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There is nothing that can justify it…

Writing is an act of pride. I’ve always known that, and so for a long time I hid the fact that I was writing, especially from the people I loved. I was afraid of exposing myself and of others’ disapproval. Jane Austen organized herself so that she could immediately hide her pages if someone came into the room where she had taken refuge. It’s a reaction I’m familiar with: you’re ashamed of your presumptuousness, because there is nothing that can justify it, not even success. However I state it, the fact remains that I have assumed the right to imprison others in what I seem to see, feel, think, imagine, and know. Is it a task? A mission? A vocation? Who called on me, who assigned me that task and that mission? A god? A people? A social class? A party? The culture industry? The lowly, the disinherited, the lost causes? The entire human race? The elusive subject that is women? My mother, my female friends? No—by now it’s blindingly obvious that I alone authorized myself. I assigned myself, for motives that are obscure even to me, the job of describing what I know of my era, that is—in its simplest form—what happened under my nose, that is to say the life, the dreams, the fantasies, the languages of a narrow group of people and events, within a restricted space, in an unimportant language made even less important by the use I make of it. One tends to say: let’s not overdo it, it’s only a job. It may be that things are like that now. Things change, and the verbal vestments in which we wrap them change. But pride remains. I remain, I who spend a large part of my day reading and writing, because I have assigned myself the task of describing. And I cannot soothe myself by saying: it’s a job. When did I ever consider writing a job? I’ve never written to earn a living. I write to bear witness to the fact that I have lived and have sought a yardstick for myself and for others, since those others couldn’t or didn’t know how or didn’t want to do it. What is this if not pride? And what does it imply if not “You don’t know how to see me and see yourselves, but I see myself and I see you”? No, there is no way around it. The only possibility is to learn to put the “I” into perspective, to pour it into the work and then go away, to consider writing something that separates from us the moment it’s complete: one of the many collateral effects of an active life.

From this excerpt, published in the New Yorker.

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Poetry interlude

There’s usually poetry lying around my bed, but not read systematically. These are the key poetry books that passed through 2015, presented without much commentary, listed with what I most needed at the top.

Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands, ed. J.M Coetzee (Princeton University Press, 2005)

Fantastic collection of 20th century Dutch poetry, dual-language edition. (I couldn’t have named a single Dutch poet before this.) Sybren Polet’s anti-war “Self-Repeating Poem” was a stand-out.

La parti pris des choses (Gallimard, first published 1942) – Francis Ponge

Prose poems I always return to. The role of THINGS in our life, imagination. I especially love “Notes on a Shell”.

Nest (Kelsey Street Press, 2003) – Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Prose fragments, like listening to someone thinking out loud.

Ghosts! (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011) – Martine Bellen

An example of why I need poetry, although (or because) I don’t understand it. The pursuit of mystery.

Black Life (Wave Books, 2010) – Dorothea Lasky

Dottie Lasky is a witch/seer of the 21st century. (I aspire to this sort of witchdom.)

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Notes on A Room of One’s Own

-The integrity of a writer – not the ethics of a narrative or its believability, but rather whether one will follow the writer anywhere, trust what is said, regardless of its place in the “real world.” 

– Forward-thinking in terms of: (1) conceiving of women as an economic class throughout time – living in poverty; (2) chastity as a barrier to women writers, composers, actors. Pinpointed still-ongoing conversations regarding the low value given to topics of “women’s concerns” (domestic) vs. “men’s concerns” (war, conquest, adventure).

– The beginning of Beauvoir’s Second Sex picks up on the theme of the vast amounts written about women, sociologically speaking, by men. It would seem too much to add more, but there is actually a fundamental mystery because women haven’t written about themselves.

– Lady Murasaki – mentioned in a list of writers – how did she come to be exposed to the Western world? Emily Bronte should have written poetic plays.

– Shakespeare as the androgynous, incandescent mind, one which surpasses private complaints and is therefore only the work, the plays, which exist in full integrity, the man as author unapparent. Jane Austen similar, but not Charlotte Bronte – because you an hear her private bitterness breaking into the narrative of Jane Eyre. (Though I think those complaints are important, and should have been set down… But the point is that it’s better to be in a place where you can move past them.)

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Last Year’s Books, part I

Better late than never, posting for my friends who enjoy book lists. (MK, looking at you to post yours, too!). A round-up with quick takes on all the books I read in 2015. In order of their impact on me at the time.


12. The Folded Clock: A Diary (Doubleday, 2015) – Heidi Julavits

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This book is a lot of fun, although the premise a bit gimmicky/misleading. Julavits clearly wrote this for publication, I wouldn’t call it a diary. There is still a withholding process, and the confessional feels bloggy, the last difficult veil is never pulled away. However, it’s thoroughly enjoyable and I loved the actual physical book – a soft, fabric-like cover. Highlights were her accounts of her obsessive friendships, and her relationship to the biography of Edie Sedgwick over time.

13. A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (NYRB, 2005 ed., originally published 1977) – Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Parts of this are delightful, and parts I was slogging through. The slogging could be owing to my relative ignorance about European history and architecture, as Fermor is a fiend on these two subjects, going very deep. Otherwise, it’s a charming account of his trek across Europe in the 1930s, sleeping in barns and castles, partying, reciting Shakespeare, meeting old counts, witnessing the coming dark times in Germany firsthand.

14. Just Kids (Ecco, 2010) – Patti Smith

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A semiannual New Year’s tradition. The book offers permission to draw, collage, write, worship dead artists, without apology.

15. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (Vintage, 1997) – Jeanette Winterson

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Art-affirming insights, and it made me want to read all of Virginia Woolf. At times off-putting because of Winterson’s early onset crotchetiness (dismissing all pop culture) and defensiveness. I think she’s deliberately taking up Gertrude Stein’s voice (in the mode of proclaiming her own genius) and Virginia Woolf’s opinions (e.g., trashing Joseph Conrad for not being a native English speaker).

16. Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (Picador, 2015) – Meghan Daum, ed.

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A big range of writers and views. I thought about a third of the essays were stellar (by Pam Houston, Sigrid Nunez, and Jeanne Safe), the rest a bit repetitive, the piece by by Lionel Shriver was downright offensive (I’m still drafting a rebuttal in my head). The hilarious piece by Geoff Dyer was my favorite. Terrible title, btw.

17. Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (Riverhead, 2014) – Sigrid Nunez

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Another angle, another glimpse of the fascinating, difficult and brilliant woman that was Susan Sontag. Her views, habits, influence. What an intense and strange arrangement, one that would have been difficult to resist in your 20s – sharing an apartment with your boyfriend and his mother, your boss, Susan Sontag.

18. Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Imperfect Publishing, 2008) – Leonard Koren

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This book is always popping up in arty bookstores. I was intrigued by the idea of wabi sabi (appreciating the process of disintegration, that which is made of earth, asymmetrical… it’s complicated). The book was much shorter and simpler than I thought, although it seems to presupposes some knowledge of the tea ceremony ritual. Feel justified in loving a crumbling wall, the skeleton of a leaf. How would this relate to text/words/poetry?

19. Goodbye, Columbus (1959) – Philip Roth

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Roth was a gap in my reading. The worried aunt was my favorite character in this. Overall, its time seems to have passed (the little black kid at the library, the Jewish princess, the wise-beyond-his-years young writer – do we need them anymore?).

20-21. The Walking Dead, Books 1 & 2 (2009) – Robert Kirkman

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I couldn’t get into this series. Perhaps I’ve absorbed the zombie thing via cultural osmosis, but it didn’t seem to offer anything new.

BOOKS ABANDONED

Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller (~20 pages)

An attempt to re-read this after hating it in college, because of the strong endorsement from Anais Nin. Not sure when I’ll  ever be in the mood, though.

Primera memoria – Ana Maria Matute (~50 pages)

Perhaps to return to, an account of the Spanish Civil War from an adolescent’s perspective.

