From a wonderful book by Czeslaw Milosz, poet: “To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.” And, he quotes from Renee le Senne: “For me the principal proof of the existence of God is the joy I experience any time I think that God is.” Quoting from Milosz: “To wait for faith in order to pray is to put the cart before the horse. Our way leads from the physical to the spiritual.” And himself: “My friend Father J.S. did not believe in God. But he believed God, the revelation of God, and he always stressed the difference.”
Tag: Life
Whatever ‘it’ is
As Nora Ephron once wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Fiction is chance to rework your life so that you give illusion of being intelligence at center of it.”
I’d settle for being either somewhat intelligent or at center of it – either one.
How ’bout you?
Kinisi 11
Simplicity and directness versus art/artifice.
Either/or
A separate life, practicing our art?
Or integrated into everything we do?
In passing
“You’re always nervous.”
“I run on nerves.”
A twist in that dream of being discovered
Which part of my work would I most want “discovered”? Note, I didn’t say which part of me. How telling!
Apart from my journaling itself, it’s always hard for me to imagine writing that’s not intended for circulation, either among a small select circle or else a wide public. Anything else could be left as notes to myself. So I’m always surprised to hear otherwise, yet apparently there are many who practice the art purely for their own private pleasure.
On the other hand, I’ve also worked so hard, so long, to be invisible. To be among those sharply objective observers. The dispassionate yogi – even though ultimately, as I’m finding, passion is what counts, in life and in art. Read the Psalms, if you must, for divine confirmation.
For one thing, as I’m finally admitting, I’m finding how liberating and energizing the effort to candidly proclaim “I hate” x, y, or z can be. No more nice face requirement, but the full range of feeling, from noble to disgust.
Face it, there’s no visibility as a poet – and even novelists are surprisingly marginal these days.
So here it is, and there you are, doing whatever we do.
A different take on taking the subway
As you know, I’m fond of subways. So when one of my favorite lifeguards was telling me of her first semester away in the big city, I had to ask.
“Oh, no! I hate them!”
What?
“Everybody’s stinky and pressed together,”
It’s not always like that. She must have been riding at rush hour.
But she continued, “And then one threw up on my shoes.”
Hmmm.
I’m trying to remember if she said she then had to do the same.
I do know she hasn’t read my subways novel, though she did have some input into What’s Left.
Hmmm.
I’m still offended
I hate being labeled in a demographic targeted with mailings that ask questions like this:
Is it hearing loss, or just … EARWAX?
I can still use a Q-tip, thank you. Now will they please go away?
