JULY 2023

that beautiful last line of derek jarman’s wittgenstein: “if a question can be put at all, it can also be answered.”

not having kept up with literary gossip I had no idea that the wife emmanuel carrère writes so profoundly and romantically about in lives other than my own is the now ex-wife who has renounced their relationship and derided him publicly about her inclusion in yoga. strangely, it doesn’t change my feelings about how beautiful I find those passages that contain their intimacy—even this one:

At her side, I know where I am. I can’t bear the idea of losing her ,but for the first time in my life I believe that what might steal her from me, or me from her, would be an accident, illness, something that would strike us from outside—and not dissatisfaction, ennui, a craving for something new. . . I suspect, of course, that if we last long enough there will be crises, empty stretches, stormy patches; desire will flag and go looking elsewhere, but I believe we’ll hold together, that one of us will close the other’s eyes. In any case, that’s what I long for.

the fact that love ends still strikes me as a great tragedy, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve arrived at a more pessimistic, or realistic, or understanding stage of accepting change and rejecting stasis—but it no longer disappoints me to find that this kind of hope collapses, in retrospect, into ashes. perhaps it’s also because what lives other than my own speaks most powerfully about is going on, passing through, fearing the otherwise before you come to live in it. I think it must be nice to open to a page and be in the company of a different version of yourself, neither a ghost nor a fossil but some kind of backwards fortune that tells you how to face the future by reminding you of how lucky you have been.

summer in all of its deadliness and sweetness as in this william gass excerpt. it was the simplest sort of life, empty of everything except ourselves. . .

wanting to discover more arabic-language music, it was a wonder to find dana hourani and her enthralling album, ensanein. a special favourite.

rediscovering sharon olds again, after a long time. her nerve! her sensual deftness! those final lines of hers that manage to sedate and explode simultaneously—how?

you run your palm, warm, large,
dry, back along my face over and 
over, over and over, like God
putting the finishing touches on, before
sending me down to be born.

I love the vertigo and linguistic fascination of rosmarie waldrop poems, which is brute and tender, which never over-complicates despite its proliferation of objects, scenes, ideas. And a silence I can’t bear because it is complete. and her husband keith waldrop passed away this month, who said to us, It is as if despairing, even of imaginary improvement, I contrive instead to set my affection on the damned world, this very world, as it was and as it is. I wonder about the lives these two minds inhabited together, how they traded samenesses and differences. if they shared their visions with one another before sharing them with us. I’d like to think that it was a very wonderful time, happening between them.

A green thing loves the green
And loves the living ground.

got stuck on a round of 90s hong kong films, the best of which depict a spiralling of desire into the larger maelstrom of societal shift, a sense of self diluted drop by drop by the chaos, and give us no answers as to what persists—something that is invisible to us because of its continual ongoing.

Summer involves going down as a steep flight of steps

in james tate’s poems the inherent sadness and unease of life has a spectral shape, a metamorphosing form that states the multivalence of sadness’s own symbols, causes, and discreet presences. I like how he tells a story in a way that makes the end feel like coming back on shore, legs still trembled from the sea. I like how their strangeness proves that they’re alive.

Oh well, I keep singing: I sing the song
of utensils, and there is one of street names,
and one of the names of dead pets.
The next day I am giving mirrors to a young girl.
I give free shoes for life to a stone lady.
She walks on air, she walks near the earth
in a region called the cryptosphere.

edmond jabès on what another person talking can mean when really, we are trapped in our own minds: . . . the dialogue that we have arranged between us—the discussion or conversation that we have had together—will produce something that is important for me, something that I am going to take note of. I’m going to hink of you afterwards, and I’m going to continue the dialogue. I’ll say, “Hey, I didn’t tell you, but here it is, here is everything important that I didn’t know how to put into words.”

jarman’s caravaggio and its implantation of stillness in the motion picture, what a sudden contemplation of composition can do for this artform which relies on change.

(I watched a lot of jarman films this month, and they are left on my mind and my imagination like ink-prints. like I am the last one left alone in a theatre)

carlos manuel álvarez is a true talent, and it is through him that I walked once again through that strange, tumultuous, burdened landscape of cuba that so moved me and gave me the gift of further questions. the tribe is an astounding, deeply felt book, one that exemplifies the worth of attention paid into the unseen corners.

silvia guerra and her small image-capsules like terraniums

Then perhaps, far away, a stone
will turn over in her memory.
Something will change place and through a strange
gust of wind in the air she will remember
suddenly
sitting on a distant fountain
casting petals on the water
from geraniums with this same scent.

i like the maps and the instability of the geography that situates places in my head. i like using graph paper to plot the latitudes and longitudes i can’t measure.

thank you, sinéad o’connor. we are in your debt.

In my garden, roses:
I don’t want to give you roses
that tomorrow …
that tomorrow you won’t have.

christian petzold is such a master choreographer. how he wanders people through the landscape, how he pulls his characters close than far from one another. how he lets us feel touching without ever seeing it transpire. . .

these short films of miguel coyula on the cuban poet rafael alcides, the almost absurdist and intimate monologues spliced together with defiant humour, wonder, wisdom.

are people forever going to be at the edge
Of things, even the nice ones, and when it happens
Will we all be alone together?

in mayakovsky’s “past one o’clock” the line Любовная лодка разбилась о быт. is often translated as: Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind. but I prefer this translation (unattributed for I can’t find the source), which is” The love boat has crashed against the everyday.

this perfect short poem of june jordan’s:

There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.

We don’t want to be
Stars but parts
of constellations.