Lit Fragments

  perhaps the most mysterious of creatures

from Interview With A Lemming
by James Thurber


     "You are an amazing animal," said the lemming.
     "We have always considered you rather amazing, too," said the scientist. "You are perhaps the most mysterious of creatures."
     "If we are going to indulge in adjectives beginning with 'm,'" said the lemming, sharply, "let me apply a few to your species--murderous, maladjusted, maleficent, malicious and muffle-headed."
     "You find our behavior as difficult to understand as we do yours?"
     "You, as you would say, said it," said the lemming. "You kill, you mangle, you torture, you imprison, you starve each other. You cover the nurturing earth with cement, you cut down elm trees to put up institutions for people driven insane by the cutting down of elm trees, you--"
     "You could go on all night like that," said the scientist, "listing our sins and our shames."
     "I could go on all night and up to four o'clock tomorrow afternoon," said the lemming. "It just happens that I have made a lifelong study of the self-styled higher animal. Except for one thing, I know all there is to know about you, and a singularly dreary, dolorous and distasteful store of information it is, too, to use only adjectives beginning with 'd.'"
     "You say you have made a lifelong study of my species--" began the scientist.
     "Indeed I have," broke in the lemming. "I know that you are cruel, cunning and carnivorous, sly, sensual and selfish, greedy, gullible and guileful--"
     "Pray don't wear yourself out," said the scientist, quietly. "It may interest you to know that I have made a lifelong study of lemmings, just as you have made a lifelong study of people. Like you, I have found but one thing about my subject which I do not understand."
     "And what is that?" asked the lemming.
     "I don't understand," said the scientist, "why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves."
     "How curious," said the lemming. "The one thing I don't understand is why you humans don't."


_________________________

Thurber, James. My World--And Welcome To It (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company 1942), pp83-83.
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  it was I who made Eve wear clothes

from Aunty Toothache
by Hans Christian Andersen


     "So you are a poet!" she said. "Well, I'll make you well-versed in all the poetry of toothache! I'll thrust iron and steel into your body! I'll seize all the fibers of your nerves!"
     I then felt as if a red-hot awl were being driven into my jawbone; I writhed and twisted.
     "A splendid set of teeth," she said, "just like an organ to play upon! We shall have a grand concert, with jew's-harps, kettledrums, and trumpets, picolo-flute, and trombone in the wisdom tooth! Grand poet, grand music!"
     And then she started to play; she looked terrible, even if one did not see more of her than her hand, the shadowy, gray, ice-cold hand, with the long, thin, pointed fingers; each of them was an instrument of torture; the thumb and the forefinger were the pincers and wrench; the middle finger ended in a pointed awl; the ring finger was a drill, and the little finger squirted gnat's poison.
     "I am going to teach you meter!" she said. "A great poet must have a great toothache, a little poet a little toothache!"
     "Oh, let me be a little poet!" I begged. "Let me be nothing at all! And I am not a poet; I have only fits of poetry, like fits of toothache. Go away, go away!"
     "Will you acknowledge, then, that I am mightier than poetry, philosophy, mathematics, and all the music?" she said. "Mightier than all those notions that are painted on canvas or carved in marble? I am older than every one of them. I was born close to the garden of paradise, just outside, where the wind blew and the wet toadstools grew. It was I who made Eve wear clothes in the cold weather, and Adam also. Believe me, there was power in the first toothache!"
     "I believe it all," I said. "But go away, go away!"
     "Yes, if you will give up being a poet, never put verse on paper, slate, or any sort of writing material, then I will let you off; but I'll come again if you write poetry!"
     "I swear!" I said; "only let me never see or feel you any more!"
     "See me you shall, but in a more substantial shape, in a shape more dear to you than I am now. You shall se me as Aunty Mille, and I shall say, 'Write poetry, my sweet boy! You are a great poet, perhaps the greatest we have!' But if you believe me, and begin to write poetry, then I will set music to your verses, and play them on your mouth harp. You sweet child! Remember me when you see Aunt Mille!"


_________________________

Owens, Lily, ed. The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales (New York: Gramercy Books, 1996), p566.
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  some women are cats and some foxes

from The Red Dragonfly
by Katherine Paterson


On our island the last nights of August are swollen with the promise of typhoon. There is a beauty about them, but it cannot hide a restless stirring of a fear one seeks to hush with: "This is only the natural course of the world. Every summer it is so. It has always been so and will remain so while the world stands." But the fear persists. Perhaps that is why our fathers in ancient days chose this season for Obon, for one cannot help believe that the sultry air is indeed teeming with the spirits of the unknown--the dead which must be placated.
     Yet it is not of the unknown dead that I would write, but of the living, who though known to us, are still unknown. I would write of myself--the self I knew, yet did not know that August night when the chorus of cicadas and frogs was joined by the coarse cries of men celebrating the festival of the dead.
     I can hear, even now, the pulsing of the drums as through the rice fields I walked and ran down the narrow path until my breath came hard, so that I unbuttoned the top of my school uniform. I was young, and obsessed, I suppose, for who could call my feeling "love" except another green boy like myself. She was my teacher, and I had no right to hold toward her the feeling a man holds for a woman.
     I was ashamed, and often condemned myself for this foolishness. But even as my mind played the stern judge, the corners of my heart would curl in a smile I could not prevent. In years, she could not have been much my elder, and she had the way of Japanese women who appear even younger than they are, with skin like polished pine and shining eyes--so shining--shining like the glint of a dragonfly's wing in the sunlight.
     A dragonfly. It was her body, at once graceful and quick--the movement of her slender hands. Some women are cats and some foxes. I have seen women who were big-footed and patiend like the water buffalo at the plow, but she in her bright shining would have made swallows appear as clumsy as these buffalo. And so, though the memory still has power to catch and twist my belly as I say it, she was like the red dragonfly of the late summer, delicate herald of autumn, precursor of they year's loveliness.
     I had written a poem, a haiku. How well I remember the rush of blood to my scalp, the hotness of my shaven student's head, as the lines fell into the ancient pattern, breaking into newness by my hand.
     Tomoshibini
     Tomarite tombo
     Aki no tomo.


_________________________

Blume, Judy, ed. Places I Never Meant to Be (New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 2001), pp65-66.
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  I'd like to be invisible watching

from The Collected Works of Billy The Kid
by Michael Ondaatje


I: Mr. Bonney, or may I call you Billy...
B: No.
I: Mr. Bonney, do you believe in God?
B: No.
I: Why not, and for how long haven't you?
B: Well I did for a long time, I mean in a superstitious way, same way I believe in luck for instance. I couldn't take the risk you see. Like never wearing anything yellow. So before big fights, or even the most minor as well as the really easy ones, I used cross myself and say, "God Please don't let me die today." I did this fast though so no one would see me, see what I was doing. I did this pretty well every day from the age of 12 till I was 18. When I was 18, I had a shooting match with Tom O'Folliard, the prize was a horse. Now it was with rifles and Tom is excellent with them and I wanted that horse very much. I prayed every day. Then I lost the bet with Tom.
I: Do you worry about what will happen after death now you don't believe in God?
B: Well I try to avoid it. Though I suppose not. I guess they'll just put you in a box and you will stay there forever. There'll be nothing else. The only thing I wish is that I could hear what people say afterwards. I'd really like that. You know, I'd like to be invisible watching what happens to people when I am not around. I suppose you thin[k] that's simple minded.
I: Are you happy, or at least were you happy? Did you have any reason for going on living, or were you just experimenting?
B: I don't know whether I'm happy or not. But in the end that is all that's important--that you keep testing yourself, as you say--experimenting on how good you are, and you can't do that when you want to lose.


_________________________

Ondaatje, Michael. The Collected Works of Billy The Kid (New York: Vintage International, 1996), p83.
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  none of this do I need

from The Volcano Lover: A Romance
by Susan Sontag


It is the entrance to a flea market. No charge. Admittance free. Sloppy crowds. Vulpine, larking. Why enter? What do you expect to see? I'm seeing. I'm checking on what's in the world. What's left. What's discarded. What's no longer cherished. What had to be sacrificed. What someone thought might interest someone else. But it's rubbish. If there, here, it's already been sifted through. But there may be something valuable, there. Not valuable, exactly. But something I would want. Want to rescue. Something that speaks to me. To my longings. Speaks to, speaks of. Ah...
      Why enter? Have you that much spare time? You'll look. You'll stray. You'll lose track of time. You think you have enough time. It always takes more time than you think. Then you'll be late. You'll be repelled. The things are grimy. Some are broken. Badly patched or not at all. They will tell me of passions, fancies I don't need to know about. Need. Ah, no. None of this do I need. Some I will caress with my eye. Some I must pick up, fondle. While being watched, expertly, by their seller. I am not a thief. Most likely, I am not a buyer.
      Why enter? Only to play. A game of recognition. Toknow what, and to know how much it was, how much it ought to be, how much it will be. But perhaps not to bid, haggle, not to acquire. Just to look. Just to wander. I'm feeling lighthearted. I don't have anything in mind.
      Why enter? There are many places like this one. A field, a square, a hooded street, an armory, a parking lot, a pier. This could be anywhere, though it happens to be here. It will be full of everywhere. But I would be entering it here. In my jeans and silk blouse and tennis shoes: Manhattan, spring of 1992. A degraded experience of pure possibility. This one with his postcards of movie stars, that one with her tray of Navajo rings, this one with the rack of World War II bomber jackets, that one with the knives. His model cars, her cut-glass dishes, his rattan chairs, her top hats, his Roman coins, and there...a game, a trasure. It could happend, I could see it, I might want it. I might buy it as agift, yet, for someone else. At the least, I could have learned that it existed, and turned up here.
      why enter? Is there already enought? I could find out it's not here. Whatever it is, often I am not sure, I could put it back down on the table. Desire leads me. I tell myself what I want to hear. Yes, there's enough.
      I go in.


_________________________

Sontag, Susan. The Volcano Lover: A Romance (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992), pp3-4.
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  is your middle finger more neutral than your tongue?

from Vita Brevis, A Letter To St Augustine
by Jostein Gaarder (translated by Anne Born)


...you write that it would have been best if in your youth you had castrated yourself for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. For then you could have waited for the embrace of God with a happier mind. Poor Aurel! How ashamed you are of being a man, you who were my little stallion. Even now--and this is many years after you chose Abstinence as your bride--even now you pour out your heart to the Lord and say you still miss a woman at your side. In Book Ten, Bishop, your write: 'But in my memory, that I have talked so much about now, there still live images of these things that have lodged there from old habit. They force themselves upon me, not vividly, it is true, when I am awake; but in seleep they tempt me, not only to pleasure, but to assent and to act upon them.
     I gather from these confessions that you have not yet castrated yourself. Can it even be that now and again you miss me? Can it be the memories of me and our old 'habits' that come to you in your dreams? For you have certainly not done that, Aurel? You who were once my proud bedpost. Why couldn't you just as well have blinded yourself? Oedipus did. Why culdn't you cut off your tongue? For I am sure you still long for my kisses.
     I think when all is said and done that your sex too was a sense organ. Wasn't it, Aurel? Anyway, you are the one who keeps on writing about 'sensual lust' when what you have in mind is the delights of love. Or do you believe that your eyes and ears are more divinely created than your sex? Do you think some parts of the human body are less worthy of God than others? For instance, is your middle finger more neutral than your tongue? You did use your finger too!


_________________________

Gaarder, Jostein. Vita Brevis (London: Phoenix, 1998), pp39-41.
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  readers of books read much and learned nothing

from Picture This
by Joseph Heller


"...how shall we bury you?" his friend Crito asked at the end.
      "Any way you like," answered Socrates. "If you can catch me and I don't slip through your fingers."
      He believed in God and in the immortality of the soul, says Plato, before anyone else in the world knew what a soul was, and they accused him of impiety and put him to death.
      The soul has its genesis in the writings of Plato.
      He was cheerful at the end when he drank his cup of poison. He could not, he had said to his good friend Crito, repudiate the laws of the community in which he had lived his life without repudiating the meaning of the life.
      He was a dedicated philosopher who had no philosophy, an educator without curriculum or system of education, a teacher without pupils; a professor who professed to know nothing; a sage with faith that a knowledge of virtue exists unborn inside each of us and might, perhaps, be brought to life through persevering search.
      He did not like books, which should have nettled Plato, who wrote so many.
      He had low reagard for people who read them.
      He mistrusted books, he said in the Phaedrus, because they could neither ask nor answer questions and were apt to be swallowed whole. He said that readers of books read much and learned nothing, that they appeared full of knowledge, but for the most part were without it, and had the show of wisdom without its reality.
      He said this in a book.
      The book, though, is by Plato, who denounced dramatic representations as spurious because the writer put into the mouths of characters imitating real people whatever the author wished them to say.
      Plato said this in a dramatic representation, in which he put into the mouth of Socrates and other real people exactly those things Plato wanted them to say.
      Socrates did not think much either of lectures and lecturers. This should have soured Aristotle, who taught by lecturing.
      Said Socrates in Plato's Protagoras, of teachers who lectured: "If anyone asks them a question, they are as incapable as a book of answering it or themselves putting a question. They behave like a brass pot which gives out a continuous ringing sound if you strike it, till someone puts his hand on it. So the orators, at the least query, go off into a long-drawn speech."
      This sounded to Aristotle like a lecture or a long-drawn speech.
      He was not anyone's idea of an intellectual.
      Other philosophers founded schools, including more of his followers than Plato alone: because he was more skeptical than dogmatic, the schools of philosophy founded by his followers were always diversely in contradicton to each other.
      Socrates had no school.
      He had no library, as Euripides and many of his contemporaries did.
      He had long lost interest in the natural sciences as useful in providing knowledge that mattered.
      He had no fellow scholars, colleagues, or associates with whom he worked or formed a group, no movement, methodology, or ideology of which he was the center or inspiration. He was not ambitious. He did not even write for a magazine.


