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Name: Andrew
Birthday: 4/6/1979
Interests: Shotokan karate, brazilian jiu-jitsu (if I had more time), tennis, reading, running, automotive, outdoors, hiking, classical music, quirky things.
Expertise: Consuming large amounts of food at a sitting. Hence the need for lots of exercise. Heh.
Industry: Computers (Software)
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  SonOfMencius
Yahoo:  sonofmencius
Member Since:
4/2/2002
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| Ngày Thương Khó (Day of Difficult Love)How deep the Father's love for us,
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure
How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the chosen One,
Bring many sons to glory
Behold the Man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice,
Call out among the scoffers
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I knoww that it is finished
I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection
Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom
~ Stuart Townend
| | |
| Life begins at 30Ahem.
(Sadly I don't have anything insightful to put here ... maybe a reference to Psalm 30, or better yet Proverbs 30, eh?) | | |
| The Day I Met DanielMost of these types of
forwards I don't usually like to pass along b/c they're somewhat made
up and designed to make us feel good about ourselves or our faith, yet
this one (apparently over a decade old) reminded me that few fictional
accounts can surpass the wonder of His truth (and it's been vetted by
Snopes.com so ... =P):
http://www.snopes.com/glurge/daniel.aspText is pasted below for easy reading: TO MEET SUCH A
MAN
I sat, with two friends, in the picture window of a quaint
restaurant
just off the corner of the town-square. The food and the company
were
both especially good that day.
As we talked, my attention was
drawn outside, across the street.
There, walking into town, was a man who
appeared to be carrying all
his worldly goods on his back. He was carrying, a
well-worn sign that
read, "I will work for food." My heart sank.
I
brought him to the attention of my friends and noticed that others
around us
had stopped eating to focus on him. Heads moved in a mixture
of sadness and
disbelief.
We continued with our meal, but his image lingered in my mind.
We
finished our meal and went our separate ways. I had errands to do
and
quickly set out to accomplish them. I glanced toward the town
square,
looking somewhat halfheartedly for the strange visitor. I was
fearful,
knowing that seeing him again would call some response. I
drove
through town and saw nothing of him. I made some purchases at a
store
and got back in my car.
Deep within me, the Spirit of God kept
speaking to me: "Don't go back
to the office until you've at least driven
once more around the
square."
Then with some hesitancy, I headed back
into town. As I turned the
square's third corner, I saw him. He was standing
on the steps of the
store front church, going through his sack.
I
stopped and looked; feeling both compelled to speak to him, yet
wanting to
drive on. The empty parking space on the corner seemed to
be a sign from God:
an invitation to park. I pulled in, got out and
approached the town's newest
visitor.
"Looking for the pastor?" I asked.
"Not really," he
replied, "just resting."
"Have you eaten today?"
"Oh, I ate
something early this morning."
"Would you like to have lunch with
me?"
" Do you have some work I could do for you?"
"No work," I
replied. "I commute here to work from the city, but I
would like to take you
to lunch."
"Sure," he replied with a smile.
As he began to gather
his things, I asked some surface questions.
Where you headed?"
"St.
Louis "
"Where you from?"
"Oh, all over; mostly Florida
"
"How long you been walking?"
"Fourteen years," came the
reply.
I knew I had met someone unusual. We sat across from each other in
the
same restaur ant I had left earlier. His face was weathered
slightly
beyond his 38 years. His eyes were dark yet clear, and he spoke
with
an eloquence and articulation that was startling. He removed
his
jacket to reveal a bright red T-shirt that said, "Jesus is The
Never
Ending Story."
Then Daniel's story began to unfold. He had seen
rough times early in
life. He'd made some wrong choices and reaped the
consequences.
Fourteen years earlier, while backpacking across the country,
he had
stopped on the beach in Daytona. He tried to hire on with some men
who
were putting up a large tent and some equipment. A concert,
he
thought.
He was hired, but the tent would not house a concert but
revival
services, and in those services he saw life more clearly. He gave
his
life over to God.
"Nothing's been the same since," he said, "I
felt the Lord telling me
to keep walking, and so I did, some 14 years
now."
"Ever think of stopping?" I asked.
"Oh, once in a while,
when it seems to get the best of me But God has
given me this calling. I give
out Bibles. That's what's in my sack. I
work to buy food and Bibles, and I
give them out when His Spirit
leads."
