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" Like ThisIf anyone asks youhow the perfect satisfactionof all our sexual wantingwill look, lift your faceand say,Like this.When someone mentions the gracefulnessof the nightsky, climb up on the roofand dance and say,Like this.If anyone wants to know what " spirit" is,or what " God’s fragrance" means,lean your head toward him or her.Keep your face there close.Like this.When someone quotes the old poetic imageabout clouds gradually uncovering the moon,slowly loosen knot by knot the stringsof your robe.Like this.If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,don’t try to explain the miracle.Kiss me on the lips.Like this. Like this.When someone asks what it meansto " die for love," pointhere.If someone asks how tall I am, frownand measure with your fingers the spacebetween the creases on your forehead.This tall.The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns.When someone doesn’t believe that,walk back into my house.Like this.When lovers moan,they’re telling our story.Like this.I am a sky where spirits live.Stare into this deepening blue,while the breeze says a secret.Like this.When someone asks what there is to do,light the candle in his hand.Like this.How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?Huuuuu.How did Jacob’s sight return?Huuuu.A little wind cleans the eyes.Like this.When Shams comes back from Tabriz,he’ll put just his head around the edgeof the door to surprise us Like this. "
8
" There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them. "
― Jorge Luis Borges , Ficciones
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" Who among us has not suddenly looked into his child's face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment " seen" that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is - peace, salvation, gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that " God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is." Such nonrational, intuitive certainties of the divine base of all that is can be vouchsafed to our gaze even when it is turned toward the most insignificant-looking things, if only it is a gaze inspired by love. That, in the precise sense, is contemplation...Out of this kind of contemplation of the created world arise in never-ending wealth all true poetry and all real art, for it is the nature of poetry and art to be paean and praise heard above all the wails of lamentation. No one who is not capable of such contemplation can grasp poetry in a poetic fashion, that is to say, in the only meaningful fashion. The indispensability, the vital function of the arts in man's life, consists above all in this: that through them contemplation of the created world is kept alive and active. "