Anne Carson

Hunting for Clues in (of) the Interior

April 16, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “She Got a Lot Out of Those Physics and Shop Classes,” by Alan Levine; located this clue to someone’s interior at Flickr, naturally, and share it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) Posted there about 10 years ago, the image seems to have been one of a daily series — all telling (one enigmatic story? several enigmatic stories?) of a woman named Lori. The story itself seems to be in rough-draft form — typos, ever so slightly “off” phrasing, and so on — and I’m guessing it went straight from Levine’s keyboard, to the Flicker post, without an intervening spell-check and so on. But it was an interesting story nonetheless, and, most importantly, I do like this still life… especially as metaphor.]

From whiskey river (highlighted stanzas):

Wildly Constant
(excerpt)

The first thing I saw
the first morning I went out for a walk in Stykkishólmur
was a crow

as big as a chair.
What’s that chair doing on top of that house? I thought
then it flapped away.

A crow that big is called a raven.
Corvus corax in Linnaeus’s binomial system.
Each one makes a sound

like a whole townful of ravens
in the country I come from.
Three adjectives that recur

in the literature on ravens are
omnivorous.
Pernicious.

Monogamous.
I’m interested in monogamous.
I got married last May

and had my honeymoon in Stykkishólmur.
This year I returned to Stykkishólmur
to live with my husband

for three months in one small room.
This extreme monogamy
proved almost too much for us.

Rather than murder each other
we rented a second place
(Greta’s house)

near the pool.
Now we are happily
duogamous.

There are ravens on the roof
of both places.
Perhaps they are the same ravens.

…

I should learn more about signs.
I came to Stykkishólmur
to live in a library.

The library contains not books
but glaciers.
The glaciers are upright.

Silent.
As perfectly ordered as books would be.
But they are melted.

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.

…I
stand amid glaciers.
Listen to the wind outside

falling towards me from the outer edges of night and space.I have no theory
of why we are here

or what any of us is a sign of.
But a room of melted glaciers
rocking in the nightwind of Stykkishólmur

is a good place to ponder it.
Each glacier is lit from underneath
as memory is.

Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is the daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses

and there is a deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart

involuntarily.
At sudden times.
For surprise reasons.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Proust wrote
in 1913:
We think we no longer love our dead

but that is because we do not remember them:
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove

and burst into tears.

(Anne Carson [source — do consider reading the entire long poem!])

…and:

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

[Read more…]

Give Yourself Time, Because Time Doesn’t Give Itself to You

March 1, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “#everydaybandw 443,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) It seems to speak for itself, especially once you understand the context.]

From whiskey river:

TIME PASSES TIME does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes. Time passing and gazing. Time has no gaze. Time as perseverance. Time as hunger. Time in a natural way. Time when you were six the day a mountain. Mountain time. Time I don’t remember. Time for a dog in an alley caught in the beam of your flashlight. Time not a video. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time smeared under the eyes of the miners as they rattle down into the mine. Time if you are bankrupt. Time if you are Prometheus. Time if you are all the little tubes on the roots of a gorse plant sucking greenish black moistures up into new scribbled continents. Time it takes for the postal clerk to apply her lipstick at the back of the post office before the supervisor returns. Time it takes for a cow to tip over. Time in jail. Time as overcoats in a closet. Time for a herd of turkeys skidding and surprised on ice. All the time that has soaked into the walls here. Time between the little clicks. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of the stars. Time for the man at the bus stop standing on one leg to tie his shoe. Time taking Night by the hand and trotting off down the road. Time passes oh boy. Time got the jump on me yes it did.

(Anne Carson [source])

…and:

The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them—those are you, those are why you are in the world.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Bad People

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks—what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams—that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god—who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

(Robert Bly [source])

[Read more…]

Never Far Below the Surface, Bubbling Out

July 25, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Lion and Sculptor, by Katsushika Hokusai. This is not one of the 200-odd lion drawings referred to below, but I do like the spirit it shows. See the note at the foot of this post for more information.]

From whiskey river:

Hokusai

Anger is a bitter lock
But you can turn it.

Hokusai aged 83
said,
Time to do my lions.

Every morning
until he died

219 days later
he made
a lion.

Wind came gusting from the northwest.

Lions swayed
and leapt
from the crests

of the pine trees
onto

the snowy road
or crashed
together

over his hut,
their white paws

mauling stars
on the way down.

I continue to draw
hoping for a peaceful day,

said Hokusai
as they thudded past.

(Anne Carson [source])

…and:

From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At one hundred, I shall be a marvelous artist. At one hundred and ten, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self ‘The Old Man Mad About Drawing.’

(Hokusai Katsushika [source (in slightly different words)])

…and (italicized portion; excerpt):

11

Like clouds, once gone in their long drift,
there’s no coming back—
And like the wind that moves them, we stop
Wherever we please, or wherever we come to be,
Each one in his proper place,
not too near, not too far
From That’s okay and No one was ever interested enough.

How many years have slipped through our hands?
At least as many as the constellations we still can identify.
The quarter moon, like a light skiff,
floats out of the mist-remnants
Of last night’s hard rain.
It, too, will slip through our fingers
with no ripple, without us in it.

How is it it’s taken me almost a lifetime to come to the fact
That heaven and earth have no favorites
in either extreme?
Bits of us set out, at one time or another, in both directions,
Sleeping fitfully, heads on our fists,
Now close together and warm, now cold in the south sky.

Each one arrives in his own fashion,
each one with his birthmark
Beginning to take shape and shine out
And lead forth like a lead lamp.
Look for us in the black spaces, somewhere in the outer dark.

(Charles Wright [source])

[Read more…]

The Devil(s) You Don’t Know

June 13, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Cadejos,” hand-painted etching on paper, by Todd Freeman; found on Flickr.
(Click to enlarge.) For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

(Neil Gaiman [source])

…and:

My definition of a devil is a god who has not been recognized. That is to say, it is a power in you to which you have not given expression, and you push it back. And then, like all repressed energy, it builds up and becomes completely dangerous to the position you’re trying to hold.

(Joseph Campbell [source])

…and:

To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.

(Anne Carson [source])

[Read more…]

At Sea

June 6, 2014 by John 3 Comments

[Image: “It Wasn’t Unfulfillment, But Rather Conscious Decisions on Their Path to Happiness,”
a photo by user “skrubu” (Pekka Nikrus) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.
For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(David Foster Wallace [source])

…and (same link as above):

If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles — to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are — is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is simply because we are here. The situation can be likened to that of a group of intelligent fish who one day begin wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe, they suggest, there are many other worlds, some of them completely dry, some wet, and everything in between.

Some of the fish grudgingly accept this explanation. Some feel relieved. Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned. Because there is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

(Alan Lightman [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Ond day someone noticed there were stars but no words, why? I’ve asked a lot of people, I think it is a good question. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the bluegreen shoots and the plant called ‘audacity’ that poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

(Anne Carson [source, but quoted here and elsewhere])

[Read more…]