I sat amazed. My homeless friend
was not homeless. He was on a mission
and lived this way by choice. The
question burned inside for a moment
and then I asked: "What's it
like?"
"What?"
"To walk into a town carrying all your things on
your back and to show
your sign?"
"Oh, it was humiliating at first.
People would stare and make
comments. Once someone tossed a piece of
half-eaten bread and made a
gesture that certainly didn't make me feel
welcome. But then it became
humbling to realize that God was using me to
touch lives and change
people's concepts of other folks like me."
My
concept was changing, too. We finished our dessert and gathered his
things.
Just outside the door, he paused. He turned to me and said,
"Come ye blessed
of my Father and inherit the kingdom I've prepared
for you. For when I was
hungry you gave me food, when I was thirsty
you gave me drink, a stranger and
you took me in."
I felt as if we were on holy ground. "Could you use
another Bible?" I asked.
He said he preferred a certain translation. It
traveled well and was
not too heavy. It was also his personal favorite.
"I've read through
it 14 times," he said.
"I'm not sure we've got one
of those, but let's stop by our church and
see" I was able to find my new
friend a Bible that would do well, and
he seemed very grateful.
"Where
are you headed from here?" I asked.
"Well, I found this little map on the
back of this amusement park coupon."
"Are you hoping to hire on there for
awhile?"
"No, I just figure I should go there. I figure someone under
that star
right there needs a Bible, so that's where I'm going
next."
He smiled, and the warmth of his spirit radiated the sincerity of
his
mission. I drove him back to the town-square where we'd met two
hours
earlier, and as we drove, it started raining. We parked and
unloaded
his things.
"Would you sign my autograph book?" he asked. "I
like to keep messages
from folks I meet."
I wrote in his little book
that his commitment to his calling had
touched my life. I encouraged him to
stay strong. And I left him with
a verse of scripture from Jeremiah, "I know
the plans I have for you,
declared the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to
harm you; Plans to
give you a future and a hope."
"Thanks, man," he
said. "I know we just met and we're really just
strangers, but I love
you."
"I know," I said, "I love you, too." "The Lord is
good!"
"Yes, He is. How long has it been since someone hugged you?" I
asked.
"A long time," he replied
And so on the busy street corner
in the drizzling rain, my new friend
and I embraced, and I felt deep inside
that I had been changed. He put
his things on his back, smiled his winning
smile and said, "See you in
the New Jerusalem."
"I'll be there!" was
my reply.
He began his journey again. He headed away with his sign
dangling from
his bedroll and pack of Bibles. He stopped, turned and said,
"When you
see something that makes you think of me, will you pray for
me?"
"You bet," I shouted back, "God bless."
"God bless." And that
was the last I saw of him.
Late that evening as I left my office, the
wind blew strong. The cold
front had settled hard upon the town. I bundled up
and hurried to my
car. As I sat back and reached for the emergency brake, I
saw them...
a pair of well-worn brown work gloves neatly laid over the length
of
the handle. I picked them up and thought of my friend and wondered
if
his hands would stay warm that night without them.
Then I
remembered his words: "If you see something that makes you
think of me, will
you pray for me?"
Today his gloves lie on my desk in my office. They help
me to see the
world and its people in a new way, and they help me remember
those two
hours with my unique friend and to pray for his ministry. "See you
in
the New Jerusalem," he said. Yes, Daniel, I know I will...
"I shall
pass this way but once. Therefore, any good that I can do or
any kindness
that I can show, let me do it now, for I shall not pass
this way
again."
GOD BLESS YOU MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY!!!
| | |
| How to Talk to Girls at PartiesAnd here I thought it was a guide ... 
How to Talk to Girls at Parties
by Neil Gaiman
"Come on," said Vic. "It'll be great."
"No, it won't," I said, although I'd lost this fight hours ago, and I knew it.
"It'll be brilliant," said Vic, for the hundredth time. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" He grinned with white teeth.
We both attended an all-boys' school in south London. While it would be
a lie to say that we had no experience with girls -- Vic seemed to have
had many girlfriends, while I had kissed three of my sister's friends
-- it would, I think, be perfectly true to say that we both chiefly
spoke to, interacted with, and only truly understood, other boys. Well,
I did, anyway. It's hard to speak for someone else, and I've not seen
Vic for thirty years. I'm not sure that I would know what to say to him
now if I did.