Chéri – Colette (~30 pages)

Another “to return to”, was not in the right place for this world of courtesans and finery…

Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History – John Julius Norwich (~100 pages)

I purchased for a trip to Sicily and carried the damn heavy thing around, but didn’t get too far. I will return to it!

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Why Write

Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. How to justify this instinct or belief I do not know … What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable – now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and make the silent world more real than the world of speech – and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. This is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Recherche du temps perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life… So when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own,  I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

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Woolf anticipates the Bechdel test

She puts her fine finger on the issue here, analyzing a recently published book written by a woman:

“ ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought …the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends … They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity – for so a lover would see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy.” 

-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

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Lunar Shatters by Melissa Broder

I came into the world a young man
Then I broke me off
Still the sea and clouds are Pegasus colors
My heart is Pegasus colors but to get there I must go back
Back to the time before I was a woman
Before I broke me off to make a flattened lap
And placed thereon a young man
Where I myself could have dangled
And how I begged him enter there
My broken young man parts
And how I let the mystery collapse
With rugged young man puncture
And how I begged him turn me Pegasus colors
And please to put a sunset there
And gone forever was my feeling snake
And in its place dark letters
And me the softest of all
And me so skinless I could no longer be naked
And me I had to de-banshee
And me I dressed myself
I made a poison suit
I darned it out of myths
Some of the myths were beautiful
Some turned ugly in the making
The myth of the slender girl
The myth of the fat one
The myth of rescue
The myth of young men
The myth of the hair in their eyes
The myth of how beauty would save them
The myth of me and who I must become
The myth of what I am not
And the horses who are no myth
How they do not need to turn Pegasus
They are winged in their un-myth
They holy up the ground
I must holy up the ground
I sanctify the ground and say fuck it
I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death
I say fuck it and fall down no new holes
And I ride an unwinged horse
And I unbecome myself
And I strip my poison suit
And wear my crown of fuck its

Appeared in Poetry magazine, December 2014

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/249128

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The Vision

The prodigious richness of the imaginative material has so over-taxed the poet’s formative powers that nothing is self-explanatory and every verse adds to the reader’s need of an interpretation…

It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterlands of man’s mind–that suggests the abyss of time separating us from pre-human ages, or evokes a super-human world of contrasting light and darkness…

Is it a vision of other worlds, or of the obscuration of the spirit, or of the beginning of things before the age of man, or of the unborn generations of the future? We cannot say that it is any or none of these…

We are astonished, taken aback, confused, put on our guard or even disgusted–and we demand commentaries and explanations. We are reminded in nothing of everyday, human life, but rather of dreams, nighttime fears and the dark recesses of the mind that we sometimes sense with misgiving…

…the material of the visionary creator shows certain traits that we find in the fantasies of the insane.

…the vision is a genuine, primordial experience, regardless of what reason-mongers may say. The vision is not something derived or secondary, and it is not a symptom of something else. It is true symbolic expression–that is, the expression of something existent in its own right, but imperfectly known.

What if there were some living force whose sphere of action lies beyond our world of every day? Are there human needs that are dangerous and unavoidable? Is there something more purposeful than electrons? Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and command our own souls? And is that which science calls the “psyche” not merely a question-mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon man and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more than personal vocation? …

It is not alone the creator of this kind of art who is in touch with the nightside of life, but the seers, prophets, leaders and enlighteners also…

The poet knows that a purposiveness out-reaching human ends is the life-giving secret for man; he has a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings in the pleroma. In short, he sees something of that psychic world that strikes terror into the savage and barbarian.

–C.J. Jung, from Modern Man in Search of a Soul. These are the bits in which he attempts to define “the vision,” which is so unspeakable and defies language. He describes it as essentially terrifying. Filtered through poetry, we can manage some proximity to it. Writers he defines as visionary: Goethe, Dante, Blake, Melville, Nietzche. The Shepherd of Hermas (what?) Rider Haggard (who? to look into). It makes me think of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. “Every angel is terrifying…” The lovers distracting each other from the vision, the lone tree on the hill regarded every day.