The mangled and damaged are in the best place to receive enlightenment..the metaphysical illiterate, the junkyard angels...
---G. Dyer.
Only in the rhetoric of the mad and inebriated can the old freedoms and continuities survive.
---Jonathan Raban (on Lowell).
Of course, not too inebriated. Just on this side of the border to make sense, or to have at least crossed back into familiar routines after a darting stint in foreign territory. And you return, and everything is the same. Or rather, everything is different by a degree or two, a slight displacement here, the strange slowing down of your voice or the quizzical look on some people's faces there.
The stammering century, full of crackpots and weirdos, who look in dark mirrors and see only themselves. One shelf above the abyss, your thoughts unhinged, uncoiling from reality, a spiral of imaginary thoughts and relations to the world. Your clothes two sizes too big for you, your shirt stained with coffee, the collars roughed with age. The fragments of lines from the books of writers you've never read, the copies of words scribbled in a notebook, the dimly guessed at sense of a poet's truth. Where is the word that stands before the law, fresh, bright and clear?
Take the line, the necessary steps, with a grateful heart. No time like this will come again.
At the border, the frontier, JFK..
"Have you had any kind of military training?"
"Does it look like I've had any military training?, I felt like asking, but in dark times humour breaks up the seriousness and shows up stupidity-and that's the last thing one expects: on the frontier identity is a matter of life and death...
Americans, let me tell you, are now just one stage away from a delusional state. That sounds a bit like Qutb, but you know what I mean. This mania for confession, for reassurance from a stranger and for "authenticity" is something that immediately struck you as quite bizarre. The artificial sweetness of a false intimacy and easy-going worldliness.
~~~
We are all old-timers
each of us holds a locked razor...
'A long sentence of history and tradition behind them..to retrieve particular experience with unprecedented brilliance and lucidity..in which the immediate moment brushes electrically against history...a new freedom.'
Scales glitter on our bodies as we fall.
God, who would have died or killed for a conversation, must have seen this scene forever: man, skilled in his loneliness, his blood thinning, the soil below his feet loosening with the warmth, the old patterns of beginning and ending. This man, this particular man, desiring to see himself undone, to see himself with burning eyes, as flesh and bones and not spirit. The centuries that have passed so that this lost gaze is found in his eye, the eyelash of recognition. The desire to know his own drunken heart.
..and the laugh
Of death is hacked in sandstone, in their year...
..and age
blackens the heart of Adam.
it is not easy to face with an open heart, an unflinching hand, the estrangement that is worked into our lives from a distance, like random luck. The ceaseless flux, the uprooting, the knowledge today that today's knowledge is tomorrow's ignorance. Blessed is the man who stammers, who still speaks.
How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?
"You can't know everything!" a dear friend tells me, caustically. We talk over one another. Keep your head down until something goes right. "We must find meaning in small things," he adds. Perhaps because nothing "big" is left for us.
car keys and razor blades
shine in an ashtray.
Harsh and sharp times we live in. The poet's words won't help. Life sticks it to you. But I do like these words,
a greyhound's gentle tautness.
(words by Robert Lowell).
~~~
Should have mentioned Jean Stafford here somewhere, but since I haven't read her...
A German shepherd:
'He was all bronzy, lustrous black except for an Elizabethan ruff of white and a tip of white at the end of his perky tail...laughing interiorly out of the enormous pleasure of his life.'
---G. Dyer.
Only in the rhetoric of the mad and inebriated can the old freedoms and continuities survive.
---Jonathan Raban (on Lowell).
Of course, not too inebriated. Just on this side of the border to make sense, or to have at least crossed back into familiar routines after a darting stint in foreign territory. And you return, and everything is the same. Or rather, everything is different by a degree or two, a slight displacement here, the strange slowing down of your voice or the quizzical look on some people's faces there.
The stammering century, full of crackpots and weirdos, who look in dark mirrors and see only themselves. One shelf above the abyss, your thoughts unhinged, uncoiling from reality, a spiral of imaginary thoughts and relations to the world. Your clothes two sizes too big for you, your shirt stained with coffee, the collars roughed with age. The fragments of lines from the books of writers you've never read, the copies of words scribbled in a notebook, the dimly guessed at sense of a poet's truth. Where is the word that stands before the law, fresh, bright and clear?
Take the line, the necessary steps, with a grateful heart. No time like this will come again.
At the border, the frontier, JFK..
"Have you had any kind of military training?"
"Does it look like I've had any military training?, I felt like asking, but in dark times humour breaks up the seriousness and shows up stupidity-and that's the last thing one expects: on the frontier identity is a matter of life and death...
Americans, let me tell you, are now just one stage away from a delusional state. That sounds a bit like Qutb, but you know what I mean. This mania for confession, for reassurance from a stranger and for "authenticity" is something that immediately struck you as quite bizarre. The artificial sweetness of a false intimacy and easy-going worldliness.
~~~
We are all old-timers
each of us holds a locked razor...
'A long sentence of history and tradition behind them..to retrieve particular experience with unprecedented brilliance and lucidity..in which the immediate moment brushes electrically against history...a new freedom.'
Scales glitter on our bodies as we fall.
God, who would have died or killed for a conversation, must have seen this scene forever: man, skilled in his loneliness, his blood thinning, the soil below his feet loosening with the warmth, the old patterns of beginning and ending. This man, this particular man, desiring to see himself undone, to see himself with burning eyes, as flesh and bones and not spirit. The centuries that have passed so that this lost gaze is found in his eye, the eyelash of recognition. The desire to know his own drunken heart.
..and the laugh
Of death is hacked in sandstone, in their year...
..and age
blackens the heart of Adam.
it is not easy to face with an open heart, an unflinching hand, the estrangement that is worked into our lives from a distance, like random luck. The ceaseless flux, the uprooting, the knowledge today that today's knowledge is tomorrow's ignorance. Blessed is the man who stammers, who still speaks.
How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?
"You can't know everything!" a dear friend tells me, caustically. We talk over one another. Keep your head down until something goes right. "We must find meaning in small things," he adds. Perhaps because nothing "big" is left for us.
car keys and razor blades
shine in an ashtray.
Harsh and sharp times we live in. The poet's words won't help. Life sticks it to you. But I do like these words,
a greyhound's gentle tautness.
(words by Robert Lowell).
~~~
Should have mentioned Jean Stafford here somewhere, but since I haven't read her...
A German shepherd:
'He was all bronzy, lustrous black except for an Elizabethan ruff of white and a tip of white at the end of his perky tail...laughing interiorly out of the enormous pleasure of his life.'
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