We were walking the backstreets that used to twine in a grimy
maze behind East Croydon station -- a friend had told Vic about a
party, and Vic was determined to go whether I liked it or not, and I
didn't. But my parents were away that week at a conference, and I was
Vic's guest at his house, so I was trailing along beside him.
"It'll be the same as it always is," I said. "After an hour
you'll be off somewhere snogging the prettiest girl at the party, and
I'll be in the kitchen listening to somebody's mum going on about
politics or poetry or something."
"You just have to talk to them," he said. "I think it's
probably that road at the end here." He gestured cheerfully, swinging
the bag with the bottle in it.
"Don't you know?"
"Alison gave me directions and I wrote them on a bit of paper, but I left it on the hall table. S'okay. I can find it."
"How?" Hope welled slowly up inside me.
"We walk down the road," he said, as if speaking to an idiot child. "And we look for the party. Easy."
I looked, but saw no party: just narrow houses with rusting
cars or bikes in their concreted front gardens; and the dusty glass
fronts of newsagents, which smelled of alien spices and sold everything
from birthday cards and secondhand comics to the kind of magazines that
were so pornographic that they were sold already sealed in plastic
bags. I had been there when Vic had slipped one of those magazines
beneath his sweater, but the owner caught him on the pavement outside
and made him give it back.
We reached the end of the road and turned into a narrow street
of terraced houses. Everything looked very still and empty in the
Summer's evening. "It's all right for you," I said. "They fancy you.
You don't actually have to talk to them." It was true: one urchin grin
from Vic and he could have his pick of the room.
"Nah. S'not like that. You've just got to talk."
The times I had kissed my sister's friends I had not spoken to
them. They had been around while my sister was off doing something
elsewhere, and they had drifted into my orbit, and so I had kissed
them. I do not remember any talking. I did not know what to say to
girls, and I told him so.
They're just girls," said Vic. "They don't come from another planet."
As we followed the curve of the road around, my hopes that the
party would prove unfindable began to fade: a low pulsing noise, music
muffled by walls and doors, could be heard from a house up ahead. It
was eight in the evening, not that early if you aren't yet sixteen, and
we weren't. Not quite.
I had parents who liked to know where I was, but I don't think
Vic's parents cared that much. He was the youngest of five boys. That
in itself seemed magical to me: I merely had two sisters, both younger
than I was, and I felt both unique and lonely. I had wanted a brother
as far back as I could remember. When I turned thirteen, I stopped
wishing on falling stars or first stars, but back when I did, a brother
was what I had wished for.
We went up the garden path, crazy paving leading us past a
hedge and a solitary rosebush to a pebble- dashed facade. We rang the
doorbell, and the door was opened by a girl. I could not have told you
how old she was, which was one of the things about girls I had begun to
hate: when you start out as kids you're just boys and girls, going
through time at the same speed, and you're all five, or seven, or
eleven, together. And then one day there's a lurch and the girls just
sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you, and they know all
about everything, and they have periods and breasts and makeup and
God-only-knew-what-else -- for I certainly didn't. The diagrams in
biology textbooks were no substitute for being, in a very real sense,
young adults. And the girls of our age were.
Vic and I weren't young adults, and I was beginning to suspect
that even when I started needing to shave every day, instead of once
every couple of weeks, I would still be way behind.
The girl said, "Hello?"
Vic said, "We're friends of Alison's." We had met Alison, all
freckles and orange hair and a wicked smile, in Hamburg, on a German
exchange. The exchange organizers had sent some girls with us, from a
local girls' school, to balance the sexes. The girls, our age, more or
less, were raucous and funny, and had more or less adult boyfriends
with cars and jobs and motorbikes and -- in the case of one girl with
crooked teeth and a raccoon coat, who spoke to me about it sadly at the
end of a party in Hamburg, in, of course, the kitchen -- a wife and
kids.
"She isn't here," said the girl at the door. "No Alison."
"Not to worry," said Vic, with an easy grin. "I'm Vic. This is
Enn." A beat, and then the girl smiled back at him. Vic had a bottle of
white wine in a plastic bag, removed from his parents' kitchen cabinet.
"Where should I put this, then?"
She stood out of the way, letting us enter. "There's a kitchen
in the back," she said. "Put it on the table there, with the other
bottles." She had golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful. The
hall was dim in the twilight, but I could see that she was beautiful.
"What's your name, then?" said Vic.
She told him it was Stella, and he grinned his crooked white
grin and told her that that had to be the prettiest name he had ever
heard. Smooth bastard. And what was worse was that he said it like he
meant it.
Vic headed back to drop off the wine in the kitchen, and I
looked into the front room, where the music was coming from. There were
people dancing in there. Stella walked in, and she started to dance,
swaying to the music all alone, and I watched her.
This was during the early days of punk. On our own record
players we would play the Adverts and the Jam, the Stranglers and the
Clash and the Sex Pistols. At other people's parties you'd hear ELO or
10cc or even Roxy Music. Maybe some Bowie, if you were lucky. During
the German exchange, the only LP that we had all been able to agree on
was Neil Young's Harvest, and his song "Heart of Gold" had threaded through the trip like a refrain: I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold. . . .
The music playing in that front room wasn't anything I recognized.
It sounded a bit like a German electronic pop group called Kraftwerk,
and a bit like an LP I'd been given for my last birthday, of strange
sounds made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The music had a beat,
though, and the half- dozen girls in that room were moving gently to
it, although I only looked at Stella. She shone.
Vic pushed past me, into the room. He was holding a can of
lager. "There's booze back in the kitchen," he told me. He wandered
over to Stella and he began to talk to her. I couldn't hear what they
were saying over the music, but I knew that there was no room for me in
that conversation.
I didn't like beer, not back then. I went off to see if there
was something I wanted to drink. On the kitchen table stood a large
bottle of Coca-Cola, and I poured myself a plastic tumblerful, and I
didn't dare say anything to the pair of girls who were talking in the
underlit kitchen. They were animated and utterly lovely. Each of them
had very black skin and glossy hair and movie star clothes, and their
accents were foreign, and each of them was out of my league.
I wandered, Coke in hand.
The house was deeper than it looked, larger and more complex
than the two- up two- down model I had imagined. The rooms were
underlit -- I doubt there was a bulb of more than 40 watts in the
building -- and each room I went into was inhabited: in my memory,
inhabited only by girls. I did not go upstairs.
A girl was the only occupant of the conservatory. Her hair was
so fair it was white, and long, and straight, and she sat at the
glass-topped table, her hands clasped together, staring at the garden
outside, and the gathering dusk. She seemed wistful.
"Do you mind if I sit here?" I asked, gesturing with my cup.
She shook her head, and then followed it up with a shrug, to indicate
that it was all the same to her. I sat down.
Vic walked past the conservatory door. He was talking to
Stella, but he looked in at me, sitting at the table, wrapped in
shyness and awkwardness, and he opened and closed his hand in a parody
of a speaking mouth. Talk. Right.
"Are you from around here?" I asked the girl.
She shook her head. She wore a low-cut silvery top, and I tried not to stare at the swell of her breasts.
I said, "What's your name? I'm Enn."
"Wain's Wain," she said, or something that sounded like it. "I'm a second."
"That's uh. That's a different name."
She fixed me with huge, liquid eyes. "It indicates that my
progenitor was also Wain, and that I am obliged to report back to her.
I may not breed."
"Ah. Well. Bit early for that anyway, isn't it?"
She unclasped her hands, raised them above the table, spread
her fingers. "You see?" The little finger on her left hand was crooked,
and it bifurcated at the top, splitting into two smaller fingertips. A
minor deformity. "When I was finished a decision was needed. Would I be
retained, or eliminated? I was fortunate that the decision was with me.
Now, I travel, while my more perfect sisters remain at home in stasis.
They were firsts. I am a second.
Soon I must return to Wain, and tell her all I have seen. All my impressions of this place of yours."
"I don't actually live in Croydon," I said. "I don't come from
here." I wondered if she was American. I had no idea what she was
talking about.
"As you say," she agreed, "neither of us comes from here." She
folded her six- fingered left hand beneath her right, as if tucking it
out of sight. "I had expected it to be bigger, and cleaner, and more
colorful. But still, it is a jewel."
