I’m in a coffeeshop and brought the book A Responsibility to Awe with poems by the astronomer Rebecca Elson. Between a delicious broccoli cream soup and a cappuccino with chocolate cake, I read in it, only a bit actually, I feel more like just gazing out the window and immersing myself in the little everyday scenes that are passing by.
The Expanding Universe
How do they know, he is asking,
He is seven, maybe,
I am telling him how light
Comes to us like water,
Long red waves across the universe,
Everything, all of us,
Flying out from our origins.
And he is listening
As if I were not there,
Then walking back
Into the shadow of the chestnut,
Collecting pink blossoms
In his father's empty shoe.
I can relate to that so well, to what she is, I believe, pointing at. “Erklärungen sind immer so hanebüchen,” I once read somewhere (or was it my “own” thought, I don’t remember). Explanations are always so outrageous. Yeah. How outrageous it is to claim that I know anything. But also, how outrageous to claim that I don’t.
My thoughts go on wandering, on the up to just now blank page of the notebook on which I’m writing this. Only this one page, the third to be precise, is blank on one side, all the others are ruled. Oh, these lovely little details that surprise you and make you wonder … It’s life on such a sweet note.
Now a scene from the movie Paterson appears in my mind. The character of the same name is calm and content and works as a bus driver. His life is very routine and ordinary, still, or just because of that, there is so much beauty in it. Some of it he captures in poems which he writes in a notebook during his lunch breaks or when he spends some time alone in a little room in the basement of his house. His wife adores his poetry, she is more outgoing and ambitious (in a lovely way), so she urges him to make a copy of his notebook and publish the poems. If my memory doesn’t lie to me, she says something like, “You’re a great poet. You should let the world know,” to which he nicely replies that she scares him. Later, their dog destroys the notebook, and the poems are gone. In the end of the movie, Paterson meets a Japanese man who gifts him a new notebook, and he just seems to go on writing as before, for himself, for the sake of the moment. That might not be enough, or simply everything.
Back in the café, there’s this little episode happening in front of my eyes. Outside there are a couple of little olive trees decorated at a balustrade. One of them gets blown down by the wind several times, and each time a passerby takes care of putting it back up. This touches me deeply in its uncomplicatedness and loveliness, how it takes care of itself in this pure, simple way. When it happens again, it makes me laugh and share it with the waitress. I think she feels what I mean, but the urge of having to intervene takes over, so she goes out, attaches the tree to the balustrade, and the little play ends. Then she does something else which leads to another plant pot falling over, to dirt falling out and soiling the entrance area. Oh, sweet irony. Now I laugh about it, but in the moment it happened, I felt somehow sad and silly. Like as if more was lost than gained through my talking about it. Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut, why didn’t I just enjoy silently, for myself?
Now that I type this on my laptop and look for the link to the Paterson trailer on YouTube, I get lost in this beautiful movie again, reading the comments, sharing the awe about it with other people across the world, loving how they feel similar and how they put it into words. No, words don’t do, but then yes, somehow they do. It’s all dancing with each other, all the time.