"Not Everyone Can See the Truth, But He Can Be It" Charles Wright

Sunday. It's always Sunday.
Rifts and seams of dark birds
Right-flank and wheel across a darker December sky
Southwest and so wide.

Winter solstice again,
burnt end of a narrow road.
The lawn chairs gutter and glare in their white solitude.

How short the days are.

How imperceptibly we become ourself--
like solstice-diminishing light
Devolving to one appointed spot,
We substitute and redress
In predetermined degrees we've neither a heart nor hand in.

How slowly the streetlights come on.
How shrill the birds are.

Take off your traveling clothes and
lay down your luggage,
Pilgrim, shed your nakedness.
Only the fire is absorbed by the Holy of Holies.
Let it shine.

Because

Because I am unhappy with (my) writing
Because I am overwhelmed by ______
Because I know many of my readers are lovahs (ipso facto or by choice)
I will now present a few block quotations from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments or, as it could be known, True Facts About Life

Agony/Anxiety

2. The psychotic lives in the terror of breakdown (against which the various psychoses are merely defenses). But "the clinical fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown which has already been experienced (primitive agony) ... and there are moments when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, fear of which is wrecking his life, has already occurred." Similarly, it seems, for the lover's anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first "ravished." Someone would have to be able to tell me: "Don't be anxious anymore--you've already lost him/her."

To Be Ascetic

Whether he feels guilty with regard to the loved being, or whether he seeks to impress that being by representing his unhappiness, the amorous subject outlines an ascetic behavior of self-punishment.


1. Since I am guilty of this, of that (I have --I assign myself--a thousand reasons for being so), I shall punish myself, I shall chasten by body: cut my hair very short, conceal my eyes behind dark glasses (a way of taking the veil), devote myself to the study of some serious and abstract branch of learning. I shall get up early and work while it is still dark outside, like a monk. I shall be very patient, a little sad, in a word, worthy, as suits a man of resentment. I shall (hysterically) signify my mourning (the mourning which I assign myself) in my dress, my haircut, the regularity of my habits. This will be a gentle retreat; just that slight degree of retreat necessary to proper functioning of a discrete pathos

Absence

4. I waken out of this forgetfulness very quickly. In great haste, I reconstitute a memory, a confusion. A (classic) word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence: to sigh: "to sigh for the bodily presence": the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace, in that it melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels.

(But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?)

Talking

1. Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words...

The Unknowable

1. I am caught in this contradiction: on ethe one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumpantly assert my knowledge to the other (I know you--I'm the only one who really knows you!); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

(Of everyone I had know, X was certainly the most impenetrable. This was because you never know anything about his desire: isn't knowing someone precisely that--knowing his desire? I knew everything, immediately, about Y's desires, hence Y himself was obvious to me, and I was inclined to love him no longer in a state of terro but indulgently, the way a mother loves her child.)

Reversal: "I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

...

3. Or again, instead of trying to define the other ("What is he?"), I turn to myself: "What do I want, wanting to know you?" What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not as a person? And if I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours? This would happen: my other would be defined solely by the suffering or the pleasure he affords me.

HEY MISS RICH. I LIKE YOU SO MUCH.

3.
We can look at each other through both our lifetimes
like those two figures in the sticklike boat
flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;
even our intimacies are rigged with terror.
Quantify suffering? my guilt at least is open,
I stand convinced by all my convictions--
you, too. We shrink from touching
our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves
and each other, we're scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love,
hose it on a city, on a world,
it wields and guides its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, rats, viruses--
like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.

Adrienne Rich, from Hunger

Y'all should listen to this new radiohead album.

Seriously.

To the bridge of love,
old stone between tall cliffs
-- eternal meeting place, red evening--,
I come with my heart.
--My beloved is only water,
that always passes away, and does not deceive,
that always passes away, and does not change,
that always passes away, and does not end.
-- Juan Ramon Jimenez (trans. James Wright)

Raven, George Seferis

Years like wings. What does the motionless raven remember?
What do the dead close to the roots of trees remember?
Your hands had the color of an apple ready to fall,
and that voice which always returns, that low voice.

Those who travel watch the sail and the stars
they hear the wind they hear the other sea beyond the wind
near them like a closed shell, they don't hear
anything else, don't look among the cypress shadows
for a lost face, a coin, don't ask
seeing a raven on a dry branch what it remembers.
It remains motionless just over my hours
like the soul of an eyeless statue;
there's a whole crowd gathered in that bird
thousands of people forgotten, wrinkles obliterated
broken embraces and uncompleted laughter,
arrested works, silent stations
a deep sleep of golden spangles.
It remains motionless. It gazes at my hours. What does it remember?
There are many wounds inside those invisible people within it
suspended passions waiting for the Second Coming
humble desires cleaving to the ground
children slaughtered and women exhausted at daybreak.
Does it weigh the dry branch down? Does it weigh down
the roots of the yellow tree, the shoulder
of other men, strange figures
sunk in the ground, not daring to touch even a drop of water?
Does it weigh down anywhere?
Your hands had a weight like hands in water
in the sea caves, a light careless weight
pushing the sea away to the horizon to the islands
with that movement we make sometimes when we dismiss an ugly thought.
The plain is heavy after the rain; what does the black
static flame against the gray sky remember
wedged between man and the memory of man
between the wound and the hand that inflicted the wound a black lance,
the plain darkened drinking the rain, the wind dropped
my own breath's not enough, who will move it?
Within memory, a gulf--a startled breast
between the shadows struggling to become man and woman again
stagnant life between sleep and death.

Your hands always moved towards the sea's slumber
caressing the dream that gently ascended the golden spiderweb
bearing in to the sun the host of constellations
the closed eyelids the closed wings...