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scrapofpaper"You don't fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It's like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else's planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else's orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)
"And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don't want to be without. That's it.
"PS You have to be brave."
--Jeanette Winterson, explaining to children how we fall in love
"We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving--seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering.
"We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves."
--David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
"You Are Tired"
You are tired
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.
Come with me then
And we'll leave it far and far away--
(Only you and I understand!)
You have played
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break and-
Just tired.
So am I.
But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight
And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart--
Open to me!
For I will show you the places Nobody knows
And if you like
The perfect places of Sleep.
Ah come with me!
I'll blow you that wonderful bubble the moon
That floats forever and a day;
I'll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream
Until I find the Only Flower
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.
--e. e. cummings
"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. The lady that only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course--and a hopeless one. She'll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she'll know mighty well that something is happening to her."
--Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
"We would often be ashamed of our best actions if the world only knew the motives behind them."
--François de La Rochefoucauld
It might be lonelier
Without the Loneliness--
I'm so accustomed to my Fate--
Perhaps the Other--Peace--
Would interrupt the Dark--
And crowd the little Room--
Too scant--by Cubits--to contain
The Sacrament--of Him--
I am not used to Hope--
It might intrude upon--
Its sweet parade--blaspheme the place--
Ordained to Suffering--
It might be easier
To fail--with Land in Sight--
Than gain--My Blue Peninsula--
To perish--of Delight--
--Emily Dickinson
"You none of you understand how old you are
And death will come to you as a mild surprise,
A momentary shudder in a vacant room."
--T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion
"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."
--Richard Feynman
"War Photograph"
A naked child is running
along the path toward us,
her arms stretched out,
her mouth open,
the world turned to trash
behind her.
She is running from the smoke
and the soldiers, from the bodies
of her mother and little sister
thrown down into a ditch,
from the blown-up bamboo hut
from the melted pots and pans.
And she is also running from the gods
who have changed the sky to fire
and puddled the earth with skin and blood.
She is running--my god--to us,
10,000 miles away.
reading the caption
beneath her picture
in a weekly magazine.
All over the country
we're feeling sorry for her
and being appalled at the war
being fought in the other world.
She keeps on running, you know,
after the shutter of the camera
clicks. She's running to us.
For how can she know,
her feet beating a path
on another continent?
How can she know
what we really are?
From the distance, we look
so terribly human.
--Kate Daniels
"Saint Catherine in an O: a Song about Knives"
On a page of vellum--Saint Catherine in an O--within
a letter made of vine-sprawl, imbricate bulbs, & the scarlet
interlaced whorl of pearl cupping calyx cupping stem, a woman
offers her neck. It's a kind of ready-made scene--the saint kneeling
on a cropped wedge of earth, someone with a crown in a tower,
& a swordsman who is only a frocked booted boy pulling back
his robe for his work--& seems carelessly done, as if the illuminator
chose death to be a kind of afterthought to vermilion. To leaf-curl,
areola, awl-shaped stems, his blossoms' dazzling tangle. As if
this were response enough. O, omphalos. Meaning center & navel,
meaning the first time a blade touches flesh. And meaning here
a frame of plenitude through which we witness again.
There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:
think of the knife
that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped
to the rooster's varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.
Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.
A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan
of reform was The Future's in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets
waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking
How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe.
The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,
shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows' nests,
slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.
Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker, bayonet, shiv.
Because in Waco, behind Benny's Gas & Go, a man plays slide guitar
with his pocketknife, accompanying the words of his songs--
one about light, the Lord moving on water, about what will be
by & by; how blood, he knows, will make him whole, & blades
that changed into doves.
Or because of this splendor of color ends
on the parchment in a burnished gold resembling a cluster of burrs,
the kind of thing that would have snagged in a cow's mottled hide
as it grazed on grass tufts or slogged its way home. Staring, bewildered
in the stillness, it may survive this way for a few days more
before it is bled & flayed & turned, as was always its purpose,
into the page of this psalm. Here, near the margin, are traces of it still:
patterns of skin, a texture like velvet, follicles, the throat's scalloped curve.
--Matt Donovan
"And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don't want to be without. That's it.
"PS You have to be brave."
--Jeanette Winterson, explaining to children how we fall in love
"We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving--seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering.
"We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves."
--David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
"You Are Tired"
You are tired
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.
Come with me then
And we'll leave it far and far away--
(Only you and I understand!)
You have played
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break and-
Just tired.
So am I.
But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight
And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart--
Open to me!
For I will show you the places Nobody knows
And if you like
The perfect places of Sleep.
Ah come with me!
I'll blow you that wonderful bubble the moon
That floats forever and a day;
I'll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream
Until I find the Only Flower
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.
--e. e. cummings
"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. The lady that only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course--and a hopeless one. She'll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she'll know mighty well that something is happening to her."
--Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
"We would often be ashamed of our best actions if the world only knew the motives behind them."
--François de La Rochefoucauld
It might be lonelier
Without the Loneliness--
I'm so accustomed to my Fate--
Perhaps the Other--Peace--
Would interrupt the Dark--
And crowd the little Room--
Too scant--by Cubits--to contain
The Sacrament--of Him--
I am not used to Hope--
It might intrude upon--
Its sweet parade--blaspheme the place--
Ordained to Suffering--
It might be easier
To fail--with Land in Sight--
Than gain--My Blue Peninsula--
To perish--of Delight--
--Emily Dickinson
"You none of you understand how old you are
And death will come to you as a mild surprise,
A momentary shudder in a vacant room."
--T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion
"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."
--Richard Feynman
"War Photograph"
A naked child is running
along the path toward us,
her arms stretched out,
her mouth open,
the world turned to trash
behind her.
She is running from the smoke
and the soldiers, from the bodies
of her mother and little sister
thrown down into a ditch,
from the blown-up bamboo hut
from the melted pots and pans.
And she is also running from the gods
who have changed the sky to fire
and puddled the earth with skin and blood.
She is running--my god--to us,
10,000 miles away.
reading the caption
beneath her picture
in a weekly magazine.
All over the country
we're feeling sorry for her
and being appalled at the war
being fought in the other world.
She keeps on running, you know,
after the shutter of the camera
clicks. She's running to us.
For how can she know,
her feet beating a path
on another continent?
How can she know
what we really are?
From the distance, we look
so terribly human.
--Kate Daniels
"Saint Catherine in an O: a Song about Knives"
On a page of vellum--Saint Catherine in an O--within
a letter made of vine-sprawl, imbricate bulbs, & the scarlet
interlaced whorl of pearl cupping calyx cupping stem, a woman
offers her neck. It's a kind of ready-made scene--the saint kneeling
on a cropped wedge of earth, someone with a crown in a tower,
& a swordsman who is only a frocked booted boy pulling back
his robe for his work--& seems carelessly done, as if the illuminator
chose death to be a kind of afterthought to vermilion. To leaf-curl,
areola, awl-shaped stems, his blossoms' dazzling tangle. As if
this were response enough. O, omphalos. Meaning center & navel,
meaning the first time a blade touches flesh. And meaning here
a frame of plenitude through which we witness again.
There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:
think of the knife
that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped
to the rooster's varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.
Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.
A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan
of reform was The Future's in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets
waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking
How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe.
The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,
shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows' nests,
slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.
Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker, bayonet, shiv.
Because in Waco, behind Benny's Gas & Go, a man plays slide guitar
with his pocketknife, accompanying the words of his songs--
one about light, the Lord moving on water, about what will be
by & by; how blood, he knows, will make him whole, & blades
that changed into doves.
Or because of this splendor of color ends
on the parchment in a burnished gold resembling a cluster of burrs,
the kind of thing that would have snagged in a cow's mottled hide
as it grazed on grass tufts or slogged its way home. Staring, bewildered
in the stillness, it may survive this way for a few days more
before it is bled & flayed & turned, as was always its purpose,
into the page of this psalm. Here, near the margin, are traces of it still:
patterns of skin, a texture like velvet, follicles, the throat's scalloped curve.
--Matt Donovan
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no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 01:56 pm (UTC)found your journal.
this is a quick 're-mix' hope
you enjoy it
Hawking in a hole
It's an effort to blow - pleasant, strange - a crap-shoot that only matters
if someone's on the other end, and not just an ideal know-it-all wind.
I look like other people - but my eyes don't match, each has a plot to take over,
but when the phone rings they cross dress and become listening ears.
I put out for most hellos. I'm not to proud to go down on someone's point.
Lovers are my restaurants, but I only eat words that whisper when we fuck.
He responds by adjusting his penis. I noodle around on a keyboard.
Neither of us is any good at it, but it's a life that never ends.
The distance between my breasts keeps changing. I can't see past
the bulge, but when they're sleeping and slow, my son walks them.
Mothers breathe fire; they know how to light the flame, get a buzz
on with dad, but mine creeps into strange beds for mercy fucks.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 02:14 pm (UTC)to far away from touching. My genitals want to open moonswith erotic selves of their own - perfect me's that don't
wander about in guilt. Maybe places where sins are treated as the charms God gave us before it realized
we'd become independent. And how many steps are there, show me the days it takes to climb out of just one
of their mortal songs. Nobody can - and yet, I'm tempted by her mind's mysterious prose; it writes not to improve
itself, but to see what it says.