more compelling
The barrenness of the poetic task: as if every day we look out at a courtyard of rubble and from this are required to make something beautiful.
— Theodor Roethke, Straw for the Fire
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
— Leonard Cohen
sulphur, mercury, and salt
By a happy quirk of alphabetical order, TCAE starts off interrogating the autobiographical impulse to which most of its authors eagerly surrender: “I am Louise Brooks,” writes Hilton Als, “whom no man will ever possess.” He’s not, as a matter of fact, but it’s thrilling to watch him pretend to be, and a reminder of how disorientingly new a great essay feels. Most of the I’s in TCAE, however, are regular old I’s, mulling over their own pasts, families, and romances. A significant chunk of the essays concern some kind of nightmarish personal tragedy, subjects for which the first person seems not just suitable but unavoidable: there are dead parents and dead children, hideous diseases, suicides. But other I’s seem harder to justify. Meghan O’Gieblyn writes brilliantly and surprisingly about the history of pedagogy but with mere textbook flawlessness about her childhood. (If writing well were the same thing as writing without conspicuous flaws, TCAE would be a near-masterpiece.) Sometimes you get the sense that she’s writing in the first person because everybody else is doing it these days. The idea that you could write an essay about detective fiction or brain damage simply because these are interesting topics comes to seem almost nonsensical. The idea that you could write about cancer without once mentioning that you have cancer, as Susan Sontag did in the New York Review of Books in 1978, comes to seem positively inhuman. Personal experience with the subject at hand, TCAE implies dozens of times over, must be announced wherever possible, and if it’s not possible, you’re probably better off writing about something else.
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
From Collected Poems 1930 – 1993 by May Sarton © W.W. Norton, 1993
If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I am exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship—and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular “good.” When I try to do something that is not in my nature or the nature of the relationship, way will close behind me.
— Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
nplusonemag-blog
“It’s hard not to think ‘death drive’ every time I go on the internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember. You really want to know what it is about 20-somethings? It’s this: we live longer now. But we also live less. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds morbid, it sounds dramatic, but in choosing the internet I am choosing not to be a certain sort of alive. Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.”
always-returning
“In other words, a lack of meaning in modern life is met with a mentality of demands that leads, inevitably, to an over-accumulation of supposedly ‘transforming’ objects, exactly because the life one lives in modern society ‘is empty,’ Marquard says… [T]he disappearance of meaning in modern life is covered up by a preoccupation with essentially superficial 'things’ that are fetishized (endowed with a mystical transforming power) and become the true carrier of radically subjective meaning, but rather than substantially replacing the apparent loss of meaning they only add bulk or clutter to life. This, once again, represents an aspect of the uncanny, as the imaginary world of the subjective is confronted by the reality of the possible material disorder of life.”
— John Scanlan, On Garbage
