May 15, 2022
#whilereadingcleaness #garthgreenwell #shrapluff https://www.instagram.com/p/CdkmtgVO3NT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
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#whilereadingcleaness #garthgreenwell #shrapluff https://www.instagram.com/p/CdkmtgVO3NT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Poet Ilya Kaminsky talks to Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell - The Paris Review
CLEANNESS in the time of Coronavirus (a love letter)
by Robyn Carliss
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All quotes copyright Cleanness by Garth Greenwell unless otherwise noted.
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I read, and then listened to the author read, Cleanness as San Francisco’s, and the world’s, COVID-19 panic widened. I needed the commas both ways.
All handles and surfaces are now suspect. Post-Cleanness, they are suggestive in additional ways: things to hold, things to lie down across.
Throats and what they harbor, or are empty of.
This book upended me. To describe it as distraction or escape isn’t reverent enough. Greenwell’s writing washes into me; I picture it as a commercial animation for a cleaning product, sudsing forth and disinfecting me of lazy attention. Tells cells: get to work. Tightens rigging. Strums viscera.
I stopped worrying about membranes as host for illness when Greenwell’s words directed me to deeper knocks of the body.
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“So good, he said then, his voice thick, so fucking good ...”
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Can you die of a book?
I’ve been grateful for the undeniable disturbance of Greenwell’s writing, even as I’ve nearly swerved my bike into traffic – either from being turned on or furious over this much rigor and talent packed in one artist – while listening to the audio.
I’m so touched by his mid-sentence refinements:
“,or almost”
“,or mostly”
“,or the idea of a”
“,I don’t know”
This trying on, permission to adjust, welcoming of nuance. Signaling to me that it’s ok our filth is in progress.
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“You’re filthy, I said, but I love you ...”
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March 2020: Wash your hands; you are dirty! We are, all, filthy, teeming!
It’s a relief, copping to this as I scrub in, the transparency of our organism.
We now know this term: self-quarantine, bodies the currency.
In February 2006, I had been mad with desire for you for nine months and was exhausted. I wished for embers from within the conflagration. I wished for a future of diminished intensity, when I no longer felt like a washing machine too loosely packed, when my skin once again provided sufficient cover for my organs.
My body’s receptors distress me more in relationship to desire than to microbes. I can’t quarantine myself from myself, when I want to turn down the depth of field, stop checking out the world’s hyphae.
Greenwell shows me: Desire is as insistent as a stray dog. Lie with it, take its paw print. Don’t sanitize it; welcome it with curiosity.
Not: I love you, but you’re filthy. Rather: You’re filthy, but I love you.
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“... you can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer; it's a large world, we're never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.”
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Greenwell reminds me that my most shielded, shaded impulses are nothing special. That we’re all made and dashed by these storms that blow through in a year, an hour, a minute.
Another relief.
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“I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, there were only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbors, I love you, I thought suddenly in that rush that makes so much seem possible, I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours.”
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Being loved can be unbearable. I sometimes don’t believe the miracle of you taking my griefs, my mania, my humor, my kink, my lowing, my flatlines. And worse, taking the taking: the joules expended in the reception of love, of receiving generosity and gentleness. I say to you, of how you love me, I can feel it. It’s an interior flesh, the softest folds. Believing in that consistency breaks a feral part. Believing in being lovable vs. being disposable. Being an object of worship instead of cruelty – or worse, indifference.
Why are you so nice to me? I ask, a joke that you don’t like.
This love of staying, abiding, your bodily warmth offered to hush my fever chills. Your texts to me, sound-sensitive: it’s ok, it’s just me, in the laundry room, washing my paint brushes. And: I have music in my ears, signal to me in person in the studio if you need me.
Why are you so nice to me?”
It’s not a humble query. It’s an interrogation of the decency I cannot recognize, or locate, in myself. The shadow request: Hurt me.
What exists simultaneously, there is no neat segue: the compelling ordinariness of long-term love, its index of small, kind gestures. I love you: a greeting, a farewell, a ceremony, a glory. Sweet: our common name.
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“As we practice social distancing, let’s not distance ourselves from books. They will keep us company and connect us back to people, back to society.”
– Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
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Last week, I cried when my middle sister told me her daughter, my niece, had learned how to read. I’m so excited for her, the synaptic discoveries in store. And the exquisite melancholy re: all the texts she’ll never get to in this life. We can share that now too.
Reading (of the non-news feed variety) is a sanity beacon. Use it.
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“I must look foolish, I thought, but there was so much pleasure in being a fool, why had I spent so much of my life guarding against it?”
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I love you. I love books. I love Garth. I love love. I love writing to make sense of things. It’s all a fucking miracle. Never enough of this world.
“(…) But then there’s something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly.” „(…) Doch hat nicht jede unserer Umarmungen etwas Theatralisches? Wir wiegen unsere Reaktionen gegen jene auf, die wir beim anderen wahrnehmen oder die wir auf den anderen projizieren, wir begehren immer zu viel oder zu wenig und kompensieren entsprechend.“
an exercise in #rereading , “… though maybe it wasn’t exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a #poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real #image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on #experience a richer #meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.” #garthgreenwell #whatbelongstoyou (at Bryant Park)
Currently #reading, almost #sexy #whatbelongstoyou #garthgreenwell #fiction #literature #lgbtfiction #lgbtwriting #hustler #easterneurope (at New York, New York)
-- Garth Greenwell Full article: http://bit.ly/2haocAV