February 2012
19 posts
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Sometimes the dead are buried in the air. In plain view. With so much exposure, they decompose. Up there for all to see, they are easier to forget. The more visible, the more accessible, the more easily they are dispensed with. What does a work of art have in common with a corpse?
{Susan Mitchell, Notes Towards a History of Scaffolding}
D’Agata and Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact
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etc.
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A Manageable Amount
“Maps simplify the world somewhat in the way a heavy snowfall does, give the sense of starting over, clarify for those overstimulated by ordinary confusion. Each path in the snow shows, the ground keeps a record of it but also makes one feel there is a manageable amount going on.”
{Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces}
{Robert Walser, having walked to his death.}
I wish for a map...
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1. Concepts are drawers in which knowledge may be classified.
{Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space}
2. Vija Celmins’ collection of chalkboards.
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“Cure of Hypochondriacal or windy melancholy.”
{Robert Berton, The Anatomy of Melancholy}
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Sailing from the island of Aiolos, whose king has given him a bag containing all of the winds, Odysseus dozes on deck and his companions get curious.
So they loosened the bag and the winds rushed out together.
Storm winds seized them and carried them wailing their hearts out,
over the sea away from their homes. But I
awakened from sleep, considered in my excellent heart
whether to drop...
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1. In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is also the mother of the nine muses.
2. Virginia Woolf found nothing with which to identify in Milton’s account of it in Paradise Lost. “Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one’s own joys and sorrows?” she wrote, saying what we all feel: the guilt of our inability to remember this.
3. But while the fall may appear to be a...
Approaching may be our most profound vocation. Perhaps we do nothing else in our lifetimes but hedge round, surround things and people with greater or lesser precision, more or less conscientiously, swerving or brushing past them, at most grasping them for a moment, never arriving anywhere for good, except, at the very last, in the earth.
{Daniël Robberechts, Arriving in Avignon}
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X. THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
BLVR: Do you think if you hadn’t written, hadn’t been a writer, could there have been some completely other—
JD: Oh, I wonder. I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. And when I was out of school and living in New York and working for a magazine, I actually went out to the Scripps Institute, which is now UC San Diego, but then it was just the Scripps Institution of...
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Notes On Attic Dreams
There remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of...
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To desire and be desired, what could be simpler? A woman cannot tell a simple story, my father used to say. Well here is what it looks like on the videotape. You see desire go traveling into the total dark country of another soul, to a place where the cliff just breaks off. Cold light like moonlight falling on it.
{Anne Carson, Just for the Thrill, An Essay on the Difference Between Women and...
January 2012
12 posts
2 tags
The Inconsolable Season
(In early use more fully “fall of the leaf” or “fall of the year”.)
A season of maturity, or of incipient decay.
Of a city or fortress: the fact of coming into the power of an enemy by capture or surrender.
A succumbing to temptation, in a stronger sense, moral ruin.
What befalls or happens to a person; one’s fortune, ‘case’ or condition, lot,...
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{From Emily Dickinson’s “Master Letters”}
Have you the little chest — to put — the alive in?
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Victory
As a child I always wrote imagining that I was already dead, dreaming the discovery of the text post-mortem as I created it, always, almost every time. As a child the journal I kept consisted not so much of lies as of dramatizations, to the point where sometimes I would decide partway through the day to cultivate an emotion – elation, usually, and victory – so that I could write about it later; I...
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But a language gives itself to whomever wishes to take it, he replied as if stung. It uses seductions and illusions to draw you in. Reticences too, sometimes. French is, as you know, a feminine language. For me she was a lover. For you a mother, I presume.
For me a mother? No, I’ve never thought of her that way. Then he smiled, looking at me askance, like an old Zen master or a sly...
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…as they exploded out of the Queen’s looking glass, the old silent dance of death became a dance of triumph, a dance into speech, a dance of authority.
{Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic}
{a postcard}
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My grandmother was introduced to my grandfather because they both liked gusts of wind.
{Edouard Levé, Autoportrait}
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January
“Where you think there is no winter, but you forget you take it with you.”
{Angela Carter, The Tiger’s Bride}
{Jon Walton}
1. Maggie Nelson describes writing as “a hard and passing rain. It, too, kills the time.” This is a statement about writing; I’m more interested in it as a statement about rain. Does she mean that time is something rain can do? Can other weathers do this?
2. People speak of “sunlight filling the room.” Always the obtrusive guest. What I feel in such a room is more akin to an emptiness, brought...
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In this work Geryon set down all inside things.
He cooly omitted
all outside things.
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Then the knitting of a moment, an every day scenic effect — the morning air, the smell of bacon, the street-chatter beyond the twisting trees — forms an acute manifestation that allows her to become balanced in a poetic approach. With effort she remembers that she dined recently with a good many in view of picturesque landscapes, but she cannot recall if they were real ones. She...
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December 2011
3 posts
…and who cares if later on the pages come loose in the wind, for the wind is the reader of all such things, who cares if the earth turns far away from me like some blue orb, I know that from now on my happiness will stay right here, in the process of choosing one word and then another, and the space separating them, thereby stretching out the thread until the very last word, which I will...
“But,” I again broke in, “where the bodily presence is weak and speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?”
Reason only answered, “At your peril you cherish that idea, or suffer its influence to animate any writing of yours!”
“But if I feel, may I never...
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November 2011
11 posts
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{Yorkshire moors, Paul Allison}
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Do you suffer what a French paleontologist called “the distress that makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars”?
{Annie Dillard, For the Time Being}
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The wind
was cleansing the bones.
They stood forth silver and necessary.
{Anne Carson, The Glass Essay}
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Young Men’s Magazine No. Second
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(O light in the sleeping house!)
Rilke
{Rune Guneriussen}
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What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back to a world of another...
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Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone.
{Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space}
{Michael Kenna}
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September 2011
2 posts
— and here it strikes me that, in practically unbearable truth, my first response to the discovery of Unguentine’s death was to cut down the garden. And so I must ask now, so many years later, so far distant from the scene, whose garden? Here, the loveful mourning that casts the prized possessions of the dead upon the pyre? Here, in glee at last the garden unprotected? Whack? Whack?
...
August 2011
3 posts
Yet there was some odd security amid all the tumult, poised as I was on the edge of a precipice, gripping numbly, the roughness scraping against my buttocks, and I felt I could have released my hands or even kicked my legs so perfect was the balance of my position, pressed between wind, waves and barge. Or that I might be lying on the prickly earth, on my back, staring into a fierce sun....
Today
{Felix Gonzalez-Torres}
Elegy, perhaps, being one of the most ornamental performances of all.