This is the vowel of the earth
dreaming its root
in flowers and snow.
(s. heaney, north)
"The impersonal claims of mythology are exposed to the pressures of private emotion which he sets out to present and to penetrate in their most irreducible aspects. He shows the relation between theory and experience, between the idea that he has preconceived, that is by its nature general and inclusive, and the tangle of feelings which, in their immediacy and closeness, substantially constitute human experience. He enters imaginatively into his mythic world and looks around, moves about in it, receiving signals from its denizens; he is inside events so that he is not presenting them objectively; he notes them; he is open to contradictory feelings, even more acutely unsure of himself and of what goes on around him." (E. Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, 91)
"Kinned by hieroglyphic
peat on a spreadfield
to the strangled victim,
the love-nest in the bracken,
I step through origins..." ('Kinship')
"The writing enacts the strain of coming to terms with the past." (e.a., 92)
"Part IV, returning to a generalizing, reflective mood, thus begins with the assertion that he has discovered a centre that holds and spreads. This is the literal bog, it is also the bog as his central poetic symbol, holding within its spread of meaning the paradox of life itself ('sump and seedbed... and a melting grave'), all that has gone to make the poet what he is":
"I grew out of all this
like a weeping willow
inclined to
the appetites of gravity." (sh, 'Kinship')
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
nest
"Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. How-ever spacious it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest. Erasmus, his biographer tells us, was long in "finding a nook in his fine house in which he could put his little body with safety. He ended by confining himself to one room until he could breathe the parched air that was necessary to him.""
I write a lot from bed, and always have. I think Colette did this, perhaps only at the end, when confined to her bed that was pushed alternately to and from the open window, depending on the French season. I find comfort in it.
I keep thinking about Annie Dillard needing to shut the blinds in her studio every day, even though they look out onto beautiful forest land. My blinds are closed, but I think I may need to stop the click-shuttering of memory slides in the back of my head, the colors blur together, I hear them turn over one by one, like my Dad's early first "digital" clock that he dismembered so you could see the numbers turn over on themselves, just the innards of the clock, working away in regular whirring increments, numbers on a spool.
With tests looming, I am trying to calm myself down. I am trying to remember landscapes that opened up around me in my past, places that responded to the immensity of space within me. I am calling up that feeling of response, the first time I drove around the curve of canyon into Taos, NM.
The basin opens up before you as an immeasurable plain, and a kind of vertigo sets in, like being underwater and feeling the shelf of sand drop off darkly and without warning. I am remembering the highway that seemed to have no end, when I first started college, first drive to school in Santa Fe, and I remember thinking "How will this landscape change me"? What will I become here? Its strange, even at that young age that I understood how landscapes had serious effects on a person, and that my choice of that particular high desert one was most painstakingly made.
Inviting that much space into my life at such a malleable age has turned out to have a reverberative and long half-life, shelf-life, pantry-life. I was watching old movies last night, and some of the Civil War footage, and thought "I want lace curtains one day." You know, the kind that you see as you drive by old farmhouses, the kind you see at the onset of dark on the prairie, the ones wavering just so as you drive by and think about the concept of home. I miss this feeling. I still feel homeless in New York most of the time, and fight it.
I am trying to make myself strong, trying to not feel the alien terror of anonymous places like airports with dirty carpets, subway tunnels with sulphur smell rising from the grates, giant warehouse stores brimming with flourescent lights, constant change of place to place. I am excited for a time when I can have a house again. When I visited my sister last month, my favorite part of her house was the old 1930's wooden back porch, old screens still latched strangely, set up for summer cross-breezes and set above the backyard with a view of the neighbor's houses curving upward.
I thought that this was a place that felt like home. This is where I would have spent my entire adolescence, with a stack of Virginia Woolf books strewn across the dirty floor, notebooks of scribbled ideas, packets of seeds, bizarre almanacs and books on how to make your own herbal elixirs, homemade jam. What we agreed on, was that it felt like "home", to both of us. It had those qualities that we remembered growing up, tactile wooden smell, creaking screen doors, privacy, space to dream, access to inside/outside, free but still safe.
As a teenager I used to sneak out onto the roof aoutside my bedroom window and smoke cigarettes. My father would get furious b/c the roof itself was not in the best shape and me sending the entire front porch to the ground would have been kind of a bummer. But I couldn't help myself, and mostly just sat there while the cigarette dwindled away unsmoked. I was looking at the huge elm and maple trees outside, moving silently overhead. I was thinking about something C.S. Lewis had written, on learning of his wife's terminal disease, that there was nothing more beautiful than the image of bare branches against a night sky.
I am still trying to find my right place in the world, but just recently it has dawned on me, I am ready for a Home.
I write a lot from bed, and always have. I think Colette did this, perhaps only at the end, when confined to her bed that was pushed alternately to and from the open window, depending on the French season. I find comfort in it.
