Just Once

by Anne Sexton

Just once I knew what life was for.

In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;

walked there along the Charles River,

watched the lights copying themselves,

all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening

their mouths as wide as opera singers;

counted the stars, my little campaigners,

my scar daisies, and I knew that I walked my love

on the night green side of it and cried

my heart to the eastbound cars and cried

my heart to the westbound cars and took

my truth across a small humped bridge

and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home

and hoarded these constants into morning

only to find them gone.

you are no myth unless i choose to speak

How Roses Get Black

by Frank O'Hara

First you took Arthur's porcelain
pony from the mantel! and! dashed
it against the radiator! Oh it was

vile! we were listening to Sibelius.
And then with lighter fluid you wet
each pretty floored rose, tossed

your leonine head, set them on fire.
Laughing maniacally from the bath-
room. Talk about burning bushes! I

who can cut with a word, was quite
amused. Upon reflection I am not.
Send me your head to soak in tallow!

You are no myth unless I choose to
speak. I breathed those ashes secretly.
Heroes alone destroy, as I destroy

you. Know now that I am the roses
and it is of them I choose to speak.

What You Don't Know Makes You Nervous

This article by Daniel Gilbert in the New York Times attempts to explain why everyone our age hates their lives. (Lately you've heard the term "quarter-life crisis" being thrown around like frisbee at a Memorial Day bbq, right?)

It's not the fact that we're coming of age in the shittiest economy since 1929 or that we watched the Twin Towers fall during our formative years or, even, that our TV dosages are steadily subsidized with bad "reality" programs that make you wonder if people really are that stupid/vapid/obscene/annoying (and if you are really that pretentious/righteous/self-actualized, etc.)

Apparently shock volunteers in an experiment at Maastricht University felt less nervous when they knew they would be zapped with high voltage everytime than when they didn't know if their shocks would be tiny or earth-shattering.

So we are miserable because there is no certainty, and we don't know how big the electric shocks will be. We have no idea what will happen next. We're all running around cracked-out on coffee in the mornings, stomachs nervous about absolutely nothing and everything, and then we go to the bars and drown our consciousness with gallons of beer: the vicious cycle of our generation.

Novel Approach

"After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally "pure." Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels."

- D.H. Lawrence, LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER

no stonecutter more obstinate

"No work could defeat him, no matter how hard or humiliating it was, no salary, no matter how miserable, could demoralize him, and he never lost his essential fearlessness when faced with the insolence of his superiors. But he was not an innocent, either: everyone who crossed his path suffered the consequences of the overwhelming determination, capable of anything, that lay behind his helpless appearance... Florentino Ariza moved through every post during thirty years of dedication and tenacity in the face of every trial. He fulfilled all his duties with admirable skill... Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet."~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Upon not sleeping I find three poems...

I Want to Sleep

I shall be still stronger,
Still clearer, purer, so let
The sweet invasion of oblivion come on.
I want to sleep.

If I could forget myself, if I were only
A tranquil tree,
Branches to spread out the silence,
Trunk of mercy.

The great darkness, grown motherly,
Deepens little by little,
Brooding over this body that the soul-
After a pause - surrenders.

It may even embark from the endless world,
From its accidents,
And, scattering into stars at the last,
The soul will be daybreak.

Abandoning myself to my accomplice,
My boat,
I shall reach on my ripples and mists
Into the dawn.

I do not want to dream of useless phantoms,
I do not want a cave.
Let the huge moonless spaces
Hold me apart, and defend me.

Let me enjoy so much harmony
Thanks to the ignorance
Of this being, that is so secure
It pretends to be nothing.

Night with its darkness, solitude with its peace,
Everything favors
my delight in the emptiness
That soon will come.

Emptiness, O paradise
Rumored about so long:
Sleeping, sleeping, growing alone
Very slowly.

Darken me, erase me,
Blessed sleep,
As I lie under a heaven that mounts
Its guard over me.

Earth, with your darker burdens,
Drag me back down,
Sink my being into my being:
Sleep, sleep.

- Jorge Guillen, translation by James Wright

Moonrise


Will you glimmer on the sea?
will you fling your spear-head
on the shore?
what note shall we pitch?
we have a song,
on the bank we share our arrows;
the loosed string tells our note:

O flight,
bring her swiftly to our song.
She is great,
we measure her by the pine trees.

-H.D.

Evening


I am strange here and often I am still trying
To finish something as the light is going
Occasionally as just now I think I see
Off to one side something passing at that time
Along the herded walls under the walnut trees
And I look up but it is only
Evening again the old hat without a head
How long will it be till he speaks when he passes

-W.S. Merwin

I remember being young, sitting on my mother's lap in the front seat of our station wagon on the way home. It was past my bedtime and everything, even houses we had passed on the way home again and again, was suddenly exhilarating. I could see the moon through the windshield and no matter how fast we went or what turns we made, the moon was always still there, neck and neck.

"Why is the moon following us?" I asked mom. The rest of the family giggled at me.
"No, honey," she said. "It only looks that way. It stays right there, always."

Clarence Thomas Loves Egg McMuffins

This hilarious post at The Curious Life is definitely worth a look. Bill Geerhart posed as a young boy and wrote letters to the Governator, Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, Clarence Thomas, and others. Some are very very creepy (looking in your direction, Ramirez), while others, like Clarence Thomas' declaration of love for all things McDonald's, are just downright heartwarming.

This reminds me of something ominous I have been thinking about for a while. Unfortunately, letter writing is on its way to being deader than dead. Here's an eerie question: in the future, will Knopf or RandomHouse or any other publishing house be publishing The Collected Emails of So-and-So? Will the opus DiStefano: The Complete GChat Correspondences someday be lost in a Barnes & Noble clearance bin?

What can we do to change something like that?


(Thanks to Marcia for the heads up)

Tragic Age

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

-Opening paragraph of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER
D.H. Lawrence, 1928

20x200

Need good art for decorating your apt on the cheap? Then check out Jen Bekman's 20x200, a site where you can buy limited edition prints for $20, $200, or $2000 depending on the size.

Right now I'm coveting this piece by Matt Jones:

And I'm absolutely in LOVE with this print by Christine Berrie:

20x200 has art for every aesthetic, and it's all tastefully chosen, so you can't really make a wrong move. And with 8 x 10 inch prints at 20 bucks a pop, your walls will sing with the triumph of teenage girls home from their back to school shopping trip!