Where is God Just Now?

For instance, one evening when I was in the workshop, my future tutor entered unexpectedly and, as he walked in, asked my father: Where is God just now? My father answered most seriously, God is just now in Sari Kamish. Sari Kamish is a forest region on the former frontier between Russia and Turkey, where unusually tall pine-trees grow, renowned everywhere in Transcaucasia and Asia Minor. Receiving this reply from my father, the dean asked, What is God doing there?' My father answered that God was making double ladders there and on the tops of them he was fastening happiness, so that individual people and whole nations might ascend and descend.

Spilt Milk

We that have done and thought,
That have thought and done,
Must ramble, and thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone.

--WB Yeats

Life Life - Arseniy Tarkovsky

Life, Life
by Arseniy Tarkovsky

1.

I don't believe forebodings, nor do omens
Frighten me. I do not run from slander
Nor from poison. On earth there is no death.
All are immortal. All is immortal. No need
To be afraid of death at seventeen
Nor yet at seventy. Reality and light
Exist, but neither death nor darkness.
All of us are on the sea-shore now,
And I am one of those who haul the nets
When a shoal of immortality comes in.

2.
Live in the house-- and the house will stand.
I will call up any century,
Go into it and build myself a house.
That is why you children are beside me
And your wives, all seated at one table,
One table for great-grandfather and grandson.
The future is accomplished here and now,
And if I slightly raise my hand before you
You will be left with all five beams of light.
With shoulder blades like timber posts
I held up every day that made the past,
With a surveyor's chain I measured time
And travelled through as if across the Urals.

3.
I picked an age whose stature measured mine.
We headed south, made dust swirl on the steppe.
Tall weeds were rank; a grasshopper was playing,
Brushed horseshoes with his whiskers, prophesied
And told me like a monk that I would perish.
I took my fate and strapped it to my saddle;
And now I've reached the future I still stand
Upright in my stirrups like a boy.

I only need my immortality
For my blood to go on flowing from age to age.
I would readily pay with my life
For a safe place with constant warmth
Were it not that life's flying needle
Leads me on through the world like a thread.

(Translator - Kitty Hunter-Blair)