A Cappella
March 7, 2020
She perches you
at the edge of a cliff,
leaves you there,
afraid for your life,
afraid for her life,
in fear of the general
and overwhelming
delicacy of life,
takes you back
to that primordial soup —
the thing
that first crawled
out of the ocean,
leaves you clinging
beneath the lip of a wave,
the underside
of a volcano,
the quivering,
quavering
cloud from which
lightening is about
to strike, leaves you
hanging there, hanging —
about to fall —
it’s over,
you know it,
and then,
in a beat,
she transports you
back to power,
raw and absolute —
the battle cry,
the victory chant,
the will to break
an unbroken horse.
So throaty and brave,
contralto a cappella,
she empowers you
not through words
but by scats,
tells your story
in the lilt
of a wounded note,
your human story,
the tale of undying
millennium,
perpetuation
of the race,
survival
of the fittest —
you —
human only
in form,
but really
the unconscious
fluttering
of a god’s
dreaming eye.
She sings this
into existence —
atom, cell
and DNA strand all –
this magical life.
She sings!
And sunflowers turn
their heads to listen,
and the moon drops
low and early
in the night,
and the voice
settles down
like a boat in the ocean —
faint rain
can still be heard
trailing off,
tapering away,
and you’re in that boat,
anchored by a rope,
at the mercy
of the weather,
but calming,
calmer now,
so still.
Melissa Studdard
History repeating
March 7, 2020
The teaching of history tends to be sanitized and distorted to fit whatever political agenda is currently in style. It is appalling how many people have so little grasp of the reality of their national history, and, indeed, on world history as a whole. It is doubly frightening as history seems, in face of this ignorance, to be repeating itself…
P
Warning
March 7, 2020
language is your medium
March 7, 2020
Any writer who tries to press against the limits of prose, who’s trying to write something genuinely different from what’s come before, is constantly aware of these paradoxes about language’s power and its limitations. Because language is your medium, you become aware of the extent to which language controls and directs our thinking, the extent that we’re manipulated by words—and yet the extent to which words necessarily limit our attention and hence misrepresent the world around us. Orwell dealt with all this in 1984 much better than I’ve been able to when he said, in effect: Let me control the language and I will control peoples’ thoughts. Back in the 1930s the Japanese used to have actual “Thought Police,” who would come around and say to people, “What do you think about our expedition to China?” or something like that. And if they didn’t like what you replied, they’d put you under arrest. What Orwell was driving at, though, goes beyond that kind of obvious control mechanism; he was implying that if he could control the language, then he could make it so that you couldn’t even think about anything he didn’t want you to think about. My view is that this isn’t wholly true. One of the dumber things you see in the comic books occasionally is where, say, Spider Man falls off a building, looks down and sees a flag pole, and thinks to himself, “If I can just grab that flagpole, I’ll be okay.” Now nobody in those circumstances would actually be doing that—if you’re falling off a building, you don’t put that kind of thought into words, even though you’re somehow consciously aware of needing to grab that flagpole. You are thinking below the threshold of language, which suggests there is a pre verbal, sub level of thinking taking place without words. Orwell didn’t deal with this sub level of thinking, but the accuracy of his insights about the way authorities can manipulate people through words is evident in the world around us.
Gene Wolfe
Interview with Larry McCaffery, November 1988
more than the poet’s intention
March 7, 2020
I must begin with first the illusion of an intention. The poem begins to form from the first intention. But the intention is already breaking into another. The first intention begins me but of course continually shatters itself and is replaced by the child of the new collision…The poem is more than the poet’s intention. The poet does not write what he knows but what he does not know.
W S Graham
Notes on a Poetry of Release
Boggies
March 7, 2020
Boggies are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have increased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the fairy-tale market. Slow and sullen, and yet dull, they prefer to lead simple lives of pastoral squalor. They don’t like machines more complicated than a garrotte, a blackjack, or a Luger, and they have always been shy of the ‘big folk’ or ‘biggers’ as they call us. As a rule they avoid us, except on rare occasions when a hundred or so will get together to dry-gulch a lone farmer or hunter. They seldom exceed three feet in height, but are fully capable of overpowering creatures half their size when they get the drop on them … Their beginnings lie far back in the Good Ole Days when the planet was populated with the kind of colourful creatures you have to drink a quart of Old Overcoat to see nowadays.
Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney
Bored of the Rings
when perfection has been attained
March 7, 2020
Paul Valéry tells us about perfect objects in nature, flawless pearls, full-bodied, mature wines, and truly complex creatures. He describes them as the “exquisite products of a long chain of causes that resemble each other.” The cumulative effect of such causes has temporal limits only when perfection has been attained. “Nature’s patient way of working,” Valéry continues, “was once a model for humans. Miniatures, ivory carvings crafted to the point of perfection, stones perfectly polished and engraved, lacquered objects or paintings in which thin, transparent layers are put on top of each other — all of these products of sustained effort required sacrifice and have rapidly vanished. The day and age is long gone in which time does not matter, Today people no longer work on anything that does not allow shortcuts.” Today we are witnessing the evolution of the short story, which is no longer connected to oral traditions and no longer allows for the gradual accumulation of thin, transparent sheets that capture the most accurate picture of how a perfect story emerges from the layering of a variety of retellings.
Walter Benjamin
The Storyteller