_________________________

Heller, Joseph. Picture This (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2000), pp93-95.
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  sorrow only increased with knowledge

from Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley


I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me: I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had for ever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensation of hunger, thirst, and heat!

Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death--a state which I feared yet did not understand. I admired virtue and good feelings, and loved the gentle manners and amiable qualities of my cottagers; but I was shut out from intercourse with them, except through means which I obtained by stealth, when I was unseen and unknown, and which rather increased than satisfied the desire I had of becoming one among my fellows. The gentle words of Agatha, and the animated smiles of the charming Arabian, were not for me. The mild exhortations of the old man, and the lively conversation of the loved Felix, were not for me.


_________________________

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (New York: Modern Library, 1999), pp157-158.
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  our best jurists have worked for generations along lines of common sense

from Memoirs of Hadrian
by Marguerite Yourcenar
(translated from French by Crace Frick in collaboration with the Author)


I should say outright that I have little faith in laws.  If too severe, they are broken, and with good reason.  If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net.  Respect for ancient laws answers to what is deepest rooted in human piety, but it serves also to pillow the inertia of judges.  The oldest codes are a part of that very savagery which they were striving to correct; even the most venerable among them are the product of force.  Most of our punitive laws fail, perhaps happily to reach the greater part of the culprits; our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing diversity of fact.  Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.  And nevertheless from that mass of outworn routines and perilous innovations a few useful formulas have emerged here and there, just as they have in medicine.  The Greek philosophers have taught us to know something more of the nature of man; our best jurists have worked for generations along lines of common sense.  I have myself effected a few of those partial reforms which are the only reforms that endure.  Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or to change it, lest the contempt into which that rash ruling has fallen should extend to other, more just legislation.  I proposed as my aim a prudent avoidance of superfluous decrees , and the firm promulgation, instead, of a small group of well-weighed decisions.  The time seemed to have come to evaluate anew all the ancient prescriptions in the interest of mankind.


_________________________

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p113.
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  she was not religious or morbid, for which every day she thanked her stars

from Wise Blood
by Flannery O' Connor


     His landlady was sitting on the porch, rocking a cat.  "What are you doing with that, Mr. Motes?" she asked.
     "Blind myself,"  he said and went on in the house.
     The landlady sat there for a while longer.  She was not a woman who felt more violence in one word than in another; she took every word at its face value but all the faces were the same.  Still, instead of blinding herself, if she had felt that bad, she would have killed herself and she wondered why anybody wouldn't do that.  She would simply have put her head in an oven or maybe have given herself too may painless sleeping pills and that would have been that.  Perhaps Mr. Motes was only being ugly, for what possible reason could a person have for wanting to destroy their sight?  A woman like her, who was so clear-sighted, could never stand to be blind.  If she had to be blind she would rather be dead.  It occurred to her suddenly that when she was dead she would be blind too.  She stared in front of her intensely, facing this for the first time.  She recalled the phrase, "eternal death," that preachers used, but she cleared it our of her mind immediately, with no more change of expression than the cat.  She was not religious or morbid, for which every day she thanked her stars.  She would credit a person who had that streak with anything, though, and Mr. Motes had it or he wouldn't be a preacher.  He might put lime in his eyes and she wouldn't doubt it a bit, because they were all, if the truth was only known, a little bit off in their heads.  What possible reason could a sane person have for wanting to not enjoy himself any more?
     She certainly couldn't say.


