Not Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Jennifer Michael Hecht

I

“Promises to keep,” was a lie, he had nothing. Through

the woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict’s

talk of quitting as she’s smacking at a vein. He was always

going into the woods. It was he who wrote, “The only way

around is through.” You’d think a shrink, but no, a poet.

He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holds

promises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fill

with a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steers

his horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzard

is a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm,

lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They go

deeper, sky gets darker. It’s the darkest night of the year.

II

He had no promises to keep, nothing pending. Had no bed

to head to, measurably away in miles. He was a freak like me,

monster of the dawn. Whose woods these are I think I know,

his house is in the village though. In the middle of life

he found himself lost in a dark woods. I discovered myself

in a somber forest. In between my breasts and breaths I got

lost. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I’ve got promises

to keep, smiles to go before I leap. I’m going into the woods.

They’re lovely dark, and deep, which is what I want, deep lovely

darkness. No one has asked, let alone taken, a promise of me,

no one will notice if I choose bed or rug, couch or forest deep.

It doesn’t matter where I sleep. It doesn’t matter where I sleep.

si bene calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est.
If you reflect well on it, life is a shipwreck everywhere.

from Petronius' Satyricon



"The library in Bridgeport has big stone steps and high pillars. It's what he first thought of when he heard that Samuel was serving the Lord in the temple of Shiloh. A temple is different from a church. Jews go to temple and Christians go to church. But Catholics go to Catholic church. And everybody goes to the library."

-Steven Millhauser, "The Voice in the Night"




I am a very bad airplane and can only
play dangerous, unwinnable games
with the other anxiety machines.

-Marc McKee, "Child Recruit" from _What Apocalypse?_




The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.

-Joseph Conrad, _Lord Jim_




Tis Miracle before Me--then--
Tis Miracle behind--between--
A Crescent in the Sea--
With Midnight to the North of Her--
And Midnight to the South of Her--
And Maelstrom--in the Sky--

-Emily Dickinson 721

Crime and Punishment - I'm about 3/4 done.

“Or renounce life altogether!” he suddenly cried out in frenzy. “Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love! Do you understand, do you understand, my dear sir, what it means when there is no longer anywhere to go?” he suddenly recalled Marmeladov’s question yesterday. “For it is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go …”

It had not occurred to him as he was going upstairs to Razumikhin’s that he would therefore have to come face-to-face with him. But now, in an instant, he realized from his earlier experience that he was least of all disposed at that moment to come face-to-face with anyone in the whole world, whoever it might be.

You see, I don’t have any lessons either, and to hell with it, but there’s a bookseller in the flea market named Cherubimov, and he’s a sort of lesson in himself.

We have to make a human being out of you, after all.

An economic idea is not yet an invitation to murder.

“Do you like street singing?” Raskolnikov suddenly addressed one not too young passer-by, who had been standing with him near the barrel-organ and looked like an idler. The man stared at him wildly and with amazement. “I do,” Raskolnikov went on, looking as if he were not talking about street singing at all, “I like hearing songs to the barrel-organ on a cold, dark, and wet autumn evening—it must be a wet evening—when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces; or, even better, when wet snow is falling, straight down, with no wind—you know?—and the gaslights are shining through it …”

He went down slowly, unhurriedly, all in a fever, and filled, though he was not aware of it, with the new, boundless sensation of a sudden influx of full and powerful life. This sensation might be likened to the sensation of a man condemned to death who is suddenly and unexpectedly granted a pardon.

“Polechka, my name is Rodion; pray for me, too, sometimes: ‘and for the servant of God, Rodion’—that’s all.” “I’ll pray for you all the rest of my life,” the girl said ardently, and suddenly laughed again, rushed to him, and again held him hard.

It sucks you in, it’s the end of the world, an anchor, a quiet haven, the navel of the earth, the three-fish foundation of the world, the essence of pancakes, rich meat pies, evening samovars, soft sighs and warm vests, heated beds on the stove—well, just as if you died and were alive at the same time, both benefits at once!

“That’s what I love him for!” whispered Razumikhin, who exaggerated everything, turning energetically on his chair. “These sudden gestures of his!…”

There was something tense in this whole conversation, and in the silence, and in the reconciliation, and in the forgiveness, and everyone felt it.

Again it suddenly became perfectly plain and clear to him that he had just uttered a terrible lie, that not only would he never have the chance to talk all he wanted, but that it was no longer possible for him to talk at all, with anyone, about anything, ever.

Why do you demand a heroism of me that you may not even have in yourself? That is despotism; that is coercion!

It’s the same outside as in a closed room.

Never, never had she felt anything like this. A whole new world had descended vaguely and mysteriously into her soul.

I left you yesterday at the most interesting point. Who won?” “No one, naturally. We got on to the eternal questions, and it all stayed in the clouds.” “Just imagine what they got on to yesterday, Rodya: is there such a thing as crime, or not? He said they all lied themselves into the blue devils.”

“And what if one reasons like this (come, help me now): ‘Ghosts are, so to speak, bits and pieces of other worlds, their beginnings. The healthy man, naturally, has no call to see them, because the healthy man is the most earthly of men, and therefore he ought to live according to life here, for the sake of completeness and order. Well, but as soon as a man gets sick, as soon as the normal earthly order of his organism is disrupted, the possibility of another world at once begins to make itself known, and the sicker one is, the greater the contact with this other world, so that when a man dies altogether, he goes to the other world directly.’ I’ve been reasoning it out for a long time. If one believes in a future life, one can believe in this reasoning.” “I do not believe in a future life,” said Raskolnikov.

For a minute they looked silently at each other. Razumikhin remembered that minute all his life. Raskolnikov’s burning and fixed look seemed to grow more intense every moment, penetrating his soul, his consciousness.

She stood before him in reality.

The murderer and the harlot strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book.

“Accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that’s what you must do.”

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;

Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?

Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?

Do you think I am trusty and faithful?

Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?

Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?

Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

-Walt Whitman

Stellar Furnace, by Marc McKee

The labels and label makers come later,
the lofty prerogatives, the philosopher
despising indulgences of the body and thus

unequal to an ordinary refrigerator, sheets
with high thread counts.  What comes first
is the size of a fist and 30 seconds later

it’s out of the reach of any other fist ever.
Archers, gentles, others:  supreme architectures
demand superior catastrophes.

Guilty of desolations birds flew above,
the first robot demanded a robot queen
and a story about how his side hurt

and even now it is unclear how
this story grew into every other one,
but birds flew above, and later paint

to the rescue, and quills.  The lute
was invented.  Sometimes a number
of people must die for those remaining

to agree upon the meaning
of reaching consensus.  The story
is a story of poison, of love, of knavery

and battering rams and delicate
baked goods.  So much to complain about,
so much to perish by while enamored of.

The story is of pangs with no cause
and no remedy.  Meadow into pothole,
cauldrons of committees.  Reparations?

Reparations can never be made.
And we will never give full account
of our peculiar and tenacious joy.

my fav poem by her

The Eye-Mote, by Sylvia Plath

Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.

Your Catfish Friend
by Richard Brautigan

If I were to live my life 
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers 
at the bottom of a pond 
and you were to come by 
   one evening
when the moon was shining 
down into my dark home 
and stand there at the edge 
   of my affection
and think, “It’s beautiful 
here by this pond.  I wish 
   somebody loved me,"
I’d love you and be your catfish 
friend and drive such lonely 
thoughts from your mind 
and suddenly you would be
   at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder 
if there are any catfish 
in this pond?  It seems like 
a perfect place for them.”

And here's a story you can hardly believe, but it's true, and it's funny and it's beautiful. There was a family of twelve and they were forced off the land. They had no car. They built a trailer out of junk and loaded it with their possessions. They pulled it to the side of 66 and waited. And pretty soon a sedan picked them up. Five of them rode in the sedan and seven on the trailer, and a dog on the trailer. They got to California in two jumps. The man who pulled them fed them. And that's true. But how can such courage be, and such faith in their own species? Very few things would teach such faith.

The people in flight from the terror behind - strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building, had greater depth, and more solidity than in any daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual- a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. All plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.

The people too were changed in the evening, quieted. They seemed to be part of an organization of the unconscious. They obeyed impulses which registered only faintly in their thinking minds. Their eyes were inward and quiet, and their eyes, too, were lucent in the evening, lucent in dusty faces.


The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

"An' I got thinkin', on'y it wasn't thinkin, it was deeper down than thinkin'. I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing, an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it on'y got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth an' run off his own way, kickin' an' draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all workin' together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that's right, that's holy. An' then I got thinkin' I don't even know what I mean by holy."

He paused, but the bowed heads stayed down, for they had been trained like dogs to rise at the "amen" signal. "I can't say no grace like I use' ta say. I'm glad of the holiness of breakfast. I'm glad there's love here. That's all." 

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

I found some pretty awesome Lord of the Rings fan art that I did in kindergarten. (My dad read it to us multiple times as kids - yes, we are a whole family of nerds.)

Very creative spellings here. The Lodhi of the Regs? Belbagns?

I like that I refer to Aragorn by his full, proper honorific: Arawgorn Son of Araton.

I contemplate a tree. 

I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.

I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air--and the growing itself in its darkness.

I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life.

I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law--those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate.

I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it.

Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.

This does not require me to forego any of the modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number included and inseparably fused.

Whatever belongs to the tree is included: its form and its mechanics, its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its conversation with the stars--all this in its entirety.

The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it--only differently.

One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.

Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.

-Martin Buber, I and Thou

Source: http://www.myjewishlearning.com/holidays/Jewish_Holidays/Tu_Bishvat/Ideas_and_Beliefs/Rabbinic/Every_Person_is_a_Tree/I_and_Thou_a_Tree.shtml

Your love is different from mine. What I mean is, when you close your eyes, for that moment, the center of the universe comes to reside within you. And you become a small figure within that vastness, which spreads without limit behind you, and continues to expand at tremendous speed, to engulf all of my past, even before I was born, and every word I've ever written, and each view I've seen, and all the constellations, and the darkness of outer space that surrounds the small blue ball that is earth. Then, when you open your eyes, all that disappears.
I anticipate the next time you are troubled and must close your eyes again.
The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe.
Oddly, at that moment, she looked over at me and smiled. As if in response to what I'd been thinking, she said, "That was beautiful. I'll never forget it."

-Banana Yoshimoto, "Helix" (from her collection Lizard)

Mr. Tench's father had been a dentist too -- his first memory was finding a discarded cast in a wastepaper basket -- the rough toothless gaping mouth of clay, like something dug up in Dorset -- Neanderthal or Pitecanthropus. It had been his favourite toy: they tried to tempt him with Meccano, but fate had struck. There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. The hot wet river-port and the vultures lay in the wastepaper basket, and he picked them out. We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

- Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

Books/movies documentation, 2015

I've skipped a few years, but I'm determined to continue keeping lists of the books/movies that I've read and watched. This list will be updated as the year progresses.

2015

Books reread will be marked like this: Joyce's Voices*

Books read more than once will be denoted like this: Joyce's Voices (3x)

(These notations also apply to movies rewatched or watched more than once.)

Books
 JANUARY

1. The Dead Secret, Wilkie Collins (1857)
2. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins (1859)
3. Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson (1989)
4. The Odyssey, Homer, tr. Fagles (hella old)*
FEBRUARY
5. The Book of Job, anon., tr. Scheindlin (hella old)*
6. Casino Royale, Ian Fleming (1953)
7. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene (1940)*

8. Dr. No, Ian Fleming (1958)
MARCH
9. Lizard, Banana Yoshimoto (1993)
10. The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham (2014)
11. The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor (1987)
APRIL
12. I and Thou, Martin Buber (1937)
13. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939)
14. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins (1868)
MAY
:(
JUNE
15. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (1979)
16. The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Oscar Wilde (1888)
17. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams (1980)
JULY
18. The Witches, Roald Dahl (1983)
AUGUST
19. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion (1968)

