Freud’s couch, by Annie Leibovitz
Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Fuck it, I’m reading Vonnegut.
What to Tell Your Boss When He Asks You What He Can Do Next For “One of My Best”…
…that what you feel you really need is a year to sit and think?
Then a couple made remarks that sounded like questions, and a man in the dark honked like a goose, and people let themselves laugh at the wolf-boy.
But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the origination ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan-music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.
Mid-day espresso whilst skiing in the Austrian Alps.
Life is hard sometimes.
- What is my real attitude toward technology and the hazy future of mankind?
- Would knowing that future change my opinion?
- Can moral systems really work on a universal scale?
- Why did Puccini have to die in the middle of writing Turnadot? I cannot help but feel that the second and third act would be as tremendous as the first if he had.
- How does one approach the new year? A mere human calendar the world subscribes to? If anything, I feel that gives the idea so much more beauty. How little is shared superficially between us—yet our concept of time is linear and accepted. We all share the notion of the possibility of change, but our reaction to that possibility can reveal so much more than we typically dare.
- With only so many months left to live on a continent that is not my own, what comes next? Back to America, I suppose—a land that I am not sure is my own anymore than the next. I have not made this country my own, but I like to think that I will take away from it the ancient feel of its land, a sense of the effect of our human existence upon the earth in a way that has not yet been found in what seems always virgin soil, a second away from tilling the perfect seed.
- “I want to loaf,” Larry says is Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and for a second, for a brief weekend, I know exactly what he means, my mouth full of tongue-in-cheek and all.
- The books around me annihilate me—my word of the year is “Evolve”.
- The next question will be unanswered for a determined amount of time.
- Look where Death is looking and perhaps you may find something to see.
Resolution
My metaphor
is becoming
& in my transience
I’ve gone viral.
*
Sit loose,
my friends:
we’re ancient
beings, all
of us set in amber
weaving through
the conversations
spiraling above
us, ghosts like gnats
that hollow the air
around the buzz
& light, casting
our shadows
on all the un-
suspecting below,
the sigh of death
unnoticed &
rightly so.
*
When I say “And?”
& you reply “No.”
I see the rough stone
of your likening
already beginning
to become a fade,
the winds pausing
before then giving
their chase to me.
A petal
falls to the floor
& I forget to breath.
- Edward Montgomery
This beating heart
won’t stop;
ancillary madness—
a caged animal
determined
to gallup.
(And thus beginning my binge of science fiction and fantasy until the new year…don’t worry: I read poetry at night to dilute the effect.)
…and the weird fever that runs behind our blogs.
Duckbeater
In correspondence to you all, to the surprisingly large number of attendees to my somewhat daily milieu, there is a tremendous amount unsaid on any given entry to the public. What is lost is sometimes found in the direct correspondence that we send one another, the purposively forced communication (sometimes easy, sometimes hard, but always a direct decision) that we send with intent for only one other set of eyes.
With this letter, I join the blogger-union and subscribe to their unwritten demands of a single, catchphrase, hook-line-and-sinker sentence as the second paragraph.
I often have so little to say because I find the exercise of relating trivial failings and upstarts as exactly that—trivial. What I don’t find trivial is the search for some meaning, some Reality beyond the primitive allowances of our own senses. We devour books like porn, sure that our obsession is in a greater realm than one of sensuality, and ask questions that have plagued all of humanity since the first moment that we realized we were going to die. We listen to music, searching for a trance that takes us beyond the basic moment of our lives and try to relegate meaning to the bass-line, the sudden kick of the guitar along the bridge. We move and we travel, scarring beaches with our footprints that we know will only too soon be erased and left for another to imagine that he is the first to walk where ancients walked, regardless of the imaginary time-gap that separates us from the Ancients to the Now. It’s all a fingernail shaving of a king dictating his measure of time.
I’m home alone for the first time this Christmas, and though I do not pity myself, I feel my pain in the ache of too-hard movements in the gym, in the grappling of meaning in the oblivion of pain. All thousand selves of mine that are catered toward cry out in unison of this solitude having meaning, even if they will later bicker whether that should come forthright with the night or after the sweaty embrace of so many anonymous faces in a crowd of others searching for something that I may or may not imagine.
With interiority comes acknowledgement of its existence in others, even the most simple of beings whom we come across in our global dealings. The bored face of my driver tomorrow in a foreign country will most likely be lost in the subdued song broadcasted on his favorite radio station, chords that are unfamiliar to my ears, but represent a home and love and dreams that I cannot begin to fathom. The letters this man may write may come with quotes from the Quran, so removed from common thought in its power that it arrives as a spell-checkable item in my own diatribe. And when we attempt to share this interiority, when we flounder at giving it words, there is so much we’d rather have understood unsaid than cheapened by being put to the verse and chorus of a language that in seldom shared.
The “weird fever that runs behind our blogs”? How about the one that drives at the marriage of sensuality with intellect, how about the one that searches for an early night in bed while facing a 4am phone call to tell him that work is about to begin, that his rooster has come in early this morning and crows just as shrilly? How about the trance of life, that sits in the moments that are bound to come, when I sit exhausted and spent in the back of a van that takes me in circles, driven by a man I will never know beyond his nodding head and his patience at watching me button up the tasks for the night in red, flaring seals?
This is the man that you follow—this is the fever that runs behind my words.
“These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequences that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, every one does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.”
“The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It’s the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.”
- Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22
—————-
A sad night for those of us who cherish good writing, intellectual vigor, passionate debate, and a fine sense of humor. Mr. Hitchens has officially left the party. Rest in peace, sir.
…I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.
Matthew Zapruder
If I had to describe these days, this is how I would put it.
How about you?
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