“…but you’ve never really looked at anyone other than yourself. So watch me. Watch my heart break. Watch me jump. Watch me learn that after death there’s nothing. There’s no more watching. There’s no more following. No love. Say goodbye to Hazel for me. And say it to yourself, too. None of us has much time.”
— Sammy Barnathan (played by Tom Noonan) in Synecdoche, New York
He doesn’t know if he hesitates or if this is where he wants to be, so moving forward is unnatural and he doesn’t even try.
Richard Foreman, The Mind King
… is above all else to juggle all the troublesome facts of life, to keep the balls of possibility in the air, to learn how to live and dance, lucid and energized, even in a world as depressing and violent as ours.
— Richard Foreman
“We rarely allow ourselves the psychic detachment from habit that would allow us to perceive the impulse as it rises inside us, unconnected to the objects we desire. But it’s impulse that’s primary, not the object we’ve been trained to fix it upon. It is the impulse that is your deep truth, not the object that seems to call it forth. The impulse is the vibrating, lively thing that you really are. And that is what I want to return to: the very thing you really are.”
“. . . my experience has been, continually, an outsider experience. A fortunate outsider, never really bereft of resources and comfort, but nevertheless an outsider. A man of few friends, who does not find it easy to associate with other people. Such a man chose the theater, years ago . . . because it was a pretend life.”
Richard Foreman, Love and Science
“Oh, I know I too shall cease and be as when I was not yet, only all over instead of in store. That makes me happy, often now my murmur falters and dies and I weep for happiness as I go along and for love of this old earth that has carried me so long and whose uncomplainingness will soon be mine.”
Samuel Beckett
You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.
But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.
Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.
— JEFF FOSTER
wolveroon 