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Falling asleep to the sound of the River Aurina. (Only now, you notice the name.)
How much cowbells look like, well, cowbells.
Strapping yourself into the front row of a rollercoaster named Raptor.
At your mother’s dining table, a young woman, singing her heart out. Luck be a lady...
The face of a friend’s father, in that photograph from before.
Talking to your one remaining Khala, about what your mother would have called the boys in the family, when it comes to their wives, ex and otherwise.
The way a one-year-old looks, when she looks at a bird.
The first half of West Side Story.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[domenica 23 settembre 2018 ore 12:11:21] [¶]
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This year The Paris Review has begun a series in which they ask four quite different, highly esteemed poets to answer the question, “Where is poetry now?”
I'm not so sure about the question—isn't the answer always, “Here”? But still there is much to love among these musings from Henri Cole:
I love poems about real life, but I also love poems made out of nothing. Both have value, since words are real signs and representations of our beings...
He talks of American poetry, and of being a poet in the world. But it is the way that he bookends his talk of poems themselves, that I love maybe most of all:
I have no moral imperative that poems must point to what is good. [...] As long as a poem is emotionally true and makes linguistic music, it has value.
I think of Glyn Maxwell and Donald Hall, and even Dorothea Lasky in her way, so many people who point and say, “Prose poetry isn’t really poetry.” Or that a poem isn’t a “great” poem unless it makes “great connections.” Or that a poet with a “project” is not “a poet at all.” That this is not a great poem or that is not a real poem, not really. That this doesn’t belong here and that doesn’t belong there. These days, they sound to me a little like all those people so obsessed with who does and does not belong in certain bathrooms.
I have no moral imperative...
On the one hand, people who believe that if a certain linguistic being doesn't seem to them to be a poem—perhaps because it doesn’t look the way they think a poem should look, doesn’t have certain more or less discernible characteristics, didn’t start out as a poem, and so on—then it does not belong in the Poem Room. And on the other, people who believe that if a certain human being doesn't seem to them to be a woman—because she doesn’t look the way they think a woman should look, doesn’t have certain more or less discernible characteristics, didn’t start out as a woman, whatever—then that human being does not belong in the Women’s Room.
But in some places, there’s no Women’s Room. There’s just a room. Whether or not you are allowed in the room depends only on what you intend to do there. Not how.
As long as a poem is emotionally true and makes linguistic music...
It doesn't matter if you’re a lady or a tramp, a man or a Madonna, a tranny or a granny or a male or a female. It doesn’t matter if you’re not quite male or female or in between the two or slightly beyond and therefore—improbably perhaps but possibly still—more beautiful, more interesting, more human.
Here is my body, poems declare.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[giovedì 20 settembre 2018 ore 10:19:12] [¶]
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This weekend I sat at an outdoor picnic table with a woman who, in commenting on the grossness of trying to eat while pigeons hovered, said, “Two things I can’t stand: pigeons and gypsies.”
I didn’t say anything, and even now, forty-eight hours later, I feel dirty with shame.
I didn’t say anything, in part, because I did not know where to begin saying things.
But also. I didn’t say anything because I had already, in the course of the afternoon, asked her to explain the thinking by which she expected everyone to understand that a Chinese repair job is shorthand for a cheap repair job. I had already, in the course of the afternoon, turned away and gone silent for a full and painful five minutes, when she made a snide remark about the two women who were walking down Via dei Servi, holding hands and leaning ever so slightly into each other, in that way that lovers do everywhere, when they are happy with the world and with each other.
I was afraid that if I said something, then this, finally, would ruin the afternoon for everyone. That it would maybe even strain the friendship. (And yes, I know what you’re thinking, and I am grappling with those questions too.)
Why am I telling you all this? Not to make excuses. There are no excuses that are good enough, for this kind of silence.
Maybe I’m hoping it’s to remember for next time, how dirty the shame feels.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[martedì 18 settembre 2018 ore 13:14:00] [¶]
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Before Todo Modo closed for August, I let myself get carried away. Among the spoils: Understanding a Photograph, by John Berger. The introduction is by Geoff Dyer (who selected the essays in the book, though Berger was still alive at the time, so I imagine he was involved too, somehow...). And while it is, of course, very much about Berger’s ways of seeing and Berger’s ways of looking (and his ways of writing about both), there are some things that Dyer says—almost in passing but not quite—that feel like good things to think about, when it comes to essays, essaying, trying, thinking, trying to think.
