Sentences to meditate on

Jonathan Carroll‘s never-emptying cornucopia of awesome brings us this quote today:

I live near the abyss. I hope to stay.

—Theodore Roethke

Yes, I quite like that. A little bit Nietzsche, a little bit Billy Joel. It, at least to me, says something about an artistic way to live.

Actually, and this is probably sharing too much, this brings to mind another of my “pop culture epiphanies”. About a million years ago when I was still in my teens I watched all the episodes of a short-lived sitcom entitled Camp Wilder. I can’t even really remember what the premise was–I really only remember two things about the show. One was I watched it because I had a crush on Hilary Swank. The other was that there was a scene with dialogue that went roughly (and I am deeply paraphrasing though the mists of memory) like this:

“How can you always live your life on the cliff’s edge? Don’t you worry about falling off?”
“But the view, {character name}, the view…”

I’m sure that first line is wrong, but you get the sense of it. It was kind of a throwaway scene, but the notion that people who lived their lives less sensibly got something back from the universe in return for that–that you get the best view when you’re standing on the edge of the cliff–was one of those notions so perfectly captured by the image that it’s been in my head ever since.

(Oh, and on the “once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places…” theme, I think the line was delivered by Jay Mohr, who probably overacted a totally hackneyed part in what was probably a pretty terrible show. Still, even in the midst of that, there are things to learn.)

Anyway, the Roethke quote is one I could chew over for a while, finding different things to reflect on about ways to live.

Of course the all time best example of a single line that can support sustained meditation is still the quotation Nicole Blackman chose as the epigraph for her collection of poetry, Blood Sugar, the Ingeborg Bachmann line:

“I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire.”

I don’t know the context Bachman originally used the line in (and I don’t want to–no context could improve the line as it exists inside my head right now), but for me that sentence captures everything important about the relationship between experience and art. I can sit and think about it for hours.