Month: July 2009

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streetlights * burning * down

73

[n.d.; 1929?]

The clock over there in the back, in the house deserted because everyone is asleep, slowly drops the clear, quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning. I haven’t gone to sleep yet, nor do I expect to sleep. Unless something catches my attention, in which case I will not sleep, or if my body weighs on me, and for that reason I cannot calm down, I lie in the shadow, which the vague moonlight of the streetlamps renders even more solitary, the muffled silence of my strange body. I don’t know how to think, because I am so sleepy, nor do I know how to feel, because of the sleep I don’t manage to get.

Everything around me is the naked, abstract universe, made of nocturnal negations. I am divided between being tired and being upset, and I manage to touch, with the sensation I am touching a body, a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things. At times my soul softens, and then the formless details of everyday life bob along the surface of my awareness, and I am tossing around on the surface of not being able to sleep. Other times, I wake from within the half-sleep in which I stagnated, and vague images of a poetic and involuntary color let their noiseless spectacle pour through my distraction. I don’t have my eyes entirely closed. A light that comes from far off limits my weak vision; it’s the streetlights burning down below on the abandoned sides of the street.

How I wish I could stop, sleep, substitute this intermittent awareness with better, melancholy things spoken in secret to someone who doesn’t know me!… How I wish I could stop, pass fluidly along the bank, the flow and reflow of a vast sea, in the visible coasts of the night in which one might sleep!… How I wish I could stop, be incognito and external, be the movement of branches in far-off walks, the tenuous fall of leaves, known more by their sound than by their falling, the fine, high sea far off, rolling, and all the indefiniteness of parks at night, lost among continuous tangles, natural labyrinths of darkness!… How I wish I could stop, be finished finally, but with a metaphorical survival, be it the page of a book, a single tress of loose hair, the shaking of the vine growing at the bottom of the half-open window, the unimportant steps in the fine gravel at the curve, the last, high smoke of the sleeping village, the driver’s forgetting his whip at the matutinal side of the road… The absurd, the confusion, the extinguishing — everything that isn’t life…

And I sleep, in my way, without sleep of repose, this vegetative life of supposition, and under my eyelids without rest there appears, like the quiet foam on a filthy sea, the distant reflection of the silent streetlights.

I sleep and I unsleep.

From my other side, there behind where I lie, the silence of the house touches the infinite. I hear the time fall, drop by drop, and no drop that falls hears itself. My physical heart, the memory of all I or it was reduced to nothing, physically oppresses me. I feel my head materially resting on the pillow in which I have been creating a valley. The contact between the skin of the pillowcase and my skin is like that between people in the shade. My very ear, on which I am resting, mathematically engraves itself against my brain. I blink from fatigue, and my eyelashes make an infinitesimal sound, inaudible, in the palpable whiteness of the raised pillow. I breathe, sighing, and my respiration takes place — it is not mine. I suffer without feeling or thinking. The house clock, a fixed place there in the depth of things, chimes the half hour, dry and meaningless. It’s all so much, it’s all so deep, it’s all so black and so cold!

Suddenly, like a child of Mystery, a rooster crows without knowing that it’s nighttime. I can sleep because within me it’s morning. And I feel my mouth smile, slightly disordering the soft folds of the pillowcase that holds my face. I can abandon myself to life, I can sleep, I can stop knowing myself… And through the new sleep that darkens me I either remember the rooster that crowed, or it’s the same rooster, crowing a second time.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

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Telescope :: Louise Glück

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on the cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
every thing is from every other thing.

[From Averno]

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The Evening Star :: Louise Glück

Tonight, for the first time in many years,
there appeared to me again
a vision of the earth’s splendor:

in the evening sky
the first star seemed
to increase in brilliance
as the earth darkened

until at last it could grow no darker.
And the light, which was the light of death,
seemed to restore to earth

its power to console. There were
no other stars. Only the one
whose name I knew

as in my other life I did her
injury: Venus,
star of the early evening,

to you I dedicate
my vision, since on this blank surface

you have cast enough light
to make my thought
visible again.

[From Averno]

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Echoes :: Louise Glück

1.
Once I could imagine my soul
I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died. This
I remember clearly.

My body persisted.
Not thrived, but persisted.
Why I do not know.

2.
When I was still very young
my parents moved to a small valley
surrounded by mountains
in what was called the lake country.
From our kitchen garden
you could see the mountains,
snow covered, even in summer.

I remember peace of a kind
I never knew again.

Somewhat later, I took it upon myself
to become an artist,
to give voice to these impressions.

3.
The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.

This silence is my companion now.
I ask: of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?

[From Averno]

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A Myth of Devotion :: Louise Glück

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness.

Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn’t everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns–

That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
that is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

[From Averno]

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Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more

In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind. And it is in this gap (between the conceptual and the real) that aggression begins. No place works any different from any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws — need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain — are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: that one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other — perhaps muted, exaggerated, or distorted, yes, but there nonetheless, and thus a source of comfort.

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

— George Saunders, “The New Mecca” (from The Braindead Megaphone)

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the comfort of being small and being able to think about being happy

May all the Gods preserve me, until the moment in which this aspect of myself ceases, the clear and solar notion of external reality, the sense of my unimportance, the comfort of being small and being able to think about being happy.

— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

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Thrush :: Louise Glück

Snow began falling, over the surface of the whole earth.
That can’t be true. And yet it felt true,
falling more and more thickly over everything I could see.
The pines turned brittle with ice.

This is the place I told you about,
where I used to come at night to see the red-winged blackbirds,
what we call thrush here–
red flicker of the life that disappears–

But for me — I think the guilt I feel must mean
I haven’t lived well.

Someone like me doesn’t escape. I think you sleep awhile,
then you descend into the terror of the next life
except

the soul is in some different form,
more or less conscious than it was before,
more or less covetous.

After many lives, maybe something changes.
I think in the end what you want
you’ll be able to see–

Then you don’t need anymore
to die and come back again.

[From Averno]

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Archaic Fragment :: Louise Glück

I was trying to love matter.
I taped a sign over the mirror:
You cannot hate matter and love form.

It was a beautiful day, though cold.
This was, for me, an extravagantly emotional gesture.

. . . . . . . . your poem:
tried, could not.

I taped a sign over the first sign:
Cry, weep, thrash yourself, rend your garments–

List of things to love:
dirt, food, shells, human hair.

. . . . . . . . said
tasteless excess. Then I

rent the signs.

AIAIAIAI cried
the naked mirror.

[From Averno]

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Crater Lake :: Louise Glück

There was a war between good and evil.
We decided to call the body good.

That made death evil.
It turned the soul
against death completely.

Like a foot soldier wanting
to serve a great warrior, the soul
wanted to side with the body.

It turned against the dark,
against the forms of death
it recognized.

Where does the voice come from
that says suppose the war
is evil, that says

suppose the body did this to us,
made us afraid of love–

[From Averno]

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I think we are climates above which pause threats of storms that take place elsewhere

I think we are climates above which pause threats of storms that take place elsewhere.

The empty immensity of things, the grand oblivion in heaven and earth…

– Bernando Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

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Strictly speaking, history does not repeat itself, but . . .

Strictly speaking, history does not repeat itself, but since the illusions man is capable of are limited in number, they always return in another disguise, thereby giving some ultradecrepit filth a look of novelty and a tragic glaze.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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Omens :: Louise Glück

I rode to meet you: dreams
like living beings swarmed around me
and the moon on my right side
followed me, burning.

I rode back: everything changed.
My soul in love was sad
and the moon on my left side
trailed me without hope.

To such endless impressions
we poets give ourselves absolutely,
making, in silence, omen of mere event,
until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul.

after Alexander Pushkin

[From Averno]

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The Grammy/man-briefly-involved-with-a-Ding-Dong/penisless-man Coalition

in persuasion nation

1

A man and a woman sit in a field of daisies.

“Forever?” he says.

“Forever,” she says, and they kiss.

A giant Twinkie runs past, trailed by perhaps two hundred young women.

The woman leaps to her feet and runs to catch up to the Twinkie.

“The sweetest thing in the world,” the voiceover says, “just got sweeter.”

The man sits sadly in the field of daisies.

Luckily, a giant Ding-Dong runs past, trailed by perhaps two hundred young men.

The man leaps to his feet and runs to catch up with the Ding-Dong.

“But not to worry,” the voiceover says. “There’s more than enough sweetness to go around!”

The Ding-Dong puts his arm around the young man, and the young man smiles up at the Ding-Dong, and the Ding-Dong bends down and gives the young man a kiss on the head.

2

A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker.

“Grammy’s here!” he shouts.

He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won’t be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where she luckily lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing in a rosebush.

“Timmy,” Grammy says feebly. “Call 911.”

Just then the bell on the microwave dings.

We see from the look on his face that Timmy is conflicted.

“Timmy dear,” Grammy says. “For God’s sake. It’s me. Your Grammy, dear.”

Timmy comes to his senses, takes his MacAttack Mac&Cheese from the microwave, and sits languorously eating it while listening to his headphones while playing his video game.

“Sometimes you just gotta have your MacAttack,” the voiceover says.

Grammy scowls in the bush. We see that she is a grouchy old unhip hag who probably wouldn’t have even been cool enough to let Timmy have his MacAttack, but would likely have forced him to eat some unhip old-person gruel or fruit.

Then fortunately Grammy’s head drops back, and she is dead.

4

Two best friends look at their penises under sophisticated microscopes.

“You call this Elongated?” says one man.

“Jim, I gained four inches,” says the other. “Perhaps you should try my brand.”

“What is your brand, Kevin?” says the other.

“My brand is, I hang a brick from my penis and stand for hour at the edge of the Grand Canyon,” says Kevin.

“Okay Kevin,” says Jim. “You’ve been my dearest friend since kindergarten. I’ll give it a try.”

Then we see Jim standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, brick dangling from his penis, while Kevin tiptoes toward Jim’s car, and a voiceover says: Pontiac Sophisto: So sophisticated, it might just make you trick your best friend into a dangling a brick from his penis!

While Jim is distracted by the pain of the brick on his penis, Kevin squeals away in Jim’s Sophisto. As Jim spins around to look, his penis rips off and plummets into the Grand Canyon. Jim smiles wryly, acknowledging Kevin’s trick but also Kevin’s good taste in cars, then starts down into the Grand Canyon, to retrieve and, hopefully, reattach his penis.

— George Saunders, selections from the story “In Persuasion Nation” (from the book In Persuasion Nation)