2009

"Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start." - E.H.

thoughts...

ca fait longtemps.

there's a lot that i need from me in 2009 ("resolutions", if one must bandy the word about), but that's not what i wanted to write about today. well, maybe one of them: believing the best in people. giving them the benefit of the doubt. acknowledging their imperceptible trials. just... being about faith. faith in people. my big '09 project. and it will not come naturally to me, but i really want to try this year -- and moving forward. i do. i've realised how important it is; what a difference it can make. and how much courage it takes -- and how much it engenders in return.

i don't remember who said "the world is a fine place, and worth fighting for". i guess it's been repeated so often that it sounds trite now. which is unfortunate. but it is just the frame of mind that i'm trying to get myself into.

with everything that has been happening lately -- with all the beggars and homeless people i see, and with gaza and the congo and somalia and sudan and burma and pakistan/india, and christians and christianity, and religion as a general concept, and the economic crisis, and the fact that mom's miserable, and just... the world, the news... it's so easy to be OVER IT, you know? to think, "well, what's the point?". maybe this is life -- like, definitively, this is life. that there HAS to be shit mixed in -- always has been, and always will be. that maybe the "conservation of energy" principle extends to global, human misery: "suffering cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one form to another". so you put out a fire here, and then one starts there and we pass our lives chasing our tails. MAYBE. i can't rule that out.

what's more important though, i think, is intent. the aggregational intent of all living people at any given point in time. and the big thing is to believe that it is good. and that when it isn't, that there's a justifiable reason for any mal-intent.

i've been thinking a lot about the news. how it's almost always miserable. MISERABLE. (no news is good news, right?) and it's easy to get down on that when, in fact, this speaks pretty powerfully to the goodness of people. news are worth reporting largely because they're aberrant. that's what makes them NEWS. that's what makes people pay attention. so the fact that news is largely negative... i don't know. it makes me think that people might have it right; that all this madness still stirs up something in our collective conscience. so maybe the fact that bad news is reported consistently, repeatedly, day after day, year in/year out is not the worst thing. the fact that it exists -- the mess that has happened to warrant it -- is undoubtedly regrettable. but that's not my point. i guess the trick comes in identifying the critical point at which bad news crosses over from being an unfortunate part of our existence that nevertheless speaks to our ability to feel outrage, and instead becomes white noise -- something we've heard so many times spun in so many different ways for as long as we can remember that it becomes what life is to us. it becomes the background of to our lives' tapestry and we get to a point where, if we're honest, we admit that we would, perhaps, want to care. but we've forgotten how. and that is the downside to all the negative headlines i'm reading now: they're irking me less and less as time goes by. and it's great that people still care enough to report them but, oh... i don't know.

but i digressed. EVERYBODY IS DOING THE BEST THEY CAN. that was the point of this post. that is the awareness i need to carry with me this year. constantly.

everybody is doing the best they can.

(am i?)

poetry 6: great cathedrals

Great Cathedrals, George Bilgere

Before a date, my college roommate
Used to drive his candy-apple red Camaro
Down to the car wash and spend the afternoon
Washing, waxing, vacuuming it,
Detailing the chrome strips, buffing the fenders,
Spraying the big expensive tires
With their raised white lettering

That said something like Intruder
Or Marauder, with a silicone spray
Until they were slick and dark as sex.
He polished that car as if each caress,
Each pass of the chamois, each loving
Stroke of the terry cloth would increase,

By measurable degrees,
The likelihood that in the immaculate
Front seat, with its film of freshly applied
Vinyl cleaner, at the end of a cul-de-sac
Somewhere above the campus,
She would consent to be rubbed
And buffed just as lovingly.

We do what we can,
And if God is no more impressed
By the cathedral at Chartres
Than by a righteously clean and cherry
Camaro, at least He can't say
We haven't tried

With all our might to conceal our fear
That we have little else to offer
Than stained glass or polished chrome,
The elbow grease of our good intentions.

So I'm happy to see
That in the Christmas card photo he sent
Mark stands, balding now,
With a dignified gut, a pretty wife,
And a couple of nice-looking kids, in front
Of the great cathedral
Like the sweet vision of a future
He'd been vouchsafed one day
Long ago, through Turtle Wax
On a gleaming hubcap.

LoS

so, "lives of the saints" by nancy lehman is totally set to be one of my life's greatest loves. yay. time for some excerpts!

