Speechless
6 January 2009
I don’t have much to say lately. It’s cold and I’ve been sleeping in long hours because the slant of the sun is not enough to wake me; I’ve been having to drawn the blinds as of late, neighbors have just moved in. Our bedroom window and their front door are near enough for a conversation and in summer, with the windows wide open and the balmy breeze blowing here to there, the neighbors are in the bedroom. But it’s winter and I’m hibernating. I’m reading long books and trying to sort out a mess of thoughts which never seem to make any sense, even on paper. Surprise!
Descents of Memory
2 January 2009
by: Morine Krissdóttir
The Life of John Cowper Powys
There are certain writers, who within their elaborately composed words, have strung a magnetic force like dynamite. When unread, the force lies dormant; when read there awakens strong stirrings, hints at explosion, tremulous and skipping the entire natural order of growth, the bud bursts: Ka-Bam! Struck still, the tremors and quakes continue and continue, never shall they loose their primal force for the words are always there within the pages and so is the fecund mind to taken them and the fecund spirit to glean from them.
Continue reading Descents of Memory…
Home
26 December 2008
Nostalgia and Christmas seem an indissoluble pair of lovers. Where there isn’t snow or Christmas trees, a heap of friends nor family there is the thought that these are owed by some foreignly implanted childhood right. I’ve been homesick this year, perhaps for the first time ever. I’ve wanted snow and Christmas trees and to be surrounded by my family; I haven’t been there at this time of year for seven years! In what we get, it makes no difference what we are thought to be owed.
More/Less
21 December 2008
Today, the day of less sun. I watch the sun crawl up the white walls smudged grey out my window, walls whose outer coating crumbles off more or less each year. I watch the sun breach the roof of light green speckled lichen terra-cotta tiles, until the sun volunteers no more proof and is evident as only more shadow. In summer the sun brandishes itself complete over the whole white wall; it creeps no where, it floods, its zenith is the living bright proof. Those are days of limitless benevolence.
This is Not a Book!
11 December 2008
Or…
A year, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character.
—Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer
Or…
Continue reading This is Not a Book!…
The Overcoat
8 December 2008
by: Nikolai Gogol
Warmth is, as Simone Weil writes, a “need for the life of the body,” just like food, just like sleep. Without these three necessities life remains in a hopeless flounder for basic survival and the struggle to keep body well limits the potentials for functions beyond. When Akaky Akakievich went to Petrovich to see about the patching up of his thread-bare “housecoat” it was foremost a matter of warmth.
Continue reading The Overcoat…
Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening
30 November 2008
by: Mary Lutyens
I do not read much Krishnamurti. The book we have, Think on These Things, is a series of talks followed by questions and answers. Not that I am a pure novel reader but I am attached to its form. I like my teachings to come through characters and more or less drama, which was probably why I needed to read this biography: I had to attach a man to powerful and resonating words. Krishnamurti’s words, when spoken by the man himself, play my heart as if it were a harp, with each string tugged is a new note drawn and the infinite opens as if it were as easy as opening a door. That’s probably why I don’t read him much, I get too maudlin with his words.