"Ukiyo-e"
"Ukiyo-e"
The body is a heavy thing.
Its limits are obvious:
no one has yet flown by armflaps,
has yet breathed clean air from seawater
at the bottom of the unknown ocean.
The body must sleep, must eat, and must die;
and when the body is one like mine,
a stubborn thing, an elephant thing,
more heavy than the weight held by others,
it seemed to me only natural
to shun it.
The mind is a flying thing.
Its six pounds of mass
belie its weightlessness;
the mind can see things that have never been,
can hear phantom voices of the dead,
can picture Schroedinger worlds that are and aren't.
The mind can dream, can think, can silently sing;
and my mind has always felt so much freer than my body,
that stubborn thing, that elephant thing,
that I have turned towards its liberty.
It seemed to me only natural
to love it.
The distinction is a false thing.
The body must have the mind; the mind must have the body.
The love of one does not make up the neglect of the other;
And so I am here, in a uniform I have dreaded (shorts and tennis shoes)
sweating to dimly heard pop songs (watching the clock closely)
running on the unending treadmill highway (slower than the woman to my right)
and finding, unwillingly, uncertainly,
something to seems so unnatural:
I like it.
I am tired,
and somewhat pained,
and breathing harder than usual,
but I feel my feet grow lighter beneath me,
as though I were flying from the earth, body and mind.
I dismount the treadmill,
and my feet touch the floor of
this new, floating world.
-6/17/2007
The body is a heavy thing.
Its limits are obvious:
no one has yet flown by armflaps,
has yet breathed clean air from seawater
at the bottom of the unknown ocean.
The body must sleep, must eat, and must die;
and when the body is one like mine,
a stubborn thing, an elephant thing,
more heavy than the weight held by others,
it seemed to me only natural
to shun it.
The mind is a flying thing.
Its six pounds of mass
belie its weightlessness;
the mind can see things that have never been,
can hear phantom voices of the dead,
can picture Schroedinger worlds that are and aren't.
The mind can dream, can think, can silently sing;
and my mind has always felt so much freer than my body,
that stubborn thing, that elephant thing,
that I have turned towards its liberty.
It seemed to me only natural
to love it.
The distinction is a false thing.
The body must have the mind; the mind must have the body.
The love of one does not make up the neglect of the other;
And so I am here, in a uniform I have dreaded (shorts and tennis shoes)
sweating to dimly heard pop songs (watching the clock closely)
running on the unending treadmill highway (slower than the woman to my right)
and finding, unwillingly, uncertainly,
something to seems so unnatural:
I like it.
I am tired,
and somewhat pained,
and breathing harder than usual,
but I feel my feet grow lighter beneath me,
as though I were flying from the earth, body and mind.
I dismount the treadmill,
and my feet touch the floor of
this new, floating world.
-6/17/2007