Much is misnomer in our present way of grasping the world.
“
| — | from Red Doc> by Anne Carson |
Here, in other words, at the heart of the maelstrom threatening to suck in the whole of the civilised world, is a pathetic conspiracy of denial; a denial of responsibility which has turned in on itself and gone sour, manifesting itself in the sort of pompous defensiveness I have encountered so often.
Weird Literary Coincidences
I’m reading The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt right now and in it the narrator, Iris Vegan, is given a book by a friend:
…a volume of poems called Unearth by an American poet I had never heard of.
Turns out Unearth is a now out of print poetry collection by Paul Auster, to whom Hustvedt is married and The Blindfold dedicated. (The poems from Unearth are now included in Paul Auster Collected Poems.)
Weirdly, I picked up Auster’s Leviathan at a Goodwill this week while dropping off some old clothes. In it is this description of a character named Iris:
Iris was just twenty-four back then, a dazzling blond presence, six feet tall with an exquisite Scandinavian face and the deepest, merriest blue eyes to be found between heaven and hell. How could I have guessed that she was a graduate student in English literature at Columbia University? How could I have known that she had read more books than I had and was about to begin a six-hundred-page dissertation on the works of Charles Dickens?
That description matches Iris from The Blindfold as well as Hustvedt herself, right down to the Dickens dissertation. Furthermore, Hustvedt’s mother’s maiden name is Vegan (see bio).
Books are fun.
We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.
“
| — | From The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt. |
Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality….
“
| — | From Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie |
From fifty years of experience in the art of getting along in the world, he had learned that mediocrity was the secret of contentment.
“
| — | from Volcano by Shusaku Endo |
The partially deaf know like cellmates the frequencies at which their heads ring.
“
| — |
From The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I find that sentence completely fantastic for some reason. And, yes, I realize I’m a decade late on this book, but still. |
Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.
Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
“
| — | It’s random Kafka aphorism time (this was 75). |
I found this tattered old copy of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in my building’s basement. It’s falling apart, the pages are brittle, and there are random blue ink scribbles throughout, but it was free.
I’m reading Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, and, without giving away any of the plot, there’s a story-within-a-story thing (actually, several) that I kept thinking to myself would make a great book on its own. Then I realized I was already reading that great book. Weird.
A man is all men.
You have no right to your wretchedness.
You have no right to your wretchedness.
“
| — | Uttered by the title character in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree. |
I won’t take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar.
“
| — | from To a Contemporary Bunkshooter by Carl Sandburg. |
So I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. “Wild” as in wild ecosystems—richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At the root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read “language”) a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? Observation, reflection, and practice show artistic process to be the latter.
“
| — | Gary Snyder in the essay Unnatural Writing, from A Place in Space. |
