Futile and sensitive, I’m capable of violent and consuming impulses - both good and bad, noble and vile - but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul. Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. I note the slightest facial movements of the person I’m talking with, I record the subtlest inflections of his utterances; but I hear without listening, I’m thinking of something else, and what I least catch in the conversation is the sense of what was said, by me or by him. And so I often repeat to someone what I’ve already repeated, or ask him again what he’s already answered. But I’m able to describe, in four photographic words, the facial muscles he used to say what I don’t recall, or the way he listened with his eyes to the words I don’t remember telling him. I’m two, and both keep their distance - Siamese twins that aren’t attached.

The Book of Disquiet: A Factless Autobiography by Fernando Pessoa.

As I said, a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore, slowly, if you feel what is inside you, not call it by the name by which it is known. Everybody knows that by the way they do when they are in love, and a writer should always have that intensity of emotion about whatever is the object about which he writes.

-Gertrude Stein, Poetry and Grammar. 

The agon, then. It begins. Today there is a gale blowing up from the Levant. The morning came like a yellow fog along a roll of developing film. From Bivarie, across the foaming channel I can see from the window, the river god has sent us his offering: mud, in a solid tawny line across the bay. The wind has scooped out the very bowels of the potamus across the way, like a mammoth evacuation, and bowled it across at us. The fishermen complain that they cannot see the fish any more to spear them. Well, the rufus sea scorpion and the octopus are safe from their carbide and tridents. Deep-water life utterly shut off, momentously obscure behind the membrane of mud. The winter Ionian has lapsed back into its original secrecy.

The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell.

One of my all time favourite novels is Justine by Durrell.

It may be that friendship is nourished on observation and conversation, but love is born from and nourished on silent interpretation…The beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us…that must be deciphered.

-Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs.

An epigraph to Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen.

Still Life:

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.

Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning or an end.

Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.

There is only one serious question. And that is:

Who knows how to make love stay?

-Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins.

hunsonisgroovy:

Texting in the Company of Others Is OK

My grandmother was a dancer until her second husband bought a bracelet, a piano and a watch and gave her love all in one night too. Even though the love was young, Faye happily received everything and had for them babies—twins—and also something like a family. But I never hear them talk of that which is why, I think, Mom had me and kept trying to have someone else.

Before Mom became a mother, she was devoted to what she felt would be her only book. I’ve seen pages but don’t remember much other than her handwriting. It looked like her, like a strange perfection that I hadn’t ever seen and couldn’t relate to. It’s as if there was something the pages found in her, something she tried to hand over. But what I’ve found that she indulged seems to be an exclusive language whose meaning is apparent only after and in herself. I don’t understand why it’s never been mentioned but I don’t believe it’s because she’s forgotten. One doesn’t forget what lived in them so long.

Her privacy is probably more like loneliness. One says they’re above judgment, then turn to hide; when they’re actually just fearful of being meaningful. I’m alone so I write; if I were lonely nothing would happen. Maybe that’s how Mom’s book never became anything. There’s also the chance I came too soon, and early on asked for too much because I only thought she was my mother. When really, like all women, she was a woman with a dream of her own. I want to keep going. I want to meet her half way. And this time, I want to be the reason she writes too.

Literature - which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality - seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in their air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.

What moves lives. What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well-described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined - what we, that is, by embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.

Right now I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I suddenly feel tired, and I’ve decided to write no more, think no more. I’ll let the fever of saying put me to sleep instead, and with closed eyes I’ll stroke, as if petting a cat, all that I might have said.

27 by Fernando Pessoa.

hunsonisgroovy:

Did I mention Jeremy Young is my favorite model?

A book is nothing but a cube of hot, smoking conscience.

It was assumed, in the not-so-distant past, that a book’s episodes were invented. That is a misconception. What need has a book of inventions? One forgets that the only thing without our power is the ability to keep the voice of truth within us undistorted.

The inability to find and speak the truth is a failing that no talent for speaking the untruth can disguise.

-Pasternak to Tsvetayeva.

Tsvetayeva to Pasternak.

May 22, 1926 Saturday

I could have written about myself what you wrote about yourself: love, love, love, on every hand. And it doesn’t bring pleasure. I used to let anyone call me by my first name (without patronymic). Well, a name can become cheap. Now I don’t forbid it. I just don’t answer to it. (A name should be in the name of something.) Suddenly you have discovered America: me. That’s not what I want. Be so kind as to discover America for me!

“What would you and I do if we were together?” (As if on a desert island. I’d know what to do on an island!) “We would go and see Rilke.” I tell you Rilke is overburdened; he doesn’t need anything or anyone. Strength, always attracting, distracts. Rilke is a recluse…

All life I meant to be like all the rest,

The world, though, in its loveliness

Refused to listen to my plea

And wanted to be - like me.

Sergei Volkonsky: Petersburg theatrical manager who wrote many volumes of memoirs. Tsvetayeva, a friend of his, copied the manuscript of one of his books, published an article about him, and dedicated a cycle of poems to him.

Not long ago I spent a beautiful day, all of it with you. I didn’t let you go until late at night. Pay no attention to my “chilliness.” There is always a sort of draft between you and me.

Take care of yourself.

Love,

M.