***
But March, forgive me —
And all those hills you left for me to Hue —
There was no Purple suitable —
You took it all with you —
{Emily Dickinson}
"I stand on the shores of America and make my cry into the dark. Yours is the first voice that has come back to me."
{Joseph Conrad}
"I’ve read many stories of revenants and apparitions, but my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them. They haunt me by not being there, by the table where no one eats, the empty window that lets the sun in without a shadow."
Keith Waldrop, Light While There is Light (from S.)
"Was not poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?"
{Virginia Woolf, Orlando}
(via sketchofthepast)
But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its marker.
{Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook}
Images, via austinkleon:
Take Note | An exploration of note-taking in Harvard University Collections
Crumbling is not an instant’s Act
{Emily Dickinson}
It may be said that we become conscious of a house that is built by women, as men only know how to build a house from the outside.
{Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space}
(Angela Carter peers out a window.)
I always think that females are insiders, and that female rebellion starts someplace where you’re really trapped…
{Eileen Myles}
Sheila: Can you explain what you meant when you wrote that females are insiders?
Eileen: It started with that idea of males being outsiders, which I had been fed for a long time – the idea that the male artist is howling outside of the culture. He is transcendent, omnipotent, or you know, just a rebel; the institutions can’t hold him. And my own female existence was often about trying to imitate a male existence, because all the images of artists I had were of men, so how could I be like that? How could I be Kerouac? But then persistently seeing that in On The Road the girls were jumping off the roof, the girls were fading into the background. And if I really thought about my female existence, it was very much about what it felt like to be in the Myles family, what it felt like to me at my job – feeling oppressed by who had a crush on me, or who didn’t. Institutions seemed to be places where women were sort of held and prodded, and I would have to figure out my freedom from in there. So often it was a hollow pain; the pain of being inside, not the yon of freedom of being outside. Whether I was in a mental hospital or in a job as a camp counselor, I was institutionalized. So it began to seem like to get wild and crazy would be to say what that really looked like. To really camp out in being female and say how it is.
Then there’s Dickinson, whose niece recalled her motioning as if turning a key in the door behind them as they entered her bedroom, whispering: Matty: here’s freedom.
‘Here’s freedom,’ I hear her saying…. I am thinking of a confined space in which the genius of the nineteenth-century female mind in America moved, inventing a language more varied, more compressed, more dense with implications, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date…
{Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home” from Lies, Secrets and Silence}
"What does it mean to be aware of one’s own preservation?"
{Kate Zambreno, Heroines}
April 24, 1953
dream of looking at reprod. of phot. of Emily Dickinson in a book — dress as the white blouse ca. 1914 ringletted coiffure (sharply detailed)
large close-up of head shoulders — the picture seemed to come to life (or be alive/real life) = eyes look toward the spectator slightly but go back to position 3/4 turned away
{from Joseph Cornell’s Dreams}
The conditional Emily
She should have been a man — a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of knowledge of the old; and her strong, imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition of difficulty.
{Emily Bronte’s headmaster}
But instead…what? Can it really be that there is nothing possible between Great Navigator and Person Who Never Leaves Their Yard? Can the line between those traits and the lack thereof be so thin as one’s sex? And if so, what’s on the other side of the line? That conditional tense, haunting that headmaster’s declaration, is so much more present than the person in question, it seems she isn’t there at all.
But there’s another way, which is to ask, wasn’t she, though? How else, wandering alone on the moors all day, with their winds so ghostly and skies so large that they seem to defy the idea of cardinal direction, could she have always found her way home?
Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have — a something overtakes the Mind —
{Emily Dickinson, prose fragment 30}
Consider (etymology) : From the Latin considerare, literally to observe the stars.
{Vija Celmins, Mount Holyoke}
Dread. I like it better than the word fear, because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while the word dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there.
{Mary Ruefle, On Fear}