Like when he’s talking about Barthes, Benjamin, Berger, and Sontag, and how photography, for all four, was an area of special interest, but not a specialism:
They approached photography not with the authority of curators or historians of the medium but as essayists, writers. Their writings on the subject were less the product of accumulated knowledge than active records of how knowledge and understanding had been acquired or was in the process of being acquired.
*
Later he says that many of the best essays are also journeys, epistemological journeys that take us beyond the moment depicted [or the subject discussed] — and sometimes back again.
Except I think he’s wrong about two things there.
One, the best essays are not also journeys. They are journeys. It is the journey (of trying, of thinking, of trying to think) that feels to me like the essence of what makes an essay. It’s in the very DNA of the word: the Middle French essai (to try) came from the Late Latin exagium (the act of weighing), which in turn came from the Latin ex- + agere.
Agere as in to drive, to ride, to be in motion.
Berger knew this of course—that it was about journeys, about rides and motion and modes of transport—not only in his essays, but in fiction too. Less than a page later, Dyer remembers him telling us (from And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos), that ‘the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous.’
And two, the best essays are not necessarily epistemological journeys. Maybe I’m chafing at the word epistemological because of the way it smells slightly to me, of that sanctimonious disdain with which the “personal” in “personal essay” is sometimes regarded. (Jia Tolentino, I’m looking at you. For starters anyway.)
Maybe too, and alongside, it’s because I’m thinking of something a friend wrote this week (in describing a series of workshops she’s doing, on unlocking stories from the body), about how the thing we know so well as knowledge becomes embodied, becomes gnosis. I had to look up gnosis, and I didn’t get very far—just far enough for some things to reverberate for me. Like the fact that you have, in Italian and French and Spanish, and even in German, one word for the kind of knowledge that is intellectual or theoretical, and another word for the kind of knowledge that is personal or experiential.
Je sais et je connais. Tu sai e tu conosci.
What does this reverberate with? Among other things, with so many Friday afternoons, when Elvira tells me I’m too rational, and that I think too much with my brain rather than my heart. Every time I want to say: But what if emotions are rational too? What if we’re wrong about this huge distinction we make between the metaphoric heart and mind? Just like we were wrong about the left brain and the right brain? Every time I want to say all that, and then I feel like my Italian isn’t quite up to it.
Feel, think, know.
It reverberates too, with some things from a podcast I’ve been listening to a lot (funnily enough, on the way to and from so many of those Friday afternoons), of a panel discussion with four women who happen to excel in just those kinds of essays—the ones that are not necessarily, and not only, epistemological.
Here, for example, is Eula Biss:
...I think what I enjoy in the work of all these authors is the body being claimed as an intellectual space or a space where you jump from that space into an intellectual problem, and the body is a problem in different ways in these different works. But I feel like in all these works there is a resistance to this old dichotomy between the body and the mind, or the female and male. And we’ve got all these sets of polarities... [...] But yeah, I guess that’s what’s exciting, is seeing the body entered as a place to think.
And here too, is Leslie Jamison:
...it’s strange to me when people pull out the body as one of my subjects because it’s always felt so much stranger to me, the idea that you wouldn’t write about the body or that the body somehow wouldn’t be present in the work. I think that’s a harder thing for me to imagine, just because, as you were saying, that distinction between the mind and body has never felt... That’s just never resonated with my sense of what it means to be or be in the world. So I think it just never has felt like a conscious choice; it just felt like the only way to access truth was somehow to treat that boundary as porous.
And Biss again:
...you know, you don’t get to have a mind without a body. This was very apparent to me when I was, like, bleeding to death on the delivery table. The body goes; the mind goes. That’s so...to me I don’t feel like it’s fair to pull those things apart. You need one for the other.
*
Eventually, I come back to Dyer, and find him quoting (because of course, what would a piece of writing by Geoff Dyer be, if not at some level, a way to bring up you-know-who...) from the poem “Thought” by D.H. Lawrence. This is the poem:
Thought, I love thought.
But not the jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas
I despise that self-important game.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness,
Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience,
Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can be read,
Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to a conclusion.
Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,
Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.
Suddenly I think of Sontag. What was that pithy thing she said once, about attention? I go looking, find it:
I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”
*
In Italian, it is the verb badare that means to pay attention. Alongside, it has some other meanings. To attend to something; to watch over or take care of it. To dedicate oneself attentively to something. To take care to do something. To consider attentively.
To give importance to something or someone.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Santo Spirito, Firenze]
[sabato 01 settembre 2018 ore 17:08:23] [¶]
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