is one of my least favorite adjectives. I think it's almost always used wrong, and even when the situation might somehow be actually Kafkaesque (your train is stopped on the tracks for 17 hours with no explanation, and all your fellow passengers inexplicably start howling all at once) the adjective is woefully chintzy and inadequate.
That being said.
I've spent the past few days, 2-4 hours a day, verifying the titles and series numbers of identically bound volumes of Israeli statistics from the 1970s...and 80s... and 90s. A dull maroon. Full of population densities, tourist hotel statistics, and car accidents.
Somewhere Josef K.'s tormentors are present. If they had faces, it's possible they might be smiling.
To quote Alfred Austin, who is a poet I just discovered by Googling Sisyphus:
"`Why was I chosen for this hateful task,
Fantastically futile, which the Gods
Lay on their victim, for their own disport?
Rather a thousand times upon the wheel
Would I, Ixion-like, be racked, or lift
The tantalising gourd-cup to my lips."
The poem is called 'Sisyphus'... OK, fevered love for the nineteenth century aside, I'm VERY GLAD some stylistic mores have changed. Saw Robert Hass give a magnificent reading yesterday, his face all carved up with skin cancer and a giant bandage over his nose like a half-invisible man; perhaps half-invisible is what the face of a colloquial poet is supposed to be. I fell in love with his poem about Grushenka, of The Brothers Karamazov, "I am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name is Dmitri." You can hear him read it here: http://selectedpoems.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/robert-hass-i-am-your-waiter-tonight-and-my-name-is-dimitri/
Also, since we mentioned the nineteenth century, I will quote some excellent and snappy lines from Hass's poem on the subject, "The Nineteenth Century as a Song":
"
Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.
He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century
while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit
and that gentle man Bakunin,
home after fingerfucking the countess,
applies his numb hands
to the making of bombs."
I love me a poet that can address finger fucking with frankness.
I feel kind of shitty that I seem to be able to address nothing but literature in this blog as of yet; we'll see how things go. I am still battling Vlad Nabokov into letting me write something of a polemic against him.
Also---I've received a few complaints about the name of this blog. Notable critiques include that it is "half fart joke, half too precious," &c. I am now announcing a name this blog contest. Something that puts the "fun" in "profundity," or a soft lob at my own narcissism, or whatever it is. I am open to suggestion. (A life goal of mine is to always remain open to suggestion.)
-Talia
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
a translation, and some thoughts
So first off I thought I would start with a translation... I was flipping mindlessly through the Internet, and because I had a sad mood of love on I decided to google Anna Akhmatova (also to shake myself out of my Tetris fixation, another of the great Russian inventions). I also remembered, lovingly, how the Russians of my acquaintance pronounced her name: not 'Anna Akhmatova,' but "AnnachMAtova," eliding the last A in the first name, the 'Ma' sliding out eagerly... anyhow, I came across this poem-- it's hard to use any adjectives for her poetry besides 'lovely' or 'haunting', so in the interests of not disgusting my readership I will refrain from any adjective at all. But I did a translation, anyhow, because the only translation I could find online (a good one, by Jane Kenyon) only encompassed the first stanza.
Akhmatova's picture was busy staring me down from all the poetry sites, with her razor-sharp unparted bangs, a bent nose like a boxer, hooded eyes... not a beautiful woman. Also, impossible to look away from. And born in Odessa--which anyone who knows me knows is my dream city, the one I will finally get to this summer. I will probably get my just desserts and be disappointed. But right now I am happily dreaming, in Cambridge, of an Odessan exile from earth.
But I digress: back to the poem. This was a hard poem to render into English, because a language with cases like Russian can express things a lot more economically. As you might imagine, a language with no need for clunky prepositions and articles has the upper hand in terms of meter and rhyme. Like most Russian poems, the language this untitled poem uses is sparse, and rigidly metered. I tried to reproduce that effect in addition to following the rhyme scheme in this translation. Translating poems is like walking blindfolded over a tightrope with a small child balanced on your nose--it takes an impossible amount of attention sometimes. (And sometimes you produce metaphors like that in attempting to describe it.)