_________________________

O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), pp210-211.
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  make sure you are jumping to a safe place

from The Vile Village
(book the 7th of 'A Series of Unfortunate Events')

by Lemony Snicket


Although "jumping to conclustions" is an expression, rather than an activity, it is as dangerous as jumping off a cliff, jumping in front of a moving train, and jumping for joy. If you jump off a cliff, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful landing unless there is something below to cushion your fall, such as a body of water or an immense pile of tissue paper. If you jump in front of a moving train, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful voyage unless you are wearing some sort of train-proof suit. And if you jump for joy, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful bump on the head, unless you make sure you are standing someplace with very high ceilings, which joyous people rarely do. Clearly, the solution to anything involving jumping is either to make sure you are jumping to a safe place, or not to jump at all.


_________________________

Snicket, Lemony. The Vile Village (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001), pp105-106.
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  the stone letters of Orpheus gave way

from The Hunchback of Notre Dame
by Victor Hugo


...up to the fifteenth century, architecture was the chief recorder for the human race.  During this interval of time every thought, no matter how complicated, was embodied in some structure; every idea that rose from the people, every religious law, had its counterpart in monuments; finally, every important thought of the human race was recorded in stone.  And why?  Because every thought, be it religious or philosophic, wants to be perpetuated; because an idea which has motivated one generation wants to motivate another, and to leave its trace.  But how precarious is the immortality of the manuscript!  How far more solid, lasting, and resistant is the edifice, the book in stone!  To destroy the written word, you need only a torch and a Turk.  To demolish the constructed word, you need a social revolution or an earthquake.  Barbarism swept over the Colosseum; a deluge, perhaps, over the pyramids.
     In the fifteenth century everything changed.
     Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier.  Architecture was dethroned.  The stone letters of Orpheus gave way to the lead letters of Gutenberg.
     The book will kill the edifice.
     The invention of printing was the greatest event in history.  It was the parent revolution; it was the fundamental change in mankind's mode of expression, it was human thought doffing one garment to clothe itself in another; it was the complete and definitive sloughing off of the skin of a serpent, which, since the time of Adam, has symbolized intelligence.
     When put into print, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, intangible, indestructible; it mingles with the air.  In the time of architecture, it became a mountain and made itself master of a century and region.  Now it has been transformed into a flock of birds, scattering to the four winds and filling all air and space.
     We repeat: who does not see that in this form thought is more indelible?  Instead of being solid it has become long-lived.  It has exchanged durability for immortality.  We can demolish a substance, but who can extirpate ubiquity?


_________________________

Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (New York: New American Library, 1965), p182.
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  you have pleasure in limine

from The Island of The Day Before
by Umberto Eco


     "So you love, and therefore you desire and do not desire. Love makes us the enemy of ourselves. You fear that attaining your end will disappoint you. You have pleasure in limine, as the theologians put it, you enjoy delay."
     "That's not so. I...I want her at once!"
     "If that were the case, you would be still only a rustic. But you have wit. If you wanted her, you would already have taken her--and you would be a beast. No, you want your desire to be set aflame, and you want hers to be stirred as well. If her desire were to blaze to such a degree that she was impelled to surrender herself to you at once, probably you would no longer want her. Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity."
     "But what am I to do in the meantime?"
     "Court her."
     "But...she knows nothing yet, and I must confess I have difficulty approaching her...."
     "Write her a letter and tell her of your love."
     "But I have never written any letter."
     "When nature fails, we turn to art. I will dictate to you. A gentleman often enjoys writing letters to a lady he has never seen, and I am equal to the task. As I do not love, I can speak of love better than you, who are struck dumb by love."
     "But I believe each person loves in a different way....It would be artificial."
     "If you revealed your love to her in tones of sincerity, you would seem awkward."
     "But I would tell her the truth..."
     "The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked."
     "But I want to tell her of my love, not of the love you would describe!"
     "Well, if you would be believed, feign. There is no perfection without the splendor of machination."

. . . .
...the perfection of love is not being loved, but being Lover (p197.)
. . . .
"...Oh, Love, Love, Love, have you not punished me enough already, is this not a death undying?" (p385.)


