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nouvelles et textes pour rien

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Here are my resolutions for the next 3 months; the next lap of the year. First, to have none. Not to be tied Second, to be free & kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio. To make a good job of The Waves. To care nothing for making money. [...] Then—well the chief resolution Is the most importrant—not to make resolutions. Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read. To go out yes—but stay at home in spite of being asked. As for clothes, I think to buy good ones.

Virginia Woolf, diary entry, Jan 2, 1931

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Iterations

Tracy Fuad

In the hotel lobby girls of nine or ten wore jeweled leotards with open backs andthin, crisscrossing straps. They were here to cheer or dance. Their coach in a shirt that said koach spelled with a k. An average dad who had silvered and glittered his mustache.

Above, a dozen screens, a dozen muted weathers.

For years I’d thought you’d sold my book you’d stolen accidentally at my reading in the backyard where we’d first met. In it I had written visit me. Someone bought it at Unnameable and messaged me a picture of my own inscription and this knowledge I was not supposed to have had wounded me. It floated up in certain darknesses and bound me. But you told me that it must have been your sister who had sold it when you moved to Oakland. You showed her to me on your phone, a version of you with different hair but identical piercings.

On a windowless patio you’d asked about my child, and then there was no space between us.

Beside your bed, the same giclée that hung beside mine. Sterile and monochromatic. A tuba and a horn. I wondered if it hung in all nine hundred rooms or was just one of several iterations. I couldn’t stop saying your name.

After you left, a breakfast sandwich that I couldn’t eat. One half marked by my teeth.

I had dreamt of a long spit of land. It was Super Bowl Sunday. I knew you, and then, I knew you.

And the longing descended like a weather front. The kind of change in pressure that makes a sky go green.

It was labile and pronged and it entered me fully.

It had limbs. It took on my shape. Then it took on yours.

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38 - Invitation to the Dance

Schiller's dictum that "Life is good, in spite of all," papier-mâché from the start, has become idiocy now that it is blown into the same trumpet as omnipresent advertising

a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and — inseparable from it — personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold on life inside them

Only when sated with false pleasure, disgusted with the goods offered, dimly aware of the inadequacy of happiness even when it is that can people gain an idea of what experience might be.

The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically Epicurean sanatorium director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office.

It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces

there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness.

--Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)

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All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only and still!—to fools.

Marcel Proust, The Captive

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Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

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Every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: 'entertainment' movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything's fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for things as they are.

Wim Wenders, "The Logic of Images" (1988)

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I thought if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer way.

John Ashbery

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"I dream that I'm back on Earth. It's the last day before going away on the Six Thousand Ship. Everything stands out so clearly, the way it does in grief, when all senses are awakened. There's the sky, pouring out its light, its blue water over the woods I walk through on my way to the station. There are the trees with all their leaves, the leaves that turn and spin like mirrors in the summer air. There's the smell of the soil, and warm asphalt, the sounds of animals and birds. The noise of the traffic at the junction. The breeze as it smooths my face, and the sound it makes in my ears. The sun in my mouth as I gape up at the great star. It's as if everything passes into me and splits me open from inside, but it's a very slow rupture and I feel as though I'm being transformed into a piece of music. I've discovered that with every passing day on board the ship, every light year that removed us from the planet, every completed orbit of New Discovery, I've become increasingly like a pop song, the same looping refrain: Earth, Earth, home, home. My child, how old is he now? He squealed with joy on the railway bridge. I don't care about the conflict. Tell me what I'm supposed to do and I'll do it. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to find the same kind of life here on board the ship. The work wasn't enough for me. I've lost myself. Every day, my hands yearn to dig deep into soil so that I might lower myself into its certainty, and the earth receive my death and make me its own."

--Olga Ravn, The Employees, trans. Martin Aitkin

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"Morning: the city is covered in snow. It’s sticking. Even on our balcony, it’s thirty or forty centimeters thick. Ash is sleeping in the other room. I am inside my novel. I have been reading a great deal about Ottoman telegraph offices. I’ve bought so many books lately! A snowy hush reigns over the house and the city. It’s still falling, so visibility is low. And I have to confess: I am so happy."

Orhan Pamuk

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Autumn in New York, a brown sludge of leaves underfoot, a light rain barely falling. Halos of mist around trees, a clock waiting to strike twelve. Almost your birthday, Monk.

The city quiet as a beach, the noise of traffic like a tide. Neon sleeping in puddles. Places shutting and staying open. People saying goodbye outside bars, walking home alone. Work still going on, the city repairing itself.

