Living on Nothing - H.D.

“You can’t live on nothing.” “I can live on sunlight falling across little bridges. I can live on the Botticelli-blue cornflower pattern on the out-billowing garments of the attendant to Aphrodite and the pattern of strawberry blossoms and the little daisies in the robe of Primavera. I can live on the doves flying in cohorts from the underside of the faded gilt of the balcony of Saint Mark’s cathedral and the long corridors of the Pitti Palace. I can gorge myself on Rome and the naked Bacchus and the face like a blasted lightning-blasted white birch that is some sort of Fury. […] And I can live on nothing.” H.D.

Why ambiguity?: Finding meaning

Three books informed this post: Moby Dick, King Lear and A Whaler's Dictionary "In order to understand the fool, one must think and discover, as one does with a sphinx's question, for oneself. The fool makes one responsible for one's own interpretation... by speaking one thing only in order to mean something else." - Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler's Dictionary In King Lear the fool is the wisest character. He says the truth beneath things and shows that the man who is supposed to be the real wise man, the king, is actually the biggest fool. That is not the point, however. Poetry and literature is purposefully ambiguous. Intentionally avoiding stating their intended meaning. Some say this is needlessly complex. If the writer has a meaning or has something important to say, why would they hide it behind fiction and overly descriptive riddles? If it is so important, why not just tell it straight? Truth, meaning and understanding come through experience. We cannot experience the same thing that the writer or poet or artist has experienced, but by working through and understanding a writer's work, or our interpretation of that work, we have gained some experience. Finding the meaning, whether it was intended or not, is the point. The act of discovering truth in literature has the effect of discovering your own process of thinking. Ambiguity is a puzzle, but as you find each piece, you discover that you are part of the puzzle as well. Every book you read and interpret, every poem, painting, photograph, landscape, word and relationship become part of you and the puzzle.

Proust: True paradises are paradises lost

“Yes: if, owing to the work of oblivion, the returning memory can throw no bridge, form no connecting link between itself and the present minute, if it remains in the context of its own place and date, if it keeps its distance, its isolation in the hollow of a valley or upon the highest peak of a mountain summit, for this very reason it causes us suddenly to breathe new air, an air which is new precisely because we have breathed it in the past, that purer air which the poets have vainly tried to situate in paradise and which could induce so profound a sensation of renewal only if it had been breathed before, since true paradises are the paradises we have lost.” – Marcel Proust Through memory and re-experiencing old memories in new contexts, we can visit those paradises again and again, but you can never stay for long. Oblivion makes paradise sweet and possible. Oblivion and paradise are not opposites – both exist, are necessary and make life so complex and sometimes wonderful.

Image: black tree to bees to dust

Hanging from a black dead tree that used to grow near the road that led to Boquillas, a small Mexican village, the destination of a long bus ride, was a yellow beehive. Large bees floated over the brown fields looking for the rare flower to bend in the dry land. Men stepped off the rough road to let us pass lowering their hats without turning their faces from the cloud of dust raised by the bus wheels as they fell behind us on their way home. The sun may not have been setting during my sixth and last arrival in Boquillas, but the brown concrete houses seemed to glow a mixture of reds and oranges.

Why write? Why art?: Metaphor

Why write? Why art?: Metaphor Why do we write? Why do we create art? Why do I write on this blog? I suppose an argument could be made for it being a waste of time, but this is one of the reasons why it isn’t. Metaphor. From Wallace Stevens’ “The Motive for Metaphor” “The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be, Desiring the exhilirations of changes: the motive for metaphor” The mental act of metaphor changes the subject and the writer. It expresses something that will never be fully and satisfyingly expressed, and once exposed to or having created a good metaphor a person is forever changed. For example, in Moby Dick Melville compares the soul, or the inner man, or an inner need inside of us, to a miner. The quote deserves to be placed here again: “The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag?” - Melville. Reading Moby Dick changed me in several ways. To get the full effect of the quote it is necessary, I believe, to read the book, but ever since I read that (it took the second read for it to really sink in) I’ve had an image of a miner digging through the mine shaft of my soul. Sometimes I think I can even hear that muffled pick chipping away at the rock. But still, why? The above almost sounds horrifying, but the soul is an idea that we will never fully express or understand. This metaphor has given me a place to start. The most amazing thing is that this metaphor combined with a D.H. Lawrence metaphor about a soul being a pile of unlit tinder. My understanding of the soul grows the more metaphors I discover. I will add another, happier, metaphor here. After I wrote about the following poem I added another reason for writing and art: happiness. “Of Mere Being” Wallace Stevens The palm at the end of the mind, Beyind the last thought, rises In the bronze decor, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. According to me and some others, the bird is the imagination. The imagination is beyond the mind, beyond reason, something we cannot control, something free and beautiful and singing. Happiness comes not from reason, but from our imaginations. Happiness comes from art.

Literature: Exercising the Imagination

One thing I love about literature, one thing that might be unique to literature, is that it forces the reader to imagine and view the world form a different perspective. Fiction forces belief and emotional connection to a world that is created from the imagination, vision and beliefs of another person. By believing and imagining this world, a similar mental journey is taken by the author and reader, and the reader becomes a unique combination of their own imagination and the thoughts and imaginings of someone else. This does not mean the reader adopts the beliefs of the writer, but some kind of alteration will occur to someone who has been so deeply exposed to something so powerful and personal. It is growth. It is change. Self-discovery and experience gained through the exercise of the imagination. Literature is the unique and personal imagination and vision of one concentrated into their fingers, gripping a pen or hovering over keys slowly being forced into the form of sentences. Forms may not be the same as the original imagination, but they allow the reader to create a new world unimagined by the writer. Each book is an infinite world and minds take one of those worlds and populate it with their own imaginings influenced by other books. The simple act of reading literature forces the reader into a metamorphosis, and after each book the reader is a new person, a stranger, even to themselves.

Virginia Woolf, p.1, Passion for Living

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

No matter what anyone says, Woolf is a great writer. This question she asks, "What's this passion for?" is one I have asked myself often. The thing is, the passion I feel and I imagine the passion that Woolf feels, is not connected to anything particular. For instance, I know people that are passionate about very specific things and I cannot imagine what that is like. Someone I know is passionate about the poor in Africa, specifically Sudan and Uganda. How do you decide that? It's just weirdly specific.

The way I feel is more of a general passion, maybe regarding emotion and life, and maybe this is why I feel compelled to write. Freaking people always ask, "What do you write about?" and seriously what kind of question is that? I write about... life, but it hurts to say something that cliche.

My sister has a passion for unborn children that may or may not be aborted. She has a passion for something. All I have is passion streaming through my brains and heart valves without landing on anything. Why?

It is like I have no direction, but not for the lack of looking for some. I've tried to ground myself in something specific, but I eventually get bored. If anything, my passion has something to do with being ungrounded, some would say free.