Never Stop Reading

never-stop-reading.com

[doubtsbestally]

I work best from a place of zero ego and zero hope. I call this state being “lower than a worm.” A feeling that nothing will ever come of what I’m working on is crucial. A feeling of my smallness in relation to the world. I gotta be below the dirt. I am nothing and nobody. That frees me up. Who cares what a worm thinks, you know? - Erin Somers

[doubtsbestally]

“What I worked very hard on was not running, but on standing, on making your life choices, and then standing with and for them.” - Bruce Springsteen

[doubtsbestally]

In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.

Whenever I spend the day crying,  my friends tell me I look high. Good grief,  

they finally understand me.   Even when the arena is empty, I thank god  

for the shots I miss. If you ever catch me   only thanking god for the shots I make,  

remind me I’m not thanking god. Remind me   all my prayers were answered  

the moment I started praying   for what I already have.  

Jenny says when people ask if she’s out of the woods,   she tells them she’ll never be out of the woods,  

says there is something lovely about the woods.   I know how to build a survival shelter  

from fallen tree branches, packed mud,   and pulled moss. I could survive forever  

on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me   to stop measuring my lifespan by length,

but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things   can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up

a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it?  I’m infinite, I know, but I still have a measly wrinkle

collection compared to my end goal. I would love   to be a before picture, I think, as I look in the mirror

and mistake my head for the moon. My dark   thoughts are almost always 238,856 miles away 

from me believing them. I love this life,  I whisper into my doctor’s stethoscope

so she can hear my heart. My heart, an heirloom I didn’t inherit until I thought I could die.

Why did I go so long believing I owed the world my disappointment? Why did I want to take

the world by storm when I could have taken it by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers

on the side of the road where I broke down? I’m not about to waste more time

spinning stories about how much time I’m owed, but there is a man

who is usually here, who isn’t today.   I don’t know if he’s still alive. I just know

his wife was made of so much hope   she looked like a firework above his chair.

Will the afterlife be harder if I remember the people I love, or forget them?

Either way, please let me remember.

Andrea Gibson

[doubtsbestally]

Everyone’s good at everything, and I kind of don’t care. Show me what it looks like when you are bad. Show me how it looks when you get it wrong. It feels like that’s what’s at stake to me. Trust they know you’re smart and that you know how to do things, and that working in these simpler or more spontaneous or more naive-feeling forms is going to do something interesting. - Lorde

[doubtsbestally]

Tell me where you come from and I will tell you what you are. - Saul Bellow

[doubtsbestally]

What I am is an émigré, I suppose, an exile. And we exiles tend to remain deracinated, to drag with us an ineffable sense of loss, exuding an aura of melancholy, a sickness of the spirit. It is harder for us to 'move on.' We're still tethered to our history, even as it grows ever more tenuous. - Peter Godwin

[doubtsbestally]

The past is beautiful, because one never realises an emotion at the time. It only expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. - Virginia Woolf

[doubtsbestally]

Nostos

There was an apple tree in the yard — this would have been forty years ago — behind, only meadows. Drifts off crocus in the damp grass. I stood at that window: late April. Spring flowers in the neighbor's yard. How many times, really, did the tree flower on my birthday, the exact day, not before, not after? Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving. Substitution of the image for relentless earth. What do I know of this place, the role of the tree for decades taken by a bonsai, voices rising from tennis courts — Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut. As one expects of a lyric poet. We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

Louise Gluck

[doubtsbestally]

I’m not a fast writer, and every time I start a new novel I promise myself that I’ll finish it more quickly than last time. But each book demands a certain rhythm. Despite working as hard as I can, sometimes things don’t work out. The only thing I’ve learned over the past twenty years is not to panic; to ignore the noise of publishing (sometimes v hard) and respond to what the novel asks of me. - Tash Aw

[doubtsbestally]

September is an Omen

I start coughing on the 1st. Rain smothers the city. I google what is the word for a feeling

of disinterest in your own well-being? Strangers stop me to stay I look terrible.

Floodwater full of dead cigarettes swallows my feet, my one good pair of shoes.

I've been just a little tired for ten years now. Walking for miles to exhaust my body,

reciting old verb conjugations: je brise, elle brise, nous brisons. I, she, we,

everyone breaks. Coughing so hard I can't go any further. The deer must think I am dying.

They tell their fawns I look terrible. Anhedonia - that is the word I was searching for.

Finding an answer doesn't solve the problem. I fall into bed without taking any medicine.

In sleep, the whole world washes away. It's a good dream.

Meg Lynne

[doubtsbestally]

In fiction there is a dramatic event which fits into a series of dramatic events which makes a novel. In a memoir there is a dramatic event, and then in real life there is the question: ‘and?’ What happened. How did this come about? It’s more like a picture, a narrative painting. What happened before, what happened afterwards? I had a moment, a memory of a drowning when I was in the water with my brother, and I was asking: how did we get here? That’s when I realised I had no idea what had happened before and after the event, and I didn’t even know what date it had happened on. It occurred to me that this level of denial is clearly a blanket over the whole experience.

