autobibliography

[luthienne]

Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

[nevver]

[nevver]

The lights are up, John Thatcher

[anthropoetics]

kinder than man, athea davis

[heathcliffcathy-archive-deactiv]

“Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel - ‘Thou mayest’ - that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’ - it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?”

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

[macrolit]

A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid anymore.

East of Eden, John Steinbeck (via macrolit)

[autobibliographies]

Can beauty save us? Yesterday I looked at the river and a sliver of moon and knew the answer; today I fell asleep in a spot of sun behind a Vermont barn, woke to darkness, a thin whistle of wind and the answer changed. Inside the barn the boys build bongs out of copper piping, electrical tape, and jars. All of the children here have leaky brown eyes, and a certain precision of gesture. Even the maple syrup tastes like liquor. After dinner I sit the cutest little boy on my knee and read him a book about the history of cod absentmindedly explaining overfishing, the slave trade. People for rum? he asks, incredulously. Yes, I nod. People for rum.

“Thanksgiving,” Maggie Nelson

[autobibliographies]

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear the frantic automatic weapons unleashed, the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands, that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish comes back belly up, and the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing? The truth is: I don’t know. But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move my living limbs into the world without too much pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight toward the pickup trucks break-necking down the road, because she thinks she loves them, because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud roaring things will love her back, her soft small self alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm, until I yank the leash back to save her because I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say, and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth. Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

“The Leash,” by Ada Limón

[autobibliographies]

[sorryforthebonyelbows]

Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Allie Ray, Holler

Richard Siken, Crush

[autobibliographies]

“The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”

― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

[autobibliographies]

“Instead of the macho, trigger-happy man our culture has perversely wanted him to be, the cowboy is more apt to be convivial, quirky, and softhearted. To be "tough" on a ranch has nothing to do with conquests and displays of power. More often than not, circumstances - like the colt he's riding or an unexpected blizzard - are overpowering him. It's not toughness but "toughing it out" that counts. In other words, this macho, cultural artifact the cowboy has become is simply a man who possesses resilience, patience, and an instinct for survival. "Cowboys are just like a pile of rocks - everything happens to them. They get climbed on, kicked, rained and snowed on, scuffed up by wind. Their job is 'just to take it,'" one old-timer told me.”

― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

[autobibliographies]

“From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.” ― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

[autobibliographies]

“The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.” ― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

[autobibliographies]

[maureen2musings]

Piping Plover chick

greggardphoto

[autobibliographies]

“From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”

― Peter Rock, My Abandonment

[autobibliographies]

"I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."

– Joan Didion, UC Riverside commencement address (1975).