Cemetery Plums (Draft #1)

 

Detachment

 

Telemachus’ Detachment 

Louise Gluck

When I was a child looking
at my parents' lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny. 

A Necessary Fiction

Notes on reading eros: the bittersweet by anne carson

He seems to me equal to gods that man

who opposite you

sits and listens close

to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing--oh it

puts the heart in my chest on wings

for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking 

is left in me

no: tongue breaks, and thin

fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass

I am and dead--or almost

I seem to me.

Sappho, fragment 31

"It is a poem about the lover's mind in the act of constructing desire for itself."

"There are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible. . . . The difference between what is and what could be is visible."

***

"A space must be maintained or desire ends."

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,

high on the highest branch and the applepickers

     forgot--

well, no they didn't forget--were not able to reach

. . .

Sappho, fragment 105a

"The poem is incomplete, perfectly."

". . . this poem acts out the experience of eros. . . . Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger. From her inchoate little poem we learn several thins about eros. The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time)."

***

"Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can."

***

"Words do have edges. So do you."

"There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. The seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost. . . . All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you know see.Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual."

"Desire changes the lover. . . . The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before."

***

"In writing, beauty prefers an edge."

***

"Let us superimpose on the question 'What does the lover want from love' the questions 'What does the reader want from reading? What is the writer's desire?' Novels are the answer."

***

"To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist's aim."

"Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love."

***

"All lovers believe they are inventing love."

"The novelists who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing."

***

"Written letters have the presence and authority of a third person, who is witness, judge and conduit of erotic charges. Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet. Letters construct the space of desire and kindle in those contradictory emotions that keep the lover alert to his own impasse. Letters arrest and complicate an existing two-term situation by conjuring a third person who is not literally there, making suddenly visible the difference between what is. . . . and what could be. . . . From within letters, Eros acts."

***

"As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges--toward something else, something not yet grasped. The unplucked apple, the beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so."

***

"Sokrates' central argument, as he goes on to reevaluate madness, is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and indeed divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. Such incursions formally instruct and enrich our lives in society; no prophet or healer or poet could practice his art if he did not lose his mind, Sokrates says (244a-45). Madness is the instrument of such intelligence. More to the point, erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul."

"When you fall in love you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting (251-52). It is the beginning of what you are meant to be."

***

"In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space. . . . When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires."

In the Dark Room by Susan Faludi

PREFACE

FIRST LINE:

In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father.

TWO

"Haaallo?" my father said, with the protracted enunciation I'd heard so infrequently in recent years, that Magyar cadence that seemed to border on camp. Hallo. As my father liked to note, that telephone salutation was the coinage of Thomas Edison's assistant, Tivadar Puskás, the inventor of the phone exchange, who, as it happened, was Hungarian. "Hallom!" Puskás had shouted when he first picked up the receiver in 1877, Magyar for "I hear you!" Would she?

FIVE

My sense of who I am, to the degree that I can locate its coordinates, seems to derive from a quality of resistance, a refusal to back down. If it's threatened, I'll assert it. My "identity" has quickened in those very places where it has been most under siege.

TWELVE

In March 1939, more than two years before Hungary even entered the war, the Hungarian government declared Jewish men unfit for military action. . . . Instead, the Hungarian Labor Service System, unique to Hungary, conscripted all male Jews between the ages of twenty and forty-eight (and later, eighteen and forty-eight) into forced work units. . . . Conscripts were deprived of army boots and uniforms (other than yellow armbands identifying them as Jews; white for Jews who were Christian coverts). . . .these men provided the slave labor. . . .marched ahead of the regular troops through mine fields. . . .the laborers died in epidemic numbers, forty-two thousand before the German occupation.

Jewish men, no matter how convincing their false identity papers, risked what was euphemistically known as "trouser inspection" every time they ventured out.

THIRTEEN

I thought often of Nobel laureate Imre Kertész's assessment of his former home: "Nothing has been worked through, everything is painted over with pretty colors. Budapest is a city without a memory."

In 2003, Hungarian legislators, intent on making their country one of the first post-Communist bloc nations to join the EU, hurried into law the Equal Treatment Act. . . . And, remarkably, "gender identity," which two human-rights NGOs managed to slip into the the legislation. Hungary became the first nation in the world to guarantee equal protection to transgender people. 
      On paper. On the street, any urge to celebrate Hungary's declared tolerance was undercut by fear.

FOURTEEN

With Trianon, Hungary shed not only landmass but ethnic diversity. A vast portion of the country's minorities--those restive Romanians, Slovaks, Croatians, Ruthenians, Slovenians--now belonged to other nations carved from its borders. . . .With the exception of ethnic Germans, strongly assimilated yet in their own way outliers, the populace had gone from a roiling rainbow quilt to black and white: Magyar and Jew. One way to read the collapse of the Golden Age--it's what happens when a fluid system becomes binary. Magyars now represented 90 percent of the population. There were no longer the only slightly-less-than-half demographic who needed the Jews to be Magyars in order to construct their majority. The Jews of Hungary now served another purpose, as scapegoats for the "amputation" of the nation, the "mutilated motherland."

I can't bear to type some of the passages I have underlined. This chapter is extremely powerful and important for readers.

FIFTEEN

"The power of editing!" she said. "Waaall, I have to edit everything I do."

TWENTY

"Identity is" -- she deliberated--"it's what society accepts for you. You have to behave in a way that people accept, otherwise you have enemies. That's what I do--and I have no problems." 

TWENTY-FIVE

I studied my father's face, averted as it so often had been in life. All the years she was alive, she'd sought to settle the question of who she was. Jew or Christian? Hungarian or American? Woman or man? So many oppositions. But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought: there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death. Either you are living or you are not. Everything else is molten, malleable.

The Story of My Teeth

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

Translated by Christina MacSweeney

Coffee House Press, 2015

"I read a story in the newspaper about a certain local writer who had had all his teeth replaced. This writer, apparently, was able to afford the new dentures and the expensive operation because he'd written a novel. A novel! I saw my future, crystal clear. If that writer had had his teeth fixed with a book, I could do it too. Or, even better, I could get someone to write one for me." p. 18

"The teeth are the true windows to the soul; they are the tabula rasa on which all our vices are inscribed." p. 50

"I am Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, I said. I am the peerless Highway. And I am my teeth. They may seem to you to be yellowed and a little worse for wear, but I can assure you: these teeth once belonged to none other than Marilyn Monroe, and she needs no introduction. If you want them, you will have to take me along too." p. 62

     Ah! I see that you're going to be a good writer too.
     Why do you say that?
     Because when you smile, you don't show your teeth. Real writers never show their teeth. Charlatans, in contrast, flash that sinister crescent when they smile. Check it out. Find photos of all the writers you respect, and you'll see that their teeth remain a permanently occult mystery. I believe the only exception is the Argentinian Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis.
     Borges?
     The selfsame. Blind and Argentinian. But he doesn't count because he was blind, so he probably couldn't picture himself smiling--at least, not with the smile he had when he was blind, if you know what I mean." p.111

September 11, 2015 New York Times Sunday Book Review:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/books/review/the-story-of-my-teeth-by-valeria-luiselli.html?_r=0

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

I recently finished this highly acclaimed novel. The first passage I underlined in the text was on page 32.  It took that long for my brain to learn the book's language.  It also took me that many pages to remember I could underline.  This is the first "real" book I've read in a long time.  I switched to reading on my iPhone when my kids were small. But after reading reviews of McBride's book, I knew I would never be able to digest it's modernist style in digital format.

Memorable quotes 

(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2014)

"Going foot to foot to foot to foot. Spinning wheels round digging. Crunch as glass on the axel rod." p. 32

"Later it ran up me. Legs stomach knees chest up head. Like smoke in my lungs to be coughed out. I'd throw up excitement. What is it? Like a nosebleed. Like a freezing pain. I felt me not me. Turning to the sun. Feel the roast of it. Like sunburn. Like a hot sunstroke. Like globs dropping in. Through my hair. Spat skin with it. Blank my eyes the dazzle. Huge shatter. Me who is just new. Fallen out of the sky. What. Is lust it? That's it. The first splinter. I. Give in scared. If I would. Stop. Him. Oh God. Is a mortal mortal sin." p. 55

"I don't think I will be clean now. Think instead I'll have revenge for lots of all kinds of things. The start is. That is love." p. 61

"How would they ever understand my life is more than cider? Complex than that." p. 74

"Saying yes is the best of powers. It's no big thing the things they do." p. 77

"So so we are just the one of us now. Me." p. 90

"My heart go bang at no go back now no go back. Some new education begins." p. 91

"Will hear him tell me he's how old a lot oh God lotter than me. I am addling but good to be seen. It's very good to be seen." p. 95

