deadlift poetry

Grab Somebody Sexy Tell ‘Em, “Hey!”

Arguments for one-night stands, in order:

1. Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress”.

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime…”

2. Nathaniel West’s, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell”

“And now, finally, we come to the Time-argument. Do not confuse what I shall say under this head with the theories so much in vogue among the metaphysicians and physicists, those weavers of the wind. My ‘Time’ is that of the poets. In a little while, love, you will be dead; that is my burden. In a little while, we all will be dead. Golden lads and chimney-sweeps, all dead. And when dying, will you be able to say, I turn down an empty glass, having drunk to the full, lived to the full? Is it not madness to deny life? Hurry! Hurry! for all is soon over. Blown, O rose! in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon. Do you realize the tune the clock is playing? The seconds, how they fly! All is soon over! All is soon over! Let us snatch, while yet we may, in this brief span, whose briefness merely gilds the bubble so soon destroyed, some few delights. Have you thought of the grave? O love! have you thought of the grave and of the change that shall come over your fair body? Your most beautiful bride—though now she be pleasant and sweet to the nose—will be damnably mouldy a hundred years hence. O how small a part of time they share, that are so wonderous sweet and fair. Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend before we too into the dust descend. Into the dust, Mary! Thy sweet plenty, in the dust. I tremble, I burn for thy sweet embrace. Be not miserly with thy white flesh. Give your gracious body, for such a short time lent you. Give, for in tile giving you shall receive and still have what you give. Only time can rob you of your flesh, I cannot. And time will rob you—it will, it will! And those who husbanded the golden grain, and those who flung it to the wind like rain…”

3. Ne-Yo’s “Let’s Do It Tonight”

“…give me everything tonight
for all we know we might not get tomorrow
lets do it tonight
i will love love you tonight
give me everything tonight
for all we know we might not get tomorrow
lets do it tonight…”

And people say we’re evolving.

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.

Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

For Franz music was the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a paint, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven’s Ninth, Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles’ White Album? Franz made no distinction between “classical” music and “pop.” He found the distinction old-fashioned and hypocritical. He loved rock as much as Mozart.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I’m rereading this book because I recently gave it to a friend who was close approaching 30 and had yet to read it. He is the kind of man who went through school a lover of all letters, but always looking for a voice of authority to tell him where to go and what to read. He once told me that he never knew one could simply search out books for themselves, that they could dictate their own path, and that many paths could not be reached by what one would consider an “authentic” route in this world. He wanted to discuss it after reading, and I felt no voices calling from my unread shelves so loud that I could not ignore them, so I indulged him and opened up TULOB for perhaps the third or fourth time in my life.

Kundera’s much-lauded masterpiece now strikes me as something that existed in the 90s, or perhaps slightly later in my budding years in college. It somehow feels old. I feel slightly guilty for reading it and enjoying it as much as I presently am, hearing imagined masses of the elite and avant garde chiding me for still puzzling over this novel that seems so digested and passed. We’re talking about the death of realism now! We’re twenty years past the Cold War and from all those who write of it; no one bears to try and relate a world that lives in fear of nuclear holocaust against one that lives in a muffled forgetfulness of the fear of demise by, well, anything, at anytime.

And yet, n+1 revisits this very perspective of Franz in their latest “Intellectual Situation”, commenting on iPods and the demise of classicism in music, in the lack of genre-specific taste becoming the greatest taste of all. In my mind, I replay a coworker’s outrage when I slipped from Brahms to Kanye West in one fell swoop today. I remained silent, unable to do anything but affirm the genius of both in my own mind.

In many ways, I wonder if I would feel this way if I spent my time rereading other classics from my days as a young reader, from even my childhood. What risks threaten me if I read Watership Down again and consider the discussions of laughters and rabbits, of beings trying to be something that they are not? What do I lose by swimming in the murky soup of my own consciousness, chasing blinking lights through the swamp of every book written by Stephen King? What intellectual validity do I automatically sacrifice by admitting the first time was not enough, that no genre has yet to define itself to me, that there is something more in digging deep in a single spot than in razing the entire world by an inch?

To Franz, for all his faults - Amen. Music is simply that.

To all my insecurities: perhaps I simply have even more self reflection left than I imagined.

deadlift poetry

Posts tagged music