I keep thinking about Annie Dillard needing to shut the blinds in her studio every day, even though they look out onto beautiful forest land. My blinds are closed, but I think I may need to stop the click-shuttering of memory slides in the back of my head, the colors blur together, I hear them turn over one by one, like my Dad's early first "digital" clock that he dismembered so you could see the numbers turn over on themselves, just the innards of the clock, working away in regular whirring increments, numbers on a spool.
With tests looming, I am trying to calm myself down. I am trying to remember landscapes that opened up around me in my past, places that responded to the immensity of space within me. I am calling up that feeling of response, the first time I drove around the curve of canyon into Taos, NM.
The basin opens up before you as an immeasurable plain, and a kind of vertigo sets in, like being underwater and feeling the shelf of sand drop off darkly and without warning. I am remembering the highway that seemed to have no end, when I first started college, first drive to school in Santa Fe, and I remember thinking "How will this landscape change me"? What will I become here? Its strange, even at that young age that I understood how landscapes had serious effects on a person, and that my choice of that particular high desert one was most painstakingly made.
Inviting that much space into my life at such a malleable age has turned out to have a reverberative and long half-life, shelf-life, pantry-life. I was watching old movies last night, and some of the Civil War footage, and thought "I want lace curtains one day." You know, the kind that you see as you drive by old farmhouses, the kind you see at the onset of dark on the prairie, the ones wavering just so as you drive by and think about the concept of home. I miss this feeling. I still feel homeless in New York most of the time, and fight it.
I am trying to make myself strong, trying to not feel the alien terror of anonymous places like airports with dirty carpets, subway tunnels with sulphur smell rising from the grates, giant warehouse stores brimming with flourescent lights, constant change of place to place. I am excited for a time when I can have a house again. When I visited my sister last month, my favorite part of her house was the old 1930's wooden back porch, old screens still latched strangely, set up for summer cross-breezes and set above the backyard with a view of the neighbor's houses curving upward.
I thought that this was a place that felt like home. This is where I would have spent my entire adolescence, with a stack of Virginia Woolf books strewn across the dirty floor, notebooks of scribbled ideas, packets of seeds, bizarre almanacs and books on how to make your own herbal elixirs, homemade jam. What we agreed on, was that it felt like "home", to both of us. It had those qualities that we remembered growing up, tactile wooden smell, creaking screen doors, privacy, space to dream, access to inside/outside, free but still safe.
As a teenager I used to sneak out onto the roof aoutside my bedroom window and smoke cigarettes. My father would get furious b/c the roof itself was not in the best shape and me sending the entire front porch to the ground would have been kind of a bummer. But I couldn't help myself, and mostly just sat there while the cigarette dwindled away unsmoked. I was looking at the huge elm and maple trees outside, moving silently overhead. I was thinking about something C.S. Lewis had written, on learning of his wife's terminal disease, that there was nothing more beautiful than the image of bare branches against a night sky.
I am still trying to find my right place in the world, but just recently it has dawned on me, I am ready for a Home.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Some Place
"I resolved it, I
found in my life a
center and secured it.
It is the house,
trees beyond, a term
of view encasing it.
The weather
reaches only as some
wind, a little
deadened sighing. And
if the life weren't?
when was something to
happen, had I secured
that-- had I, had
I, insistent.
There is nothing I am,
nothing not. A place
between, I am. I am
more than thought, less
than thought. A house
with winds, but a distance
-- something loose in the wind,
feeling weather as that life,
walks toward the lights he left."
(Robert Creeley, Words, 77)
found in my life a
center and secured it.
It is the house,
trees beyond, a term
of view encasing it.
The weather
reaches only as some
wind, a little
deadened sighing. And
if the life weren't?
when was something to
happen, had I secured
that-- had I, had
I, insistent.
There is nothing I am,
nothing not. A place
between, I am. I am
more than thought, less
than thought. A house
with winds, but a distance
-- something loose in the wind,
feeling weather as that life,
walks toward the lights he left."
(Robert Creeley, Words, 77)
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Montevertine 'Montevertine' 2006
What else would I drink while reading about Comanche warfare practices for my upcoming Masters exams? If you guessed Sangiovese you would be right. I am having a sip of the Montevertine 'Montevertine' 2006 (Sangiovese, Canaiolo, Colorino), for the usual reasons: I opened it yesterday, thought it might have been corked, too oaky, etc, waited, and and tried it again today.
The key is trusting in the wine shop you work at, and sometimes blindly buying something you should probably know something more about. I can really only sell things well that I like, or at least know well. My co-workers have stumbled upon my "tells", the words I use when I (rarely ha) don't know enough about what I am trying to sell. My lucky charm word is 'phenomenal',,,, as in "this wine is good, but this one is "phenomenal"..... try it! I have a pretty close 97% success rate with it! Who's gonna argue with a slightly outdated and awkward word said with such gusto? Not many people friends, not many.
I have been absurdly lucky in wine this year. I stumble upon things that I may not know the value of yet, but hopefully, I wait a little, and like the "empath" I sold wine to yesterday, I feel things out, and let the weight of my good fortune and now-knowledge hit me in its own time. (Think vertical of J.L. Chave white Hermitage from '81-2007, minus 2 years)..... that one is still sifting through the back part of my brain, but I carry the tattered old tasting notes I took that night with me, a weird talisman, but the physicality and poetry of those notes grounds me, and makes me remember its okay to be in a place where I am still learning.
Back to today's Montevertine, I am glad I waited with this wine. It may be a year or so young, but there is something about the combination of dusty light-currant acid and central corded structure that is elegant and supremely restrained at the same time. The smells, as they were, seem to be inside the wine (if this makes even the tiniest of sense), enfolded, and wrapped, instead of worn so lushly on the sleeve. I have lately been drinking a lot of frappato and gamay, so the leanness at the core of this wine is a welcome change.
I don't usually drink during the day, or at least not "blog" about it, but it is a Saturday, and I spent the morning walking around buying absurdly specific regional cheeses. There is a strangeness to the week also, perhaps because I haven't thrown myself so headlong into studying art history/anthropology for many months, perhaps because I am sensing a similarity to the structures that I use to learn about new wines, terminologies, practices, terroirs, etc. The two subjects are becoming neat and seamless in their concurrent appreciation and appropriation into the brainiest parts of my brain.
Do I sound drunk? I'm NOT. I am trying to take a day off for god's sake, and my brain won't really let me. The Comanche ('Nermerneh', or simply calling themselves 'the People') became the terrorizers of the Plains by the 18th century, with their fast adaption of the Spanish horse (1598 with Don Juan de Onate into New/Mexico territory). In under a century the former Shoshone forest dwellers perfected their horse riding skills, could now freely raid their sedentary enemy tribes on the northern NM pueblos with ease, and also hunt bison.
The detail that is sticking with me from the studies of the last few days: in combat, the men would paint their faces in black streaks, they "devised the grimmest and most striking war helmet on the plains: a headdress made from the bison scalp, in which the great, thrusting horns of the bull buffalo were retained. The stark horns gave the mounted warriors a frightening and unforgettable appearance that no enemy forgot." (Comanches, "Death in the High Country", 112)
This must have been something to see, and terrifying. Happy spring everybody!
The key is trusting in the wine shop you work at, and sometimes blindly buying something you should probably know something more about. I can really only sell things well that I like, or at least know well. My co-workers have stumbled upon my "tells", the words I use when I (rarely ha) don't know enough about what I am trying to sell. My lucky charm word is 'phenomenal',,,, as in "this wine is good, but this one is "phenomenal"..... try it! I have a pretty close 97% success rate with it! Who's gonna argue with a slightly outdated and awkward word said with such gusto? Not many people friends, not many.
I have been absurdly lucky in wine this year. I stumble upon things that I may not know the value of yet, but hopefully, I wait a little, and like the "empath" I sold wine to yesterday, I feel things out, and let the weight of my good fortune and now-knowledge hit me in its own time. (Think vertical of J.L. Chave white Hermitage from '81-2007, minus 2 years)..... that one is still sifting through the back part of my brain, but I carry the tattered old tasting notes I took that night with me, a weird talisman, but the physicality and poetry of those notes grounds me, and makes me remember its okay to be in a place where I am still learning.
Back to today's Montevertine, I am glad I waited with this wine. It may be a year or so young, but there is something about the combination of dusty light-currant acid and central corded structure that is elegant and supremely restrained at the same time. The smells, as they were, seem to be inside the wine (if this makes even the tiniest of sense), enfolded, and wrapped, instead of worn so lushly on the sleeve. I have lately been drinking a lot of frappato and gamay, so the leanness at the core of this wine is a welcome change.
I don't usually drink during the day, or at least not "blog" about it, but it is a Saturday, and I spent the morning walking around buying absurdly specific regional cheeses. There is a strangeness to the week also, perhaps because I haven't thrown myself so headlong into studying art history/anthropology for many months, perhaps because I am sensing a similarity to the structures that I use to learn about new wines, terminologies, practices, terroirs, etc. The two subjects are becoming neat and seamless in their concurrent appreciation and appropriation into the brainiest parts of my brain.
Do I sound drunk? I'm NOT. I am trying to take a day off for god's sake, and my brain won't really let me. The Comanche ('Nermerneh', or simply calling themselves 'the People') became the terrorizers of the Plains by the 18th century, with their fast adaption of the Spanish horse (1598 with Don Juan de Onate into New/Mexico territory). In under a century the former Shoshone forest dwellers perfected their horse riding skills, could now freely raid their sedentary enemy tribes on the northern NM pueblos with ease, and also hunt bison.
The detail that is sticking with me from the studies of the last few days: in combat, the men would paint their faces in black streaks, they "devised the grimmest and most striking war helmet on the plains: a headdress made from the bison scalp, in which the great, thrusting horns of the bull buffalo were retained. The stark horns gave the mounted warriors a frightening and unforgettable appearance that no enemy forgot." (Comanches, "Death in the High Country", 112)
This must have been something to see, and terrifying. Happy spring everybody!
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