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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476503" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Because I Don't Confront You</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Because I don't confront you<br>doesn't mean this tree <br>doesn't know how to stand up to the wind.<br>If I bend like a river reed in a current<br>I'll still be here<br>long after the current has passed.<br>To the unenlightened it's inconceivable <br>there's nothing to win <br>because both opposites are empty. <br>Take empty from empty it's still empty.<br>No reason to put a gun to your head to check it out.<br>Just because you've got a trigger <br>like the first crescent of the moon <br>doesn't mean you have to pull it.<br>Three for three.<br>Blood and cartridges. <br>Strange lipstick. <br>But you're still banking on the one that's empty. <br>Those that have the power to hurt <br>but will do none.<br>Shakespeare. <br>Sonnet 94.<br>Lonely advice to those who never take it.<br>And it's not hard to imagine <br>better things to do in the world <br>than trade barbs and stingers <br>with third world killer bees. <br>And there's nothing unholier than a holy war. <br>Or a faith that festers <br>because it doesn't know <br>how to clean a wound properly.<br>Even maggots make better nurses than that. <br>And besides <br>as unlikely as it seems at times <br>I'd rather be loved than right. <br>I don't want to lie down with a woman at night<br>like a body count.<br>You say I'm not in touch with reality <br>as if reality were some kind of guillotine <br>you expected me to stick my neck out for <br>swanning on the block. <br>No. <br>I don't stay in touch much <br>with French executioners. <br>But I can see the world as you see it. <br>A snakepit with the occasional apple-tree.<br>You think of reality as a hard medicine <br>you have to wince like a lemon to take<br>but if you ask me <br>the way you put it <br>reality sounds more like a toxin <br>than the antidote to the snake.<br>If the kids don't like it then neither do I. <br>The iodine you pour on things <br>hurts worse than the original scrape.<br>The cure is more delirious than the disease. <br>You see the black door of the prison <br>and you want to paint it pink.<br>You realign the constellations <br>like barbed wire around a concentration camp <br>and reality drives up like the commandant<br>of what you think <br>to announce to the inmates <br>they're in the real world now <br>where iron rules<br>and the watchdogs never sleep. <br>What happy fool <br>bemused by watching his illusions <br>chase their tails<br>and play with snakes <br>is going to turn his delusion in <br>for something as stern as that? <br>An ideologue is someone <br>whose spirit is weaker than their intellect<br>and ideas pack like cholesterol around their hearts<br>and harden like plack on their teeth. <br>Someone who is terminally ideational <br>thinks of reality as a kind of rehabilitation <br>for the rest of us. <br>A man asks for water in a desert of stars. <br>An ideologue offers him bleach<br>as if he were redressing an incorrigible wino<br>for giving up on reality. <br>And when he talks of reform <br>it's like listening to a dvd<br>giving step by step instructions <br>in how to turn a chameleon into an albino.<br>And I see something of the same in you.<br>Ideologues are appalled by the sloppiness of life. <br>They see it as something to organize <br>not something to create.<br>They hate the suggestible mysteries <br>that never quite come into focus. <br>They want to refit the Flying Dutchman <br>with real sails and upgraded astrolabes. <br>They loathe the Uncertainty Principle <br>at work in their atoms and their evolution.<br>They look at beauty as ornamentalism. <br>There's nothing functional about a sunset. <br>Even out in the country <br>I've heard them scolding life <br>for squandering itself on a flower.<br>Wild asters and loosestrife <br>are merely a silly extravagance<br>and there are so many stars at night <br>you'd think life was running a casino. <br>When you tell me I should get in touch with reality <br>I feel I should be looking for some ultimate <br>behind everything <br>some ulterior way of understanding life <br>that illegitimizes everything under my nose <br>as mere phenomena and appearance. <br>The rat behind the arras. <br>The meaning of things <br>that makes things irrelevant <br>as if what my senses perceived <br>were mere wrapping.<br>When I look at things <br>as if there were no inside or out <br>to them or me <br>I see the creative contents <br>and events of a mind <br>that belongs to all of us.<br>And there isn't a thought or a thing <br>that doesn't express the whole of it. <br>Delusion and enlightenment <br>share the same nature I do. <br>The star is as much me <br>as I am the star <br>so when I say the stars have opened my eyes <br>to how exalted you can feel <br>when you're humbled <br>by the sublime lucidity of life<br>my eyes have done as much for them.<br>You want to put life on a diet. <br>And time on a budget. <br>Usually when someone tells me to be realistic <br>I'm talking to a conservative <br>who's in denial about the future. <br>Nature is nurture<br>and no one's ever left the womb <br>but there are available dimensions <br>in the dark backward abysm of time<br>that's been maturing us for the last <br>fourteen and a half billion years <br>out of our own inconceivability <br>like wine <br>not vinegar <br>into this sublime creative collaboration <br>which is the life of the mind. <br>Whatever we create <br>simultaneously and seamlessly creates us.<br>It's a child's drawing. <br>There are no flaws in it. <br>What's unrealistic about a purple sun? <br>Lebanese cochineal shells <br>for the togas of the Roman imperium.