“Look. / Each loses what he chooses.”

The assertion that loss is chosen is clearly wrong, at least sometimes. Sometimes we are of course blindsided. But it’s a provocative idea, as is the other reading (which I think is more relevant): that what we choose inevitably slips away. When we make a choice we think we are pinning something down, but most things refuse to be pinned down. What I take your post to be saying is that, even so, we must choose; we must grasp for the ungraspable. An Annie Dillard essay called “Living Like Weasels” comes to mind. Two relevant passages:

“Once a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?”

[. . .]

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. The even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your murky flesh fall off in shred, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

(Come to think of it, I may write on this essay in conjunction with something about Weilian obedience.)

I love unfolding, laconic narratives. And I remember all the defining bands and CDs you mentioned, because they defined me too, growing up a few hundred miles away in Orange County.

So moving. Thank you.