Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) wrote a relatively unknown book called The Beatrice Letters, which I haven’t read and can’t find (maybe used?) in the usual places where I find books. I’ve only seen it reviewed; nevertheless, it inspired the poem below. Intertextuality is hilarious, isn’t it?
Here is a brief discussion of The Beatrice Letters, by one of the best booktubers out there. I mean out here, because I’m out here now, in the interwebs. Cool.
And here’s my little poem.
Ergo
I will love you even if you never know that I exist, if it never occurs to you that I should have existed but never did.
I will love you even if I realize I never existed and nothing that exists around me – or doesn’t – is real.
I will love you if we never meet because we won’t.
I’ve been thinking about thinking and maybe breathing some life back into the old dead blog.
Do you ever think that Earth might be the only place in the whole universe where anything thinks? We are each a life, rising up like a wave, rolling, crashing, receding. Enlightenment comes when the wave realizes it is ocean, yes? So here we are, made of stars and driving our meatcycles around on a single planet orbiting one star among billions in a galaxy among trillions of galaxies. And for all we know, this is the only place where all that big banging has given rise to consciousness, where the universe has the opportunity to consider itself.
Of course, it’s not easy. A single finite and incredibly fragile life has to be very advanced – intelligent – to know how stupid it is. And in order to get good at doing anything, that life has to nearly perfect a skill set just barely surpassing the skills to know it’s not good at that thing yet. (I’ll let you know when I think I’m any good at writing.) It’s infinitely easier to be terrible at that thing and think you’re great at it. Which explains at least half the human population and the entirety of its propaganda, laws, and the domestication of humans.
Anyway, I have poems, a few. Later, but soon. Also if you see this post, could you click Like, even if you don’t? Just so I’ll know somebody else is out there. Otherwise, how do I know I’m not the only wave on the beach, just the same wave rolling over and over? … It’s the phenomenology of Sisyphus, fam.
In the meantime, today is the birthday of William Faulkner, my all-time favorite writer. Yes, maybe even considering Gabriel Garcia Marquez. OK, maybe they’re tied. And also Cormac McCarthy.
“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. “That was all I wanted,” he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. “That was all, for thirty years. That didn’t seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.”
“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’ clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” ― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Well this doesn’t feel right for Easter but what can you do? It’s the most close to ready piece in the notebook. And I like the cadence and the weird rhyme between the third and last stanzas. I don’t use rhyme much but sometimes I like to experiment.
Happy Easter. I hope the bunny or higher power of your conception made timely delivery of whatever peace, happiness, or sense of purpose you needed most.
The red-tailed hawk turns on a thermal above the wild brushy ground and cries
There is nothing you need Nothing is precious but time Nothing is worth dying for but love Nothing is worth living for but peace Nothing belongs to you but now
Below is the last poem I wrote in 2022; it was a lean year for creative output, to say the least. My bad. And I don’t know if anyone is still reading this blog. At one time it had 7,000 subscribers but I have been neglectful. I hope that 2023 will be better. One of the things I’ve been trying to teach myself is that writers/poets have to practice their scales just like musicians. Of course that means setting boundaries, protecting the hour or so a day that’s the bare minimum for doing anything with one’s life. And the people around me don’t respond well to boundaries. They see spending time living the life you’re working to make a living to have as a reward for being successful enough that you don’t have to work. Which is like saying a farmer can’t harvest any of his crop unless he harvests enough to throw some away.
I see life differently. I believe that we’re born to live a certain secret amount of time, and that every moment of that time belongs completely to the person whose life it is. Not one second ever belongs to anyone else. It’s ridiculous to think you have to borrow some of it back from your employer, or your family. You don’t have to justify your self-expression, how you spend your time, or deny the fact that being not busy doesn’t mean being available. You should keep your promises and support others, but you haven’t promised to be with them all the time, and they haven’t promised to pay you what your life is worth.
How infinite and amazing a human life is, and how completely we reduce every life we see – even our own – to its most basic appearances. It’s tempting to see only the surface: the hair, the tattoos, the piercings, the clothes, the secondary sex characteristics. When I see people, I try to see the sadness, the gladness, the pain, the fears and hopes and history that has all brought them to their Now.
The way we see each other and our fleeting lives is like looking at a distant galaxy and saying well, that’s not quite enough light to read a menu by. And it makes me sad and I can’t communicate in words how much life is worth loving, how much people are worth their freedom and the celebration and defense of their solitude.
Happy New Year
Human Life
Thinking about a human life makes all the light held by time retreat to the distant corners of the mind. Time can’t imagine such a life, can’t hold it, and time can’t set it free. Eternity is the only – oh, so lonesome – measure of a thought.
And how can I love you, who never arrived, was never found, barely sought: the walled garden unmapped in any world? But I do, I have so for long. I swear to die with your secret name still forming in my thoughts.
If I see the surface of the ocean and think I know what lies beneath, I must be ready to accept a slow death by thirst, shivering and steeped in a cold mist. Eight billion lives is so many infinite worlds.
But for the time being I am in the center of everything that screams and teems. And it’s subtle as the most intangible reality. For now time is the duration of a thought.
Clarice Lispector Agua Viva
Boomer is living on borrowed time. He has very little he can call his own, so he borrows as much as he can. It arrives from the sky in tiny packages that glance off the struggling grass, brush his face and become exactly the just-now moment of a thought.
Boomer is in love with words, even their droplets of darkness. All night and sometimes in the day he mumbles words. He conjures them out of paper and they skitter and lurch away into short lives, meaning nothing to anyone but him. When he sleeps the words fall out of line and make a run back toward chaos. And they are glad to be scattered. They were no good for each other.
