NogaNote:

1. Just something I found in my files and thought was worth sharing. It could not get any more pertinent than this, in the anguished crucible of war, politics, ethics, friendships and loves in which I find myself these days.

To anyone who is interested, I recommend reading the whole 28 verses.

The Twenty-Eight Stations of the Heart / A.S.Kline
1.

To desire, desiring what can only be desired, what
desire destroys, no longer desiring,
ever, and never, achieved, desirable.

2.

To delight in anticipation, delight, in security, be
happy, in other’s happiness, lose
self, in another self, celebrate being.

3.

To make the other, self, to love self embodied
in other, from words, thoughts, make
in the semblance of other.

4.

To remake, refashion, confuse, construct
the other as greater, as what conforms
to the image, the dream, the desire.

5.
To find the one perfect place, time, other
and then to be there, in the place, in the time,
not to miss in anticipation, expectancy
in uncertainty or regret, but to know.
6.

To see what is loved in things, places, times,
symbols, radiant fires, echoing radiant thought,
external analogues, that outer world
as image of what is inner.

7.

To desire to be desired, think to be thought,
attend, to be attended to, seek to be sought,
rehearse the other as self, the self as the other.


http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/ASKpoetry/fromthemountain.htm#_Toc481055303


2. I bought a DVD for my six-year old daughter of a filmed theatre production of Cinderella. It’s a musical and it's just a wee bit too sophisticated for her understanding. Or so I thought. She seems to enjoy it. It takes place in medieval Venice. The prince shows up, his eyes covered in a mask. After he meets Cinderella, he takes off the mask. My daughter tells me: He looked more handsome and interesting in a mask!

Why am I telling you this? Because it's one of those small nuggets that intrigue, charm and send me off into a ramble. I don't know how to define it. I just know what it is when I hear or read it...

Maybe I found it interesting because I realized, when she said it, that sometimes masked people are a better proposition than unmasked ones. And it's kind of impossible to come to terms with the unmasked when you put your trust in the masked person. There is something in you resists the reality.

And what does it mean, anyway, the mask? What is it? Who is to say that this is the false and the unmasked it the real?

"The Jews believe that the soul comes to inhabit the body at the moment of birth. Until then, until the image of itself becomes flesh, it pursues its crystal clear pattern, untied. Wave function of life scattered down to one clear face. How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much". (Gut Symmetries, Jeannette Winterson)