Akhmatova wrote the poem in 1934, in Leningrad... students of Russian literature and history (the two are more intertwined in that particular nation than any other I can think of except Israel--but more on that later) might quail at the date, knowing that it was deep in the heart of the Stalinist Terror. Akhmatova's ex-husband, father of her child, had been executed by the Soviets; her poetry was subject to an unofficial ban that made it impossible for her to publish original work; this poem was written a year after her rumored lover, Osip Mandelstam, had written the poem that would later prove to be his death sentence (the "Stalin Epigram," nearly always introduced as "the infamous Stalin Epigram," a work with more balls than anyone thought could ever be crammed into fourteen lines). As in most of her work, she's part dour mater dolorosa, part viciously literate, all far-seeing and shrewd. Rumors flew about Akhmatova, and in particular surrounded her relations with both Pasternak and Mandelstam. Part of the rationale of Soviet authorities in censoring her work seems to have been her rumored sexual promiscuity, so it's good to know that love was just as much among her habits as grieving. And yet... It's possible that my love of twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literatures have a common factor--tragedy is their natural idiom. But I digress again. The poem is shorter than its introduction, but aren't they always?
Привольем пахнет дикий мед,
Пыль - солнечным лучом,
Фиалкою - девичий рот,
А золото - ничем.
Водою пахнет резеда,
И яблоком - любовь.
Но мы узнали навсегда,
Что кровью пахнет только кровь...
И напрасно наместник Рима
Мыл руки пред всем народом,
Под зловещие крики черни;
И шотландская королева
Напрасно с узких ладоней
Стирала красные брызги
В душном мраке царского дома...
--
Wild honey smells of freedom,
The dust--—a ray of sun,
A girl’s mouth has violet’s perfume,
and gold has none.
The mignonette smells of clearest water,
And love of apple-wood.
But we’ve found out forever after
that blood smells only of blood.
In vain the alderman of Rome
washed his hands before his men,
under their black and wrathful cries;
And in vain the Scottish queen
scours her palms of scarlet drops
in the choked gloom of the kingly home...
1934
Leningrad
Next time, I promise, it will be Nabokov.
Maybe even later tonight.
Akhmatova's picture was busy staring me down from all the poetry sites, with her razor-sharp unparted bangs, a bent nose like a boxer, hooded eyes... not a beautiful woman. Also, impossible to look away from. And born in Odessa--which anyone who knows me knows is my dream city, the one I will finally get to this summer. I will probably get my just desserts and be disappointed. But right now I am happily dreaming, in Cambridge, of an Odessan exile from earth.
But I digress: back to the poem. This was a hard poem to render into English, because a language with cases like Russian can express things a lot more economically. As you might imagine, a language with no need for clunky prepositions and articles has the upper hand in terms of meter and rhyme. Like most Russian poems, the language this untitled poem uses is sparse, and rigidly metered. I tried to reproduce that effect in addition to following the rhyme scheme in this translation. Translating poems is like walking blindfolded over a tightrope with a small child balanced on your nose--it takes an impossible amount of attention sometimes. (And sometimes you produce metaphors like that in attempting to describe it.)
Akhmatova wrote the poem in 1934, in Leningrad... students of Russian literature and history (the two are more intertwined in that particular nation than any other I can think of except Israel--but more on that later) might quail at the date, knowing that it was deep in the heart of the Stalinist Terror. Akhmatova's ex-husband, father of her child, had been executed by the Soviets; her poetry was subject to an unofficial ban that made it impossible for her to publish original work; this poem was written a year after her rumored lover, Osip Mandelstam, had written the poem that would later prove to be his death sentence (the "Stalin Epigram," nearly always introduced as "the infamous Stalin Epigram," a work with more balls than anyone thought could ever be crammed into fourteen lines). As in most of her work, she's part dour mater dolorosa, part viciously literate, all far-seeing and shrewd. Rumors flew about Akhmatova, and in particular surrounded her relations with both Pasternak and Mandelstam. Part of the rationale of Soviet authorities in censoring her work seems to have been her rumored sexual promiscuity, so it's good to know that love was just as much among her habits as grieving. And yet... It's possible that my love of twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literatures have a common factor--tragedy is their natural idiom. But I digress again. The poem is shorter than its introduction, but aren't they always?
