guide and stay

there is a hymn, Abide With Me, text by a very dead Henry Lyte. there is a line in the third verse that goes

Who like thyself my guide and stay can be?

and it struck me, once, that those two words 'guide' and 'stay' seem so different yet so similar and together so encompassing. I remember going home and writing a few pages about how being guided seems so humbling, so enabling. being led forward and upward and onward. progression and happiness. and being stayed seems so limiting--so insulting almost. being held. being held back, perhaps. being stopped and prevented and kept. yet a guide need not be condusive to any more freedom (the word brings echos of rulers and rules), and a stay may not be preventing anything very important. in fact it's probably just holding you up, giving your tender sapling the support it needs against the wind, holding your hand tightly so you don't wander off.

it's just my pride that doesn't want to be guided or stayed. my pride that sees so much that seems so true.

there's a lot more to let go of these days. where did it all come from?

isotope 4.1 came in the mail today. I owe those dear editors a lot for letting me on the permanent subscription list. I miss isotope a lot. their office is smaller, but they have more plants. no mac, no huge printers, but more art on the walls. more familiar chairs. more stairs to walk up. I miss it.

4.1 is the last issue I will have had any connection with. I proofread it a few times. I put its samples on the website. my name is in the back cover under the glamorous title of webmaster. 4.2 will be totally new when it comes in the mail, with no strings. but that won't be til the fall.

anyway. I've been reading Isotope for a few days. there's an essay by Bernard Quetchenbach called Summertime. when I proofed it it didn't seem interesting. when I copied it into the website and styled it appropriately, it still didn't seem interesting. but late last night it drew me in.

the essay is about change in ourselves and change in our worlds and how we deal with it, with oldies music and flashbacks and nostalgic conversations. one line at the end of a paragraph about Lake Ontario and rowboats,

But I can’t stay here. Here might not even be able to stay here.

encompassed the whole piece for me. nothing gets to stay. time is a noose.

and what's more, that line also exemplifies the ambiguities between thing-nouns and place-nouns. here and now, here and there, time, place, space-time, all that. i am a thing. i am a place. i am a time. an event. a noun. just me.

I'm listening right now to John Brown by Tea Leaf Green, whoever they are.