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 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

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)

Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.

-Steve Earle

back from hiatus?

so, I just finished Eliot's The Cocktail Party:


There is certainly no purpose in remaining in the dark
Except long enough to clear from the mind
The illusion of having ever been in the light.
The fact that you can't give a reason for wanting her
Is the best reason for believing that you want her.


It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
Resign yourself to be the fool you are.
That's the best advice that I can give you.
You will find that you survive humiliation.
And that's an experience of incalculable value.


We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colassal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--therein lay its exhileration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

-The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne
by Steven Millhauser

I have an idea that it was the obstacles which kept you so true to me.

Madame de Clèves knelt by the bed, and fortunately for her the light did not fall on her face.

-Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves

Desire is about wanting more than it is about getting. It is the hunger that highlights the food; the patience that heightens the faith; the arousal that anticipates the sex. The salt of a lover's lips or the sweet juice of grapes is not just pleasurable anymore: with desire, they become exquisite. Desire is the discipline to live on that edge between wanting and satisfaction. It is not for the timid or the fickle. [...]

Yearning itself may even come to be experienced as a pleasure. The Song is concerned with the provocative question of whether the exquisite sensation of wanting another could surpass in any realistic sense the pleasure of actual consummation. The surprising claim that it cann does seem to be the premise of the song, which stays focused on the experience of yearning, not its relief.


-Carey Ellen Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs

I found this in a National Geographic:
The moon is beautiful, but I do not live on the moon.


And I've been trying to get my head around this, from Thomas Aquinas. I'm terribly suspicious, but it's also weirdly appealing on some level.
In things that have knowledge, desire follows knowledge. The senses only know being as it is, here and now, but the intellect knows it absolutely and for all time. Therefore everything that has an intellect naturally desires to exist forever. However a natural desire cannot be in vain. Therefore every intellectual substance is incorruptible.

More soon. It's Week 1 of the 3-week-long insanity I put myself through every semester: finals.

Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.

— John Darnielle

In the poem's milieu, the late Middle Ages, when man's mood begins to darken into pessimism and deepening melancholy about the transience of earthly life, this tension becomes more pressing, even fraught with panic. Man's ultimate goal, Paradise, appears now more fragile and inaccessible. Art and literature present man diminished, pathetic, even comic--and therefore less worthy of such an attainment. In Pearl, the antagonists of this drama of faith are man and God, so bound by love yet so irreconcilable by nature. The poet aims at a definition of their relationship, existential rather than theoretical, and displays a certain attitude toward this relationship, which weaves in and out of the poem's emotional crises like a pervasive contrapuntal theme. The poem shows man at a moment of profound loss and spiritual confusion. In the dream, where desire battles actuality, the hero gravitates toward an ideal realm, seeking to fathom the mystery of ultimate reality, to reconcile his loss with the universal scheme of things, and to find consolation. His personal desire is gradually transformed and expanded to its anagogic form as the nostalgia for Paradise. He attempts to unite himself with the divine, at least through understanding, so that he can transcend the contradictions of this life. The divine beckons him to itself and ravishes him with its perfection, only to reject him, withdrawing at his searching touch into its awesome mystery. Yet it leaves a profound claim upon his life with its promise of final "cnawing" and immortality.

-Theodore Bogdanos, Pearl: Image of the Ineffable. A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism



et quid erat quod me delectabat, nisi amare et amari? sed non tenebatur modus ab animo usque ad animum quatenus est luminosus limes amicitiae, sed exhalabantur nebulae de limosa concupiscentia carnis et scatebra pubertatis, et obnubilabant atque obfuscabant cor meum, ut non discerneretur serenitas dilectionis a caligine libidinis. utrumque in confuso aestuabat et rapiebat inbecillam aetatem per abrupta cupiditatum atque mersabat gurgite flagitiorum. invaluerat super me ira tua, et nesciebam. obsurdueram stridore catenae mortalitatis meae, poena superbiae animae meae, et ibam longius a te et sinebas, et iactabar et effundebar et diffluebam et ebulliebam per fornicationes meas, et tacebas. o tardum gaudium meum! tacebas tunc, et ego ibam porro longe a te in plura et plura sterilia semina dolorum superba deiectione et inquieta lassitudine.

-Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions




It’s a depressing thing what’s going on with the person in the song, but it’s essentially about how when things are very awful, if you are looking for some place to turn, you’re not the type of person who can really stand to say, “Well, maybe tomorrow’s better.” Because you know tomorrow’s not better. People are gonna tell you, “You don’t know that! You don’t know about tomorrow!” But sometimes, yes you do. Sometimes you know it for a fact it’s gonna be worse. Maybe if you can go to sleep and never wake up, then you can put some faith in that. If you can’t sleep, then you can see tomorrow like a fucking train coming at you. And if it gets closer and closer, you can make out the paint on its grill as it’s coming up to meet you and you can say, “No, tomorrow’s almost here and I can already tell just as it’s about to kill me. It’s the same as the one that I just tried to abandon.” And you’re not suicidal, you say, “No, I would never do that, I’m Catholic,” but at the same time, you get in one of these moods and I will wager that every person has been in one where you go, “Well you know what wouldn’t be so bad right now would be death.”

-John Darnielle introducing Isaiah 45:23 at The Fillmore in San Francisco, 11/14/09

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

-A.E. Housman