Привольем пахнет дикий мед,
Пыль - солнечным лучом,
Фиалкою - девичий рот,
А золото - ничем.
Водою пахнет резеда,
И яблоком - любовь.
Но мы узнали навсегда,
Что кровью пахнет только кровь...
И напрасно наместник Рима
Мыл руки пред всем народом,
Под зловещие крики черни;
И шотландская королева
Напрасно с узких ладоней
Стирала красные брызги
В душном мраке царского дома...
--
Wild honey smells of freedom,
The dust--—a ray of sun,
A girl’s mouth has violet’s perfume,
and gold has none.
The mignonette smells of clearest water,
And love of apple-wood.
But we’ve found out forever after
that blood smells only of blood.
In vain the alderman of Rome
washed his hands before his men,
under their black and wrathful cries;
And in vain the Scottish queen
scours her palms of scarlet drops
in the choked gloom of the kingly home...
1934
Leningrad
Next time, I promise, it will be Nabokov.
Maybe even later tonight.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
an essay about ideas
So here's something I wrote this week about ideas. It's strange and trippy and started out as a letter to my friend Pete Davis, who is an idea man par excellence - check out his amazing idea/company here: http://www.commonplaceusa.com/ It's a little ironic to be blogging an essay that ultimately points out the failure of the Internet as a vehicle for ideas. But you work with the medium you can, right?
Anyway, I call this - well - a hybrid of an essay and a poem, dubiously historically rooted. Or: a natural history of ideas.
--
I’ve been imagining a kind of historiography of ideas: lucky for me, the big privilege of the poet is to walk through imaginary countries, with no inhabitants to take responsibility for. One thing that’s struck me about this fixation on ideas I have is that it all seems to start in the nineteenth century—the big era of progressives and their fervid projects, in the big stewpot of egalitarian America. I’m also kind of stuck on the nineteenth century--and I’ve had trouble moving on.
It’s 1750...the printing press has been around for a few hundred years, but has had little success among the little-educated masses of Europe. The serfs of Russia are still bound to their fields, toiling with little hope of recompense. The dream of freedom will wait for them for another century. In the Indies, in the new colonies of America, the slave-ships are still docking by the hundreds. And on the backs of these workers—in the drawing-rooms of the nobles, in the new coffee shops springing up all over Britain, in the freshly decked-out quarters of the new petit bourgeoisie, even in the dim study-houses of the Jews—the first birth pangs of the real idea are beginning. Ideas beforehand have a little bit of fragile history: the records and philosophies passed, hand-written, from elite hand to elite hand, the small illuminations of the monks through humanity’s enfeebled ages. But it’s long enough after Gutenberg now—a little light is peeping in. The small, ghostly mouth of the idea is beginning to speak. How strange an idea is: an entity with no counterpart on earth, born out of thought and borne on by thought, the unique province of mankind... pluripotent, but alone utterly powerless.
In the printing presses and the coffeehouses and the study rooms and the drawing rooms, aloof from the ignoble striations of the society that gave birth to them, ideas are beginning to hatch and pass from mouth to mouth and hand to hand... Romanticism, Impressionism, socialism (1840s), Lamarckian (1809) and Darwinian evolution (1859), the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Mill and Schopenhauer and Bakunin... the birth of innumerable imagined republics is beginning. And spreading, for the first time, out of the little drawing-rooms of the richest—into the public blood.
It’s a heady time—the birth of the idea. Writing about Nietzsche, Lechower, one of the first visionary Zionists, said—“What I can say of him—he found a bowl deep in his spirit and upturned the bowls of everyone else. And replaced it with his own, a bowl overbrimming with a new and beautiful essence.”
