reverie

To designate a dreamed world well, it is necessary to mark it with a happiness.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie.


Or perhaps only with a hopefulness, however slight. Making light out of the dark, against all odds. Against the darkest signs reality keeps on sending you from out there. On a daily basis. Opening up the tiniest aperture where grace can somehow still coexist with this sense of irrecoverable loss.

style

To the poor souls who think that 'style' has anything whatsoever to do with clothes & fashion, here's the coolest, most stylish answer ever given:

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

Gore Vidal

(Cited apud Mark Simpson, 'Gore Vidal Turns Off The Lights On The American Dream' / 'Gore Vidal speaks to Mark Simpson')


There you are.

the unbearable lightness of being

A poem I return to every now and then, if only to remind myself that our grip on life, frail though it may seem, doesn't cease to surprise us in the most testing times - or, harder even, amidst the desultory, futile banality of the everyday.


You've Lived

All through the play, Hamlet's
Looking for some hold in the world.
All through it, he's searching for something in life
To bear the weight of his being

And neither his father's murder,
The adultery of his mother
Nor Ophelia's love --
Things shattering enough
One would have thought --
Is sufficient to root him
In the rank, unweeded garden
Which was what he called life.
He was here without an anchor
In a fruitless sea of being.
And he never evolved an interest
(As we say) 'to keep him going' --
He, with his wayward life; he, the lost one.

So take comfort --
Even if you only grow onions,
Breed rabbits or put ships in bottles,
If that grips you, you are one of the saved,
The light shines on you, you can fear death,
Go in dread of the end.
That is to say, you've lived.


Gwyn Thomas

Photo: Jim Brandenburg

subjective correlative

Were I to find a correlative of my state of mind these days, it would be the following verses by Stevie Smith:


All things pass
Love and mankind is grass


Why say more?...

It isn't happiness I seek

After Anna Akhmatova


It isn't happiness I seek.
My lover leaves to visit a lover.
I put my tired child to sleep
like a good mother.

I kneel in my cool, calm room
and pray to the angels -
how hard it is to live alone
and to pretend to be cheerful.

I ask for a vision of passion,
walking the path I know too well,
in my usual fashion,
to the cold, stone building on the hill.


Carol Ann Duffy

shit happens

Love is awakened only by chance. It flares up at the merest coincidence. . . . Nothing is more contrary to love than to exercise the reckoning mind so as to exclude adverse chances.
Shit happens.

Alphonso Lingis


Indeed. Couldn't agree more.

More and more.