Blindsided

I've been listening to Bon Iver's Blindsided on loop, a track from Justin Vernon's solo debut album For Emma, Forever Ago (2007). Save for Skinny Love, I hadn't bothered to listen to the entire album until now. I guess I wasn't in the mood to wallow in this type of sad bastard music when I first heard Bon Iver in 2010. I was simply not ready for it.

I thought perhaps one has to reach a level of maturity before the pleasure of listening to gloomy music becomes anything more than a masochistic habit. Despite this realization, I knew sadness was a kind of drug. I used it many times to refuse reality without the intent of ever releasing myself from its stupor. It reminded me of lost years; sadness not in knowing I had lost an irretrievable part of my life, but that I did not want to forget whatever it was I had--and yet, already I was slowly forgetting.

Slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory;
speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

- Milan Kundera, "Slowness"

Memory is a fragile thing. Sadness and the tendency to sulk in it is an effort to slow down the passage of time. To play things in repeat is the illusion we give ourselves when we cannot see beyond loss.

The experience of listening to Bon Iver reminded me of the Japanese concepts of wabi, which is finding beauty in sadness, and mono no aware, which is the Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence or "transience of things." Some days I'd just sit here thinking what a great thing it is to feel so small and yet so alive simply by understanding these facts of life.

**Bon Iver means Good Winter in French (Bon Hiver - H in the French language is silent)

For Justin Vernon, the kind of loss he had to go through inexorably produced the melancholic dirge that is For Emma, Forever Ago:

"Following his break-up with his girlfriend at the time, as well as the break-up of his previous band DeYarmond Edison, Justin Vernon, suffering from mononucleosis, secluded himself in a cabin in Medford, Wisconsin for three months planning to "hibernate." Three months of solitude resulted in the creation of For Emma, Forever Ago. "All of his personal trouble, lack of perspective, heartache, longing, love, loss and guilt that had been stockpiled over the course of the past six years, was suddenly purged into the form of song."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Emma,_Forever_Ago)

--

As life would have it, I had the pleasure of sharing the music of Bon Iver to A. He isn't an audiophile like me, but we tend to have similar taste in music. He asked me if "Emma" ever returned to Justin after making such beautiful music for her. A. recalled a friend of ours who had a nine year relationship. The girl broke up with him one day. Gone, just like that. Our friend made a film for this woman, it was shown in many continents, it won praises. And yet--

Why do women do that?

What?

Leave, just like that.

I don't know. 

Would you come back if anyone made you 
something like this?--


I leave things the way they are. Emma could be reminded, but she chose to move on. Justin had to move on in the only way he could.

The Snowmass Cycle

for Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown


1.   RETREAT

The sailor dreamt of loss,
but it was I who dreamt the sailor.
I was landlocked, sea-poor.
The sailor dreamt of a woman
who stared at the sea, then tired
of it, advertised her freedom.
She said to her friend: I want
all the fire one can have
without being consumed by it.
Clearly, I dreamt the woman too.
I was surrounded by mountains
suddenly green after a long winter,
a chosen uprootedness, soul shake-up,
every day a lesson about the vastness
between ecstasy and repose.
I drank coffee called Black Forest
at the local cafe. I took long walks
and tried to love the earth
and hate its desecrations.
All the Golden Retrievers wore red
bandannas on those muttless streets.
All the birches, I think, were aspens.
I do not often remember my dreams,
or dream of dreamers in them.
To be without some of the things
you want, a wise man said,
is an indispensable part of happiness.



2.   MOUNTAIN, SKY

I’ve been paying attention
to the sky again.
I’ve seen a ravine up there,
and a narrow, black gorge.
Not to worry, I tell myself,
about tricks the mind plays,
as long as you know they’re tricks.

If the rich are casually cruel
perhaps it’s because
they can stare at the sky
and never see an indictment
in the shape of clouds.

The frown, for example,
in a thunderhead. The fist.

That big mountain
I’ve been looking at—
I love how it borrows purple
from the filtered light,
sometimes red.

Like any of us
it’s all of its appearances.

It’s good that the rich
have to die,
a peasant saying goes,
otherwise they’d live forever.

Here in this rented house,
high up, I understand.
I’m one of the rich
for a while. The earth feels
mine and the air I breathe
is rarefied, if thin.

Dusk now is making its last claim.
I love the confluence
of dark mountain, dark sky.
Soon I won’t know the beginning
from the end.



3.   HIM

Those empty celebrations of the half-believer
along for the ride.
Those secret words repeated in mirrors—
someone’s personal fog.
A man’s heart ransomed for comfort
or a few extra bucks, his soul in rags.

I have been him and him and him.

Was it nobility or senility
when my old grandmother tried to drown
artificial flowers in the bathtub?

Can only saints carry the load
without talking about the burden?