_________________________

Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (London: Vintage, 1998), pp117-118. Subsequent references are to this edition.
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  boys, the noodles I would make for you!

from Cosmicomics
by Italo Calvino


"Oh, if I only had some room, how I'd like to make some noodles for you boys!" ...in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy, moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs which cluttered the wide board while her arms kneaded and kneaded, white and shiny with oil up to the elbows; we thought of the space that the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields, and the grazing lands for the herds of calves that would give their meat for the sauce; of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gasses and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk· was uttering those words: "...ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe ...and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk·, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk·s, scattered throughout the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms...


_________________________

Calvino, Italo. Cosmicomics (San Diego: Harvest Book, 1968), pp46-47.
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  love is not a gift. It is a diploma

from Paradise
by Toni Morrison


     Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good.
     Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reson or motive except that it is God.
     You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn--by practice and careful contemplation--the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God--carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it.
     How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share that interest.
     Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.


_________________________

Morrison, Toni. Paradise (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997), pp141-142.
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  we merge in our eccentricity/ this penchant for the right to live

from boogie woogie landscapes
by ntozake shange


paradise has her own ugliness: the man on the boat
from dusseldorf/ chasing me to dance with a "colored"/
the first in his life/ this my april in the north atlantic.
at dusk the sea is sultry/ we are not her lovers & she treats us so.
did you know i have so many secrets i believe are yrs/
what of me? i need you to have & still cant imagine
you ever thot i wanted you to see the posters in rio/
guerilleros' faces taped to steel/ remind me of our stuggle.
we merge in our eccentricity/ this penchant for the right to live/
peter tosh awready said: "everybody's talkin abt peace, i
talkin abt justice"/ our kiss is desperate/ long awaited/
known immediately/ unequivocal & not enuf.
tupac amaruo knew what to do. i imagine you in guadalajara
on the back of a donkey/ the 3-yr-old pickpocket will seduce you.
this is not the first time i've swallowed bad white wine/
i've been betrayed by escalators before/ no one knows
you've planted here/ no one knows you find wine tricklin
from my body/ our champagne still quirts from my braids/
even now i am not empty...such things i wd say/ tho cecil taylor
long ago passed quevy station/ in the cemetery there
i smelled myself in soil/ bitter & french/ dark & falling apart
in my hand...i wd say to you/ a marimba might civilize me/
a fashion fair in bangkok suffocate my sense of style.
jessica swears the yng men in manila dance well/ but
have no minds. i want to hold you in this/ so you might know
what i bring you/ my mouth is full & broad/ my tongue
cluttered with syllables & desire/ even this has not come out
straight/ so many days uprooted/ each time i fly i know again
memory & desire are relentless/ when yr not here to talk to
i speak my most precious/ lay out the mystery/ the devastation/
my honor/ i cant even catch yr eye/ so i trace the skies
with/ these hidden things/ ces choses perdues/
that you might find me/ in the night/ when i am flying.
i want to tell you i cannot stop smoking kools/ forget
the militia in panama/ all brown & bald in gestapo boots/
dontcha wanna be music/ & ease into the fog
dontcha wanna be like rain/ a cosmic event/ like sound...


_________________________

Shange, Ntozake. Three Pieces (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), pp141-142.
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  this prize belongs to no one. but you will pay all your life

The Catch
by Stanley Kunitz


It darted across the pond
toward our sunset perch
weaving in, up, and around
a spindle of air,
this delicate engine
fired by impulse and glitter,
swift darning-needle,
gossamer dragon,
less image than thought,
and the thought come alive.
Swoosh went the net
with a practiced hand.
"Da-da, may I look too?"
You may look, child,
all you want.
This prize belongs to no one.
But you will pay all
your life for the privilege,
all your life.


_________________________

Dietz, Maggie & Pinsky, Robert, eds. Poems to Read (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p41.
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  we will make a musical scale of the rainbow

by Mayakovsky


We will smash the old world
wildly
we will thunder
a new myth over the world.
We will trample the fence
of time beneath our feet.
We will make a musical scale
of the rainbow.

Roses and dreams
Debased by poets
will unfold
in a new light
for the delight of our eyes
the eyes of big children.
We will invent new roses
roses of capitals with petals of squares.*


(*The 150,000,000, 1919-20. Translation by Anna Bostock.)

