by Unknown
We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.
Everything in art is a formal question, so he tried to do it in prose with much blank white space.
(1997)
FANNY HOWE (1940–)
Everything’s a Fake
Coyote scruff in canyons off Mulholland Drive. Fragrance of sage and rosemary, now it’s spring. At night the mockingbirds ring their warnings of cats coming across the neighborhoods. Like castanets in the palms of a dancer, the palm trees clack. The HOLLYWOOD sign has a white skin of fog across it where erotic canyons hump, moisten, slide, dry up, swell, and shift. They appear impatient—to make such powerful contact with pleasure that they will toss back the entire cover of earth. She walks for days around brown trails, threading sometimes under the low branches of bay and acacia. Bitter flowers will catch her eye: pink and thin honeysuckle, or mock orange. They coat the branches like lace in the back of a mystical store. Other deviant men and women live at the base of these canyons, closer to the city however. Her mouth is often dry, her chest tight, but she is filled to the brim with excess idolatry. It was like a flat mouse—the whole of Los Angeles she could hold in the circle formed by her thumb and forefinger. Tires were planted to stop the flow of mud at her feet. But she could see all the way to Long Beach through a tunnel made in her fist. Her quest for the perfect place was only a symptom of the same infection that was out there, a mild one, but a symptom nonetheless.
(1997)
Doubt
Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941 when the German bombing campaign against England was at its peak and when she was reading Freud whom she had staved off until then.
Edith Stein, recently and controversially beatified by the Pope, who had successfully worked to transform an existential vocabulary into a theological one, was taken to Auschwitz in August, 1942.
One year later Simone Weil died in a hospital in England—of illness and depression—determined to know what it is to know. She, as much as Woolf, sought salvation in a choice of words.
But multitudes succumb to the sorrow induced by an inexact vocabulary.
While a whole change in discourse is a sign of conversion, the alteration of a single word only signals a kind of doubt about the value of the surrounding words.
Poets tend to hover over words in this troubled state of mind. What holds them poised in this position is the occasional eruption of happiness.
While we would all like to know if the individual person is a phenomenon either culturally or spiritually conceived and why everyone doesn’t kill everyone else, including themselves, since they can—poets act out the problem with their words.
Why not say “heart-sick” instead of “despairing”?
Why not say “despairing” instead of “depressed”?
Is there, perhaps, a quality in each person—hidden like a laugh inside a sob—that loves even more than it loves to live? If there is, can it be expressed in the form of the lyric line?
Dostoevsky defended his later religious belief, saying of his work, “Even in Europe there have never been atheistic expressions of such power. My hosannah has gone through a great furnace of doubt.”
According to certain friends, Simone Weil would have given everything she wrote to be a poet. It was an ideal but she was wary of charm and the inauthentic. She saw herself as stuck in fact with a rational prose line for her surgery on modern thought. She might be the archetypal doubter but the language of the lyric was perhaps too uncertain.
As far as we know she wrote a play and some poems and one little prose poem called “Prelude.”
Yet Weil could be called a poet, if Wittgenstein could, despite her own estimation of her writing, because of the longing for a transformative insight dominating her word choices.
In “Prelude” the narrator is an uprooted seeker who still hopes that a conversion will come to her from the outside. The desired teacher arrives bearing the best of everything, including delicious wine and bread, affection, tolerance, solidarity (people come and go) and authority. This is a man who even has faith and loves truth.
She is happy. Then suddenly, without any cause, he tells her it’s over. She is out on the streets without direction, without memory. Indeed she is unable to remember even what he told her without his presence there to repeat it, this amnesia being the ultimate dereliction.
If memory fails, then the mind is air in a skull. This loss of memory forces her to abandon hope for either rescue or certainty.
And now is the moment where doubt—as an active function—emerges and magnifies the world. It eliminates memory. And it turns eyesight so far outwards, the vision expands. A person feels as if she is the figure inside a mirror, looking outwards for her moves. She is a forgery.
When all the structures granted by common agreement fall away and that “reliable chain of cause and effect” that Hannah Arendt talks about—breaks—then a person’s inner logic also collapses. She moves and sees at the same time, which is terrifying.
Yet strangely it is in this moment that doubt shows itself to be the physical double to belief; it is the quality that nourishes willpower, and the one that is the invisible engine behind every step taken. Doubt is what allows a single gesture to have a heart.
In this prose poem Weil’s narrator recovers her balance after a series of reactive revulsions to the surrounding culture by confessing to the most palpable human wish: that whoever he was, he loved her.
Hope seems to resist extermination as much as a roach does.
Hannah Arendt talks about the “abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for.” Consciousness of this abyss is the source of belief for most converts. Weil’s conviction that evil proves the existence of God is cut out of this consciousness.
Her Terrible Prayer—that she be reduced to a paralyzed nobody—desires an obedience to that moment where coming and going intersect before annihilation.
And her desire: “To be only an intermediary between the blank page and the poem” is a desire for a whole- heartedness that eliminates personality.