Boomer wakes and looks around and laughs – he knows he’ll find his words again beyond the deep blue channel, past the islands, outside of time. And also dogs.
Boomer will be an excellent ghost. He loves to be quiet. He’ll be a spirit of wood – of furniture and windowsill – the vague squeak of a floorboard when no one living is up and moving through the dark house. A phantom of ambiguity and a slight tingle in the nerves. So he practices being forgotten and unnamed.
Boomer will be a friend to sleeping cats, focusing puddles of sunlight on the rugs. His thoughts will float like motes of dust and make the room a little sad, though no one will remember why. And somewhere in eternity, old Boomer will be asleep in his words.
Oh! My (for lack of a better word) God You who are if I am not, You who are not if I am, for that matter both and neither, I pray to you the unnamable, incomprehensible Being, for peace, for consolation in my inexorable solitude, for my life to light (even if weakly) the lives of those I touch and hold fast, for my moment in the space of time to do no damage, cause no suffering, abridge no freedom, and then for me to be forgotten in the long birthnight of mystery and oblivion. Amen.
Since I’m not generating much polished work product these days, I thought we might try tackling the subject of books. I’m thinking I’ll start a series of posts about the books I’m enjoying. Also, links to booktube channels on YouTube where I find great recommendations.
I read more than I write. I’ve read a number of good books so far this year, and I’m currently reading a lot more. My current reading list has gotten way out of control, but it’s all so good that I don’t want to move any of these down to my reading later list.
I guess I’m what people call a mood reader. I don’t stick with one thing and finish it; I read whatever I’m in the mood to read. Also, some books seem to fit into a certain general time of day. For example, Great Expectations is a prime time book. I read it in the evening sometimes, instead of streaming video for a while. The Book of Disquiet, Collected Fictions, and Decreation aren’t novels and they’re better closer to bedtime.
This is my current list of books for 2022. This isn’t my collection, just what what I’m reading now, expect to read this year, and what I’ve recently completed.
I’m currently reading:
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa Season of Migration to the North -Tayeb Salih Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (1818) Collected Fictions – Borges Decreation – Anne Carson The Iliac Crest – Cristina Rivera Garza Dowry of Blood – S.T. Gibson Cathedral of Mist – Paul Willems Seeking Slow – Melanie Barnes The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern Journal of a Novel – John Steinbeck
Recently Completed Books
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle – Murakami The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata Snow – Orhan Pamuk The Book Thief – Marjus Zusak Pedro Paramo – Juan Rulfo Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson Piranesi – Susanna Clarke Untold Night and Day – Bae Suah One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Sense of an Ending The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter
Books Waiting on My Shelves
1Q84 – Haruki Murakami Letters to a young Poet – Rilke The Remains of the Day – Ishiguro When we were Orphans – Ishiguro The Anthropocene Reviewed – John Green The Alienist – Machado de Assis The Waves – Virginia Wolf Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong Things Fall Apart – Achebe, Chinua The Road – Cormac McCarthy The House of Spirits – Isabel Allende The Memory Police – Yogo Ogawa Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon Dark Tales – Shirley Jackson The Legend of Hill House – Shirley Jackson The Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell Ghostwritten – David Mitchell Quiet – Susan Cain The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro Beloved – Toni Morrison The Count of Monte Christo – Alexandre Dumas The Best of Richard Matheson Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas – Machado de Assis Collected Stories of William Faulkner Absalom! Absalom – William Faulkner Sixty Stories – Donald Barthelme Emma – Jane Austen Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen Eugene Onegin – Pushkin Frankenstein in Baghdad -Ahmed Saadawi The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux The Snow Leopard – Matheson Don Quixote – Cervantes A Gentleman in Moscow – Where the Crawdads Sing East of Eden – John Steinbeck Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Dark Interval – Rilke
We were never lovers and I don’t know if that means everything or nothing since so much of everything I imagine remembering is meaningless now. It’s not important but maybe
I saw the moon one night last week. Alone, I just stood there and thought it looked strange, smoky as it rose over Rincon. Later I realized I’d unseen the blood moon in its flight.
My mind was somewhere else while Earth threw a bloody shadow on its bone china innocence. (The only place that Man has ever reached and not committed murder.)
But why did you take my hand that night in the college parking lot under the oak trees, interlacing your perfect young fingers with mine, if everything means nothing?
Never mind: I’m too old now to misunderstand the maimings of love. The great eye of the moon looks down from eternity and they say we’re meeting on the other side.
The maimings of love are endlessly funny, as are the tiny figures of talking animals, being blown to pieces in cartoons. ~ Gilbert Sorrentino, The Moon in its Flight
A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs.… A poem should not mean But be. ~ Archibald Macliesh, Ars Poetica
It’s national poetry month and I have some things indolently percolating in the notebook but nothing ready to post just yet. But the month is about to end and I’m nothing if not sensitive to the pressures of the calendar. So here’s a better poem, but the great mystical poet W.S. Merwin. It’s been living in the back of my mind since the 1980s, when it first occurred to me that it applies to me. I was in college studying literature when it was published so I probably saw it hot off the press. Those were days in ways that today and yesterday were not, if you know what I mean.
I’ll try to get one of those new poems up by the weekend but no promises. I don’t think any of us is responding well to pressure these days. We know the consequences of our actions only in the protractions of time.
“I am old, Gandalf. I don’t look it, but I am beginning to feel it in my heart of hearts. Well-preserved indeed! Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can’t be right. I need a change, or something.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
Metaphor 