She yawned, covered her mouth with her right hand, only for a
moment, before it was back on the table again. "I grow weary of the
journeying, and I wish sometimes that it would end. On a street in Rio
at Carnival, I saw them on a bridge, golden and tall and insect-eyed
and winged, and elated I almost ran to greet them, before I saw that
they were only people in costumes. I said to Hola Colt, 'Why do they
try so hard to look like us?' and Hola Colt replied, 'Because they hate
themselves, all shades of pink and brown, and so small.' It is what I
experience, even me, and I am not grown. It is like a world of
children, or of elves." Then she smiled, and said, "It was a good thing
they could not any of them see Hola Colt."
"Um," I said, "do you want to dance?"
She shook her head immediately. "It is not permitted," she
said. "I can do nothing that might cause damage to property. I am
Wain's."
"Would you like something to drink, then?"
"Water," she said.
I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another Coke, and
filled a cup with water from the tap. From the kitchen back to the
hall, and from there into the conservatory, but now it was quite empty.
I wondered if the girl had gone to the toilet, and if she
might change her mind about dancing later. I walked back to the front
room and stared in. The place was filling up. There were more girls
dancing, and several lads I didn't know, who looked a few years older
than me and Vic. The lads and the girls all kept their distance, but
Vic was holding Stella's hand as they danced, and when the song ended
he put an arm around her, casually, almost proprietorially, to make
sure that nobody else cut in.
I wondered if the girl I had been talking to in the
conservatory was now upstairs, as she did not appear to be on the
ground floor.
I walked into the living room, which was across the hall from
the room where the people were dancing, and I sat down on the sofa.
There was a girl sitting there already. She had dark hair, cut short
and spiky, and a nervous manner.
Talk, I thought. "Um, this mug of water's going spare," I told her, "if you want it?"
She nodded, and reached out her hand and took the mug,
extremely carefully, as if she were unused to taking things, as if she
could trust neither her vision nor her hands.
"I love being a tourist," she said, and smiled hesitantly. She
had a gap between her two front teeth, and she sipped the tap water as
if she were an adult sipping a fine wine. "The last tour, we went to
sun, and we swam in sunfire pools with the whales. We heard their
histories and we shivered in the chill of the outer places, then we
swam deepward where the heat churned and comforted us.
I wanted to go back. This time, I wanted it. There was so much I had not seen. Instead we came to world. Do you like it?"
"Like what?"
She gestured vaguely to the room -- the sofa, the armchairs, the curtains, the unused gas fire.
"It's all right, I suppose."
"I told them I did not wish to visit world," she said. "My
parent-teacher was unimpressed. 'You will have much to learn,' it told
me. I said, 'I could learn more in sun, again. Or in the deeps. Jessa
spun webs between galaxies. I want to do that.'
"But there was no reasoning with it, and I came to world.
Parent-teacher engulfed me, and I was here, embodied in a decaying lump
of meat hanging on a frame of calcium. As I incarnated I felt things
deep inside me, fluttering and pumping and squishing. It was my first
experience with pushing air through the mouth, vibrating the vocal
cords on the way, and I used it to tell parent-teacher that I wished
that I would die, which it acknowledged was the inevitable exit
strategy from world."
There were black worry beads wrapped around her wrist, and she
fiddled with them as she spoke. "But knowledge is there, in the meat,"
she said, "and I am resolved to learn from it."
We were sitting close at the center of the sofa now. I decided
I should put an arm around her, but casually. I would extend my arm
along the back of the sofa and eventually sort of creep it down, almost
imperceptibly, until it was touching her. She said, "The thing with the
liquid in the eyes, when the world blurs. Nobody told me, and I still
do not understand. I have touched the folds of the Whisper and pulsed
and flown with the tachyon swans, and I still do not understand."
She wasn't the prettiest girl there, but she seemed nice
enough, and she was a girl, anyway. I let my arm slide down a little,
tentatively, so that it made contact with her back, and she did not
tell me to take it away.
Vic called to me then, from the doorway. He was standing with
his arm around Stella, protectively, waving at me. I tried to let him
know, by shaking my head, that I was onto something, but he called my
name and, reluctantly, I got up from the sofa and walked over to the
door. "What?"
"Er. Look. The party," said Vic, apologetically. "It's not the
one I thought it was. I've been talking to Stella and I figured it out.
