[Image: “PADC12-15 Being stripped,” the enigmatic title of this work by a photographer who identifies himself — at least on Flickr — as “(T)imothep.” The piece was offered there under a Creative Commons license (thank you!), and of course that’s how I’ve reused it here.]
From whiskey river (italicized lines):
Advice to Myself #2: Resistance
Resist the thought that you may need a savior,
or another special being to walk beside you.
Resist the thought that you are alone.
Resist turning your back on the knife
of the world’s sorrow,
resist turning that knife upon yourself.
Resist your disappearance
into sentimental monikers,
into the violent pattern of corporate logos,
into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.
Resist being consumed.
Resist your disappearance
into anything except
the face you had before you walked up to the podium.
Resist all funding sources but accept all money.
Cut the strings and dismantle the web
that needing money throws over you.
Resist the distractions of excess.
Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.
Resist your genius and your own significance
as declared by others.
Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade
as tributes to your double.
Walk away in your unpurchased skin.
Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.
Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book —
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.
Resist all pressure to have children
unless you crave the torment of joy.
If you give in to irrationality, then
resist cleaning up the messes your children make.
You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.
Resist cleaning up after your husband.
It will soon replace having sex with him.
Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.
However you can, rely on sun and wind.
Resist loss of the miraculous
by lowering your standards
for what constitutes a miracle.
It is all a fucking miracle.
Resist your own gift’s power
to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.
Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,
so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,
or to get a laugh.
Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.
Resist all chairs.
Be the one sitting on the ground
or perching on the beam overhead
or sleeping beneath the podium.
Resist disappearing from the stage,
unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,
the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face
that has become your own, though all your life
you have resisted it.
(Louise Erdrich [source])
The next selection doesn’t come from whiskey river at all. In this scene of the novel, a wealthy middle=-aged industrialist has returned, during a ferociously cold snowstorm, to his hometown in North Dakota; he spends a semi-nostalgic night on a frozen lake, in an ice-fishing hut. While out there he is visited by a figure familiar to him from childhood nightmares, who says:
You, sir, derive less real pleasure from this world than anybody who’s ever come through here. You are blind and deaf and cold to the touch and you have no taste and music and poetry and good cooking are lost on you. You’re all tied up in knots about money and getting old and the daily insult of the bathroom mirror. You walk down city streets with no eye for your fellow citizens, you are offered magnificent music and exit early so you won’t get caught in traffic. You think happiness is somewhere out in the future but you have no more idea what it is than you could explain radioactivity. You are a man of stunning ineptitude. Your daddy knew about engines, plumbing, hydraulics and arc welding and pouring concrete, gutting a deer, cleaning a walleye, digging a fish hook out of your thumb, not to get rich but just to get by, and here you are and you feel superior to him and you can’t pour piss out of a boot when the instructions are printed on the sole… You walk through life like you’re waiting for it to begin any day now. And it’s almost over.
(Garrison Keillor [source])
…and (from a different novel):
The thoughts she considers real come to her when she is alone or taking the child for a walk in the stroller. For her, real thoughts do not concern people’s ways of speaking and dressing, the height of sidewalks for the stroller, the ban on Jean Genet’s The Screens, or the war in Vietnam. They are questions about herself, being and having, existence. Real thoughts plumb the depths of transient sensations, impossible to communicate. These are the things her book would be made of, if she had the time to write, but she no longer even has time to read. In her diary, which she rarely opens, as if it posed a threat to the family unit and she were no longer entitled to an inner life, she writes, “I have no ideas at all. I don’t try to explain my life anymore” and “I’m a petite bourgeoise who has arrived.” She feels she has deviated from her former goals, as if her only progress in life were of the material kind. “I’m afraid of settling into this quiet and comfortable life, and afraid to have lived without being aware of it.” Just as she makes this observation, she knows she isn’t ready to give up the things this diary never includes, the living-together, the shared intimacy, the apartment to which she eagerly returns after class, the sleeping side-by-side, the sizzle of the electric razor in the morning, the tale of The Three Little Pigs at night, the repetition she believes she hates, which ties her down—all the things whose lack she felt when she left for three days to write the CAPES, and which, when she imagines their accidental loss, make her heart grow heavy.
(Annie Ernaux [source])
…and (from yet another source):
Mirrors exist for a reason — a reason which has nothing to do with the shape of your eyebrows or mouth, the lines in your forehead and cheeks, the stray hair suddenly sprouting where no hair had sprouted before. Indeed, you don’t need a mirror at all if you regularly take stock of the most important observations a mirror can trigger.
(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)
___________
Footnote: having come up with the title of this post, I feel duty-bound to include the following…:
(I’m not sure, but the film in which this performance is embedded may be Rock Around the Clock.)
