“At a distance, you only see my light / Come closer, and know that I am you” RUMI
Distance. Distance. Poem or essay or lyric on Distance. What are your thoughts, philosophical or not, on such a topic?
[Preamble concludes, deflate the diaphragm, let in air.]
That’s all there is between us, air, and distance. In the Linklater flick about the boy and the girl who meet on a train, the girl says, something like, “It’s the space in between,” us, that is all, her two fingers indicating.
You can’t edit distance. You can’t delete distance. All objects are constantly accelerating away from one another. To approach someone is to resist. To get closer is to climb. Absurdity’s little bug legs wiggle toward the ceiling, meanwhile. The door is locked. We throw an apple, asks an logician with a hackneyed sockeye face, at the edge of the universe. (Then, after perverse anticipatory hesitation, he proceeds) does the universe expand?
We knew one another from inside a vestibule. We spent more time apart yet inside the other, than inside the other’s parts a spinning thus far. If calligraphy were an art-form worth exploring, my pen would trace proportions between body meters and land miles, and curve over a dotted line to meet you again. If you took a step west, would you be a penny saved, or I a penny earned, if I stepped toward you. Wont to tell me, would you? Oblige me, would you.
(Were we to translate if onlys into what ifs, my divisible remainder would uproot your square nothing.)
A relationship cannot grow from eclipse encounters, alone, but once in a blood moon, twice in an equatorial horse gallop, we shall and wherefore deign. But who am I, cries the penguin in his pin-stripped pajamas, to pontificate on pebble loves?
One expected, as one does, a coherence, when really, as one finds, there exists only confluence, destruction, and malformation. If ideas were to settle, only statements would be hard to find. Expression here must once emanate inside-wardly, only cowards here agree.
“Be concrete!” shouts the blog blob itself. “Be real! Be yourself!”
The inward jelly congeals and overturns its goo astride. From askance glance to cursory happenstance this goo-bellied jelly becomes at once monotonous and experimental. It, or he, pulls itself asunder then apparent.
A poem to prove? No, three.
DISTANCE pt 1:
(If you only wanted basic, here it would be)
It equals speed times time.
No matter how far she is, just go faster. Time is on your side.
No matter how far he is, just go faster. Time is on your side.
DISTANCE pt 2:
New York City is a far apart city. Forty minutes here, fifty-five minutes here, sixty to the beach, ninety upstate.
Houston is a spread-around-butter kind of city. Twenty minutes to reach grocery centers. Thirty minutes to reach shopping arenas. Forty-five, speeding mind you, to touch sand, or go to work, rushhour-wise.
Buenos Aires is a land far, far away. Twelve by flight, one recalls?
DISTANCE pt 3:
How many long-distance relationships (LDR, FML) have you been in?
How much more difficult, or easier, is an LDR than a R?
An R is an R is an R?
Distance eliminates, due to technological gaps in our Christian year, three senses: olfactory, tactile, gustatory. Aural and Visual live. The rest vaffanculo.
In conclusion, all in all, to close, finally, to sum up, let it be said, and remembered, that, to make a long story short, we stood here and thought about an incomprehensible subject: distance. A variable taken for granted, until, like all things, it wasn’t. Thank you for your time. Call the curtain. Goodnight. Turn blue.
(I think Rumi, to not put words in his mouth, makes an interesting statement about how we perceive one another; one is reminded of the redshift of a distancing object in the sky, caused by its light stretching further and further, as the object accelerates further and further away; turn blue, come closer, is, if not the theme, then the hope, of this sputtering post; that said, to not put words in Rumi’s mouth still, what I want to say is, were we to reverse the entire expanding universe to its big-bang deduction, we were all in fact, then, one and the same thing.)