Movies
JANUARY

1. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)*
2. Kingpin (Peter & Bobby Farrelly, 1996)
3. Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)*
4. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1988)
5. House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)
6. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)*
7. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1921)
FEBRUARY
8. A bout de souffle (Breathless) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) 
9. Joe Vs. the Volcano (John Patrick Shanley, 1990)
10. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)*
11. We Are the Best! (Vi är bäst!) (Lukas Moodysson, 2013)
12. They Live (John Carpenter, 1988)*
13. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, (1986)*
14. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014) 

MARCH

15. Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)

16. Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967)

17. The Visitor (Guilio Paradisi/Michael J. Paradise, 1979)
18. Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)
19. Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
20. Mary and Max (Adam Elliot, 2009)
21. It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015)
22. Phantasm (Don Coscarelli, 1979)
APRIL
23. My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

24. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005)*
25. Star Wars Episode VI Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983)*
26. Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950)*
27. Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948) (2x)
28. The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955)
29. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky, 2012)
MAY
30. Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978)
31. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)*
32. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014)*
33. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)*
34. In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)*
35. The Children's Hour (William Wyler, 1961)
36. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)*
JUNE
37. French Kiss (Lawrence Kasden, 1995)
38. Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)
39. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)
JULY
40. Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)*
41. Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne and John Stevenson, 2008)*
42. The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008)
43. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)*
44. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)*
AUGUST
45. 

There was a man of double deed
Sowed his garden full of seed.
And when that seed began to grow
'Twas like a garden full of snow.
When the snow began to melt
'Twas like a ship without a belt.
When the ship began to sail
'Twas like a bird without a tail.
When the bird began to fly
'Twas like an eagle in the sky.
When the sky began to roar
'Twas like a lion at the door.
When the door began to crack
'Twas like a stick across my back.
When my back began to smart
'Twas like a penknife in my heart.
When my heart began to bleed
'Twas death and death and death indeed.

(Anonymous)

It is well known that the ceiling of one room is the floor of another, but the household ignores this ever-downward necessity and continues ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors, and so their house never ends and they must travel by winch or rope from room to room, calling to one another as they go.
The house is empty now, but it was there, dangling over dinner, illuminated by conversation and rich in the juices of a wild duck, that I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.

-Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

There was talk of witchcraft but what is stronger than love?

-Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

Recession Song (by Justin Quinn)

Sage is just the thing
for snakebite, bee sting, 
and keeping all the bad at bay.
The bush stands guard through ice and snow
and when warm winds begin to blow
it draws mauve flowers out of dark clay.

 They steeped it in a tea
with rosemary, 
garlic, horehound, baby's breath,
and called it Four Thieves Vinegar,
convinced its perfume could deter
the swelling horrors of Black Death.

But it will do, good herb,
to salve and curb
a common cold or nerves, and I
these days, with everybody's eyes on
the grim news banked on the horizon,
like how its leaf spears face the sky.

Book haul from Goodwill yesterday. All good finds. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency has long struck me as charming and adorable -- now to put it to the test!

The real highlight of this trip, though, was finding a first printing of Bored of the Rings, one of the unfunniest piece of classic humor ever recorded. It's so dumb but it's an awesome bit of weird nostalgia.

I love book shopping at Goodwill (this one is in Milford, CT) because I always find such an odd assortment of stuff -- and there's no organization or sorting, which makes it quite fun to browse!

I was also glad to find Portrait of a Lady, not because I love Henry James or anything, but because every time I look at it I think of this moment from Harriet the Spy, which always makes me chuckle:

"There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.'" 

Ole Golly said this steadily and sedately, then leaned back in her chair with a satisfied look at Sport. 

Sport looked completely blank. 
"Henry James," said Ole Golly, "1843-1916. From Portrait of a Lady." 

"What's that?" Sport asked Harriet. 
"A novel, silly," said Harriet. 
"Oh, like my father writes," said Sport, and dismissed the whole thing.

(source: archive.org)