A belatedly posted sight from my Saturday afternoon run with Lulu, our fast, young dog.
More from Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet:
So, dear Mr. Kappus, you shouldn’t be dismayed if your sadness rises up in front of you, greater than any you have ever seen before; or if a disquiet plays over your hands and over all your doings like light and cloud-shadow. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed. If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it. All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself.
Rilke also cautions “Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you.” I will not be snide and ask whether “All one has to do is help it to be ill” constitutes solid, up-to-the-minute science or, rather, “over-rapid conclusions.”
This is no time for snide. Mostly.
[video]
Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska passed away today, at 88 years old. She says it best herself:
A Note
Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything it’s not;
to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.
An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;
and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,
mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.
“An extraordinary chance / to remember for a moment / a conversation held / with the lamp switched off”
Yes.
(via halsf)
[video]
“Affenlight didn’t hate David, not anymore. Not that he had much regard for the man, but he’d spent more time thinking about David in recent years than about anyone in the world besides Pella and Owen, and that kind of constant mindfulness, over time, could mellow into sympathy. He would never forgive David, but David had become a part of life, and Affenlight had achieved a grudging acknowledgment of the fact that David would continue to live and breathe whether he wanted him to or not.” —
- from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
I wrote a paragraph explaining why this passage speaks to me during this phase of my life, but it’s clumsily, uncomfortably personal. So I followed the advice you’ll read later in this post: I axed it.
Meanwhile, to distract you from my clumsily, uncomfortably personal disclosure that I wrote and deleted something clumsily, uncomfortably personal, here’s another striking quote from Harbach’s novel:
Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer—you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes …
That last bit holds a healthy reminder for writers: Revising isn’t a burden; it’s a luxury.
So junk thousands of words. Start fresh. Be glad. And know that the shortstop whose game-deciding throw missed the first baseman’s glove by ten feet is deeply envious.
“Part of Affenlight felt peeved at Owen for interrupting or dismissing his bliss. Because it was bliss, he felt, to be here with Owen and to read to him, even when he was reading dry-as-dust sentences from a poorly xeroxed course packet. Of all the activities two people could do together in private, Affenlight had a special fondness for reading aloud. Maybe this was part of his instinct for solitude and self-enclosure; a way to reveal himself while hiding behind someone else’s words.” —
- from Chad Harbach’s novel, The Art of Fielding
I’m with Affenlight. Whether or not you’re hiding behind someone else’s words, reading to a loved one is bliss. So is being read to.
And when I say “a loved one,” I mean that broadly, to include everyone from your lover to your own infant, whose brain detects no story but only the song of your voice.
One of the most comforting deathbed scenes I’ve ever found myself imagining involves a late-middle-aged version of my daughter reading to an old-man version of me as I fade and fade and finally am no more.
“
“You shouldn’t eat so much flour,” Owen said, taking a single pancake for himself. “Even when I’m stoned I don’t each much flour. The other reason, of course, is that I’m a staunch monogamist. In practice, if not in theory. I can’t help it. Do I acknowledge the oppressive, regressive nature of sexual exclusivity? Yes. Do I want that exclusivity very badly for myself? Also yes. There’s probably some sort of way in which that’s not a paradox. Maybe I believe in love. Maybe I just badly crave my mother’s approval. Hang on a sec.” Owen jogged back to the hot-food line, spatulaed up four more flapjacks, and slid them onto his plate. “Sorry to babble on like this, Henry. I think I’m immoderately stoned.”
After brunch they went to the union to play Ping-Pong. Owen, even immoderately stoned, proved to be a surprisingly good player.
” —- from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
A little like Owen, I have nothing but maybes to explain why I like this passage. Maybe it’s because I’ve stubbed my toe more than once on those “In practice, if not in theory” tree roots that lurk just below the tips of the grass blades when your spirit is more bold than your flesh. Or maybe I’ve just read “In theory, if not in practice” so very many times that I hallucinate a twisting backflip in Harbach’s “In practice, if not in theory.”
Maybe the spelling of “spatulaed” looks so wrong that it’s just got to be right.
Maybe it’s as simple as being a sucker for a good Ping-Pong reference. Your serve, Mr. Nabokov.
“
OKAY, BACK UP, WE CAN’T LET THIS PASS. YOU LIVED IN A TREE HOUSE?
The tree house is a structure on a friend’s property in North Carolina. When I left my very first job, I retreated to said tree house for several months. Then I went and worked for some friends of mine who are weavers in Italy for several months for the winter. When I came back in the Spring, the friend and I decided we wanted to make the tree house bigger. So I drafted plans for an additional part and we hired a carpenter. For about four months, I worked on building the second part of this tree house, which I then lived in for several years after.
YOU’RE DRAWN TO THE MAKING OF PHYSICAL THINGS.
I’m a builder.
OF BOOKS, OF TREE HOUSES, AND ALSO OF SHOES, RIGHT?
Oh gosh, shoes, yes! As I started getting more and more involved in bookmaking and my work began to be collected, I would see my books go into special collection libraries, put behind glass boxes in exhibitions, and stowed away deep inside buildings, never to be handled again. … Making shoes is a way to take the tools, materials, and processes I know and understand as a bookmaker, and using them in service of making a utilitarian object.
” — - from an interview with Jennifer Brook, who I nominate to succeed the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man In The World” guy.
I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start.
Here, have a passage:
As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.
THAT THING WHERE YOU’VE FINALLY SLEPT BETTER THAN A COLICKY INFANT BUT BOOKS CAN’T HOLD YOUR INTEREST AND YOU DECIDE THAT BURROUGHSING YOUR KID’S TAYLOR SWIFT SONGS MIGHT RESTORE YOUR SOUL TO FACTORY SETTINGS
We were both young when I first saw you
make your way through the crowd
and say hello
Little did I know
you can take me down
with just one single blow
We were both young when I first saw you
A one-hand feel on the steering wheel
The other on my heart
Our song is the way you laugh
Something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around
Our song is a slamming screen door
I keep waiting for you, but you never come
Crying on the staircase
Go and tell your friends
that I’m obsessive
and crazy
I just want to feel okay again
Watch me strike a match on all my wasted time
Sparks fly
whenever you smile
We were both young when I first saw you
We’re on the phone
and you talk real slow
’cause it’s late
and your mama don’t know
She’ll never know your story like I do
Our song is the way you laugh
Our song is a slamming screen door
Play it again
Play it again
Drop everything now
Meet me in the pouring rain