-explodingdog

Schoolchildren

Here are all the captivities, the cells are as real,
but these are unlike the prisoners we know,
who are outraged or pining or wittily resigned
or just wish all away.

For these dissent so little, so nearly content
with the dumb play of dogs, with licking and rushing;
the bars of love are so strong, their conspiracies
weak like the vows of drunkards.

Indeed, their strangeness is difficult to watch:
the condemned see only the fallacious angels of a vision,
so little effort lies behind their smiling,
the beast of vocation is afraid.

But watch them, set against our size and timing
their almost neuter, their slightly awkward perfection;
for the sex is there, the broken bootlace is broken:
the professor's dream is not true.

Yet the tyranny is so easy. An improper word
scribbled upon a fountain, is that all the rebellion?
A storm of tears wept in a corner, are these
the seeds of a new life?


-W.H. Auden (1937)

If you feel something I do not feel, then we become separated. If you feel something which the group you associate yourself with does not feel, then you become alienated. In the first instance, you may dismiss the problem of separation because we are equals, and you are as good as I am. In the second instance, the matter is not to be dismissed so lightly, since one is not equal to a group. Here you become an alien, you move yourself to another country of the mind and take up citizenship there, like Ruth among the alien corn. Of course, the movement may be partly voluntary, partly compulsory; it is frequently difficult to distinguish where exile begins and expatriation leaves off. Here you must question whether the unifying standards of the group are true and acceptable. If you reject them, then you are declaring that you are superior to the group-and, for the social animal that man is, such a step is daring in the extreme. Hence you must be prepared to assert new standards, and to defend them, either by developing a rationale-the beginning of philosophy-or else merely to assert that the individual will is the only standard.

-James A. Arieti, "Achilles' Guilt"

Happiness

I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them.
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

-Carl Sandburg

here
[FFFFound! again. 'scuse me folks. They're the best.]

The metaphor is of course very primitive. It is easier to illustrate than it is to explain because action came before speech. Let us make a parallel. Language is like money. In primitive communities actual goods, however bulky, are bartered for what one wants. This finally evolves into coin, the coin being not real wealth but a symbol of wealth. Still later even coin is abandoned for legal tender, and still later for cheques in certain usages.

-Zora Neale Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression"

...she traced her own birth back
to a proud Athenian line and the high gods
and off in caverns half the world away,
born of the wild North Wind
she sprang on her father's gales,
racing stallions up the leaping cliffs -
child of the heavens. But even on her the Fates
the gray everlasting Fates rode hard
my child, my child.

-Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Fagles

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t good art.

-David Foster Wallace, quoted here

here
[via FFFFound!]

The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and as long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter.

-Bernard Knox, Introduction to The Iliad, Penguin edition

One day a man was asked if there were any true atheists. Do you think, he replied, that there are any true Christians?

- Denis Diderot

The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible.

-Anton Chekhov

Roth’s novels abound in comic moments, and so does Indignation. His compassion for his characters doesn’t prevent him from noting their foolishness. “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends,” Roth said in an interview with Joyce Carol Oates back in 1974. Every tragic action casts a comic shadow, is how one may describe his view of life. His new novel, despite its many funny scenes, moves with the pace and inevitability of a tragedy.

-Charles Simic's review of Indignation
[via 3 quarks daily]

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.

-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
                  I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

-Frank O'Hara

Burn.

Principles of charity:

1. The other uses words in the ordinary way;
2. The other makes true statements;
3. The other makes valid arguments;
4. The other says something interesting.

here
[via FFFFound!]

And he forged on the shield two noble cities filled
with mortal men. With weddings and wedding feasts in one...
But circling the other city camped a divided army

-The Iliad

Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in the process of becoming.

I trust it is clear now why there is no philosophy or belief or set of principles which I could encourage or persuade others to have or hold. I can only try to live by my interpretations of the current meaning of my experience, and try to give others the permission and freedom to develop their own inward freedom and thus their own meaningful interpretation of their own experience.

If there is such a thing as truth, this free individual process of search should, I believe, converge toward it. And in a limited way, this is also what I seem to have experienced.

-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

Telemachus rebukes her for not greeting Odysseus more lovingly after his long absence, but Odysseus has other problems to worry about. He has just killed all of the noble young men of Ithaca—their parents will surely be greatly distressed. He decides that he and his family will need to lay low at their farm for a while. In the meantime, a minstrel strikes up a happy song so that no passersby will suspect what has taken place in the palace.