1.
"There's a famous line in a story where there is this married couple and it is observed about them that she had none of the world's dark magic for him, but he couldn't live without her for six consecutive hours. My feeling for Claude was like the reverse: I could live without his presence – as I had just done, when I was away at college – for a whole duration of years between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. But he had the world's dark magic.

I don't expect him to be near, I mean. He can probably live without me for six consecutive hours. It would not matter to me if I only saw him three times in five years – and it will still be with the understanding that if there are people like that in the world, then there is honour, for here was a fellow whom you could depend on to be kind as a steadfast, incorruptible rule."

2.
"He politely watched me while I read the newspaper, which he'd brought. He did not speak. He had an air of observant logic, just watching me read.
"My eyes are killing me," I said. "I read like a fiend."
"Well, read like an angel," he said mildly, not taking his eyes off my face. "you're too interested in glamour," he said suddenly. "You socialize too much. You go out too much. You stay out too late. You drink too much. You should just be a simple, regular person. You should go to bed at eleven every night. You should just come home from work and cook, do the dishes, and just be a regular person. You shouldn't eat Carnation Instant Breakfast."
I received these stunning recommendations in silence. Then I said, "You're the one who needs that advice."
"No, no, I'm just a regular, normal guy. Who leads a regular life."
"Oh God."
"It's youth – it's just youth," he said looking at me, mild and unintelligible.
"What is?"
"Your behaviour."
"What behaviour?"
"You're so young!" he raved. "You're so innocent," he said. "How have you really been? I haven't really known, these past few years,, when you were away at school. I heard you had a breakdown," he added in a kind voice, solicitous but cheerful, as though it interested him especially. "Breakdowns?" he said. "Tell me about your breakdowns. That's what we're all about down here," he said. "Breakdowns.""

3.
""I've been hearing some things about Claude," Mr. Stewart said to Mr. Collier. "I hear he's been spending a lot of his time at the racetrack."
"Claude is not using his abilities," said Mr. Collier. Mr. Collier turned an eye of amused benevolence on his son Claude. Mr. Collier had a soft spot for Wastrel Youth. In fact, it was one of his favourtie episodes in life. He always said - trying to get the lingo, in his dignified old age - that the young people should "find themselves."
"I'd like to see that boy at the law school, Louis."
"He's finding himself, Walter," said Mr. Collier, ecstatic. He loved wastrel youths, but he loved his sons to a degree approaching beatitude. The combination - his sons plus wastrel youth - was almost too much for him."

hindsight really IS 20/20...

so i let it out unwittingly today. and it turns out i came here for an apology - or at the very least an explanation. funny that. and also funny what the combination of ignorance and delusion can do to a person. seriously, what the fuck was i thinking?

major learning: what matters to me matters... but then only to me. and i need to learn to be able to sit and live and dance and... breathe with that - and not just pay lip service to my ability to do so. and i'll have grown up when i truly let go of my need for certain "sorry"s. i just don't know why it's so hard to let it go, you know?

for a while i thought everything hinged on self-awareness - i mean, my ability to be "adjusted" and fine... maybe even happy? i thought that was about me knowing that i can't do x and need to work on fixing that, that i can't do y and need to let that go, that i kick ass at doing z and need to be cognizant of that too. but it... self-awareness isn't even the half of it. i mean, it's a start. the whole point of me blogging was to force myself to be in my head a bit more - but even that does not necessarily grant any results! and it's getting disheartening. it's like... like i find myself in a really deep lake and i take that in (self-awareness feat A)... then i admit to myself that i can't swim (self-awareness feat B)... then i decide that what i need is a raft, and i'll be fine - and there you have it. i have identified the problem and in this case even gone so far as to propose a solution but that does not result in the raft materialising, does it? cos if there isn't one, well... nothing's changing. it's an awful (awful!) metaphor on the whole - to speak nothing of the melodrammatic allusions to drowning in particular - but i couldn't think of a better one.

bottomline: all my expectations were really stupid.

fsg 2 and eh 1

i don't know why i'm so fascinated by these two men, but anyway - here goes...

"When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is—but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones."
- Ernest Hemingway

poetry 5: hope for the past

Thanks, Robert Frost, David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks.
Hope for the past, yes, old Frost,
your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.