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Lee Bontecou making things.

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

--Flannery O’Connor

(The Vermeer image is from here - lovely service.)

Exit. June 2011.

Call

They had to recount seven years’ worth of separate lives within two hours. They spoke of traveling and family deaths, difficulties, illnesses, and adventures in countries unfamiliar to them during the time they knew one another. Towards the end, they chewed on new loves, births, recently released books, songs, and the lines they were unwilling to cross now that they were older.

In the middle of two hours, they got to the funny heart of lost time. They tested waters to see how their habits had changed. She still loved eggs but ate them burnt now instead of nearly raw. He gave up rice, bread and pasta and found a passion for early morning walks in lieu of lonelier night hours that used to cause such panic to his legs and arms. She learned to sit still in the hot sun, and he learned to run. He acquired her discipline while she finally lost a little, slept in when she could, but also gained the habit of staying awake twenty hours each day. Her exhaustion was new and welcome. His ability to stay asleep was fortuitous and overdue. Under the rumbling conversation they plumbed one another’s veins to see how much mineral they still shared: what was tapped out; what still made up their bones.

The heart of the matter came with the realization that time bent on their behalf, covering much of the rage and wonder that ransacked their story. The left over bits they chewed during the call passed from her mouth to his, back again, until they realized they joyfully could never fully catch up to one another. Their scope of their entire history continued to fold onto itself as they hung up, promising one another to speak again after they both fell off the phone.

Portrait

“He was a wonderfully frank man, my great-uncle Joseph, full of self-love and self-pity, vulnerable and craving recognition, brimming with childlike merriment, a happy man who always pretended to be miserable. With a kind of cheery contentment he loved to talk endlessly about his achievements, his discoveries, his insomnia, his detractors, his experiences, his books, articles, and lectures, all of which without exception had caused a ‘great stir in the world,’ his encounters, his work plans, his greatness, his importance, and his magnanimity.

He was at once a kind man and a selfish, spoiled one, with the sweetness of a baby and the arrogance of a wunderkind.”

--Amos Oz. A Tale of Love and Darkness. Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. New York: Harvest Book, 2003. 63-4.

#Amos Oz

Tack

Eleven tin cutouts stick a wall in a shadow corner of an old room. This afternoon she wants to drink tea while sitting in the long lobby of the hotel down the street. She went there with her husband when they first arrived to the city. Now she is thirsty and cold. The hotel has newspapers and she often hides for hours on end. But there is too much to do between this moment and next afternoon. She will have tea tomorrow with Louise or Nadja or any of the women who work in the neighborhood and take long breaks after lunch. All the roses must be trimmed and reset in clean water throughout the rooms. Windows will be cleaned so that the barges on the river can travel exclusively in their own fog and not through this building’s dirt. First there is the problem with these cutouts. They tack the wall like mollusks on a boat’s bottom. They are caught in plaster, but they also capture the wall in a collective grasp of tiny razors. Circles on two sides with spokes inside each. Points at two other ends and a straight bend of grace binding the points apart. The cutouts could be two-wheeled wagons or the detached faces of eleven frozen, metal birds.

She could afford to buy eleven of them from an original flock of tens, or hundreds, or however many an artist once made. They circle her wherever she lands. When they arrive to a new place, with its different rhythms, its quiet moments, the various rise and fall of its inhabitants as they crawl through each day, the cutouts keep her to the place at hand.

The matter with the bird-heads arose earlier when her husband brought a newspaper clipping home. They sat on their fourth floor balcony facing the river and evening rolled towards them. It was summer and the heat met the water in an orange haze. Ferries dodged barges. They flitted across the river to bring day workers home and guests to the parties hosted in the former palaces and the grand neighborhood hotel under ceiling fans and in glasses filled with cracked ice and lemon water. No cafes line this river. Fishermen don’t bother to cast from the river banks and instead throw lines over bridges that glide over the river’s tributaries that slice through the European half of the city. Asphalt rims the river’s edge. The ferry’s doors break open to allow the passengers out into the narrow, curving streets, their movements twisting between the balcony’s bannister, sliding quietly up the hill to walk across the clipping in her hand.

The eleven cutouts were a journey’s gift, and they are moving again. This evening she folds up the newspapers, lining the folds to the slits in the sticks and hanging everything back on the wall so another traveler can grab them easily. She tacks the clipping to the wall. It announces the daily happenings in the new place. The new city also has a river, this one through a wide marsh full of mosquitoes and rice. This new river also directs the flow of an entire city, its bodies, fish and boats. The cutouts hack a new wall, pinned against the bright light of a tall window overlooking a water’s edge lined in long grasses. The sun hits them at this hour just as horns blast geese into the sky, their shadows flying past the tin bird-heads that align into a start at great flight.

Not everything goes

"It is a mistake to think that the novelist is God Almighty and can do anything he wants. At some point the characters take over. The novelist can put his foot down and say, I refuse to take that direction, but he cannot tell his characters who to be and how to unravel their stories."

--Interview with Amos Oz. Paris Review "The Art of Fiction" No. 148.

#Amos Oz #Paris Review

Why spurn my home when exile is your home? / The Ithaca you want you’ll have in not having. / You’ll walk her shores yet long to tread those very grounds, / kiss Penelope yet wish you held your wife instead, / touch her flesh yet yearn for mine. / Your home’s in the rubblehouse of time now, / and you’re made thus, to yearn for what you lose.

--In André Aciman’s Out of Egypt. New York: Picador, 1994. 290. Quoting Homer’s Odyssey (but what translation?)

#Homer #Odyssey #Andre Aciman

Pasta and Beer Halls

Or we could go through Buenos Aires and try to find a table where a thousand people have sat before we arrive. We’ll knock our knees against wooden legs and rub sandals over tile cracks packed with dust and dried beer. We’ll start late in the mornings and eat small cakes along a balcony overlooking a hall filled with coffee and clean hair. We’ll drink sharp lemonade and seltzer and overhear long lies about friendly nights, and shorter, true tales about old music and dance. We’ll sleep in deck chairs on a narrow side street while everyone else naps in beds. We’ll tuck our linens under our plates, wash our teeth in beer and have concert tickets thrown into our pockets. We slip into a corridor of legs and arms clapping dust from suit jackets and shoulders. We sit at the height of another hall, by a current of curtain, as a small form takes flight and passes us on her way through the skylights. All the claps in the city make our ears ring as we walk from the doorway into pasta and beer halls by the water. We destroy ceiling fans by throwing umbrellas into their blades. Someone screams at us and we eat gelato laced with cinnamon. The streets become a third hall where people turn themselves inside out. Hands push against hands. Arms cling to keep each other at bay. The wind stays until morning when an early someone hangs new laundry out a window. Drops tap anyone walking at this time of day as fingers type a Reverie tumbling quietly from window to street, from piano shop to a tree, and we walk all the way to where we were before we arrived.

(For L.K.)

#Buenos Aires

Starting Over

On writing: We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Staring over with accuracy. I mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same.

--Anne Carson. Interview in The New York Times Magazine. March 17, 2013

#Anne Carson #writing

Giving all

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the preset. --Albert Camus

What we search for

(Would be willing to learn how to remember this way.)

Toward An Impure Poetry, --Pablo Neruda

"It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things---all lend a curious attactiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding---willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetraion of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment---moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice."

#Pablo Neruda #Impure Poetry

8:19pm

I am a bell sounding / without an echo. / Without this response / I just clang, / scream, /amount to nothing but deafening noise. / All I do is beg myself to /beg the other me/ to keep calm, /stay out of people’s ears, /and grow accustomed to this/ silent time. / I have no confident to turn to. / Am forced by my own voice / to seek open space /where noise doesn’t hit walls, /where even the stones won’t ring /back to me.

A bell doesn’t have skin /the way I once had skin. /No current of blood keeps /me beating. /I don’t leave a trace. /No body, /no form, /no image but /the one that comes to mind /if one had an ear near me.

I am sound. /And if this is now a silent time, /and I cannot escape it, /then I will turn, /as I always turn,/ and keep turning, /and screaming /until I sing.

A single poem

"[For the sake of a single poem]

…Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people thing, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they are open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished form ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."

--Rainer Maria Rilke. From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

#Malte Laurids Brigge #Rilke

“To be great, be whole. Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are in to the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor, because it blooms up above.”

-Fernando Pessoa

#Fernando Pessoa

Mérida

If I could run away, I would take you to Mérida. We could plug the holes in an old hacienda and fill it with nothing but two chairs and a desk, one bed and a stove. We would paint the walls and the dust pink and orange and wear old cotton shirts and soft shorts and keep the sun on our faces. We’d have a small, shaded courtyard with stone pools of water and import frogs if there were none to have company without words. We’d nap each afternoon when it grew too hot, and I fall asleep with my chin in your mouth. You learn how to build a fire without matches and teach me to do the same. We earn new scars on our bodies. I wash your hair in the pool. Our heels dodge scorpions as we walk in bare feet. We refuse to believe rain doesn’t fall during the dry season. When it does we dance in mud and let it dry to our skin.

We grow up together. You catch up to me until we are the same age. We chew words the way we chew meat. We leave most words behind and give to ourselves only the most essential: dance, sleep, swim, earn, teach, run.

#Merida

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