some beautiful things

a collection of the words and sentences and images that have been to me like the blast of a trumpet

[cose-belle]

It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend, writing his history, I would want to write things down. I would try to make lists. A list of all the stores and businesses going up and down the main street and who owned them, a list of family names, names on the tombstones in the cemetery and any inscriptions underneath. A list of the titles of movies that played at the Lyceum Theatre from 1938 to 1950, roughly speaking. Names on the cenotaph (more for the First World War than for the Second). Names of the streets and the pattern they lay in. The hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy, heartbreaking.

And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting.

- Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

[cose-belle]

So lying alongside our world was Uncle Benny’s world like a troubling distorted reflection, the same but never at all the same. In that world people could go down in quicksand, be vanquished by ghosts or terrible ordinary cities; luck and wickedness were gigantic and unpredictable; nothing was deserved, anything might happen; defeats were met with crazy satisfaction. It was his triumph, that he couldn’t know about, to make us see. - Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

[cose-belle]

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it. - Sharon Olds, “I Go Back to May 1937″

[cose-belle]

A gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it. - Cool Runnings

[cose-belle]

I say to them, Life is lukewarm enough! Give us a little heat! If I’m going to read about a bunch of people who drive Volkswagens and seem to have mostly Volkswagen-sized problems, and the writer shows them driving around on top of the ice, I want a sense that there’s a lot of very, very cold water down below. I eventually want for someone to crash through. - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

[cose-belle]

Then I started to write about my envy. I got to look in some cold dark corners, see what was there, shine a little light on what we all have in common. Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic—jealousy especially so—but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned. Now I felt like I was getting somewhere, after all those weeks of emotionally swimming the English Channel, cold and afraid.

...

The movie: You could see the amazing fortitude of people going through horror with grace, looking right into the pit and seeing that this is what you’ve got, this disease, or maybe even this jealousy. So you do as well as you can with it. And this ravaged body or wounded psyche can and should still be cared for as softly and tenderly as possible.

...

The more I wrote about it and the more I thought of the movie, the angrier I got at how often this writer friend mentioned her money to me, because that summer Sam and I had almost none, and she knew this. I kept writing about my childhood, about how often I had longed for what other girls had and for what other families seemed to be about. I taped Hillel’s line to the wall by my desk: “I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.” The way I dance is by writing. So I wrote about trying to pay closer attention to the world, about taking things less seriously, moving more slowly, stepping outside more often. Eventually what I was writing got funnier and compassion broke through, for me and also for my writer friend. And at this point I told her, as kindly as possible, that I needed a sabbatical from our friendship. Life really is so short. And finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful, like the men in the AIDS movie, doing the dance of the transformed self, dancing like an old long-legged bird. - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

[cose-belle]

I woke up every morning on the fourth floor, in the two-hundred-year-old walls made of plaster and river grass. I would leave the woman and walk across beautiful Kobenhavn to the island of Amager. To my small room in the leftover Nazi barracks that looked out on a swamp. Most of the time it was winter. I would light my hydrant-size iron stove and set a pot on top, putting in hamburger and vegetables while the water was getting hot. Starting to type with numb hands. The book I planned to write in two weeks for a thousand dollars already a week behind (and threatening to get beyond a month). Out of money and no prospects. Then the lovely smell of soup and the room snug. I would type all day and late into the night. Until the soup was finished. Then I would start back across the frozen city, crunching over the moats, loud in the silence. The stars brilliant. Focused on her waiting for me, ready to fry sausages at two in the morning. Me thinking idly of the ancient Chinese poet writing in his poverty, “Ah, is this not happiness.” - Jack Gilbert, “The Thirty Favorite Lives: Amager”

[cose-belle]

He will not abandon his life. Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills along the banks where he became a young man as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them even though they are gone, to measure against. - Jack Gilbert, “Refusing Heaven”

[cose-belle]

Something voiceless flies lovely over an empty landscape. - Jack Gilbert

[cose-belle]

He began hunting for the second rate. The insignificant ruins, the negligible museums, the back- country villages with only one pizzeria and two small bars. The unimproved. - Jack Gilbert, “Less Being More”

[cose-belle]

I ask myself what is the sound of women? What is the word for that still thing I have hunted inside them for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy, the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper down where a woman's heart is holding its breath, where something very far away in that body is becoming something we don't have a name for. - Jack Gilbert, “Happening Apart from What’s Happening Around It”

[cose-belle]

My heart split open as a melon. And will not heal. Gives itself senselessly to the old women carrying milk. The clumsy men sweeping. To roofs. God protect me. - Jack Gilbert, “Before Morning in Perugia”

[cose-belle]

Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places. - Alice Munro

[cose-belle]

It should have been the family that lasted. Should have been my sister and my peasant mother. But it was not. They were the affection, not the journey. It could have been my father, but he died too soon. Gelmetti and Gregg and Nogami lasted. It was the newness of me, and the newness after that, and newness again. It was the important love and the serious lust. It was Pittsburgh that lasted. The iron and fog and sooty brick houses. Not Aunt Mince and Pearl, but the black-and-white winters with their girth and geological length of cold. Streets ripped apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts when the snow finally left in April. Freight trains with their steam locomotives working at night. Summers the size of crusades. When I was a boy, I saw downtown a large camera standing in front of the William Pitt Hotel or pointed at Kaufmann’s Department Store. Usually around midnight, but the people still going by. The camera set slow enough that cars and people left no trace. The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan did not last. But the empty streets of Perugia, my two bowls of bean soup on Kos, and Pimpaporn Charionpanith lasted. The plain nakedness of Anna in Denmark remains in me forever. The wet lilacs on Highland Avenue when I was fourteen. Carrying Michiko dead in my arms. It is not about the spirit. The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate. The way a child knows the world by putting it part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw my way into the Lord, working to put my heart against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night, letting the rain after all the dry months have me.

- Jack Gilbert, “The Spirit and the Soul”

[cose-belle]

Never take yoga from a woman named Pretzel. Learn to love the way the light hits the sofa at 3:18 in the afternoon so your eyes are drawn to look without instead of within. No is still no, but occasionally no requests revision, revisiting, renovation. Spell it y-e-s. Live your life with the insistence of a tea kettle’s whistle. Just remember to turn off the burner before you run out of water. Swallow words like one-a-day vitamins. The words for January 1st are: asylum, lure, parchment, seldom, vixen. Use each day’s words when speaking with friends or they will make you sick. If the words taste bad, spit them out. Spend 53 minutes of every day wrapped in a cloak of impossibility, but know that if the cloak resembles a straight jacket, bad dreams will follow. If you tend toward linearity, invest all your money in chaos. Gather up four letter words in your pockets as you find them and use them to fertilize the flowers and vegetables you plant in the spring. And if you can’t remember what you are doing, ask the squirrels. The know how to find what is hidden. - Staci R. Schoenfield, “Advice for a New Year”

[cose-belle]

But nobody said things were going to be easy. A taste for the sublime is a greed like any other, after all - Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole”

[cose-belle]

and I thought, this was what it was to be blessed— to know a love that was beyond an owning, beyond the body and its needs, but went straight from wild thing to wild thing, approving of its wildness. - Ada Limon, “The Wild Divine”