Writing nonfiction has changed my relationship to fiction. I don’t really know about fiction anymore. Having been a true believer I now feel agnostic. I feel a lot of strong fiction is rooted in autobiography and memoir and the further it gets away from that the less power it has. It tends to work for me when I’m reading a book and I think, yes this really happened, this is your story. Maybe that’s a trick fiction writers can pull to make you think it’s their story when actually it’s not. But the direct power of memoir has really made me question fiction.

[doubtsbestally]

"To pay close attention to private narratives when there appears to be little space left is to me a way to not succumb to this time of ours. The challenge in entwining public and private narratives is that the former is an egotist: it demands to be fully engaged with, and if it’s not the center of a piece of work it deems the work irrelevant. A story has to push back; a story cannot let itself be bullied."

Yiyun Li

[doubtsbestally]

Of Suicide

Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me. I drink too much. My wife threatens separation. She won’t ‘nurse’ me. She feels ‘inadequate’. We don’t mix together.

It’s an hour later in the East. I could call up Mother in Washington, D.C. But could she help me? And all this postal adulation & reproach?

A basis rock-like of love & friendship for all this world-wide madness seems to be needed. Epictetus is in some ways my favourite philosopher. Happy men have died earlier.

I still plan to go to Mexico this summer. The Olmec images! Chichén Itzá! D. H. Lawrence has a wild dream of it. Malcolm Lowry’ s book when it came out I taught to my precept at Princeton.

I don’t entirely resign. I may teach the Third Gospel this afternoon. I haven’t made up my mind. It seems to me sometimes that others have easier jobs & do them worse.

Well, we must labour & dream. Gogol was impotent, somebody in Pittsburgh told me. I said: At what age? They couldn’t answer. That is a damned serious matter.

Rembrandt was sober. There we differ. Sober. Terrors came on him. To us too they come. Of suicide I continually think. Apparently he didn’t. I’ll teach Luke.

John Berryman

[doubtsbestally]

I'm Explaining A Few Things

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs? and the poppy-petalled metaphysics ? and the rain repeatedly spattering its words and drilling them full of apertures and birds?' I’ll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb, a suburb of Madrid, with bells, and clocks and trees. From there you could look out Over Castille’s dry face:                a leather ocean.    

                       My house was called the house of flowers, because in every cranny geraniums burst: it was a good-looking house with its dogs and children.

Remember, Raúl?Eh, Rafael?

Federico, do you rememberfrom under the ground where the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?

Brother, my brother!Everything loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises, pile-ups of palpitating bread, the stalls of my suburb of Argüelles with its statue Like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake: oil flowed into spoons, a deep baying of feet and hands swelled in the streets, metres, litres, the sharp measure of life,

stacked-up fish,the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which the weather vane falters, the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes, wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down to the sea. And one morning all that was burning, one morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth devouring human beings - and from then on fire, gunpowder from then on, and from then on blood. Bandits with planes and Moors, Bandits with finger-rings and duchesses, Bandits with black friars spattering blessings came through the sky to kill children and the blood of children ran through the streets without fuss, like children's blood. Jackals that the jackals would despise, stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out, vipers that the vipers would abominate! Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives! Treacherous generals: see my dead house, look at broken Spain: from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers, from every socket of Spain Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes, and from every crime bullets are bom which will one day find the bull's eye of your hearts. And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land? Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets!

Pablo Neruda

[doubtsbestally]

[i want to go back]

I want to go back To the beginning. We all do. I think: Hurt won't be there.

But I'm wrong. Where the water Bubbles up At the spring: Isn't that a wound?

Gregory Orr

[doubtsbestally]

Poem Drafted after Meditating for Ten Minutes

The next world has the answers to my questions.  Life is an interim period. I could heal an insane Dad  better than anyone. I used to be six years old.  I've been working on poetry about death and time.  Andrew Basiago says time travel was "reduced  to practice" in 1970. I saw crystal domes on the moon  in a book. It's June now and I'm healing my myopia  with a technique called "print pushing." Mom said  Dad might go insane. I'm crying. I'm turning 40 in July.  I'm glad I called Mom earlier tonight. Dad's healing  journey might not begin until he dies. He's 75.  15,000 years ago, sea levels were 300 feet lower.  My parents are going to the next world. I used to be six.  I've been researching time, death, and the afterlife.  My cats don't know I used to be as small as them.  Mom turned 70 in January. I'm turning over in bed.  My healing journey prevents me from going insane.  Dad used to say life begins at 70. He used to be six. 

Tao Lin

[doubtsbestally]

Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows over the hedge you can get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven left lying around, can be picked up and saved. People won’t even see that you have them, they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others. You can shake your head. You can frown.

William Stafford