Whatever you say of Nietzsche—the nineteenth century is the time the bowl of human nature first began to be fully upset. The first imaginings of human potential—the notion that that potential could be limitless—were taking root in human hearts. Men began to look to their fellows and imagine themselves bound together as nations, began to thirst for lands in which to root that public body, free of the shackles of empire. Others looked at the seemingly impassable chasm between classes and began to imagine it pregnable. One man made a machine that could capture the human voice, speaking; another made a machine that could capture the clear image of a man, harnessing light into stillness, stamping curved glass with a truth hitherto unknowable. Out of the consciousness of individual men, that clamorous darkness we all possess, ink began streaming from pens and then from presses, all with the same new, imagined, unimaginable message: the world can be other than it is. We don’t have to accept it anymore. We, even we, with ten little fingers on two little hands, can change the whole face of the earth.
Steam poured into valves and the valves formed themselves into automobiles. Man, who had yearned from the dawn of time to sprout wings, constructed them out of wood and metal and the brittle but immeasurable force of his own ingenuity. The serfs shed their broad breeches and their ties to the brown land and became the black mass of the cities, that nervy, malleable mass they call “the people.” And the ideas streamed towards them: inchoate...unreal...unstoppable. In the nineteenth century men stopped looking back to the charred gates of Eden, and looked to create a new, perfect garden: the garden of ideas—a paradise that had never been. A peaceful and ethical garden: everything in neat rows, so carefully planted and tended that nothing could ever be as it was before. And how could it be? No one had ever attempted this!
But by the twentieth century, the paradise of ideas had become a dark garden. Socialism became Communism, raised up its red flag, and felled whole regions; the air of Europe’s countries was clotted with smoke; nationalism had showed its claws, and raked the land with greed, making colonies out of all the earth. Out of the speaking-machines and the seeing-machines blared the unified assent of thousands of voices, no man distinguishable from the great roar. Little words in the mouths of scholars and students became bullets, filling bayonets; and the earth was filled with trenches, and the trenches were draped with the bodies of young men whose ideas were draining, with their life’s blood, into the razed earth. By the middle of the century the bodies could no longer be counted: lost to ash; only a few gold teeth; innumerable under unmarked earth. Or stacked: in neat little rows. With dust filling their mouths, the dead could no longer disturb the garden of ideas; their stiff fingers would never muss the shell-pocked furrows.
But by the end of the twentieth century Europe was fatigued by blood. The flag of Communism fell over Russia, and the masses pulled Stalin down by his cold stone nose. They were weary of being the masses. They were weary of waiting for bread. They were weary of mourning their brethren. The smoke of the eternal memory flame, lit in every city and village for the fallen, stung their eyes and cleared them. The masses wanted to be men again. Each from a womb. Each with a name.
The privilege of an idea: it’s born to a man. Men’s privilege: their fathers die, and they rise up in their place. As a result, the memory of mankind is short; its little sight is poor. Even if ideas had spent themselves utterly in blood, it’s possible that someday men would forget their bankruptcy. Very few ideas are immortal, although all can be; some are as short-lived as their makers, and are blind as frogs in their last days.
Another privilege of a man: when he falls to the ground, he may lift himself up to his feet. And when he puts his hand to the ground again, he scoops up a cup of earth, and he lifts it to his mouth.
A new kind of idea began to be born: instead of turning all the earth into a paradise, man began to look inward, towards himself. By the end of the twentieth century, men had begun to doubt the sweeping power of the old ideas. They fixed every idea they saw with the stamp of its maker, the date of its origin. They looked deeply at their hands: they saw a tracery of veins, each leading in to a sole, inviolable center. And they said: no two men can be connected at the heart and survive; how then can we say this of whole nations?
They did not seek, any more, to shake the earth down and rebuild it again. They wrote new ideas in the fog of their breath on their mirrors, and they kissed their own lips. From their lips emerged a new song: the song of gain. The song of gain issues from one mouth, alone; but when men sing it in their thousands, the whole earth trembles with its discordant music.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had given men the earth: had filled maps with names, had filled the names with teeming cities; had filled each man’s mind with his own importance. A pity in man: the bride of self-importance is avarice, that hungriest of sirens. The engines that had begun to work in the nineteenth century grew fatter still on the earth’s deep reserves, and the rivers grew sick and blenched and gushed filth. Slender steel trees sliced the sky of cities into ribbons. And most remarkable of all: from the speaking-machines and the seeing-machines men created thinking-machines. They could think but little. They could see nothing, unaided. Really, they were nothing but mirrors—mirrors that men might fill with pictures no one could have imagined before. With the aid of these thinking mirrors, men could stamp their names on the air, could sing the small songs of their own importance. Ideas that might have seemed immutable—earth-changing—in the nineteenth century now flashed quick as flames and were gone, sliced into ribbons by the unstoppable mirrors.
And the pictures continue to flash. And still men sign their names on the cold, cold glass.
I will tell you who I am: I am a woman in a mirror. Each day I see my own memory cut into thinner and thinner ribbons. I am weary of signing my own name on the air. Fragile collection of syllables that it is, it grows weary with use.
I will tell you what I want: I want to turn away from the mirror. I want to walk back now: I am weary of the path we’ve taken. Most of all, I am weary of looking only at myself.
I turn away from the mirror and I look out to the street: sleeping in houses are my brothers and sisters, lying awake under cold stars are my brothers and sisters, stooping in hot sun far away are my brothers and sisters. Each from a womb. Each with a name.
Brothers and sisters: I want to turn back to the birthplace of ideas. I don’t want to wind up the bloody spool of the twentieth century—even if I could. But I’m sick and tired of the song of gain: a poor song with one discordant note, with one weary refrain.
Before it’s gone, I want to lean down to the ground and pick up a handful of earth. I want to stand up on my own two feet and cup my hand to my mouth.
I look down at my two dusty hands: the pallid skin, the tracery of veins. I listen to my blood. In my blood is an old song. Many of us have forgotten it; the first singers are long dead. But it’s there, pulsing, hovering, just under the fingernails:
The world can be other than it is. We don’t have to accept it anymore. We, even we, with ten little fingers on two little hands, can change the whole face of the earth.
Anyway, I call this - well - a hybrid of an essay and a poem, dubiously historically rooted. Or: a natural history of ideas.
--
I’ve been imagining a kind of historiography of ideas: lucky for me, the big privilege of the poet is to walk through imaginary countries, with no inhabitants to take responsibility for. One thing that’s struck me about this fixation on ideas I have is that it all seems to start in the nineteenth century—the big era of progressives and their fervid projects, in the big stewpot of egalitarian America. I’m also kind of stuck on the nineteenth century--and I’ve had trouble moving on.
It’s 1750...the printing press has been around for a few hundred years, but has had little success among the little-educated masses of Europe. The serfs of Russia are still bound to their fields, toiling with little hope of recompense. The dream of freedom will wait for them for another century. In the Indies, in the new colonies of America, the slave-ships are still docking by the hundreds. And on the backs of these workers—in the drawing-rooms of the nobles, in the new coffee shops springing up all over Britain, in the freshly decked-out quarters of the new petit bourgeoisie, even in the dim study-houses of the Jews—the first birth pangs of the real idea are beginning. Ideas beforehand have a little bit of fragile history: the records and philosophies passed, hand-written, from elite hand to elite hand, the small illuminations of the monks through humanity’s enfeebled ages. But it’s long enough after Gutenberg now—a little light is peeping in. The small, ghostly mouth of the idea is beginning to speak. How strange an idea is: an entity with no counterpart on earth, born out of thought and borne on by thought, the unique province of mankind... pluripotent, but alone utterly powerless.
In the printing presses and the coffeehouses and the study rooms and the drawing rooms, aloof from the ignoble striations of the society that gave birth to them, ideas are beginning to hatch and pass from mouth to mouth and hand to hand... Romanticism, Impressionism, socialism (1840s), Lamarckian (1809) and Darwinian evolution (1859), the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Mill and Schopenhauer and Bakunin... the birth of innumerable imagined republics is beginning. And spreading, for the first time, out of the little drawing-rooms of the richest—into the public blood.
It’s a heady time—the birth of the idea. Writing about Nietzsche, Lechower, one of the first visionary Zionists, said—“What I can say of him—he found a bowl deep in his spirit and upturned the bowls of everyone else. And replaced it with his own, a bowl overbrimming with a new and beautiful essence.”
Whatever you say of Nietzsche—the nineteenth century is the time the bowl of human nature first began to be fully upset. The first imaginings of human potential—the notion that that potential could be limitless—were taking root in human hearts. Men began to look to their fellows and imagine themselves bound together as nations, began to thirst for lands in which to root that public body, free of the shackles of empire. Others looked at the seemingly impassable chasm between classes and began to imagine it pregnable. One man made a machine that could capture the human voice, speaking; another made a machine that could capture the clear image of a man, harnessing light into stillness, stamping curved glass with a truth hitherto unknowable. Out of the consciousness of individual men, that clamorous darkness we all possess, ink began streaming from pens and then from presses, all with the same new, imagined, unimaginable message: the world can be other than it is. We don’t have to accept it anymore. We, even we, with ten little fingers on two little hands, can change the whole face of the earth.
Steam poured into valves and the valves formed themselves into automobiles. Man, who had yearned from the dawn of time to sprout wings, constructed them out of wood and metal and the brittle but immeasurable force of his own ingenuity. The serfs shed their broad breeches and their ties to the brown land and became the black mass of the cities, that nervy, malleable mass they call “the people.” And the ideas streamed towards them: inchoate...unreal...unstoppable. In the nineteenth century men stopped looking back to the charred gates of Eden, and looked to create a new, perfect garden: the garden of ideas—a paradise that had never been. A peaceful and ethical garden: everything in neat rows, so carefully planted and tended that nothing could ever be as it was before. And how could it be? No one had ever attempted this!
But by the twentieth century, the paradise of ideas had become a dark garden. Socialism became Communism, raised up its red flag, and felled whole regions; the air of Europe’s countries was clotted with smoke; nationalism had showed its claws, and raked the land with greed, making colonies out of all the earth. Out of the speaking-machines and the seeing-machines blared the unified assent of thousands of voices, no man distinguishable from the great roar. Little words in the mouths of scholars and students became bullets, filling bayonets; and the earth was filled with trenches, and the trenches were draped with the bodies of young men whose ideas were draining, with their life’s blood, into the razed earth. By the middle of the century the bodies could no longer be counted: lost to ash; only a few gold teeth; innumerable under unmarked earth. Or stacked: in neat little rows. With dust filling their mouths, the dead could no longer disturb the garden of ideas; their stiff fingers would never muss the shell-pocked furrows.
But by the end of the twentieth century Europe was fatigued by blood. The flag of Communism fell over Russia, and the masses pulled Stalin down by his cold stone nose. They were weary of being the masses. They were weary of waiting for bread. They were weary of mourning their brethren. The smoke of the eternal memory flame, lit in every city and village for the fallen, stung their eyes and cleared them. The masses wanted to be men again. Each from a womb. Each with a name.
The privilege of an idea: it’s born to a man. Men’s privilege: their fathers die, and they rise up in their place. As a result, the memory of mankind is short; its little sight is poor. Even if ideas had spent themselves utterly in blood, it’s possible that someday men would forget their bankruptcy. Very few ideas are immortal, although all can be; some are as short-lived as their makers, and are blind as frogs in their last days.
Another privilege of a man: when he falls to the ground, he may lift himself up to his feet. And when he puts his hand to the ground again, he scoops up a cup of earth, and he lifts it to his mouth.
A new kind of idea began to be born: instead of turning all the earth into a paradise, man began to look inward, towards himself. By the end of the twentieth century, men had begun to doubt the sweeping power of the old ideas. They fixed every idea they saw with the stamp of its maker, the date of its origin. They looked deeply at their hands: they saw a tracery of veins, each leading in to a sole, inviolable center. And they said: no two men can be connected at the heart and survive; how then can we say this of whole nations?
They did not seek, any more, to shake the earth down and rebuild it again. They wrote new ideas in the fog of their breath on their mirrors, and they kissed their own lips. From their lips emerged a new song: the song of gain. The song of gain issues from one mouth, alone; but when men sing it in their thousands, the whole earth trembles with its discordant music.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had given men the earth: had filled maps with names, had filled the names with teeming cities; had filled each man’s mind with his own importance. A pity in man: the bride of self-importance is avarice, that hungriest of sirens. The engines that had begun to work in the nineteenth century grew fatter still on the earth’s deep reserves, and the rivers grew sick and blenched and gushed filth. Slender steel trees sliced the sky of cities into ribbons. And most remarkable of all: from the speaking-machines and the seeing-machines men created thinking-machines. They could think but little. They could see nothing, unaided. Really, they were nothing but mirrors—mirrors that men might fill with pictures no one could have imagined before. With the aid of these thinking mirrors, men could stamp their names on the air, could sing the small songs of their own importance. Ideas that might have seemed immutable—earth-changing—in the nineteenth century now flashed quick as flames and were gone, sliced into ribbons by the unstoppable mirrors.
And the pictures continue to flash. And still men sign their names on the cold, cold glass.
I will tell you who I am: I am a woman in a mirror. Each day I see my own memory cut into thinner and thinner ribbons. I am weary of signing my own name on the air. Fragile collection of syllables that it is, it grows weary with use.
I will tell you what I want: I want to turn away from the mirror. I want to walk back now: I am weary of the path we’ve taken. Most of all, I am weary of looking only at myself.
I turn away from the mirror and I look out to the street: sleeping in houses are my brothers and sisters, lying awake under cold stars are my brothers and sisters, stooping in hot sun far away are my brothers and sisters. Each from a womb. Each with a name.
Brothers and sisters: I want to turn back to the birthplace of ideas. I don’t want to wind up the bloody spool of the twentieth century—even if I could. But I’m sick and tired of the song of gain: a poor song with one discordant note, with one weary refrain.
Before it’s gone, I want to lean down to the ground and pick up a handful of earth. I want to stand up on my own two feet and cup my hand to my mouth.
I look down at my two dusty hands: the pallid skin, the tracery of veins. I listen to my blood. In my blood is an old song. Many of us have forgotten it; the first singers are long dead. But it’s there, pulsing, hovering, just under the fingernails:
The world can be other than it is. We don’t have to accept it anymore. We, even we, with ten little fingers on two little hands, can change the whole face of the earth.
hello friends.
I decided to start a new blog. I feel ambivalent about this project-- the Internet is already clotted with vanity projects, etc. etc. -- but I also have a lot of ideas and the occasional unprompted essay cluttering up my word processor, Facebook doesn't seem like the appropriate medium to convey serious thought, and, well, what's a girl of the "me" generation without her own heaping helping of vanity?
So here is a blog.
The title, in case anyone is curious, is based off an extraordinary stanza from an extraordinary poem. It's by Ilya Kaminsky, a Ukrainian-American poet and one of my personal heroes (he's partially deaf and speaks with this thrilling, super-loud Slavic slur that's to die for--cf. recordings here http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/poems/ilya_kaminsky_at_bowdoin_college_february_2_2006.shtml). The poem is called "My Father Between Yes and No," it's very long and glorious and also Googlable, and to my knowledge unfinished. Here is the stanza:
" I imagined myself a caravella
sinking towards sleep,
four-years-old on a summer night,
listening for my father's return.
He steps into the darkened room,
touches my cheek.
Father the wind. Child the boat.
Wind touches the sail!
In the morning secretly, in his ear,
I whisper the dream.
And he smiles, saying, Lada.
"Dear" and "Ship," two words in one,
dynasty of green light.
A word harbor welcomes us, saying:
in this we can hide, we can live.
Lada, my father's voice. This sea.
This sail. This tender wind. "
"A word harbor welcomes us": I've felt the longing for that word harbor since I could read, I think; call it the product of a troubled mind or an active intellect (often hard to distinguish, let's be honest), my literacy has always been hungry, restless, full of an animating desire for refuge. I hope to write a novel this summer. A lot of writers say that reading is the key to writing well, that if you read enough, the words fill you up and start tumbling out of their own accord. I think this is true to a certain extent. Really Good Writing, the kind worth the capitalization, certainly sets my nerves stinging. Sometimes, when I'm reading something transcendent, I go outside and my blood is so excited I get a kind of auditory hallucination: I imagine I can hear the hiss of plants growing, and the cars rushing by sound like the surf. I've spent a lot of hours of my little life reading, and all those words upon words are, well, present. Even emphatically. And maybe jostling out. But there's a lot of audacity in turning from the reading to the writing--in saying, I can create a word harbor for others, instead of just resting in one already made for me. It's pretty crass to assume you're worthy of an artistic destiny (or any destiny or calling at all). Desire has a lot to do with it, but I have also got to summon up the chutzpah from my tummy. Which may be overlarge, but quails easily.
So this is a space--impermanent, easy to click on, easy to overlook, and maybe just for myself--to put a hold on the frightening assumption of that destiny and get to work thinking out loud.
I hope to write posts in the next few days about:
the history of ideas since the nineteenth century;
why I hate Vladimir Nabokov;
some kind of breathless hagiography of Ilya Kaminsky and/or Isaac Babel;
a few musings on Hebrew poetry in the early twentieth century;
a confused 'how-to' for defining yourself against a canvas of generational apathy;
what I learned herding sheep for a summer;
and other things that will be determined by unpredictable measures.
It's the province of the poet--and now, the blogger--to create imaginary countries with abandon, with no inhabitants to take responsibility for, and furnish it with wonky and imperfect inventions. I intend to fill this blog with wonky inventions, and I hope to hear some of yours, too.
-Talia
So here is a blog.
The title, in case anyone is curious, is based off an extraordinary stanza from an extraordinary poem. It's by Ilya Kaminsky, a Ukrainian-American poet and one of my personal heroes (he's partially deaf and speaks with this thrilling, super-loud Slavic slur that's to die for--cf. recordings here http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/poems/ilya_kaminsky_at_bowdoin_college_february_2_2006.shtml). The poem is called "My Father Between Yes and No," it's very long and glorious and also Googlable, and to my knowledge unfinished. Here is the stanza:
" I imagined myself a caravella
sinking towards sleep,
four-years-old on a summer night,
listening for my father's return.
He steps into the darkened room,
touches my cheek.
Father the wind. Child the boat.
Wind touches the sail!
In the morning secretly, in his ear,
I whisper the dream.
And he smiles, saying, Lada.
"Dear" and "Ship," two words in one,
dynasty of green light.
A word harbor welcomes us, saying:
in this we can hide, we can live.
Lada, my father's voice. This sea.
This sail. This tender wind. "
"A word harbor welcomes us": I've felt the longing for that word harbor since I could read, I think; call it the product of a troubled mind or an active intellect (often hard to distinguish, let's be honest), my literacy has always been hungry, restless, full of an animating desire for refuge. I hope to write a novel this summer. A lot of writers say that reading is the key to writing well, that if you read enough, the words fill you up and start tumbling out of their own accord. I think this is true to a certain extent. Really Good Writing, the kind worth the capitalization, certainly sets my nerves stinging. Sometimes, when I'm reading something transcendent, I go outside and my blood is so excited I get a kind of auditory hallucination: I imagine I can hear the hiss of plants growing, and the cars rushing by sound like the surf. I've spent a lot of hours of my little life reading, and all those words upon words are, well, present. Even emphatically. And maybe jostling out. But there's a lot of audacity in turning from the reading to the writing--in saying, I can create a word harbor for others, instead of just resting in one already made for me. It's pretty crass to assume you're worthy of an artistic destiny (or any destiny or calling at all). Desire has a lot to do with it, but I have also got to summon up the chutzpah from my tummy. Which may be overlarge, but quails easily.
So this is a space--impermanent, easy to click on, easy to overlook, and maybe just for myself--to put a hold on the frightening assumption of that destiny and get to work thinking out loud.
I hope to write posts in the next few days about:
the history of ideas since the nineteenth century;
why I hate Vladimir Nabokov;
some kind of breathless hagiography of Ilya Kaminsky and/or Isaac Babel;
a few musings on Hebrew poetry in the early twentieth century;
a confused 'how-to' for defining yourself against a canvas of generational apathy;
what I learned herding sheep for a summer;
and other things that will be determined by unpredictable measures.
It's the province of the poet--and now, the blogger--to create imaginary countries with abandon, with no inhabitants to take responsibility for, and furnish it with wonky and imperfect inventions. I intend to fill this blog with wonky inventions, and I hope to hear some of yours, too.
-Talia
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