The Big Heart by Anne Sexton

“Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.” – From an essay by W. B. Yeats

Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have:
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise,
Joan, Marie, Dawn,
Arlene, Father Dunne,
and all in their short lives
give to me repeatedly,
in the way the sea
places its many fingers on the shore,
again and again
and they know me,
they help me unravel,
they listen with ears made of conch shells,
they speak back with the wine of the best region.
They are my staff.
They comfort me.

They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in—
all in comes the fury of love

(Raising e to an imaginary power produces rotation around a unit circle in the complex plane, according to Euler’s formula. How? Magic, as far as I can tell. But apparently it’s true).

(from the blog of stuart riffle)

the distance that separates me from myself suffices to cure me from the judgement of others.  (antonin artaud anthology)

i am most faithless when i most am true.  (edna st. vincent millay’s ‘oh, think not i am faithless to a vow!’)

reading about the golgi method, or black reaction, in neuroscience, which allowed a middle ground between seeing all black versus all gray.  surely there is a decent metaphor here to be used in a poem or short story.

Life is a long lesson in humility. -James M. Barrie, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright (1860-1937)
Yo, you girls be sportin’ mad humbility in the corner ova here.  -drunk snugs patron (sometime after that)

ideas worth trying:  don’t ignore the ridiculous in yourself, pick it up and put it under a light and stare at it, until no one knows your flaws better than you do.  don’t trick yourself into thinking you’re smarter or more enlightened or a better person; in my experience those who think so are the farthest from it.  and most of all, don’t ever stop questioning everything you knew yesterday, don’t ever settle into some inflexible way that you see the world, or all you’ll see is the model you made for it, and none of the infinite rest that is going on outside of it.  only once you accept that you’re a baby, an idiot, a hopeless clueless fuck, can you really begin to see truth in anything.

apparently aristotle thought that the brain was just a massive cooling system, to regulate all that hot explosive emotion of the heart.  if we’re talking about the brain as the post-sorted and filtered consciousness part of the brain then yeah, that makes sense.

speaking of cooling systems, my car no longer has one.

yesterday, when watching a video of african parrots speaking, a friend mentioned that feral cats don’t meow in nature…cats are natural imitators, they shape shift their language for the ones they are around, in an attempt at empathy and understanding.  so the mewing is just what humans sound like to them, compared to other species.  so the next time a cat is meowing, remember that she is not just talking to herself, she is speaking with you in mind, like you would choose the native language of a particular person in the room whom you wanted to hear you.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him. -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)

are two of me writing this?