Posts – Page 14 – Megin Jiménez

June 21, 2012

Rest = tenderness to the self

She finds rest as opposed to sleep the truly pleasurable state. If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favorite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a soldier who never knew your name. Tenderness towards the unknown and anonymous, which was a tenderness to the self.“

-Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

I must have time to lie in bed and stare out the window, this keeps me functioning.

June 3, 2012

Gift from immigrant taxi driver to Marianne Moore

Wariness is essential where an inaccurate word could give an impression more exact than could be given by a verifiably accurate term. One is rewarded for knowing the way and compelling a resistful un-English-speaking taxi-driver to take it when he says upon arrival–dumfounded and gratified–“Ah, we did not suffer any lights.”

–Marianne Moore, in her little essay “Subject, Predicate, Object”

June 2, 2012

What else to call it

Dazzled speechless–an alchemist without implements–one thinks of poetry as divine fire, a perquisite of the gods. When under the spell of admiration or gratitude, I have hazarded a line, it never occurred to me that anyone might think I imagined myself a poet. As said previously, if what I write is called poetry it is because there is no other category in which to put it.

Marianne Moore, in her little essay “Subject, Predicate, Object”. Vocab note: “perquisite” means “a tip, gratuity”.

June 2, 2012

Combine with charmed words certain rhythms, and the mind is helplessly haunted.

Marianne Moore, from her little essay “Subject, Predicate, Object”

May 22, 2012

The poets are confused about their roles.

They set themselves up as philosophers or men of action. I do not think the poet should preach, seek to convert, philosophize or moralize. […] If you live as a poet the poet’s duty is to maintain his power to create the marvelous by contagion. If the poet maintains himself inside a dream and is able to communicate this capacity to others by osmosis, well and good. But he should not step out of this dream to preach, to meddle with political and practical constructions. Let him remain a poet and reveal magic coincidences and magic possibilities. The one who has the vision is not necessarily the one who knows how to actualize or embody this vision. The old communities understood this. Each one had his role allotted to him. The poet to supply his vision, his song, his inspiration (from within) and the others to hunt, fish, build, and the wise men to interpret events, omens, the future. The poet’s business is exaltation and how to impart it.

I feel the poet is losing this power because he is joining the prosaic, the contingent, the mediocre everyday details, the mechanism.

–Anais Nin, 1940, from The Diary, Volume 3 (bold emphasis mine)

Poets who would fall under her “true poet” category: Rilke, Whitman, Blake, Jean Valentine, Fanny Howe. Perhaps this is what troubles me about the Ann Waldman school of chanting the latest evil politicians’ names as part of your poetic practice, as if this were as tangible as true political action. Poetry isn’t politics, but is as essential as politics – the capacity to understand life through symbol and metaphor, to swim in the profundity or delve in the mystery of human consciousness, activity, imagination. As A. Nin says (back in 1940), it’s difficult (or perhaps in 2012, impossible), to preserve respect for the vision in a society whose faith and truth is based on technological innovation, material success, empirical facts.

May 21, 2012

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Carl Sagan, on books (via stateless1972)

May 15, 2012

With writing it is this way.

One says: ‘I feel good, too good. I don’t need to write. I want to live.’ One is inside, enjoying life, living without formulation. No echoes, no registering. Then one day, without reason, life is split into two channels: being, and formulating. An activity resembling a motion picture starts to run inside one’s head. (One can hear the purring of the machine.)

I am writing. It is not analyzing, or meditating, or a monologue, it is writing. It is living in terms of immediate phraseology, with great excitement as before, a discovery of appropriate words, an anxiety to capture, retain, to be precise, felicitous. It comes on unexpectedly, like a fever, and goes away, like a fever. It is distinct from all other activities.

–The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Two

May 12, 2012