Your Story Was This

Baxter, June 7, 2014

It Was Like This: You Were Happy
by Jane Hirshfield [listen]

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you 
or your days: they will be wrong, 
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

The Story

"I think a lot of people probably live their life not concerned with their own happiness, but with the story they're creating."

~ Philip Seymour Hoffman

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See also:  

• Happy Talk: Simon Critchley + Philip Seymour Hoffman,  recorded December 17, 2012 (Rubin Museum of Art's YouTube Channel)
• Blank on Blank
• Egocide
• Stay

Some Unprotected Desire

Skybox Imaging HD Video of Burj Khalifa on April 9, 2014 (1080p) from Skybox Imaging on Vimeo.

Mergers and Acquisitions
by Edward Hirsch, from The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

Beyond junk bonds and oil spills,
beyond the collapse of Savings and Loans,
beyond liquidations and options on futures,
beyond basket trading and expanding foreign markets,
the Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard
& Poor’s stock index, mutual funds, commodities,
beyond the rising tide of debits and credits,
opinion polls, falling currencies, the signs
for L. A. Gear and Coca Cola Classic,
the signs for U.S. Steel and General Motors,
hi-grade copper, municipal bonds, domestic sugar,
beyond fax it and collateral buildups,
beyond mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts,
hostile takeovers, beyond the official policy
on inflation and the consensus on happiness,
beyond the national trends in buying and selling,
getting and spending, the market stalled
and the cost passed on to consumers,
beyond the statistical charts on prices,
there is something else that drives us, some
rage or hunger, some absence smoldering
like a childhood fever vaguely remembered
or half-perceived, some unprotected desire,
greed that is both wound and knife,
a failed grief, a lost radiance.

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See also: Alfred A. Knopf's Poem-a-Day 2014

A Remote Faint Question

"A remote faint question, where I might be, drifted and vanished again in my mind. I found myself standing astonished, my emotions penetrated by something I could not understand.

I felt naked. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop.

I began to feel the need of fellowship. I wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate my experience. What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness, to toil and to place himself in danger?"

~ H.G. Wells

Narration adapted from the works of H.G. Wells. Excerpted from the following:

The Time Machine (1895)
The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
The First Men in the Moon (1901)
In The Days of the Comet (1906)
The World Set Free (1914)

Happy

Clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do

~ Pharrell Williams

Pharrell Williams, 'Happy' from Somesuch & Co. on Vimeo.

24hoursofhappy.com