rawsharktexts

a proj in mirror

[orclnght]

lady poets

"She told them about Sappho, an olden-days poet from the island of Lesbos, and when there were a few snickers at this she began to recite a poem where Sappho is jealous when she sees the woman she loves laughing with a man, and she can't speak and fire ripples under her skin and her ears are filled with roaring.

People imagined poems were wispy things, she said, frilly things, like lace doilies. But in fact they were like claws, like the metal spikes mountaineers use to find purchase on the sheer face of a glacier. By writing a poem, the lady poets could break through the slippery, nothingy surface of the life they were enclosed in, to the passionate reality that beat beneath it. Instead of falling down the sheer face, they could haul themselves up, line by line, until at last they stood on top of the mountain. And then maybe, just maybe, they might for an instant see the world as it really is."

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

[orclnght]

the impossible thing

“It was like getting advice from an alien--Just write a book. As if books just waited around in someone’s head, waiting to be let out. Anyway, I knew better--writers a miserable lot. Literature isn’t written by the content. Why would I suffer to write when reading is so much more pleasurable?”

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

[orclnght]

that distant call still rings in my ears

“I smiling wife do promise these things. Newly identified, do I smother my childhood and my father’s name, as my mother smothered her own?” 

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

[orclnght]

great devourer of our time

“I’d never seen any photographs of her, so I don’t know what I was expecting, but in the gallery that night she was radiant--not so much with beauty, as no one would have called her conventionally beautiful--but with life itself. That seems simplistic--it is simplisitic--but how could you see in someone’s face anything meaningful about her life? With X, you could; her ferocity was evident in her body. And photographs did it little justice, could never convey the feeling she sent into a room, her hunger, her velocity.”

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

[orclnght]

erosion

“X was not exactly a person to me yet, but a possibility, a different way of life. I deified her then and for a long time after, believed her to be an oracle, almost inhuman. Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.” 

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

[orclnght]

an unmanageable fatigue

“Suddenly I feel I am in the space between two breaths, in the moment of time it takes to stretch out a hand to another person, in the second when the heart beats and braces itself to beat again. I stand and wait with nothing to wait for. Am I on board a ship at sea, in a house in a park, in a town in a country? Is nothing changed, can everything be swept away as a dream is swept out of the conscious mind in the morning?” 

Sven Holm, Termush

[orclnght]

thread of displacement

“This had become such a ritual lately, this waking up at night to check on the backyard, the laundry, the garage, this inspecting of strange noises, this securing of windows, this strengthening of locks. This was all part of this new world we had entered, this new dream we had begun to dream. And yet, at times, there were still cracks in the dream, voices from the past that startled you, little winks from that other life, like that text message from Mitch that still glowed faintly on my phone. What happened to you, buddy? it read, in soft blue text. Where did you go?”

Andrew Porter, The Disappeared, “Austin”

[orclnght]

seagull on a frenzied shore...

“Outside I could hear the occasional sound of a car passing, young people shouting things into the air. When did I become the person who listened to such sounds and not the person who made them? These were the types of questions I often asked myself late at night, as I sat here in this chair, sipping on my drink, feeling at peace, but also somehow adrift, somehow disconnected from things, as if I’d been unthethered from some larger purpose. There was always the sense of a shadow looming just beyond the wall, the hum of a greater absence. There was always the sense that something I’d once owned had been lost, or left behind, abandoned... It was a different melody now. Delicate, lyrical, soft.” 

Andrew Porter, The Disappeared, “Austin”

[orclnght]

a polonaise

“These were the simple pleasures of my life these days--the way I spent those two or three hours in the evenings after work... Did I want more? I sometimes believed I did, but at that moment, I was content to simply sit there and listen to this music, to the strange poetry of it, to hold a drink in my hand, and to know that I was in my own house and that I was safe there...” 

Andrew Porter, The Disappeared, “Austin”

[orclnght]

carried away

“He can hear it, precisely, in his head, the way an Amen break washes like a wave, slots inside itself again and again, fits inside his heart, his favourite thing when it drops down to half speed, slouching, swagger, weapons close to its chest, and then it jumps up, exploding crisp and juicy, mathematical perfection, up, up and away, made by drum machines and samples but sounding like divine intervention.”

Max Porter, Shy

[orclnght]

the build the break the sub-quake shake

“The night is a shattered flicker-drag of these sense-jumbled memories, like he’s dropped, but he’s stone-cold not, he’s just traipsing along, conducting memories.”

Max Porter, Shy

[orclnght]

dat sweet sweet cortisol glow of adult life, a luminous rectangle

“What would remain of the things I had learned about history and science and literature, come four or five years, I did not know. What was the point of knowing anything, of learning how to think, that favorite phrase of my American teachers, if all it did was burnish my contempt for the mentally negligible project managers and associate division directors all around me? I should have majored in Microsoft Excel.” 

Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

[orclnght]

the clarity of catastrophe

“That sounds great, I said, may have added, I’m honored to get to work for you. All nonsense. Once I hung up I punched the air and yelled. I remember the restaurant as deserted, but it may not have been. This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit.”

Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

[orclnght]

trending

“The quality of the work had become a secondary concern, as had any notion that the writer might aspire to invsibility, deferring to this subject. No, these days the scribe had to center stage, an ego machine of first-person perspective, and that character had to hold provocative opinions that brooked no uncertainty--the more dogmatic the better--and to restate those beliefs in prose a middle schooler could understand, over and over, until she or he became a reliable “brand”, generating baked-in attention from the internet-captured masses from whom there was no middle ground between the denunciative and the obsequious... The spoils had gone to the loudest, most shameless and combative, and often least qualified voices in the room--”

Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

[orclnght]

the ocean is unstill

“I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they’d get to the point a little faster...It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.”

Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

[orclnght]

sunlight zone

“Things are easy enough to recall, in isolation. Scenes appear completely unto themselves... Trickier is the task of pulling the pictures together, of connecting the points in a way that makes tangible sense.

All of this is easy enough, at close range - bright flashes, a relationship borne out of evidence, the bits and pieces that make it a fact. What is harder is stepping back far enough to consider us in the altogether, not the series of pictures but the whole that those pictures represent. I don’t particularly like to do this. Stepping back too far makes me dizzy - my memory, like something punched, reeling about with its hands clapped over its face. It is easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light. 

So in pieces, then: a long time ago, we met.”

Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

[orclnght]

impulse to stir

“How strange it was, the inability to ever fully see yourself through another person’s eyes.”

Carolina de Robertis, The President and the Frog