At some time all cities have this feel: in London it's at five or six on a winter evening. Paris has it too, late, when the cafés are closing up. In New York it can happen anytime: early in the morning as the light climbs over the canyon streets and the avenues stretch so far into the distance that it seems the whole world is city; or now, as the chimes of midnight hang in the rain and all the city's longings acquire the clarity and certainty of sudden understanding. The day coming to an end and people unable to evade any longer the nagging sense of futility that has been growing stronger through the day, knowing that they will feel better when they wake up and it is daylight again but knowing also that each day leads to this sense of quiet isolation. Whether the plates have been stacked neatly away or the sink is cluttered with unwashed dishes makes no difference because all these details--the clothes hanging in the closet, the sheets on the bed--tell the same story--a story in which they walk to the window and look out at the rain-lit streets, wondering how many other people are looking out like this, people who look forward to Monday because the weekdays have a purpose which vanishes at the weekend when there is only the laundry and the papers. And knowing also that these thoughts do not represent any kind of revelation because by now they have themselves become part of the same routine of bearable despair, a summing up that is all the time dissolving into the everyday. A time of the day when it is possible to regret everything and nothing in the same breath, when the only wish of all bachelors is that there was someone who loved them, who was thinking of them even if she was on the other side of the world. When a woman, feeling the city falling damp around her, hearing music from a radio somewhere, looks up and imagines the lives being led behind the yellow-lighted windows: a man at this sink, a family crowded together around a television, lovers drawing curtains, someone at his desk, hearing the same tune on the radio, writing these words.

--Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz

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Phantoms, what have you left? What underground? What place in which to be is not enough To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place Like silver in the sheathing of the sight, As the eye closes. . . How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality.

—Wallace Stevens, "Esthétique du mal"

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Time and again she had read through the half dozen letters that moved her, and even they sometimes seemed so commonplace that it frightened her, as if a precious thing had been lost and she could not find it, search as she might. Then she would notice a phrase, something about loneliness or weariness or the view from a train window, the intimacy of the ordinary, and her heart would stir. She had ticked the margins beside these lines to spare herself the vertiginous sense that there was nothing in the letters at all worth cherishing, and then when she looked at them again she could not always see why she had chosen those passages, and again she would be frightened. He was at the center of her life, and who was he, after all? Why did it comfort her to trust him? The letters were so precious to her, and what were they? They were bland and prosaic, three readings out of four. But when they touched her, she was suffused with joy. There was no other word for it. She knew that if she had kept them, she would still look at them to see if there was anything in them to account for the sweet power they had had for her, and that if she did not find it, she would read them again. When she thought of them, she put aside all bitterness and folly and disillusionment, as no one else ever could, no one who listened to her with compassion. Sympathy would corrupt something wonderful, which secrecy and a kind of shame kept safe for her.

—Marilynne Robinson, Home

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Love is on the other side of the lake. It is painful because the dark makes you hear the water more. I accept all that. And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance. Having finished with it all, now I am not listening. I wait for the silence to resume.

Linda Gregg, "New York Address"

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Strawberries

Gabrielle Bates

A car’s tires thu-thunk over the rubbery black trip wire at the oil change, triggering a fat bell, and a group of girls in silver leotards are reflected like spatters of sap in its windows— liquidine, firm, gleaming. It’s a Game Day; they are the girls chosen to split in tempo to the brass band, heel of a front foot sliding over Astro-Turf, top of a back foot grinding over lit green, cervix slapping the fifty-yard line like a fried egg flipped down on a griddle to burn. Behind the bleachers, a boy takes off the shirt of another boy, paints a letter there in red paint (R, and then another boy I-O-T . . . ). When the sun goes down over the ridge all the painted boys will make PATRIOTS. For now the sun rises, sanctioning the street: Jiffy Lube, pet store, the Sam’s Super Sandwiches teens file into, practicing the joke of language— I love you . . . I like your faded shirt . . . The morning is cool on the outside and hot in the restaurant, the war in the words playful as a war can be, meaning each gut bleeds out like a slit pig’s, filling the cracks in linoleum, spilling over, becoming smooth. The layers of red dry and build on one another, and for years the gap between ceiling and floor lessens; backs hunch as the mind saws downward, revealing rings. In the parking lot, Are you asleep? says the boy who is not my boyfriend, running his fingers along the band of my underwear. Across the street from this, for years, an ancient tortoise roams the floor of the pet store, closing his army-green beak around the red toenails of sandalled women, thinking them strawberries. I feel ashamed for all the people I’ve been kind to knowing kindness is all it will take.

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b chehayeb