for Cassandra Passarelli
‘There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.’
Raymond Carver, ‘Radio Waves’
When you ask me why it is that, sometimes,
I don’t say very much, I don’t say much,
just as when you ask me what it is I’m
thinking about, I say ‘Thinking about?’
It reminds me of that joke we’ve all heard
comediennes tell: ‘In every man’s head
there’s a room with nothing in it. Never –
and I mean NEVER – ask to look inside.’
Buddhists call such emptiness Sunyata.
Carver gets it in his poem: ‘There is
in the soul a desire for not thinking…’
something to do with keeping that small room
empty, or knowing that ‘fullness’ and ‘void’
are just two ways of naming the same thing.
Andy Brown