How the stones have lost their lustre!! We are longing to return home. Longing for reunions. Longing to give presents and hugs. Its an abyss of emptiness, this longing, a gaping hole in my body, in my chest like a black hole, star destroyer. Intense, tangible and at the same time the policeman in my head says "indulgent child, stop your crying!" When there was no challenge to my happiness I was easy, and free, and now, all the caverns have collapsed and the stars have fallen from the sky.
Yearning, the abyss separating us from paradise, from stasis. Yearning - this out-of-balance, incredible desire to be in balance - with what? - with society? with nature? with each other? with our own selves? within our selves? with our ideals and conceptions? Palpable longing for homeostasis... and yet when homeostasis is achieved we search for a challenge that will keep us in tension with the world. We require this tension to become?? Without this tension we are in danger of subsiding, with desensitization to the world, we lose all forward momentum.
The heightening of longing leads to heightening of the imagination, in my imagination I see a rainbow of scenarios in which my desires are fulfilled. Children embraced, turkish delight munched, copper coffee pots admired, scarves and hats tried on, charades and laughing, photographs, the lighting of incence, the hyperbolic descriptions and laughter, the exotic tales of the camels on the hills.
I have merged with my Shulamith. I am the apparition and she becomes real, the vessel of my own mounting soul-sickness, my yearning-sickness that prevents me from drinking and breathing. I am bound in place, straining against these ropes of fate while the whole world loses its colour. I am no longer in the now. I have moved to the place of transit, the neither-here-nor-there. I no longer see the swallows and the doves.
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