50. shut softly your watery eyes
Ramona, come closer,
Shut softly your watery eyes.
The pangs of your sadness
Shall pass as your senses will rise.
The flowers of the city
Though breathlike, get deathlike at times.
And there’s no use in tryin’
To deal with the dyin’,
Though I cannot explain that in lines…
I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
By worthless foam from the mouth.
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin’ and returnin’
On back to the South.
You’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishin’ end is at hand.
Yet there’s no one to beat you,
No one t’ defeat you,
‘Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad…
I’d forever talk to you,
But soon my words,
They would turn into a meaningless ring.
For deep in my heart
I know there is no help I can bring.
Everything passes,
Everything changes,
Just do what you think you should do.
And someday maybe,
Who knows, baby,
I’ll come and be cryin’ to you.
– bob dylan
in retrospect, the problem with isolation is the problem of meaning. how do you commit to life if you so distance yourself from the very people that constitute life in its immediacy? all talk of courage, of love, all deal with the same problem: the problem of contact- the necessity of the journey through the wastelands of the heart into the real world of uncertainty, disappointment and possibly joy.
to live for oneself in all entirety is to provoke a crisis of faith. this is because in the absence of others, the self is often nebulous, a mash of half thoughts and feeble gestures, inert philosophies. this is because we can only always look beyond ourselves for that spark of transcendence, that epiphany that will then transform the self.
empathy is a conscious decision because the natural state of humanity is an interminable decline into apathy. from the very act of enjoying ourselves in the midst of great privation and inequity, we are adept at forgetting, at enjoying the restfulness of an amnesiac. to empathize is then not just a matter of haphazard remembrance upon our memory being triggered, but the discipline of caring beyond the dictates of the atropic self.
that is then my resolution: to commit to people. it has been too long, but the army is over. today i am filled with the image of strawberries. bergmansque, hopeful.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments
dispatches 
1) Tag me =P
2) Will keep you posted if Barney says anything! In the meantime don’t forget that we have to meet up sometime soon.
3) I wish I had your writing skills, or Dawn’s. Maybe one day I’ll curl up in front of a fireplace with your CAP portfolio heh. *envy*
4) I should really stop posting puerile tags like this.
congratulations =)
still reading this, by the way.
commit to me! buy me dinner when i come back!
to people in general, or particular people?
eat your vegetables, penguin, that, everyone should commit to. take care.
to particular people. because the self is limited, and there is not enough time.
happy for you:) this was a lovely post.
hm lucas, dawn hasnt written for a long time, partly maybe because she has been not entirely committing to people as much as she should be, but at the end of the day, writing skills are all they are “skills” — learnable, practiceable.
do you ever wonder whether people talk to you because of you, or because they must do it for themselves?
am happy for you too (: on a sidenote, i like this song.