<br>The emperor's got no clothes. <br>So you dress him up in your nakedness <br>and paint his portrait in purples and blues<br>and ask Caligula to lend him some shoes.<br>It's a dynamic equilibrium of transformations. <br>It's a living cosmic harmony <br>that's as mystically specific and intimate <br>as a snowflake melting on your arm. <br>The dead branch blossoms <br>like a witching stick <br>whenever it's near water <br>and the magician's wand sheds its skin <br>like serpent-fire on the wind. <br>These things are true too.<br>Anything the Inconceivable <br>does or reveals <br>is always spontaneous<br>because there is no way of predicting it. <br>Every dropp of water<br>that opens itself like an eye<br>in the infinite sea of awareness <br>is merely water watching water<br>shift its shape into fish and trees and humans.<br>The river turns <br>and the zodiacal kings of the Etruscans <br>bow down to Vertumamnis <br>who will grow up to be kidnapped by the Romans <br>and raised as Morpheus the god of dreams.<br>Or Orpheus among the Greeks<br>if he dreams while he's awake. <br>If life weren't creatively inconceivable <br>we couldn't have been born into it <br>to conceive of the unthinkable. <br>It's the empty cup that pours the wine. <br>It's the mystery <br>that all our answers are looking for.<br>When I look at the stars <br>though they're arranged in constellations <br>to me they are never endlessly one thing <br>but radiant with beginnings <br>going off in all directions at once.<br>You speak of reality <br>as if it were the negative <br>of a photographic starmap <br>elapsed by time. <br>You're an equatorial mount with clock drive <br>and a colour-blind spectrograph <br>where your third eye used to be. <br>Thirteen ways of looking at the same blackbird.<br>Meaning infinite.<br>And they're all true.<br>I am. <br>And so are you.<br>And what's a blackbird<br>if it isn't the primordial atom <br>the many in the one<br>nuclear fusion <br>the muse and the inspiration <br>all the combinations and permutations <br>of the way it will continue to be seen anew<br>in every moment <br>as if it will always be the beginning of creation? <br>Six trillion miles in a light-year. <br>And Proxima Centauri 4.7 light years away.<br>The next star over unfencible time and space. <br>You look at the insurmountability of these distances<br>and you think that's how far it is from here to there <br>and your isolation brings you to the precipice of despair <br>when your omnidirectional self<br>looks creation in the face <br>and mistakes humility for insignificance everywhere. <br>And you say to yourself <br>there's no point or place <br>for a period <br>at the end of an infinite sentence.<br>And you make a brutal discipline of your irrelevance <br>and call it reality<br>and the dead begin to legislate for the living <br>and the blind for those who can see. <br>Van Gogh said it best in a letter to Theo. <br>Some people live their lives<br>as if they were walking to the stars. <br>Some take the train. <br>And some fly.<br>For the birds <br>nothing's ever further away <br>than their wingspan <br>as it is with fish and fins.<br>And turning the jewel in the light<br>and looking at its infinite flashes of insight <br>without the glass eye <br>of a Cyclopean appraiser<br>cut it up atomically<br>like a butcher or a surgeon<br>deciding on where to make the next incision <br> I would add that like a star <br>even after billions of years on the road <br>whose light never really leaves home <br>because everywhere it goes <br>it's in the doorway <br>on the threshold<br>because there's no discontinuity <br>no distinction <br>no severance <br>between a ray of light and its source <br>between a way of life and its course <br>there's a fourth kind of pilgrim <br>who just has to look up at the stars<br>or the sun and the moon <br>or Venus luxuriating in the sunset <br>if he wants to shine down on everything.<br>So if I don't confront you like a bottom-feeder <br>on the floor of your thinktank<br>rising to the surface<br>like a scumbag to high public office <br>it's not because I'm a coward or a fool.<br>It's just that I'm enrolled <br>in this funny kind of school <br>where you learn through experience<br>to use your ignorance <br>as a teaching device <br>to enlighten the Buddha.<br>What's water to the goldfish <br>is water to the barracuda <br>without and within <br>every wave of water light and life <br>the whole sea of awareness at high tide<br>the whole sky with all its myriads of stars <br>tattooed on the skin of a water droplet<br>that thinks it's tough <br>to stick pins through the eye of an inkwell <br>like an Oedipal voodoo doll<br>with Medusan issues<br>because she never had a mother <br>who didn't turn her heart to stone.<br>Water is fish.<br>Fish is water. <br>Air is bird. <br>Bird is air. <br>Earth is worm. <br>Worm is earth. <br>And fire is a phoenix that nests in its own ashes.<br>And you can ask the moon <br>if you don't believe me. <br>Sometimes the water <br>makes a quick exit <br>and swims out of you<br>like tears and light-years of neap tides<br>but there's never going to come a time <br>whether you measure it in lunar months <br>or waterclocks<br>or the wavelengths of a snake-pit <br>you're ever going to swim out of it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476503" data-title="Because I Don't Confront You de Patrick White" data-description="Because I don't confront you
doesn't mean this tree 
doesn't know how to stand up to the wind.
If I bend like a river reed in a current
I'll still be here
long after the current has passed.
To the unenlightened it's inconceivable 
there's nothing ..."></div>
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