Virginia Woolf, a maestro of lyric resistance, was frightened by Freud’s claustrophobic determinism since she had no ground of defense against it. The hideous vocabulary of mental science crushed her dazzling star-thoughts into powder and brought her latent despair into the open air. Born into a family devoted to skepticism and experiment, she had made a superhuman effort at creating a prose-world where doubt was a mesmerizing and glorious force.
Anyone who tries, as she did, out of a systematic training in secularism, to forge a rhetoric of belief is fighting against the odds. Disappointments are everywhere waiting to catch you, and an ironic realism is so convincing.
Simone Weil’s family was skeptical too, secular and attentive to the development of the mind. Her older brother fed her early sense of inferiority with his condescending intellectual putdowns. Later, her notebooks chart a superhuman effort at conversion to a belief in affliction as a sign of God’s presence.
Her prose itself is tense with effort. After all, to convert by choice (that is, without a blast of revelation or a personal disaster) requires that you shift the names for things, and force a new language out of your mind onto the page.
You have to make yourself believe. Is this possible? Can you turn “void” into “God” by switching the words over and over again? Any act of self-salvation is a problem because of death which always has the last laugh, and if there has been a dramatic and continual despair hanging over childhood, then it may even be impossible.
After all, can you call “doubt” “bewilderment” and suddenly be relieved?
Not if your mind has been fatally poisoned . . . But even then, it seems, the dream of having no doubt continues, finding its way into love and work where choices matter exactly as much as they don’t matter—when history’s things are working in your favor.
(2000)
TOM CLARK (1941–)
&nb
sp; Death, Revenge and the Profit Motive
Death is good, revenge is a waste of time, and who ever thought up the profit motive didn’t understand either of those things, John said, tipping his head back to pour another drink into it. He was paying twelve hundred dollars a month to keep Mary in a glass and redwood shack with a hot tub in the hippest canyon in town, he said. And now she wouldn’t even talk to him, and—he said—he was dying. “But only to get even!”
(1981)
BILLY COLLINS (1941–)
Five Fondly Remembered Passages from My Childhood Reading
“When they had inched about as close as they dared, they crouched down, parted the tall grass and beheld an amazing spectacle. Thousands upon thousands of the tiny creatures had assembled around an old tree stump upon which their leader sat addressing his subjects. As it turned out, the King of the Mice was not a mouse at all, but a small boy!”
L.G. Stevens, King of the Mice
“I think it would be great if we got the wagon out of the garage and pulled it around the neighborhood and put things in it,” said the Head-on-the-Right.
“I’m tired,” said the Head-in-the-Middle.
“Isn’t it supposed to get dark soon?” asked the Head-on-the-Left.
“We could collect different things and bring them home and keep them.”
“You should have thought of that a little earlier.”
“Does your mother know you’re here?” asked the Head-on-the-Left.
“I haven’t seen my mother for days,” said the Head-in-the-Middle, and the heads on either side, eyebrows knitted, turned to look at him and wondered about the consequences of what he had just said.
Penelope Graves, The Boy with Three Heads
“Don’t forget to take a cardigan,” Mother called from the top of the stairs, “just in case you fall into a dark pit full of things with sharp teeth on your way home from the picture show.”
Sigert Manes, The Trouble with Mother
“Tony, that house you’ve been pointing to isn’t so far off in the distance, you know. It’s really just a very small house a few feet in front of you.”
“Gee, you’re right, Paul. Hey, look, I can reach out and pick it up!”
“Sure, it fits right in your palm.”
“Hey, lookit, there’s a bunch of little people walking out the front door.”
“Careful, some of them are starting to crawl up your arm!”
“Boy, this is really something!”
“One’s under your sleeve!”
“Wow!”
R. Enright, Fun with Perspective
“Is that you playing the piano in there, Ellen?”
“No, it’s Pinky. I told you she was the smartest kitten in the whole wide world!”
“Well, just don’t ask me to pay for her lessons!” Mrs. Thompson joked as she entered the music room carrying a tray piled high with delicate china tea things.
Rebacca Wall, Pinky’s World Concert Tour
(1999)
ROBERT HASS (1941–)
A Story About the Body
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.
(1989)
In the Bahamas
The doctor looked at her stitches thoughtfully. A tall lean white man with an English manner. “Have you ever watched your mum sew?” he asked. “The fellow who did this hadn’t. I like to take a tuck on the last stitch. That way the skin doesn’t bunch up on the ends. Of course, you can’t see the difference, but you can feel it.” Later she asked him about all the one-armed and one-legged black men she kept seeing in the street. “Diabetic gangrene, mostly. There really isn’t more of it here than in your country, but there’s less prosthesis. It’s expensive, of course. And stumps are rather less of a shock when you come right down to it. Well, as we say, there’s nothing colorful about the Caribbean.” He tapped each black thread into a silver basin as he plucked it out. “Have you ever been to Haiti? Now there is a truly appalling place.”
(1989)
Tall Windows
All day you didn’t cry or cry out and you felt like sleeping. The desire to sleep was light bulbs dimming as a powerful appliance kicks on. You recognized that. As in school it was explained to you that pus was a brave army of white corpuscles hurling themselves at the virulent invader and dying. Riding through the Netherlands on a train, you noticed that even the junk was neatly stacked in the junkyards. There were magpies in the fields beside the watery canals, neat little houses, tall windows. In Leiden, on the street outside the university, the house where Descartes lived was mirrored in the canal. There was a pair of swans and a sense that, without haste or anxiety, all the people on the street were going to arrive at their appointments punctually. Swans and mirrors. And Descartes. It was easy to see how this European tranquillity would produce a poet like Mallarmé, a middle-class art like symbolism. And you did not despise the collective orderliness, the way the clerks in the stores were careful to put bills in the cash register with the Queen’s face facing upward. In the house next to the house where Descartes lived, a Jewish professor died in 1937. His wife was a Dutch woman of strict Calvinist principles and she was left with two sons. When the Nazis came in 1940, she went to court and perjured herself by testifying that her children were conceived during an illicit affair with a Gentile, and when she developed tuberculosis in 1943, she traded passports with a Jewish friend, since she was going to die anyway, and took her place on the train to the camps. Her sons kissed her good-bye on the platform. Eyes open. What kept you awake was a feeling that everything in the world has its own size, that if you found its size among the swellings and diminishings it would be calm and shine.
(1989)
LYN HEJINIAN (1941–)
Three Sections from My Life
We have come a long way from what we actually felt
If it were writing we would have to explain. I say that as much to comfort myself as to state something I think to be true. Dashing up out of the dark basement, pursued by the humid fear. Similarly, due to some peculiar sentimentality, people always want the runt of the litter. She sat every afternoon in her chair waiting for her headache, exactly as one might sit on a bench awaiting a bus. In a book I read the sentence, “the water is as blue as ink,” which made me regret that so few people use fountain pens. Never give the blindman money without taking one of his pencils. When I went to Christian Science Sunday school, the teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I answered that I wanted to be a writer or a doctor. The words of the last one to speak continued to hover in the air, and that was embarrassing. A name trimmed with colored ribbons. At the circus men were selling live chameleons which wore tiny collars and were attached to red and yellow ribbons that one could pin to one’s dress or shirt as a living jewel. As for we who “love to be astonished,” mother love. The game of solitaire, of patience, is disappointing when it “comes out” the first time. It is impossible to return to the state of mind in which these sentences originated. So I borrowed my
father’s typewriter. There was a garden, a hole in the fence, a grandfather who had no religion—one can run through the holes in memory, wearing a wet hat, onto the sidewalk covered with puddles, and there are fingers in them. Similarly, a beautiful concert or an unusual autumn sunset makes me feel restless if I’m by myself, wanting someone with whom to share it. At noon, under no one’s new moon. I didn’t want the kids over to play, messing with my stuff. We were coughing after a day by the sea. That was the gap between behavior and feeling. This was a year at the breaking point, turning over, given the swift combination. That summer when I was nine I trained myself to hold my breath and stubbornly swim the full length of the pool under water and back, until the returning end of the pool went black. In the telephone room one heard the disembodied voice over the receiver while staring into the row of empty coats and hats, and when we played hide and seek with the other cousins, on those occasions when my grandparents had all the family to dinner, only the oldest cousins dared hide among them. An other is a possibility, isn’t it. I have been spoiled with privacy, permitted the luxury of solitude. A pause, a rose, something on paper. I didn’t want a party for my tenth birthday, I wanted my mother, who was there, of course, at the party, but from whom I was separated by my friends and because she was busy with the cake and the balloons. She kept a diary but she never read it. Yet those who scorn friendship can, without illusion but not without some remorse, be the finest friends in the world. Now the shower curtain is sexy. The gap indicated that objects or events had been forgotten, that a place was being held for them, should they chance to reappear. The sound of the truck had frightened the towhees away. Like the “big, round O” taught by the traditional penmanship teachers (the Palmer method, it was called), there was a big round “A” and we were to pronounce it, in place of the nasty, narrow “A” in words like cat and Ann. The high curb turned on the curve. The windows on the northwestern wall looked out toward the clock on the so-called Campanile by which my father, far-sighted, kept time. What was the meaning hung from that depend. Apples have bellies. She was a skinny little girl and her bathing suit fit her so loosely that when she sat to play on the beach the sand fell into the crotch and filled it like a little pouch. The toll bridge takes its toll, the span its fog, its paint. Nevertheless fleas, and therefore powders. You are not different from your friend, but with your friend you are different from yourself, and recognizing that, I withdrew, wanting to protect my honesty, because I had defined integrity on two dimensions. I pushed my thumb to make a lever of the blunt spoon, he took up the palette knife and ships came out of the blue, I hit the space bar. Actually I don’t remember whether my father went with Braque or was only invited to do so one fine day outside of Paris to paint a landscape in plain air. And finally, on a visit to the zoo, as we were passing by the enclosure where the silver foxes were kept, I saw a flock of sparrows pecking at the ground of the enclosure, and one of them, venturing too close to a fox which was crouching in the shadow of an artificial rock, was suddenly seized by the fox, who swallowed it in a moment.