Costs of Creation

From whiskey river:

The Midnight Club

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon’s light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

(Mark Strand, The Continuous Life [source])

…and:

The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what’s coming; never. That’s the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it’s hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you’ll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you’d have missed it if you’d given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone.

(Allen Wheelis, from The Illusionless Man [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

(William Saroyan)

…and:

The Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart

I’m bouncing across the Scottish heath in a rented Morris Minor
and listening to an interview with Rat Scabies, drummer
of the first punk band, The Damned, and Mr. Scabies,
who’s probably 50 or so and living comfortably on royalties,
is as recalcitrant as ever, as full of despair and self-loathing,

but the interviewer won’t have it, and he keeps calling him “Rattie,”
saying, “Ah, Rattie, it’s all a bit of a put-on, isn’t it?”
and “Ah, you’re just pulling the old leg now, aren’t you, Rattie?”
to which Mr. Scabies keeps saying things like
“We’re fooked, ya daft prat. Oh, yeah, absolutely — fooked!”

Funny old Rattie — he believed in nothing, which is something.
If it weren’t for summat, there’d be naught, as they say
in that part of the world. I wonder if his dad wasn’t a bit of a bastard,
didn’t drink himself to death, say, as opposed to a dad like mine,
who, though also dead now, was as nice as he could be when he was alive.

A month before, I’d been in Florence and walked by the casa di cura where
my son Will was born 27 years ago, though it’s not a hospital
now but a home for the old nuns of Le Suore Minime del Sacra Cuore
who helped to deliver and bathe and care for him when he was just
a few minutes old, and when I look over the gate, I see three

of these holy sisters sitting in the garden there, and I wave at them,
and they wave back, and I wonder if they were on duty
when Will was born, these women who have had no sex at all,
probably not even very much candy, yet who believe in something
that may be nothing, after all, though I love them for giving me my boy.

They’re dozing and talking, these mystical brides of Christ,
and thinking about their Husband, and it looks to me
as though they’re having their version of the sacra conversazione,
a favorite subject of Renaissance artists in which people who care
for one another are painted chatting together about noble things,

and I’m wondering if, as I walk by later when the shadows are long,
will their white faces be like stars against their black habits,
the three of them a constellation about to rise into the vault
that arches over Tuscany, the fires there now twinkling,
now steadfast in the chambered heart of the sky.

(David Kirby [source])

Finally, a reminder about the razor-thin line between observer and participant, courtesy of the Brothers Coen (this is “Tuileries,” their contribution to the anthology film Paris, Je T’Aime):