#laura marris

[bluewillowmoon]

"I'm beginning to understand that absence itself could be a landmark. That sometimes, to know where you are, you have to navigate by what's not there."

— Laura Marris, from "Lost Lake," The Age of Loneliness: Essays (Graywolf Press, 2024)

[halfcookeddreams]

“The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer has written about what she calls the ‘grammar of animacy’—the ability to recognize in language, the life forces of the earth and other species, ‘the word-less being of others in which we are never alone.’ She writes that in Potowami, the language of her ancestors, many things that she had known in English as nouns were actually verbs. “To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to a be a Saturday are all possible verbs in a world where everything comes alive,” she continues. “Water, land and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all the things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.” On the other hand, “A bay is a noun only if the water is dead.” For those of us who are used to thinking in English, our language is wildly disadvantaged in this area,. Many elements of the nonhuman world are referred to not just as nouns but as objects. Sure a pair of scissors is an ‘it’ but so is a network of mycelium, homing through the soil in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Why is a whip-poor-will an it when these birds say their names over and over in the dark, like metronomes on moonlit nights? Wen we know so little about their lives and perceptions, thanks, in part, to their perfect camouflage. When you’re lonely it’s hard to see yourself in the language of others. ‘The arrogance of English,’ Kimmerer write, ‘is that the only way to be animate to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human.’ As a result, exploitation can fester in the linguistic distance we make between ourselves and other species. For Kimmerer, ‘Saying “it” makes a living land into “natural resources.”’ The alternative doesn’t have to be anthropomorphism though — that would be an equally arrogant co-option of other species. There is a space between objectification and other species that I amight as well call respect. Respect might mean lying in bed listening to the whip-poor-will through the skylight and wondering how the woods look to a nightjar, how she might perceive the shadows of branches and the shelter of the leaf cover. It might look, as writers like Kimmere and Ed Young have recently argued, like finding tghe true expansiveness in our world through the understanding of nonhuman intelligence. The humility of knowing that we as we live, other species are pursuing their own lives through the world of their perceptions —a vast cacophony of senses. A grammar of animacy where each verb is a different mode of existing.”

[rosejuicewonderdrunk]

I met you and now I am kind to myself in my sleep and how do you explain that?

TELL ME GENTLY by Laura Marris 

[oldwinesoul]

𝐼 𝑚𝑒𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑤, 𝑙 𝑎𝑚 𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑦𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓 𝑖𝑛 𝑚𝑦 𝑠𝑙𝑒𝑒𝑝

𝑎𝑛𝑑 ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑑𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡?

—Laura Marris, "Tell Me Gently," published in The Shallow Ends

[beingharsh]

'"i met you and now / i am kind to myself in my sleep / and how do you explain that?"

"tell me gently" by laura marris, embroidered on a pillowcase

[acknowledgetheabsurd]

Ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of a translation? Laura Marris, translator for the new edition of The Plague, gave us a glimpse behind the scenes at her process, by annotating two pages of the text. Check out her notes!

[x]

[soracities]

early loves, a primer 💌

“In that book which is my memory, On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”

— Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nouva

“When I first met you, that’s what I remember. I looked up at the sky and thought, I’m going to love this person because even the sky looks different.”

— Margaret Stohl, Beautiful Chaos

“We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

— The Beatles, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”

“Just by existing and by letting me speak to you, you give me an immense amount. You are infinitely rich where I am concerned; entirely clear and captivating. I love you extremely and how it eases my heart to be able to say so.”

— Iris Murdoch, in a letter to Michael Oakeshott

“I feel met by you, he says afterwards. It’s weird. (That’s exactly what it feels like. I felt met by him the first time I saw him. I felt met by him all the times we weren’t even able to meet each other’s eyes.)” 

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis)

“How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden, wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours–with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it–and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret–so sharp!–that we haven’t lived through it together–whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissable–or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road–you see what I mean, my happiness?”

— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra

— Benjamine Alire Saenz, Aristotle and dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I cannot write about Damascus, without the jasmine climbing on my fingers. / I cannot say Her name, without my mouth getting overcrowded with apricot juice, blackberries and quince.”

— Nizar Qabbani, A Green Lantern on Damascus’ Door

“I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought–and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra 

— Lorde, “400 Lux”

“You know, when I start telling you something by saying, ‘I was thinking about what you said about … ,’ it always gives me pleasure to say that, to let you know that I was brooding on your words. And I think the pleasure is … well, I know how much I love it when you say ‘I was thinking about what you said about …’ It’s somehow as though the part of you that’s in me will be able to nourish the part of me that’s in you, or-something-I don’t know how to put it. But that there’s some circuit of reciprocity between these holding relations: your ability to hold me inside you, and mine to hold you inside me.”

— Eve Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love

“There wasn’t anything mean about him. I don’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without some meanness?”

— Benjamine Alire Saenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Do you remember a night when I came along the dark passage to your room in a thunderstorm and we lay talking about whether we were afraid of death or not? That is the sort of occasion on which the things I want to say to you,–and to you only,–get said.”

— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West

“Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“I saw her smile so close to my eyes that there was nothing but to see but the smile, and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before, who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once?”

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

— Laura Marris, “Tell Me Gently”

“The thing is, Iphis and Ianthe  had actually, for real, very really, fallen in love. Did their hearts hurt? I said. Did they feel like they were underwater all the time? Did they feel scoured by light? Did they wander about not knowing what to do with themselves? Yes, Robin said. All of that. And more.”

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“You are all the colours in one, at full brightness.”

— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Arwen: Do you remember when we first met? Aragorn: I thought I had wandered into a dream.”

— Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

— Labi Siffre, “Bless the Telephone”

“This hour I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

”When I am with you, there is nowhere else I’d rather be. And I am a person who always wants to be somewhere else.”

— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories

“[Bridge:] But we're both a long way from home We got the windows down, the radio's on, always [Verse 2:] I wrote a letter to the sky saying maybe one day you'll get to kiss me, kiss me, kiss me. My girl found it in the car and said baby why you trying to diss me, diss me, diss me? Cause you know you're my baby, you know you're my baby, ooh I'm not just in it for the pride, in it for the ride, yeah...”

— Frank Ocean, “Acura Integurl”

— Cat Power, “Sea of Love”

[silocityreadingseries]

Silo City Reading Series, 2021