On Running Away

"I looked up the rue Jean Nicot and could see lights twinkling, like fireflies, right across the Seine, filling the trees. I went to investigate another day and found out that they were just lights strung in the trees to draw tourists to the bateaux-mouches.

The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they're your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o'clock when you're walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river - only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still... - you feel as if you've escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they're transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven't seen before, either.

It's true that you can't run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away."


Paris to the Moon, 269-270.

A Machine to Draw the World

"Just after the move, for my birthday, Luke and Martha gave me a wonderful toy, La Machine à Dessiner le Monde, a machine to draw the world. Really, all it is is a camera lucida, but nicely done in plastic, with a viewing stand on top. You put a piece of vellum on it, and if the light's bright enough, and it has to be very bright, it projects the thing you're looking at right onto the paper. All you have to do is trace it.

All! For just tracing turns out to be the hardest thing of all. All the clichés and exasperating French abstractions about the insuperable difficulties of realism turn out to be plain truth when you have your machine to draw the world pointed out the window at the plane trees on the boulevard Saint-Germain, your pencil poised, and then you try to decide where to make the first mark. The world moves so much - shimmers and shakes like a nautch dancer, more than you can ever know when you're in it rather than looking at it. You bless any leaf that holds still long enough for you to get it. Hold still, you tell the tree, the light leaping up and down the balustrade, as though you were talking to a small child as you try to get on its galoshes. Just hold still. Where you finally make the mark is mostly a question of when you finally get fed up.

Tracing becomes a deep, knotty problem, a thing to solve, and I am completely absorbed in it. I take the Machine to Draw the World to the Palais Royal or the Luxembourg Gardens and just watch the screen, pencil poised, at the translation of Paris into this single flat layer of translucent, lucid shimmer. I no longer try to circus it, or mourn it, or even learn from it, since just drawing it is enough. What you really need from the world in order to draw it is a lot of light and for everything to just stand still."

Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (New York: Random House 2000), 255-6.

(Listen here...)

FUNDAMENTALS

A brilliant poem by Ian Duhig.

hoped-for chord

"If our days could be like piano keys, black and ivory across the floor,
could I lift you up with one single phrase as my fingers shape into a chord?"

Denison Witmer, 'From Here On Out' from Carry the Weight (Militia, 2008).

flung

"The earth was suddenly more than many separate things, more than houses, rocks, concrete roads, a horse here or there, a human in a shallow, boulder-topped grave, a prickling of cactus, a town invested with its own light surrounded by night, a million apart things. Suddenly it all had one pattern encompassed and held by the pulsing electric web.

She spilled out swiftly into rooms where life was rising from a slap on a naked child's back, into rooms where life was leaving bodies like the light fading from an electric bulb - the filament glowing, fading, finally colorless. She was in every town, every room, making light-patterns over hundreds of miles of land; seeing, hearing everything, not alone anymore, but one of thousands of people, each with his ideas and his faiths.

Her body lay, a lifeless reed, pale and trembling. Her mind, in all its electric tensity, was flung about this way, that, down vast networks of powerhouse tributary.

Everything balanced. In one room she saw life wither; in another, a mile away, she saw wineglasses lifted to the newborn, cigars passed, smiles, handshakes, laughter. She saw the pale, drawn faces of people at white deathbeds, heard how they understood and accepted death, saw their gestures, felt their feelings, and saw that they, too, were lonely in themselves, with no way to get to the world to see the balance, see it as she was seeing it now.

[...]

Her grief was but one part of a vast grief, her fear only one of countless others. And this grief was only a half thing. There was the other half; of things born, of comfort in the shape of a new child, of food in the warmed body, of colors for the eye and sounds in the awakened ear, and spring wild flowers for the smelling."

-Ray Bradbury, 'Powerhouse' from A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 102-3.

grin-enducing

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house is quiet and I am the only one awake. The rain patters against the glass. I came across this poem by Wallace Stevens.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

five things i read

El Tornillo walks the streets of Melo. People in town think he's crazy. He carries a mirror in his hand and he looks at himself with furrowed brow. He doesn't take his eyes off the mirror. 'What are you doing, Tornillo?' 'I'm here,' he says, 'keeping watch on the enemy.'
-Eduardo Galeano

Henry Thoreau was languishing in jail after he had refused to pay the Massachusetts poll tax in 1843 [to protest the Mexican-American war]. Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit him and asked him why he was there. 'Waldo, why are you NOT here?' said Thoreau.
-Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

Not all forms of commitment... are equally healthy. The grand inquisitors of the medieval Catholic Church were utterly dedicated to their 'holy' work, and Hitler and many of his associated were fanatically committed to their Nazi doctrines.
-Albert Ellis

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
-Lorriane Hansberry

I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than of an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep.
-Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord