Electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds.
Print writing will remind us of our love for the physical, for the sensual world. And for the light only a book held in one’s hands can give. The book taken to bed or the beach — the words dancing with the heat and the sea — and the mouth now suddenly on my salty neck.
Electronic writing shall inspire magic. Print writing shall inspire magic. Ways to heal.
“Intoxicated with Serbian nationalist propaganda, one charge is that X took part in the murder of a Muslim civilian, F, by forcing another Muslim to bite off F’s testicles.”
What is a book and how might it be reimagined, opened up, transformed to accommodate all we’ve seen, all we’ve been hurt by, all that’s been given, all that’s been taken away:
“…deliberately infecting subjects with fatal diseases, killing 275,000 of the elderly, the deformed and other ‘useless eaters’ through the guise of euthanasia, and killing 112 Jews simply to fill out a university skeleton collection.”
No more monoliths. No more gods.
“Let us go then, you and I….”
No more sheepish, mindless devotion. No more quiet supplication.
All the dark roads you’ve led us down no more.
You will call me naive, childlike, irreverent, idealistic, offensive, outrageous, defiant at times, because I do not believe in a literature of limitation, in a future of limitation. I annoy you with this kind of talk, I know. You’ve told me many times before. You’d like me to step into my quiet box. You’re so cavalier, as you offer your hand.
The future. Possibility will reign. My students poised on some new threshold. We’re too diversified, we’re too fractured, all too close in proximity suddenly — one world.
One wild world,
free of categories, free of denominations, dance and fiction and performance and installation and video and poetry and painting — one world — every hyper- and cyber-
And in upstate New York, a woman sees fields of flax and iris and cattails, and dreams of making paper. And dreams of creating an Art Farm — a place just for experimenting with unusual indigenous fibers, a real space for bookbinding, an archive, a library, a gallery.
Dream: that this new tolerance might set a tone, give an example. This openness in acceptance of texts, of forms, this freedom, this embrace will serve as models for how to live. Will be the model for a new world order — in my dream. A way to live together better — in my dream.
Godard: “A film like this, it’s a bit as if I wanted to write a sociological essay in the form of a novel, and all I had to do it with was notes of music. Is that what cinema is? And am I right to continue doing it?”
But I do believe, and no doubt childishly, unquestioningly, in the supremacy of beauty, in pattern, in language, as a child believes in language, in diversity, in the possibility of justice — even after everything we have seen — in the impulse to speak — even after everything.
“Peder Davis, a bouncy, tow-headed five-year-old, shook his head and said, ‘I would tell him: You shoot down this building? You put it back together.
And I would say, You redo those people.’”
One hundred and sixty-eight dead in Oklahoma bombing.
“Peder said he drew ‘a house with eyes that was blue on the sides.’ He explained, ‘It was the building that exploded, in heaven.’”
Wish: that writing again, through its audacity, generosity, possibility, irreverence, wildness, teach us how to better live.
The world doesn’t end.
The smell of the air. The feel of the wind in late April.
You can’t have a genuine experience of nature except in nature. You can’t have a genuine experience of language except in language. And for those of us for whom language is the central drama, the captivating, imaginative, open, flexible act, there can never be a substitute or a replacement.
Language continually opening new places in me.
A picture of a bird will never be a bird. And a bird will never be a picture of a bird. So relax.
The world doesn’t end, my friend. So stop your doomsday song. Or Matthew Arnold: “The end is everywhere: Art still has truth, take refuge there.”
All will perish, but not this: language opening like a rose.
And many times I have despaired over the limits of language, the recalcitrance of words that refuse to yield, won’t glimmer, won’t work anymore. All the outmoded forms. Yet I know it is part of it, I know that now; it’s part of the essential mystery of the medium — and that all of us who are in this thing for real have to face this, address this, love this, even.
The struggles with shape, with silence, with complacency. The impossibility of the task.
You say destined to perish, death of the novel, end of fiction, over and over.
But Matthew Arnold, on the cusp of another century, dreams: art.
And I say faced with the eternal mysteries, one, if so inclined, will make fictive shapes.
What it was like to be here. To hold your hand.
An ancient impulse, after all.
As we reach, trying to recapture an original happiness, pleasure, peace—
Reaching—
The needs that language mirrors and engenders and satisfies are not going away. And are not replaceable.
The body with its cellular alphabet. And, in another alphabet, the desire to get that body onto the page.
There will be works of female sexuality, finally.
Feminine shapes.
All sorts of new shapes. Language, a rose, opening.
It’s greater than we are, than we’ll ever be. That’s why I love it. Kneeling at the altar of the impossible. The self put back in its proper place.
The miracle of language. The challenge and magic of language.
Different than the old magic. I remember you liked to saw women in half and put them back together, once. Configure them in ways most pleasing to you.
You tried once to make language conform. Obey. You tried to tame it. You tried to make it sit, heel, jump through hoops.
You like to say I am reckless. You like to say I lack discipline. You say my work lacks structure. I’ve heard it a hundred times from you. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
In spite of everything, my refusal to hate you, to take you all that seriously, to be condescended to—
Still, too often I have worried about worldly things. Too often have I worried about publishing, about my so-called career, fretted over the so-so-writers who are routinely acclaimed, rewarded, given biscuits and other treats — this too small prison of self where I sometimes dwell.
Too often I have let the creeps upset me.
The danger of the sky.
The danger of April.
If you say language is dying….
Susan Howe: “Poetry is redemption from pessimism.”
April in the country. Already so much green. So much life. So much. Even with half the trees still bare. Poking up through the slowly warming earth, the tender shoots of asparagus. Crocus. Bloodroot.
This vulnerable and breakable heart.
As we dare to utter something, to commit ourselves, to make a mark on a page or a field of light.
To incorporate this dangerous and fragile world. All its beauty. All its pain.
You who said “hegemony” and “domino theory” and “peace with honor.”
To not only tolerate but welcome work that is other than the kind we do.