I want to lean into life,
catch the faintest perfume.

In every boy child an old man is dying.
By middle age
he begins to stink, complain.

I want to have gifts for him
when we finally meet.
I want him to go out like an ancient
Egyptian, surrounded
by what is his, desiring nothing.



4.   DELINEATION AT DUSK

A lost hour, and that animal lassitude
after a vanished afternoon.
Outside: joggers, cyclists.
Motion, the great purifier, is theirs.
If this were Europe someone in a tower
might be ringing a bell.
People hearing it would know
similar truths, might even know
exactly who they are.
It’s getting near drinking time.
It’s getting near getting near;
a person alone conjures rules
or can liquefy, fall apart.
That woman with the bouffant—
chewing gum, waiting for the bus—
someone thinks she’s beautiful.
It’s beautiful someone does.
The sky’s murmuring, the storm
that calls you up,
makes promises, never comes.
Somewhere else, no doubt,
a happy man slicing a tomato,
a woman with a measuring cup.
Somewhere else: the foreclosure
of a feeling or a promise,
followed by silence or shouts.
Here, the slow dance of contingency,
an afternoon connected to an evening
by a slender wish. Sometimes absence
makes the heart grow sluggish
and desire only one person, or one thing.
I am closing the curtains.
I am helping the night.



5.   SOLITUDE

A few days ago I stopped looking
at the photographs
clustered on the wall, nudes,
which had become dull to me,
like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks.

I turned away from the view
and conjured a plague of starlings.
Oh how they darkened the landscape.

Surely such beauty had been waiting for its elegy.
I felt like crushing a rhododendron.

Now and again I feel the astonishment
of being alive like this, in this body,
the ventricles and the small bones
in the hand, the intricacies of digestion ....

When the radio said parents in California
gave birth to another child
so that their older child might have
a bone-marrow transplant and live,

I found myself weeping
for such complicated beauty.
How wonderful the radio
and its distant, human voices.

The rain now is quite without consequence
coming down.

I suppose I’ve come to the limits
of my paltry resources, this hankering
for people and for massive disturbance,
then high pressure,
the sequence that’s been promised for days.

I will long to be alone
when my friends arrive.



6.   THE BODY WIDENS

The body widens, and people are welcomed
into it, many at a time. This must be
what happens when we learn to be generous
when we’re not in love, or otherwise charmed.
I’ve been examining yesterday’s ashes. I’ve visited
my own candleless altar. Little by little,
the old selfish parts of me are loosening.
I have a plan for becoming lean: to use
all my fat in service of expansion. Have women
always known this? Loveliness and fear
when they open and let in and give away?
The mountains here pierce the sky,
and the sky, bountiful, closes in around them.



7.   A NEW MOUTH

Give me a new mouth; I want to talk.
I’ve been watching the spider mend its web.
I think I’ve learned something
about architecture from a swallow.
Excuse me while I separate the nettles
from the flowers, while I put my nose
to the black moist smell of earth
and come up smiling. Somewhere in the world
is the secret name
for God, many-lettered, unpronounceable.
             There’s a speakable grace
in the fields and even in the cities.
The grapes ripen, someone refuses to become
a machine. And yet I want to talk
about the worn-out husks of men and women
returning from the factories,
the venereal streets, the bruise history
passes down to its forlorn children.
    I need a new mouth to acknowledge
that piety will keep us small, imprisoned,
that it’s all right to be ridiculous
and sway first to the left, then to the right,
in order to find our balance.
                                  I’ve been watching
an evening star quiver. I’ve been trying
to identify the word before its utterance.
Give me a new mouth and I’ll be
a guardian against forgetfulness.
I’ve noticed the wind doesn’t discriminate
between sycamore and cypress.
I want to find the cool, precise language
for how passion gives rise to passion.



8.   STRANGER

The wind gone. I can hear my breathing.
I can hear the lateness of the hour
by what isn’t moving.

Woodrun Slope. Snowmass Village.
These are winter names, and it’s summer.
The water from the mountains
rushes down man-made gullies.

Serious phantoms with their black tears
are out tonight.
I’m close—my other delusion goes—
to the heart of things.

A young man with a young man’s itch
would rise and go out prowling.

Tomorrow I’ll choose a mountain
that’s a hill, take the slowest horse
at the Lazy-7, slow and old,
sure to know its trail.

I knew a man who said he could dominate
solitude. In other ways, too,
he was a fool.

Once I wanted to be
one of those fabulous strangers
who appear and disappear.
Now I arrive only by invitation,
stay long enough to earn my fare.

Outside my window, clouds from the west
erasing the stars.
A coyote howling its singular news.

At whatever pace,
isn’t there an imperative to live?

Before a person dies he should experience
the double fire,
of what he wants and shouldn’t have.


-- Stephen Dunn

The Bank Heist Theme

Feel Good. Always.

