the madwoman in the attic attempts flight
there is something very magical about sitting in the kitchen with two windows open and a warm breeze passing through, with deafening thunderclaps and flashbulb-bright lightening, with the sound of raindrops on pavement and grassy fields, with a good glass of whiskey and a funny black cat to keep you company.
We live in a place where the official rewards aren’t so grand, but that means something else happens: Artists slide between mediums, they work on each others’ projects, and new forms emerge. …
We put hours into each others’ art, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the only rewards we can count on are the rewards of creating, the pleasures of doing it together, and the satisfaction of being in each other’s audience.
” —“A New Canadian Myth for New Canadian Times”
by Sheila Heti
Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He loves you and wants you to love him. I have never been to Paris, but I have heard that it is a good place to be in love in.The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is real. The Eiffel Tower is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real. None are necessary to your life.
Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until afterward.The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing that it has already happened.
Diderot wrote that the word is not the thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing. Plato wrote of the need to be reconjoined with the rest of oneself. My analyst speaks of codependent impulses in modern society. These various explanations are metaphors for an inaccessible truth.
In de Laclos, a betrayal is an invitation to a string of further betrayals, each one taking you further from the original. If the hell for lovers consists in being betrayed, the hell for the beloved consists in betraying. These hells constitute the world.
A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision.
Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. In Bulfinch’s, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind us that we live underwater.
Up above the high-water mark, angels with their teeth and their sharp little wings watch us with murderous disinterest. They sentence us for the one crime we all commit.
It is said by area doctors that cowboys notoriously misrepresent their degree of pain. For this reason their diseases progress far beyond the point at which treatment is beneficial. Are they lying?
If I could read only one sentence for the rest of my life, it would be the one where the jailer says to Socrates I can see that you are a good man, the best one that has ever been in this place.
These examples are meant to dissuade you, Winnie, from loving men other than my friend Harris. He asked me to write this poem.
Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the heart of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.
What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone.
From The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James Books, 2002)
Olga Wold and her stepfather, Norman Wold, stand outside her homestead shack at Marsh, Montana. Photograph taken on December 28, 1912 by Evelyn J. Cameron.
nostalgia-pieces from my childhood. for a long time I kept a stuffed parrot in here.
(Source: 102water)
Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub;
It is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges.
We make a vessel from a lump of clay;
It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.
We make doors and windows for a room;
But it is these empty spaces that make the room livable.
Thus, while the tangible has advantages,
It is the intangible that makes it useful.
-Tao Te Ching
whenever something’s free, usually then you’re not
