Luco Too Shall Pass

The dog says he is in love. Fremlin says she might be. What has happened to these animals? Do they not know "this too shall pass?"

I would not usually quote a proverb. I think it rather too cliche. I prefer the more tangled wording of something like all of life is in constant flux and it is foolish to otherwise believe. The awkward grammar in that statement is dearer to my heart, but "this too shall pass" is a tolerable approximation.

Ah, yes, so as I was saying. These animals. Are they so naive as to believe their wonder and their joy, their twin hearts, their effervescence, unique, unchanging?

Not that they have said as much. I have yet to hear the dog bark out forever or Fremlin whine eternity. 

However, if they did, why should I care? Am I so cynical, so sadistic as to need to press into their animal eyes, their animal hearts my disdain? Am I truly disdainful, or am I jealous.

I must be honest with myself. I have a vow made this year, and I will be strict; there will be no turning from the truth. Perhaps it is a bit of a "this too shall pass" for some of my deeper antagonism, but what do I know? Another beloved old saw is that no one changes, so how are we to know upon which cliche to rest our anxious heads?

Kate Light writes in a poem titled "There Comes the Strangest Moment:"

Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You'd have sworn no one knew more than you.

How many people thought you'd never change?
But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.

I love this poem. I know not why as it is certainly not my usual fare.

Or, well, yes, yes both you and I know I know why I love this poem. You see? The truth? It is a difficult affair to commit oneself to honesty, but I will persevere.

Why do thoughts of love, thoughts of Slippy and Fremlin, bring this poem into my mind? It is because I am, reluctantly, willing to concede this: perhaps there is something to their delirium.

See? I have changed. I am not sure if "It's beautiful. It's strange," but it is there, a moth's wing brushing against my heart.

All is flux, but the all is itself static in its movement; all is flux, but there is an all that is always; this too shall pass, but there will be a this until we cannot conceive of it; there is constancy in inconstancy, eternity in the fragmentary, momentary, in the fleeting, in the beating of dusted moth wings, in the calculated logic that turns and turns my thoughts - this too shall pass and pass again and again and again like the golden mean, a rectangle divided into a square and a rectangle, which can be divided into a square and a rectangle, which can be divided into a square and a rectangle...

Where a + b is to a as a is to b. Golden numbers. Irrational numbers. Repeating and repeating and repeating and all together the one thing made up of every swirling filament.

"How many people thought you'd never change?"

To be alive is to change, but no one changes so much that there is no evidence of the past. We are story tellers, Mnemosyne's progeny - you must forgive this romanticism - and we persist in attempting to define that which defines us, but we cannot see those slight threads clearly. Often it is simply that we hear repeated in our thoughts asinine platitudes - this too shall pass - as we grapple with difficulty.

Yes, and we will die as love dies (but I do not truly believe it does, see here), but let us hope at least. I need to let the other animals have that.

I need to let them clutch and cling and lullaby each other. Let them see what blossoms wild in their embrace.

I did not think I would change, and I have, and it has been a strange experience reconciling the old Luco with the new.

However, I do not think my two selves bipolar, paradoxical; rather, they complement each other. Before, despairing, I lost myself for days sleeping beneath a couch, dry eyed and full of woe; now, despairing, I find myself searching the animals' eyes, bent toward contact like a satellite circling, circling. I am no longer trapped on some distant planet.

I have become the planet itself.