Against Drowning

2013

*Quoted lyrics from Lykke Li, “Love out of Lust” 
2011 album "Wounded Rhymes" Atlantic Records

I can take bullets to the heart

Tove Lo on loop. My friend says she's that wasted girlfriend you can always count on. You can tell her everything and she will never judge you. 

I'm not a fan of Hunger Games (I haven't even watched the films to be honest), this video just happens to play the best version of this song online.


   

Love it when I'm play-pretending 
When I can take bullets to the heart 
Fucking up my happy ending 
But I can take bullets to the heart..

Burning Books

This is not about Bradbury’s novel, but it does have a great deal to do with governing institutions and how their powers dictate whose books are read by the world or left to rot in drawers. 

If he were to will it, A. would rather have books by brilliant writers—who perished before they were widely appreciated—burned to never be read by the public again. He believes publishers and everyone today do not deserve to read such great works of literature. The way he sees it, our society continues to propagate the same system that rejects poets and novelists that create important and revolutionary books. 

Think about it, every century has a roster of maligned geniuses way ahead of their time. A. finds it hypocritical and pretentious that the "same" institutions, critics, writers, academics, publishers (publishers most especially) even have the gall to laud these dead writers today. Not everyone forgets how all they ever did was reject and throw scathing remarks at these writers when they were alive.

One such extreme case is that of novelist John Kennedy Toole, the author of “A Confederacy of Dunces” (which I've yet to read). Toole approached many publishers to accept his manuscript yet none of them could understand his brand of tragicomedy. As history had it, presses didn’t bother to give him a chance. When frustration and depression finally took its toll on the young writer, Toole committed suicide in 1969 (he was 32). Upon learning this, A.’s exact words were “How could the world do that?—He died thinking he was a horrible writer.”

Struck by grief, Toole’s mother continued to submit his manuscript to various publishers. With the help of his friend writer Walker Percy, “A Confederacy of Dunces” was finally published in 1980, almost twenty years after Toole’s death. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and is now revered as one of the most a canonical works of modern literature about the Southern United States.

http://www.jktoole.com

http://thebooklion.files.wordpress.com

Another case: Herman Melville's popular classic “Moby-Dick” (also another book I’ve yet to enjoy) was not well-received when it was first published in 1851. It gone out of print by the time Melville passed away in 1891. Nevertheless, today it is considered a brilliant classic and one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century.

--

Yes, it’s possible to be a writer and not be read in your lifetime. I can go on and on about writers who didn’t enjoy much recognition for their masterpieces. Try to find “The Monk” by British novelist and dramatist Matthew Gregory Lewis and you’ll marvel at one of the finest gothic novels written in the English language. If you’ve ever come across works by Chinese poet Li-Po (also known as Li  Bai, some say he’s arguably more brilliant than Tu Fu, but unlike Tu Fu, he wasn’t popular when he was alive), French poet Charles Baudelaire, and American poet Emily Dickenson (who probably just published 3 poems in her life), then you stumbled upon treasures that humanity almost shunned and never found. 

We devour one book after another and yet we don’t know how much suffering some of these writers had to endure while they were alive. 

A. maintains that none of us deserve to know of such beauty; if the world truly wanted to help its writers, it should reward them while they are living. In an ideal world, institutions should help keep artists from going poor and hungry. Perhaps in another universe there must be a Xanadu where artists can stay true to their craft without being neglected and shunned by society. But at the same time, somewhere in my heart I know one cannot produce great art by staying in a “place of comfort." It is the fate of artists and writers to understand human suffering well enough to create art.

Drinking Alone by Moonlight by Li Bai

A. said to me, “Do you agree? If I were to have it, society should burn these books! We don’t deserve them.”

He, WE, feel strongly about this issue, though I took the opposite position: I said no.

I understood how A. felt. As writers, we scoff at the idea of powerful institutions that publish minor works over books that have the potential to stand the test of time. If it were to happen to him, A. would choose to keep his book to himself—this is how he shows defiance, this is his way of rejecting the world that continues to drive true writers and artists mad.

“But that wouldn’t be right,” I said to him. “I would however keep them away from the publishers who rejected them. It's wrong how they continue to earn more just by reprinting their works.”

--

It’s not this generation’s fault many authors were not read when they were alive. The existence of beautiful books by neglected writers are a testament to the injustice that pervades the publishing and writing enterprise (I say this exactly because I believe it mustn’t be driven exclusively by capitalism).

If more people read these books, whether they write masterpieces or not, their lives will be richer for it. It is also my hope that a good reader may be inspired to continue writing important literary work. Who knows, perhaps some of them can even change the goddamn system. It’s a long shot, but it has to start somewhere.

Mindfulness

Tonight's reminder 💌🙏 Very timely words of wisdom, indeed. #chinesefortunecards thanks, Arnie!