Light, Remembering, and Benjamin

 I have been reading about memory and remembering. The other day my friend shared another excerpt from Gilead. He loved, as Amanda did, the relationship between light and memory. He shared this: 

 I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon.  I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one can begin to do it justice.  There was the feeling of a weight of light--pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do.  It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap.  So familiar.

 And this:

The moon looked wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning.  Light within light. . . .  It seemed to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence.  Or it seems like poetry within language.  Perhaps wisdom within experience.  Or marriage within friendship and love.

And then there is Walter Benjamin's essay "Image of Proust," which discusses memory and forgetting: "When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with or purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and ornaments of forgetting."

I am not sure what I have to say about them, but they just were so beautiful I've been thinking about them for days. 

Bon Iver

I had listened to this song several times when Amy shared it with me over Christmas, but I just bought a ticket to see him in Orlando, and my love for this song was rekindled. The lyrics, his voice/s, the guitar.



Skinny Love

Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer

I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in the moment this order's tall

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
In the morning I'll be with you
But it will be a different "kind"
I'll be holding all the tickets
And you'll be owning all the fines

Come on skinny love what happened here
Suckle on the hope in lite brassiere
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full; so slow on the split

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?
Now I'm breaking at the britches
And at the end of all your lines

Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?

Mundane Miracles

I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and loving it, every page. Especially the pages that contain pearls like this one:

"You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did look like a birth or a resurrection. For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection. I've always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water."

where's a good warehouse when you need one

but i'll take it

I like this quite a bit: [Ah, the line breaks don't transfer for some reason, so look here]

Vespers
Charles Wright

Who wouldn't wish to become
The fiery life of divine substance
blazing above the fields,
Shining above the waters,
The rain like dust through his fingerbones,
All our yearning like flames in his feathery footprints?
Who, indeed?
And still . . .

The world in its rags and ghostly raiment calls to us
With grinding and green gristle
Wherever we turn,
and we are its grist, and we are its groan.
Over the burned lightning strikes of tree shadows
branded across the near meadow,
Over the dusk-dazed heads of the oat grass,
The bullbat's chortle positions us, and hold us firm.
We are the children of the underlife,
at least for a time,
Flannel shirt on a peg, curled
Postcards from years past
thumbtacked along the window frames.
Outside, deer pause on the just-cut grass,
The generator echoes our spirit's humdrum,
and gnats drone high soprano . . .
Not much of a life, but I'll take it.

get ready to be delighted

dedicated to thelma, to get through this coming week:

(from zooillogix)

Digging Limestone

Here is another Scott Russell Sanders excerpt, this one from an essay about the many and massive limestone quarries in southern Indiana and the people who work them:

"Wherever holes have been drilled in the quarry ledges, dirt catches and seedlings take root. Eventually these roots will burst the stone. Our roots also go down into rock—the rock of caves, spearheads, knives, the megaliths and cairns and dolmens of our ancestors, the rock of temples and pyramids, gravestones, cathedrals. Entire millennia of human labors are known to us solely through their stone leavings. The only common stuff that rivals it for durability is language, words laid down in books and scrolls like so may fossils. With a touch of mind, the fossil words spring to life; so might the stones, if we look at them aright."

Obituaries

Nicole Krauss's The History of Love ends with an obituary of Leo Gursky written by himself. I reread it today and was incredibly moved. Leo's life of solitude makes me sad. He knew how to love so deeply. And even though he was a writer, he could not communicate when it mattered the most. And I cannot help but love him.

THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY

Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920.
He died learning to walk.
He died standing at the blackboard.
And once, also, carrying a heavy tray.
He died practicing a new way to sign his name.
Opening a window.

He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
Or he died thinking about Alma.
Or when he chose not to.

Really, there isn't much to say.
He was a great writer.
He fell in love.
It was his life.

Thank you NY Times for introducing me to St. Vincent

Maybe I'm out of the music loop and everyone already knows about this goodness... but enjoy anyway

The Dream and Lie of Franco

I've been a bit in love with Picasso's "Guernica" lately - but also love with this panel - "Dream and Lie of Franco"

Ae Fond Kiss by Robbie Burns

I may have just spent the past hour listening to every version of this song I could find on YouTube.

Galveston, 1961

[I have problems with rhyming poetry but I LOOVE it when it does it well, with grace, like this wonderful Richard Wilbur one. Also, he uses "flense," which is a spectacularly specific word meaning to strip the blubber from a whale. I love specificity in language so much.]



You who in crazy-lensed
Clear water fled your shape,
By choppy shallows flensed
And shaken like a cape,

Who gently butted down
Through weeds, and were unmade,
Piecemeal stirring your brown
Legs into stirred shade,

And rose, and with pastel
Coronas of your skin
Stained swell on glassy swell,
Letting them bear you in:

Now you have come to shore,
One woman and no other,
Sleek Panope no more,
Nor the vague sea our mother.

Shake out your spattering hair
And sprawl beside me here,
Sharing what we can share
Now that we are so near-

Small talk and speechless love,
Mine being all but dumb
That knows so little of
What goddess you become

And still half-seem to be,
Though close and clear you lie,
Whom droplets of the sea
Emboss and magnify.

[From The New Yorker]

Plus, now you can listen to this great "60s hit" and be so happy:

my life just got so much better

When I saw Julia Child's kitchen in the Museum of American History I started crying--the good kind. I'm still not sure why, but it seemed important to note here.

carebear stare

I'm pretty sure this is what a Carebear Stare would look like in our world:

Coeur de Pirate || Comme des enfants from Dare To Care Records on Vimeo.

Self-Sacrifice

I just wanted to share a post on self-sacrifice from written by a friend. Cassie is a dedicated student, intensely talented writer, beautiful woman, loving wife, and compassionate friend, among many other great things. She is also soon to be a doting mother. I encourage you to read as much of her blog as you can, but this post in particular has me wondering at how perfectly patterned this existence reveals itself to be sometimes.