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  beauty is like a decayed tooth

from The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima


     ...although beauty may give itself to everyone, it does not actually belong to anybody.
     How shall I put it? Beauty--yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one's tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence. Finally it gets so that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to the dentist to have the tooth extracted. Then, as one looks at the small, dirty, brown, blood-stained tooth lying in one's hand, one's thoughts are likely to be as follows: "Is this it? Is this all it was? That thing which caused me so much pain, which made me constantly fret about its existence, which was stubbornly rooted within me, is now merely a dead object. But is this thing really the same as that thing? If this originally belonged to my outer existence, why--through what sort of providence--did it become attached to my inner existence and succeed in causing me so much pain? What was the basis of this creature's existence? Was the basis within me? Or was it within the creature itself? Yet this creature which has been pulled out of my mouth and which now lies in my hand is something utterly different. Surely it cannot be that?


_________________________

Mishima, Yukio. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (London: Vintage, 2001), p136.
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  all the lovely things you got from life, and no penny down

from Green Shadows, White Whale
by Ray Bradbury


     What have I done for a single mortal soul this day? Nothing! And that's why I feel so terrible destroyed.
     The older I get, the less I do for people.
     It's an awesome responsibility when the world runs to hand you things. For an instance: sunsets. Everything pink and gold, looking like those melons they ship up from Spain. That's a gift, ain't it?
     Well, who do you thank for sunsets? And don't drag the Lord in the bar, now! Any remarks to Him are too quiet. I mean someone to grab and slap their back and say thanks for the fine early light this morn, boyo, or much obliged for the look of them damn wee flowers by the road this day, and the grass laying about in the wind. Those are gifts too, who'll deny it?
     Have you waked middle of the night and felt summer coming on for the first time, through the window, after the long cold? Did you shake your wife and tell her your gratitude? No, you lay there, a clod, chortling to yourself alone, you and the new weather!
     Ain't you horribly guilty yourself? Don't the burden make you hunchback? All the lovely things you got from life, and no penny down? Ain't they hid in your dark flesh somewhere, just the clean taste of stout here, all gifts, and you feeling the fool to go thank any mortal man for your fortune.


_________________________

Bradbury, Ray. Green Shadows, White Whale (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2002), pp127-128.
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  this tiny cinder flung helplessly around and around a helplessly burning star

A Late Twentieth-Century Prayer
by Ernest Sandeen


We've been taught for two thousand years
that not a single sparrow can fall
outside your notice. And now
you've given us leave to perfect

microscopic spectacles insightful enough
to show us your meticulous concern
with these minute particles in the body
of the world we inhabit, so alien to our everyday

perception we know them only by their nicknames,
some of them snuffed out in fractions of a second.
You must have, then, some inclination
to attend to all my little kind and me,

orphaned on earth, this tiny cinder flung
helplessly around and around
a helplessly burning star. We trust your interest
in us may be what locally we call love.

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  somewhere sometime we must have passed one another like going and coming trains

Palindrome
by Lisel Mueller


"There is less difficulty--indeed, no logical difficulty at all--in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other... Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as 'forward' and time in the other galaxy as 'backward.'"
               --Martin Gardner in Scientific American


Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:
     Things I will need in the past
          lipstick
          shampoo
          transistor radio
          Alice Cooper
          acne cream
          5-year diary with a lock
She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.

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  you’re the ideal fool

from To The Infinite Power
by Alane Rollings


     You do all you can to undermine the reality of an ordinary day. Desperate passions are your pastime, though, including this time, you’ve had only one of these, lasting all your life.

     When your heart climbs two feet in your chest, you think of new discoveries in mathematics: strange numbers, absolute elsewhere, and the baffling graphs that try to chart baffling galaxies. You tell yourself, "He didn’t come into my life to make it simple."

     With the basic love assumption that other loves are lesser, less itense, less necessary, and your solidity fluttering in mid-air, you’re the ideal fool to live through all this feeling.


(*note: "To the Infinite Power" is an excerpt from The Struggle to Adore.)