Well, she sort of explained it to me. We're at a different party."
"Christ. Are we in trouble? Do we have to go?"
Stella shook her head. He leaned down and kissed her, gently,
on the lips. "You're just happy to have me here, aren't you darlin'?"
"You know I am," she told him.
He looked from her back to me, and he smiled his white smile:
roguish, lovable, a little bit Artful Dodger, a little bit wide- boy
Prince Charming. "Don't worry. They're all tourists here anyway. It's a
foreign exchange thing, innit? Like when we all went to Germany."
"It is?"
"Enn. You got to talk to them. And that means you got to listen to them, too. You understand?"
"I did. I already talked to a couple of them."
"You getting anywhere?"
"I was till you called me over."
"Sorry about that. Look, I just wanted to fill you in. Right?"
And he patted my arm and he walked away with Stella. Then, together, the two of them went up the stairs.
Understand me, all the girls at that party, in the twilight,
were lovely; they all had perfect faces but, more important than that,
they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it
is that makes a beauty something more than a shop window dummy.
Stella was the most lovely of any of them, but she, of course,
was Vic's, and they were going upstairs together, and that was just how
things would always be.
There were several people now sitting on the sofa, talking to
the gap- toothed girl. Someone told a joke, and they all laughed. I
would have had to push my way in there to sit next to her again, and it
didn't look like she was expecting me back, or cared that I had gone,
so I wandered out into the hall. I glanced in at the dancers, and found
myself wondering where the music was coming from. I couldn't see a
record player or speakers.
From the hall I walked back to the kitchen.
Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an excuse to be
there, and, on the good side, at this party I couldn't see any signs of
someone's mum. I inspected the various bottles and cans on the kitchen
table, then I poured a half an inch of Pernod into the bottom of my
plastic cup, which I filled to the top with Coke. I dropped in a couple
of ice cubes and took a sip, relishing the sweet-shop tang of the
drink.
"What's that you're drinking?" A girl's voice.
"It's Pernod," I told her. "It tastes like aniseed balls, only
it's alcoholic." I didn't say that I only tried it because I'd heard
someone in the crowd ask for a Pernod on a live Velvet Underground LP.
"Can I have one?" I poured another Pernod, topped it off with
Coke, passed it to her. Her hair was a coppery auburn, and it tumbled
around her head in ringlets. It's not a hair style you see much now,
but you saw it a lot back then.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Triolet," she said.
"Pretty name," I told her, although I wasn't sure that it was. She was pretty, though.
"It's a verse form," she said, proudly. "Like me."
"You're a poem?"
She smiled, and looked down and away, perhaps bashfully. Her
profile was almost flat -- a perfect Grecian nose that came down from
her forehead in a straight line. We did Antigone in the school theater
the previous year. I was the messenger who brings Creon the news of
Antigone's death. We wore half-masks that made us look like that. I
thought of that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and I
thought of Barry Smith's drawings of women in the Conan comics: five
years later I would have thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris
and Lizzie Siddall. But I was only fifteen then.
"You're a poem?" I repeated.
She chewed her lower lip. "If you want. I am a poem, or I am a
pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea."
"Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?"
"What's your name?"
"Enn."
"So you are Enn," she said. "And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?"
"But they aren't different things. I mean, they aren't
contradictory." It was a word I had read many times but never said
aloud before that night, and I put the stresses in the wrong places. Contradictory.
She wore a thin dress made of a white, silky fabric. Her eyes were a
pale green, a color that would now make me think of tinted contact
lenses; but this was thirty years ago; things were different then. I
remember wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I was sure
that they were in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it
almost hurt.
Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were talking
nonsense, even if her name wasn't really Triolet (my generation had not
been given hippie names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the
Moons, they were only six, seven, eight years old back then). She said,
"We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem,
to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we
said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our
dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live
forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to
wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and
bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time
when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be
decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again."
"And then what happened?"
She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was as if she
stared out at me from her own Antigone half-mask; but as if her pale
green eyes were just a different, deeper, part of the mask. "You cannot
hear a poem without it changing you," she told me. "They heard it, and
it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms
becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently
transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations
becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born
already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these
things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for
them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and
walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known."
I edged closer to her, so I could feel my leg pressing against hers.
