First, two things:
One day i was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
Wm. Faulkner, spoken by Addie in 'As I Lay Dying'.
When the routine bites hard
And ambitions are low
And the resentment rides high
But emotions won't grow
And were changing our ways,
Taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again
Ian Curtis in 'Love Will Tear us Apart'.
Honesty is a tired cliche. But I don't think that exempts any one of us from having to reckon with it. I am in Winston-Salem and most of the leaves have fallen. The roads are wet with rain, and until today there was nothing but grey in the sky. My brother and mother returned from New Orleans with cans of coffee spiced with chicory, and i'm drinking it minus the requesite hot milk. It's really not the end of the world.
I used to delight in the mundane. I thought that it was thrill enough to pluck something out of the everyday and elevate it to grace. Things being equal enough, all that should take is polish to shine. Now I don't know where I am, but have a much clearer idea of who.
My thoughts are cluttered like useless things, aimlessly arranged on a sitting room table with the appearance of chaos and mess. I utter from dead ideologies, reflecting assumptions that have fallen out of fashion and out of use. I have not won the race to the new, I am hobbled by my grip on an older order.
Style is a game that we are constantly playing with ourselves. We deafen the messages in our articulations in order to communicate as quietly as possible. In order to be receptive one must be up to the times. There is no room in this for beauty like there is no room for speech on the moon. We should take up slings against gentle suggestion, we should punish subtlety in ourselves. If we don't speak to other times, then we may not as well speak at all.
All words are fighting words. Time escapes like gas from a flask. Most of it has flown from us already.
Happy thanksgiving.
jamz.
2 comments:
blessed are the observers.
"...hearing the watch. it was grandfather's and when father gave it to me and said i give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; its rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. i give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. because no battle is ever won he said. they are not even fought. the field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
--william faulkner, "the sound and the fury"
"People need trouble -- a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy. "
--william faulkner (again)
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