Much of the writing in the blogosphere seems to be about the author and the author's baggage, all rendered in a self-serving mess of psychological confession and silliness, much of it adorned with pictures of cats.
The problem, of course, is that my passage through, first journalism, and then through academia, has probably beaten all expressivity out of my writing, which now seems to me as barren and brittle and prickly as the steel wool I use to polish it. Nor do I have a cat.
The problem, of course, is that my passage through, first journalism, and then through academia, has probably beaten all expressivity out of my writing, which now seems to me as barren and brittle and prickly as the steel wool I use to polish it. Nor do I have a cat.
My mind drifts and I can’t help recall Gilgamesh’s deception by Ishtar, and Samson’s by Delilah and that thing which inspires Lady Macbeth to want to murder King Duncan. The pulse of love and the throb of heartbreak, joy and death; there is only one theme, of life and death and the question of what survives of the beloved.
Writing should be an attempt to transform the matter of being into something magical; an attempt to possess the heady feeling of tense, bewildering exaltation which rightly belongs to the poet who has successfully completed a poem, as for example, when owls hoot, the moon rides like a ship through scudding cloud, trees sway slowly together above a rushing waterfall, and a distant barking of dogs is heard. An art of subtlety, with cascades of majestic subordinate clauses, colloquial, eloquent, satirical and witty by turns, a dazzling, spellbinding, introspective beauty. Bald description, satire through parody, calculated ramblings; it is my assumption, permit nuances within disgust, and even at times a sad sort of sympathy.
Writing should be an attempt to transform the matter of being into something magical; an attempt to possess the heady feeling of tense, bewildering exaltation which rightly belongs to the poet who has successfully completed a poem, as for example, when owls hoot, the moon rides like a ship through scudding cloud, trees sway slowly together above a rushing waterfall, and a distant barking of dogs is heard. An art of subtlety, with cascades of majestic subordinate clauses, colloquial, eloquent, satirical and witty by turns, a dazzling, spellbinding, introspective beauty. Bald description, satire through parody, calculated ramblings; it is my assumption, permit nuances within disgust, and even at times a sad sort of sympathy.
There is no centre, only peripheries. Odysseus longs for home. Proust is in search of lost time. Kerouac is on the road. I’m on the internet.
Art, whose sincerity must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating the truth, cannot avoid the lie. To a poet, the mere making of a poem can sometimes seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry. There can be no literary or artistic equivalent to truth. The truth is always laid out in an infinite number of circles, tending to become, but never quite becoming, concentric.
The aim of art is not to resolve a question irrefutably, but to compel the love of life in all its manifestations, to weep and laugh over it and fall in love with it. The goddess of speech dwells only in the tongues of poets.
My images are sharply focused, their hues intensely saturated. Their accuracy, I realize, in light of my subjectivity, is profoundly in doubt. It doesn’t matter whether or not or how these things occurred, but that I tell about them.
