A la recherche du temps perdu

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I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays (review here)

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Elements

When we attempted fire we were stubbornin carparks making amends with our rings on     our tongues out I could tell you how I got here but I am instead intenton telling you how I am planning to leave      the fire is onlyone way out     when we attempted earth we failedthe landscape held my heel like a moor victim until I heard onlya lecture about how you were the victim how your motherburned…

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Oh listen to these words I'm spitting out for you. My distance from you makes them louder.

Jorie Graham, “The Guardian Angel of the Private Life”

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Salvador Dalí, Sketch of Sigmund Freud, 1938

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Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.

Richard Siken, Crush

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So... Lately I’m not really here or on Twitter anymore, but you can find me on Goodreads. I’m not reviewing much on there, but feel free to follow me if you like, if only to see what I’m reading these days.

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Caravaggio, The Supper at Emmaus (1601), detail

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I am what is around me.

Wallace Stevens, from “Theory”

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A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

Jane Hirshfield, from “A Hand”

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Édouard Boubat, Jardin Zen, Kyoto, Japan, 1975

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Home is so sad.

Philip Larkin, from “Home Is So Sad” (w/ thanks to @lydiakiesling’s The Golden State)

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And if the story sounds so far like a dream, a glossy tale of the kind one occasionally—on holiday or a long-haul flight—allows oneself to lean back into and, as if it were sinful, a praline, vanish within for a brief moment, then it's because life is a dream, a dream from which you never wake up, but which one day is nonetheless suddenly long since over, but you're still here and can either use 'the rest of your days' to forget and 'get on with it' or on the other hand, like me, abandon what is and try to retrieve what was, even the tiniest little thing that has been lost, even what perhaps didn't really exist but nonetheless belongs in the story, call it forth and tell it so it doesn't vanish but on the contrary now at last becomes real and in a way more real than anything else.

Madame Nielsen, The Endless Summer

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Tentacle

for A. 

we send them both off bare-chested into the den to plug in their machines and watch the images on screens morph into shapes they assume for the duration of the spell     in Guadalajara the trees bloom and then wilt spent spine curved like a question mark I send you messages while they are occupied that sound like branches snapping or me lapping up your saliva     when he is next to me the…

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god is not the voice in the whirlwind god is the whirlwind at the last judgment we will all be trees

Margaret Atwood, from The Journals of Susanna Moodie

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Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalgia (1983)

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Deep experience is never peaceful.

Henry James, from “Madame de Mauves”

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I am pleasantly located in the deep sea, but love will row you out, if her hands are strong, and don't wait till I land, for I'm going ashore on the other side.

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Kate Anthon, n.d. 1861