofpaper | men are blind at night, and the dogs under black skies threaded with light (Reply)

"Somewhat overly legibly, I wrote on a sheet of paper, 'We're held up indefinitely by the parade. We're going to find a phone and have a cold drink somewhere. Will you join us?' I folded the paper once, then handed it to the Matron of Honor, who opened it, read it, and then handed it to the tiny old man. He read it, grinning, and then looked at me and wagged his head up and down several times vehemently. I thought for an instant that this was the full and perfectly eloquent extent of his reply, but he suddenly motioned to me with his hand, and I gathered that he wanted me to pass him my pad and pencil. I did so--without looking over at the Matron of Honor, from whom great waves of impatience were rising. The old man adjusted the pad and pencil on his lap with the greatest care, then sat for a moment, pencil poised, in obvious concentration. Then the pencil began, very unsteadily, to move. An 'i' was dotted. And then both pad and pencil were returned to me, with a marvelously cordial extra wag of the head. He had written, in letters that had not quite jelled yet, the single word 'Delighted.' The Matron of Honor, reading over my shoulder, gave a sound faintly like a snort, but I quickly looked over at the great writer and tried to show by my expression that all of us in the car knew a poem when we saw one, and were grateful."
--J.D. Salinger, "Raise High the Roof Beam"

"It was as though love were a wine-bearer, filling the cups of their hearts to the brim; they drank whatever was poured for them and grew drunk without understanding why."
--Reza Aslan, No god but God

"What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be."
--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

"Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic."
--Aldous Huxley

"At any given moment, our mind is overstuffed with disparate sensations and fleeting thoughts; our different hemispheres want different things and distinct blobs of brain pump out distinct emotions. Why, then, do we feel like a unified person? Why do I feel like 'Jonah' and not like a collection of random and stray neural emanations? Because we tell ourselves a story. Just as a novelist creates a narrative, we create a sense of being. The self, in this sense, is our work of art, a fiction created by the mind in order to make sense of its own fragments."
--Jonah Lehrer

"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today."
-–Lawrence Krauss

"Sound of a Body Falling off a Bridge"
I can tell you there is no word for this
in any language. I've asked

and everyone seems to confirm
its translatability.

Feet shuffling off a stone pillar-
simple, but not easy. A young tree

fracturing under the sudden weight-
exactly how one imagines it.

And somewhere between shuffle and fracture-
the silence of Scott Koch's body

falling off the Normanwood Bridge,
which is also the silence of stars.

~

They write their arc over faces
of stones staring up from riverbed,

and if you were a swarm of mayflies
hatching in the pre-dawn, coal-dark

aubade of a Susquehanna morning,
or if you were a freshman in college

and bought some pot and drove out
with friends to gaze at stars,

you would know stars make a hell of a racket.
Like time, like death,

they scrawl their inscrutable marks
of light.

~

Say you are not a hatch of insects
or one of those kids wrecked and lovely,

their skins' leaf-awkward sheen.
Though if you were, you'd be lost

in a fury of living and dying.

So you'll have to trust the words
for the way his face twitched, went

stone-white, for how unbeautiful
his body comprehended night, words

for a breath untaken, the arrested
air in his lungs.

~

I give them to you piecemeal,
hand over hand, as if in aftermath

we build a city of bridges. I press each
against your mouth. They taste of salt.

They fall into place. They are beginning
to mean less and less. They only do

what they do. For anything else, you'll need
something like a life, or memory-

car tires ticking over a bridge, wheel
of a flower cart knocking cobblestone,

seams, separations.
--James Hoch