She seemed to welcome it: she put her hand on my arm, affectionately, and I felt a smile spreading across my face.
"There are places that we are welcomed," said Triolet, "and
places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease,
something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does
contagion end and art begin?"
"I don't know," I said, still smiling. I could hear the
unfamiliar music as it pulsed and scattered and boomed in the front
room.
She leaned into me then and -- I suppose it was a kiss. . . .
I suppose. She pressed her lips to my lips, anyway, and then,
satisfied, she pulled back, as if she had now marked me as her own.
"Would you like to hear it?" she asked, and I nodded, unsure
what she was offering me, but certain that I needed anything she was
willing to give me.
She began to whisper something in my ear. It's the strangest
thing about poetry -- you can tell it's poetry, even if you don't speak
the language. You can hear Homer's Greek without understanding a word,
and you still know it's poetry. I've heard Polish poetry, and Inuit
poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like
that. I didn't know the language, but her words washed through me,
perfect, and in my mind's eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and
people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every
syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.
Perhaps I kissed her properly. I don't remember. I know I wanted to.
And then Vic was shaking me violently. "Come on!" he was shouting. "Quickly. Come on!"
In my head I began to come back from a thousand miles away.
"Idiot. Come on. Just get a move on," he said, and he swore at me. There was fury in his voice.
For the first time that evening I recognized one of the songs
being played in the front room. A sad saxophone wail followed by a
cascade of liquid chords, a man's voice singing cut-up lyrics about the
sons of the silent age. I wanted to stay and hear the song.
She said, "I am not finished. There is yet more of me."
"Sorry love," said Vic, but he wasn't smiling any longer.
"There'll be another time," and he grabbed me by the elbow and he
twisted and pulled, forcing me from the room. I did not resist. I knew
from experience that Vic could beat the stuffing out me if he got it
into his head to do so. He wouldn't do it unless he was upset or angry,
but he was angry now.
Out into the front hall. As Vic pulled open the door, I looked
back one last time, over my shoulder, hoping to see Triolet in the
doorway to the kitchen, but she was not there. I saw Stella, though, at
the top of the stairs. She was staring down at Vic, and I saw her face.
This all happened thirty years ago. I have forgotten much, and
I will forget more, and in the end I will forget everything; yet, if I
have any certainty of life beyond death, it is all wrapped up not in
psalms or hymns, but in this one thing alone: I cannot believe that I
will ever forget that moment, or forget the expression on Stella's face
as she watched Vic hurrying away from her. Even in death I shall
remember that.
Her clothes were in disarray, and there was makeup smudged across her face, and her eyes --
You wouldn't want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that.
We ran then, me and Vic, away from the party and the tourists
and the twilight, ran as if a lightning storm was on our heels, a mad
helter-skelter dash down the confusion of streets, threading through
the maze, and we did not look back, and we did not stop until we could
not breathe; and then we stopped and panted, unable to run any longer.
We were in pain. I held on to a wall, and Vic threw up, hard and long,
into the gutter.
He wiped his mouth.
"She wasn't a--" He stopped.
He shook his head.
Then he said, "You know . . . I think there's a thing. When
you've gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn't
be you anymore? You'd be the person who'd done that? The places you
just can't go. . . . I think that happened to me tonight."
I thought I knew what he was saying. "Screw her, you mean?" I said.
He rammed a knuckle hard against my temple, and twisted it
violently. I wondered if I was going to have to fight him -- and lose
-- but after a moment he lowered his hand and moved away from me,
making a low, gulping noise.
I looked at him curiously, and I realized that he was crying:
his face was scarlet; snot and tears ran down his cheeks. Vic was
sobbing in the street, as unselfconsciously and heartbreakingly as a
little boy.
He walked away from me then, shoulders heaving, and he hurried
down the road so he was in front of me and I could no longer see his
face. I wondered what had occurred in that upstairs room to make him
behave like that, to scare him so, and I could not even begin to guess.
The streetlights came on, one by one; Vic stumbled on ahead,
while I trudged down the street behind him in the dusk, my feet
treading out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could not
properly remember and would never be able to repeat.
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| 現代化Pilfered from another Xanga I read:
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/California/200805/gargan.asp
What does it mean to be Chinese, or Chinese-American?
I thought I'd known at one point ... now ... not so sure.
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