On Hedonism

Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.

Anne Carson, in Plainwater. One of the “Short Talks”, I think I like these best…

All we as leaves in the shock of it:
spring–
one dull gold bounce and you’re there.

Anne Carson, from the poem “All We as Leaves”, in Plainwater

Symbology of the Mermaid

I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature.

But woman is not nature only. She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious. Her creation will be to make articulate this obscure world which dominates man, which he denies being dominated by, but which asserts its domination in destructive proofs of its presence, madness.

From The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 2 (1937)

I have been pondering the power of the mermaid as image, as symbol. Mermaids were always fascinating to me as a child. More recently I’ve been troubled by their lack of sex – a sex symbol to sailors, but then they lure them to their death, is their sexlessness a part of it? This passage made it so clear, though. Water as a symbol of everything that is mysterious & uncontrollable about being human: the surge & tide of our feelings, the depths of the unconscious. The mermaid (woman) swims in this world, she is half & half, that is why man fears her, & why she is disabled in a world defined entirely by ratiocination. Water is also a connection to our time before birth, we all began as little fish, in a way. The unconscious preserves this bond, also related to womanhood (our time in the womb).

Call for a moratorium on poems that reference themselves as poems

…. Similar to that songwriting trick of, “Whoa ah oh, and that’s why I wrote this song for you, girl. Ooo lalala.” OK, it feels like a neat trick when you’re doing it, but all it does now is confirm the self-congratulatory stereotype about poets, the writer’s amazement that he could be writing a poem –a poem!– in this day & age…

It’s not exclusively a post-modern gesture (being meta referential). Shakespeare, Donne & others worked in references to the fact of writing the poem in the poem, often as a means of seduction (“and look, look what I’m doing for you, my lady”)… Too many poets do this today.

New tricks, please!

The neurotic = the romantic

“The more I explore neurosis, the more I become aware that it is a modern form of romanticism. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and if it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality, the power to imagine and not to sustain one’s endurance, and then the creative force turned into destruction.

"Many of the romantics destroyed themselves because they could not attain the absolute, in love or creation. They could not attain it because it was invented. It was a myth. The neurotic acts in the same way. He sets himself impossible goals, imaginary goals. He will win the respect and admiration of a parent who is not even alive any more (appealing to his substitutes). He will gain the love of the world by giving the world something it may not want. He will seek union with opposites, perverse contrary relationships with those who turn away. He will seek to conquer the unconquerable. Like the romantic, he is creative, and may apply his power to invention to art, science, history.”

–Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume Two

American suffering

“For a long time I have sought the justification for Henry [Miller’s] angers, hostilities and revenges. I believed it was a reaction to unusual suffering. So many American writers show this bitterness and hatred.

"But when I compare their lives and suffering with the lives of European writers (Dostoevsky, or Kafka) I find that the Europeans suffered far more, and all knew greater poverty, greater misery, yet they never turned into angry, hostile men like Edward Dahlberg, or Henry. Suffering became transmuted into works of literature, and into compassion. The asthma of Proust, the Siberia of Dostoevsky, contributed to their compassion for humanity. In some American writers any deprivation, any suffering, turns into mutiny, criminal anger and revenge upon others. There is an almost total absence of emotion. They hold society responsible and writing becomes an act of vengeance.

"It seems to me that the answer lay in the attitude towards suffering. To some American writers anything but paradise was unacceptable. To the European it was part of the human condition, and something shared with other human beings.”

–Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume Two

Poetry = Bad Faith?

“…that I was a fraud had never been in question–who wasn’t? Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said ‘I’; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. I could lie about my interest in the literary response to war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defending the victims of the latter, but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so-called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity. I had been a small-time performance artist pretending to be a poet, but now, with an alarming fervor, I wanted to write great poems.”

–Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

The texture of et cetera

“I would begin to feel a rush of what I considered love, first for the things at hand: the swifts, if that’s what they were, hopping in the dust, the avenues of old-world trees, the stone statues of kings and queens with whom the tourists pose, love for the glare off El Estanque, the park’s artificial lake. Love for Topeka: the chicken hawk atop the telephone poll, the man-child with the flare gun tucked into his sweatpants, the finger lost to snapping turtle or firework; love for the bully and his neck beard, a love only a mother could face. Love for all my sitters, except James; love for the wrestler falling from the water tower where he’d tried to represent. Then for Providence: the first breakdown in the stacks, running lines of prescription something with the dim kids of the stars, emerging from a tunnel or sleep into New York, redefining ‘rich,’ love for the unread book of poems, Cyrus and our walks. But most intensely love for that other thing, the sound-absorbent screen, life’s white machine, shadows massing in the middle distance, although that’s not even close, the texture of et cetera itself.”

-Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station


Describing the detachment and appreciation of life that comes from being in a new place (in this case Madrid). I get this feeling being on an airplane.

I can only understand really amateur performers or really bad performers, because whatever they do never really comes off, so therefore it can’t be phoney. But I can never understand really good, professional performers.

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol