i am trying to divert my focus
to what is beautiful. there are
any number of beautiful diversions.
so why exist in the darkness all of
the time? why be sad at all? ever?
this is certainly not a question that i
have normally had to ask myself. but
it is today, and has been at times of
recent. so what do i find myself doing?
i am watching the black and white whir at
the top of a short film about diane di prima.
this is what i happened upon a few short
moments ago. and on the very the same
device onto which i’m presently punching
out these lines. this is what happens when
one goes through the tiny bit of effort, it’s
effortless at times, quite often actually, of
diverting one’s attention away from the
bleak and toward the beautiful. the blur
or the whir of the black and white film,
hardly paying attention to whatever it
is upon which the focus of the camera
leans, it’s just a blur as if seen out the
window on a train-ride in the fifties or early
sixties, there could be windows, out of which
could be buildings, structures with insides
scattered with real people that existed
at the time this was filmed. people
who cohabited, worked or shopped.
follks who flirted, debated or argued.
what this blur gives my eyelids,
eyelids that are from the future, so
to speak, is a bit of a buzz, a slight lift,
as the words, which were spoken by the
subject of the film itself, but yet heard
by me as if simultaneously some sixty
or so years later, are sounds which mirror
the movement of the horizon, or whatever it
is that shimmers and glimmers on the screen,
whatever structures or open spaces are/were
being passed, by whatever passengers there might
be/have been, in whatever train or moving vehicle, i’m
guessing it’s public transportation, it could be a volkswagen
van with large windows through which all this flitting and
flickering occur(ed...), this vague movement from right
to left, as if someone, or as if the camera itself, is being
transported, just so that what it picks up on film, to be
watched in this case several decades into a future, lifts
these eyelids like a bit of a buzz, a literal high that enters
my heretofore sad or bleak self; i am lifted a bit by just
taking in the sight, the movement that exists on the
screen of the device that i soon thereafter watch these,
my very own lines of description, pile into a shaped form
in front of me, a form that could, if one is only a bit
imaginative, look a bit like a cliff, or a bluff, that is
reaching higher and higher into the sky, that is
beautiful, that is like no other cliff or bluff that
reaches, reaches, reaches, until it has made its
place, becomes its own fresh location. upon a
planet, something like but not quite like earth,
begins to be formed in and around it, and the
possibilities for more beauty on this planet, in this
new location, partially formed by me, partially formed
by the device onto which my fingers are audibly clanging,
partially informed by the short film about diane di prima,
which i just watched a few minutes before, are all giving
me this gift, a new cliff or bluff, a mountain, or you might
instead call it a hill, with texture and height, all of which
are just a beautiful diversion from what had been a
bleak morning. this is how one might easily, with
very little effort, improve one’s outlook, transporting
from a sad or bleak moment into an alternative
moment, a beautiful one, in fact. can you see it?
