tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13680868.post-1130719832492101042005-10-30T19:37:00.000-05:002005-10-30T19:50:32.503-05:00"Their grandmother wept. I wept. I touched their deepest wound, covered but never to be healed. The victim's brother, a thick-set, powerful-looking man, told me he wanted my client to die and cited the Bible as support. His mother also cited the Bible, but to express forgiveness and a desire that my client live. There was no struggle or argument--they each had their own way of resolving the loss. Out of respect and a shared pain, neither presumed to dictate what the other should feel. It was one of the gentlest expressions of love between a mother and son that I have seen.<br /><br />"I don't know how long I'll keep doing this work. Sometimes the weight of it feels real, like a load I cannot set down. But then, other times, when I least expect it, it lifts me."<br /><br />I keep thinking of the way Count Orlock first appears at his castle in Transylvania, when the pitiable real estate agent first arrives. Becoming visible in that strange passageway the way figures develop on polaroids; first darkness, then an inexplicable sense of presence, and by some unexplained mechanism, finally, a human figure, almost as though the spirit was becoming carnate simply by being looked upon or for.<br /><br />I keep looking for that unexplained mechanism--that which brings that strange otherworldly presence into light, into what my eyes can see...looking for that which is defined only by being indefinate / indefinable / unfindable.<br /><br />I imagine if I could touch that, if I could see it or know it, that I could at last be free...be lifted out of this land. In some ways, maybe all ways, I guess this is about as useful as me trying to write an essay on nothingness...<br /><br />I feel like I left some part of me somewhere, maybe all of me, somewhere that I can't reach in this life...irahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08126052534311148133noreply@blogger.com