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  man is not a god

Walking Home
by Gjertrud Schnackenberg


Walking home from school one afternoon,
Slightly abstracted, what were you thinking of?
Turks in Vienna? Luther on Christian love?
Or were you with Van Gogh beneath the moon
With candles in his hatband, painting stars
Like singed hairs spinning in a candle flame?
Or giant maps where men take, lose, reclaim
Whole continents with pins? Or burning cars
And watchtowers and army-censored news
In Chile, in the Philippines, in Greece,
Colonels running the universities,
Assassinations, executions, coups--

You walked, and overhead some pipsqueak bird
Flew by and dropped a lot of something that
Splattered, right on the good professor, splat.
Now, on the ancient Rhine, so Herod heard,
The old Germanic chieftains always read
Such droppings as good luck: opening the door,
You bowed to improve my view of what you wore,
So luckily, there on the center of your head.

Man is not a god, that's what you said
After your heart gave out, to comfort me
Who came to comfort you but sobbed to see
Your heartbeat zigzagging on a TV overhead.
You knew the world was in a mess, and so,
By God, were you; and yet I never knew
A man who loved the world as much as you,
And that love was the last thing to let go.

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  always we do know whereof we wait

Between-Living
by Edith Tiempo


When we love a wanderer,
We wait for footsteps
That may, or may not, come:
First the hours-the-days-
Then-years. Then, never.
Yet always we do know
Whereof we wait:
The creaking gate
The scraping of the steps
And at the door the level gaze;
For these we wait to know
The roving one is home.

We boast of a green thumb
And coax the stems to bloom:
Hibiscus, santan, the wholesome
Cabbage rose; and make ambitious room
For gardenias, irises, and orchids
(Taking time to scour the aphids),
And maybe, soon or late
The flowers show;
But always we do know
Whereof we wait:
The nectar and the odors,
And the windblown blazing colors.

So it’s the space between
The wishing and the end
That is the true unknown;
The massive world’s timekeeping
And our own agile flow
Never to blend.

And thus we care,
And thus we live
Not for the end
(Since that is not unknown),
It is the wait, creative
Life and love in full;
Unfinished, uncertain, unknown,
Yet mocking the known end
That comes sooner,
Later, or not at all.


_________________________

Carbo, Nick & Tabios, Eileen, eds. Babaylan (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2000), pp281-282.
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  I use you like the belt pressed inside your grip

What is Left
by Cherríe Moraga


Mamá
I use you
like the belt
pressed inside your grip
seething for contact

I take
what I know
from you and want
to whip this world
into shape
          the damage
has defined me
as the space you provide
for me in your bed

...

I was not to raise an arm aganst you

But today
I promise you
I will fight back

Strip the belt from your hands

and take you

into
my arms


_________________________

Moraga, Cherríe. Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End Press, 1983), p16.
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  down the road, where one almost misses the life lived beyond the flower, is a small shack

You
by Russell Edson


     Out of nothing there comes a time called childhood, which is simply a path leading through an archway called
adolescence. A small town there, past the arch called youth.

     Soon, down the road, where one almost misses the life lived beyond the flower, is a small shack labeled, you.

     And it is here the future lives in the several postures of arm on windowsill, cheek on this; elbows on knees, face in the hands; sometimes the head thrown back, eyes staring into the ceiling... This into nothing down the long day's arc...

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Poetry = Music + Metaphor - Drivel

© 21 November 2003, CRazel 


Back to 'Moments, Merely'


Literature is mostly about having sex
and not much about having children.
Life is the other way around.
- David Lodge


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Index

by title
A Late 20th Century Prayer | Aunty Toothache | Boogie Woogie Landscapes | Between-Living | Cosmicomics | Frankenstein | Green Shadows, White Whate | Interview With A Lemming | Memoirs of Hadrian | Palindrome | Paradise | Picture This | The Catch | The Collected Works of Billy The Kid | The Hunchback of Notre Dame | The Island of the Day Before | The Red Dragonfly | The Temple of the Golden Pavilion | The Vile Ville | The Volcano Lover | To The Infinite Power | Vita Brevis | Walking Home | What is Left | Wise Blood | You

by author
Alane Rollings | Cherríe Moraga | Edith Tiempo | Ernest Sandeen | Flannery O' Connor | Gjertrud Schnackenberg | Hans Christian Andersen | Italo Calvino | James Thurber | Joseph Heller | Jostein Gaarder | Katherine Paterson | Lemony Snicket | Lisel Mueller | Marguerite Yourcenar | Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley | Mayakovsky | Michael Ondaatje | Ntozake Shange | Ray Bradbury | Russell Edson | Stanley Kunitz | Susan Sontag | Toni Morrison | Umberto Eco | Victor Hugo | Yukio Mishima

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