-SparkNotes

What Kafka’s stories have . . . is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, “unconscious,” which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul. Kafka’s humor–not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane, is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. [Flannery] O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.

And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get–the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell [students] that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward–we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komish. (64-65)

-DFW, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed”

[here]
[via clusterflock]

Elsewhere

(For Stephen Spender)

Somewhere a white horse gallops with its mane
plunging round a field whose sticks
are ringed with barbed wire, and men
break stones or bind straw into ricks.

Somewhere women tire of the shawled sea's
weeping, for the fishermen's dories
still go out. It is blue as peace.
Somewhere they're tired of torture stories.

That somewhere there was an arrest.
Somewhere there was a small harvest
of bodies in the truck. Soldiers rest
somewhere by a road, or smoke in a forest.

Somewhere there is the conference rage
at an outrage. Somewhere a page
is torn out, and somehow the foliage
no longer looks like leaves but camouflage.

Somewhere there is a comrade,
a writer lying with his eyes wide open
on mattress ticking, who will not read
this, or write. How to make a pen?

And here we are free for a while, but
elsewhere, in one-third, or one-seventh
of this planet, a summary rifle butt
breaks a skull into the idea of a heaven

where nothing is free, where blue air
is paper-frail, and whatever we write
will be stamped twice, a blue letter,
its throat slit by the paper knife of the state.

Through these black bars
hollowed faces stare. Fingers
grip the cross bars of these stanzas
and it is here, because somewhere else

their stares fog into oblivion
thinly, like the faceless numbers
that bewilder you in your telephone
diary. Like last year's massacres.

The world is blameless. The darker crime
is to make a career of conscience,
to feel through our own nerves the silent scream
of winter branches, wonders read as signs.

-Derek Walcott

From The Arkansas Testament
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)

God knows, I watch my fair share of movies and television, and they're powerful in their own ways. But I think fiction is more powerful. [It's certainly] a more powerful anodyne for loneliness. I enjoy TV, but I always feel lonelier after I've watched four hours of it. I feel like I've pretended to be with people but I really haven't. In fiction you both feel like the writer is talking to you and [that] you are intimate with people in a book; you can be inside their heads; you can hear their brains' voice[s]. I'll never be that intimate with anyone in person.

When I'm bored or restless I will watch television. When I want to feel like I'm talking to someone, I will read, and not read anything, I mean stuff that works.

-David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant. Again from the town, deadened a little by the walls, the scream of the siren mounted toward its unbelievable crescendo, passing out of the realm of hearing.

-William Faulkner, Light in August

Auden's game: Purgatory Mates

Perhaps the nothingness astonished him a little, but not much, and not for long.

-Faulkner, Light in August

let us no longer speak of love

Let us no longer speak of love.
Love is horseplay at its best
and good, I think, for just this life.

Let’s speak of something of ourselves
or of the way that we relate
that will endure beyond the grave—

but what? Your smart-ass comments,
no. Your anecdotes and hand gestures,
no and no. They’ll be the first to go.

And my rejoinders, punk-ass rhymes,
will soon be swallowed whole by time,
as will my money, my car, my keys.

Even our truest moments in speech
or touch, or listening to each other breathe
after making love and brushing teeth

and cuddling in blankets, spooning
habitually in our comfortable
nightly grave and rising like Jesus

to do it all again: All gone, and yet
without regret. When nothing’s left,
what’s there to mourn? Nothing itself?

Nothing will endure beyond the grave
(more wit), and nothing’s what
we’ll miss the most, I think (a trifle).

So actually let’s do speak of love
and horseplay, careless punches
to each other’s noses, awkward kisses,

dancing in our underwear near the edge
of the dumb void like the former
junior ringmasters that we are.

Let’s trounce the forbidden places
knowing that there’s less to life
than we had thought at first.

-Aaron Belz

Walking Around

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie
houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse
sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the
night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist
houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical
cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic
shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

-Pablo Neruda

[via belz]

A curious thing
about the ontological problem is its
simplicity.

-W.O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View

I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world. Tom Wolfe was trying to say everything, the world plus 'I' or filtered through 'I' to embrace the world in which he was born and walked a little while and then lay down again, into one volume. I am trying to go a step further. This I think accounts for what people call obscurity, the involved, formless 'style,' endless sentences. I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period.

-William Faulkner

My own opinion is more or less this: no wise man believes that anyone errs voluntarily or willingly does evil or any base act. They know very well that every base or evil act is committed involuntarily.

-Socrates, Protagoras

There was a world... or was it all a dream?

-Homer [Helen, The Iliad]