"Wash my body on or off and think I'll be some new a disgrace. Slap in the alley with no doubt rats I am leaving. Epiphany. I am leaving home. I've picked up and left. Fresh. I'm already gone." p. 96

"I love the. Something of it all. Feeling ruined. Fucking. Off. I'm ready. Ready ready. To be this other one. To fill out the corners of this person who doesn't sit in photos on the mantel next to you." p. 98

"The answer to every single question is Fuck." p. 146

"Trains passing like teeth through my head." p. 151

"I walk the street. City. Running through my mouth. Running in my teeth the. Me eyes are. All the things. The said the done what there what's all this? That stuff. I could do. My. I walk the street. Who's him? That man. Who's him there having a looking at me he. Look at my. Tits. Ssss. Fuck word. No don't. Fuck that. No. Will. Not that. Not. That. But. If I want to then I can do. And it would fill me up fine. And I. I do. Do it. Take him back with me. Give him. The word. I want that. Hurt me. Until I am outside the pain." p. 163

"Me the thing but I. Think I know. Is that the reason for what's happened? Me? The thing. Wrong." p. 179

"Think. There's a there's a world's not this." p. 185

Useful links:

The White Review interview with Eimear McBride:

http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-eimear-mcbride/

The New Yorker Review

"Useless Prayers"  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/useless-prayers

Top Ten Books

I compiled this list in September, 2014 in response to a Facebook meme.  The idea was to list the first ten books and/or authors that came to mind and describe why they are important.  The books that came to mind (without the aid of my bookshelves) are those that are connected to a shared reading experience. 

I dug this out of my writing notes today because I just finished reading Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen, his memoir.  It prompted me to consider what episodes and texts in my life I might include in a memoir.  

Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter.  

This book was given to me by my Grandma Anna Mae Kelley as a Christmas present when I was around ten. 

John Grisham

Reading his thrillers in high school was one of the first times I got drawn into the excitement of waiting with a friend for the next book by an author. 

Stephen King

Reading anything by him when I was in high school was intense.  Again he created a little society of readers who dared to read him.  The experience of reading Gerald's Game in one night through the dawn was terrifying.  I didn't read him again until The Cell. 

The Places You Will Go by Dr. Seuss

This was a key book at my high school graduation and at my wedding. I loved rereading it recently and noticing how the difficulties of life are so vividly portrayed. 

Blindness by Jose Saramago

This is a hard book.  I like hard books.  And that scene on the balcony is worth the entire book. And I'm afraid of going blind.

The Red Tent By Anita Diamant

This book is on the list because of the foundational role it played in my book club.  The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd also makes the list for the same reason.

The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich

It is an epic tale of living in America as an immigrant.  It is a book I've found myself giving to people.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

It is a short book, yet it captured life in contemporary Japan and caught the imaginations of my classmates at Saint Mary's. 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

I am not even sure why/when I first read this.  Not even sure why it is on the list other than perhaps it was one of my first tastes of the modernist style.  And I once quoted it at length in a love letter.

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler

This play became the heart of many relationships for me.

bouquet of first lines

They asked her her name and said that was a lovely name when she told them.  Violets were held out to her to smell.  They said where they’d picked them.  A dell they called the place, near the fingerpost.  They could have picked an armful.

“We hoped we’d see you,” the taller woman said. “For you, my dear.”

Again the violets were held out, this time for Cecilia to take.

“We’re not meant to pick the flowers.”

Both smiled at once.  “You didn’t pick them, you might explain. A gift.”

---from The Women by William Trevor

***

Daniel stands in the funnel, a narrow path between two high brick walls that join the playground to the estate proper.

He hasn’t talked to anyone today. I haven’t talked to anyone today.

Madeleine and I are waiting at the bus stop at the bottom of Beech Grove in our school uniforms:  green print dresses, short white socks and sandals, blazers.

Growing up in the listless 1980s, Cecilia Normanton knew her father well, her mother not at all.

I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town.

Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.

While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. 

For the heart, life is simple:  it beats for as long as it can.

At dusk they pour from the sky.

The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.

The moment builds; it swells and builds—the moment when I realize we have lost.

Empty, vast, and cold were the halls of the Snow Queen.

‘Get out, you cunting, shitting, little fucking fucker!’ were the first words I ever heard.

We made our vow on a windy night in 1962, by the light of a full moon, three young women, with a priest as our companion.

***