loose sally of the mind

There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection...The essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter." Well, yes, that's just it. An essay, she writes, "can be polished till every atom of its surface shines" – yes, that's it, again.

In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay".

---from Zadie Smith, The Guardian.

'Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible'
---W.B. Yeats.

Life is made up of very small things that happen. How did I get here? Look, and look again into the rusting mirror. Hard to imagine that it is metal, was polished once, saw other faces. Increasingly you think...you like that phrase, the sudden change of direction, the slow unhinging, casting off of weight, the mind curving out, enlarged, cat-like...increasingly you think: how difficult it is to start a novel, with all that baggage, excess, skirting around the main thing, the accumulation of detail upon detail. Just as a face is not "known" (take note, my oldest friend), only recognized, glanced at, and then deeply familiar. You will mark a few words with a pencil, lead on paper, grey mingling with the white, distill it down to a few choice phrases or quotes, get down to the basics, the elemental... pornification.

this is where you are, and this is where it's at..and it seems to me that you can start anywhere and still end up there. if it's written, you can't change it. mineral ink. slowly decomposes.

various people notice different things. why do you always want to know what people have had for breakfast, what they wear to sleep, the most ordinary of things? people who sleep on their stomachs are a strange breed.

the words in a certain way, the selection of language has everything to do with the silences that exist in between the words, the quality of that silence. the silence in the trees, in the mind, between atoms and stars, was there when i spoke to you. the chaste heart that knew better, that had seen the desert of time, and imagined a tulip, scarred but whole.

(the borrowed finery is paula fox's)