For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.
He said that while Clemence adored the sacrament, he meditated on how it could be possible that humans had evolved out of apes only to sit gaping at a round white cracker.
Information, long of reach, devastating, and as a side benefit, a substance with no serious legal repercussions, was superior to any other form of power.
His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.
We would all be together on the journey then, our destination the village at the end of the road where people gamble day and night but never lose their money, eat but never fill their stomachs, drink but never leave their minds.
We Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names of the earth. And unless the earth is called by the names it gave us humans, won’t it cease to love us? And isn’t it true that if the earth stops loving us, everyone, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease to exist? That is why we all must speak our language, nindinawemagonidok, and call everything we see by the name of its spirit. Even the chimookomanag, who are trying to destroy us, are depending upon us to remember. Mi’sago’i.
I relax into a black unconsciousness. I dive in, submerse, and breathe oblivion, my favorite element.
Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth.
Perhaps you will know how to speak this language – perhaps it is a language we have forgotten in its present form. Perhaps you are dreaming in this language right now. And perhaps there is a word that has changed the course of human existence. A word written in the depth of things, in the quantum and genetic and synaptic codes, a word that told all beings and all life – enough.
Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?
TO LOVE Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn’t even hum the first line.
She compares the deepest wells of depression to gestation, to a time enclosed, a secluded lightlessness in which, unknown and unforced, we grow.
The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars.
And Patrice thought another thing her mother said was definitely true – you never really knew a man until you told him you didn’t love him. That’s when his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface.
Our baby gives herself to me completely. There is no hesitation, no reservation, no holding back, no coldness, no craft, no tremor or fear in her love. Although our relationship may encompass tears, frustration, even fury, it is an utterly reliable bond. As it grows, her love is literally unadulterated. Her love is wholly of the child, pure in its essence as children are in their direct passions. Children do not love wisely, but perhaps they love the best of all.
We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human, are we?
Now that she was conscious there was no end to her questions and exclamations, for Dot was a born traveler, meant to go places, unlike us.
Irene nodded. She couldn’t say it but she knew she was destroying a world. A little culture. It was the known and safe way of behaving in the family. All the rituals, wrong or sick, it didn’t matter, good or bad, would be useless. All the strategies. They knew the familiar treacheries, but now they would be open to new dangers.
A MAN FINDS happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope.
If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.