Nicole Krauss

Only the Heart of the Matter Genuinely Matters

August 14, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Enigma with Key, Ocean Falls, BC,” by user “adavey” (Alan Davey) on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) From the photographer’s caption there: “Someone must have a quirky sense of humor and enough spare time to do something with it. The key behind the glass is attached to a door. Farther down the door, and not shown here, is a hasp with a padlock. What we don’t know is whether the key opens the padlock. In some places, this installation would be considered art. I’ve seen worse stuff at the Whitney Biennial. Here in the real world, it doesn’t really matter, because at the moment the padlock isn’t locked.”]

From whiskey river:

Nocturne II
August arrives in the dark
we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

What matters is that you allow your heart—not your ego—to rule your life. Then very little matters because you will be a humble person and you’ll take most of life as it comes. If it rains, you get wet; if they don’t show up on time, you wait; if they don’t pay you, you eat less; if they don’t love you, so what, you didn’t come to please them anyway; if they don’t think you’re special, that’s marvelous, it frees you from having to thank them for their compliments. If life doesn’t go the way you want, accept the way it does go, use it as your teacher.

(Stuart Wilde [source])

…and:

The less we cling to one side of reality—betting on either or or, arguing for for or against—the more we can be aware of the exquisite counterpoint of things. Everything matters: how we vote, how we tie our shoelaces, how we respond to the faintest whisper of a thought. And nothing matters, because (look!) it’s already gone. When we understand this, we’re home free.

(Stephen Mitchell [source])

…and:

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

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Large, Containing Multitudes

June 26, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “DCI Mooreland,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) To see the microfiction behind its title, refer to the original in my SmugMug “#jesstorypix” gallery; just click on the title at the bottom of the photo, and the story will appear at the left or bottom (depending on your screen’s orientation).]

From whiskey river:

“Shoot, I can’t remember her name. What is her name? Darn, here she comes. What is it… Sally… Sue? She just told me yesterday. What’s the matter with me? This is going to be embarrassing.”
In case you haven’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important? And if right now you are hearing, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any voice inside my head!”—that’s the voice we’re talking about.

(Michael A. Singer [source])

…and:

Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree a castle.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people… Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time. Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.

(Jandy Nelson [source])

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Breakables

June 5, 2020 by John 2 Comments

[Image: This post’s original title was Things Pass Away. Eventually that changed, obviously, but the phrase stuck in my head. Whence, I wondered, did I remember that “things pass away” phrase? A Google search provided ambiguous results: the full phrase appeared to be either “ALL things pass away,” or “OLD things pass away.” So I turned to the Google Ngram viewer, which counts the number of occurrences over time of one or more phrases, across the entire corpus of books scanned into Google Books OCR-searchable form. The results were illuminating — indicating (to me, at least) that the English-speaking world is much more cynical these days than it was prior to, say, 1860 or so: the proportion of references to the impermanence of ALL things has remained more or less unchanged over time, but the importance of singling out OLD things as temporary, well, who cares about them, anyhow? (More thoughts on this in the note below.)]

From whiskey river:

How Angels Sleep. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude…

Also, they don’t dream. For this reason, they have one less thing to talk about. In a backward way, when they wake up they feel as if there is something they are forgetting to tell each other. There is disagreement among the angels as to whether this is a result of something vestigial, or whether it is the result of the empathy they feel for the Living, so powerful it sometimes makes them weep. In general, they fall into these two camps on the subject of dreams. Even among the angels, there is the sadness of division.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

Microcosmos
When we first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it’s still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them.
But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.
The glass doesn’t even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.
To say they’re many isn’t saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they’re multiplied.
They don’t even have decent innards.
They don’t know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are—or aren’t.
Still they decide our life and death.
Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don’t know what their moment is.
Since they’re so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.
A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a farflung labyrinth
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.
I’ve wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it’s a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.

(Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh [source])

…and:

The Outcry
What I want to do is shout. Happiness? No.
Outrage? No. What I want to do is shout
because we were all wrong, because the point
was not the point, because the world, or what
we took for the world, is breaking, breaking. We were wrong
and are not right. Break! Break! We are here!
What I want to do is shout! Break! Shout!

(William Bronk [source, apparently, but unconfirmed])

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“I See,” Said the Blind Man (As He Picked Up His Hammer and Saw)

May 22, 2015 by John 2 Comments

[Image: Eudoxia, by “Zike Questi.” For more information, see the note at the foot of this post. To enlarge, click the image; to see the thing in its full-size glory, right-click here and select “Open in a New Tab/Window” (or your browser’s counterpart). Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing other than the apparition of the non-apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the utterance of the unutterable, the access to the inaccessible, the intellection of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the beyond-essence, the form of the formless, the measure of the immeasurable, the number of the unnumbered, the weight of the weightless, the materialization of the spiritual, the visibility of the invisible, the place of the placeless, the time of the timeless, the definition of the infinite, the circumscription of the uncircumscribed, and the other things which are both conceived and perceived by the intellect alone and cannot be retained within the recesses of memory and which escape the blade of the mind.

(John Scotus Eriugen [source (among others)])

…and:

The Now is as it is because it cannot be otherwise. What Buddhists have always known, physicists now confirm: there are no isolated things or events. Underneath the surface appearance, all things are interconnected, are part of the totality of the cosmos that has brought about the form that this moment takes.

(Eckhart Tolle [source])

…and (from whiskey river):

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

[Read more…]

Feeling Your Way

March 28, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: cartoon by David Sipress, from The New Yorker (July 31, 2000). Original here.]

From whiskey river:

Goods

It’s the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and:

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

298

A monk said, “In the day there is sunlight, at night there is firelight. What is ‘divine light’?”

The master said, “Sunlight, firelight.”

(uncredited [source])

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Eye-Openings

February 21, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Awakening in the Snow,” by user InnocentEyez on Flickr.com (photograph of sculpture, The Awakening, by J. Seward Johnson). Reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Franz Kafka is Dead

He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down. “Come down!” they cried to him. “Come down! Come down!” Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. “I can’t,” he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. “Why?” they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. “Because then you’ll stop asking for me.” The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children’s hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers’ shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn’t wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.

That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone.

They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It’s said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself — to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed & then to find yourself still in bed.

(C. S. Lewis [source])

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The Clarity of Surprise

December 13, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Sign in Woods,” by user dibytes (Diane Hammond) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons License. For more information, see the photographer’s note on the photo’s Flickr page.]

From whiskey river:

The Reverse Side
The reverse side also has a reverse side — Japanese proverb

It’s why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is—the opposite
of what we said.

And perhaps why as we fall in love
we’re already falling out of it.

It’s why the terrified and the simple
latch onto one story,
just one version of the great mystery.

Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to rein things in—
the snapshot, the lie of the frame.

How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live with the circle, the ellipsis, the word
not yet written.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

…and (italicized portion):

…“astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

…and:

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

[Read more…]