“The wind fleets, the heart beats”

I don’t feel capable of communicating the vast, subterranean complex of emotions that subsumed me as I watched the film “The Elephant Man” for the first time tonight.

True tears at the delight in simple human kindness. How much kindness has been burned away in me. How much of life’s color has been drained. And yet how little it takes.

I want to sleep soundly, awake refreshed, and calmly pursue the action of a day. This hardly ever happens. And yet I have so much. No family on the mantlepiece. To admire one’s mother without having met her. To be regarded, with kindness, in a world where people do speak to each other. Our horrible nature, bred pestilent by scarcity and utter lack of dignity for so many. “How else is he to make a living?” Appearance, a prison, but some get to be cathedrals. None of this is right.

“Never. Oh, never. Nothing will die. The stream flows, the wind blows, the cloud fleets, the heart beats. Nothing will die.”

If only.