From Mary Gaitskill's Veronica

When I say that the songs we listened to at the hostel had a feeling of sickness in them, that doesn’t mean I don’t like them. I did like them, and I still do. The sick feeling wasn’t all in the songs, either. But it was in many songs, and not just the ones for teenagers; you could go to the supermarket and hear it in the Muzak that roamed the aisles, swallowing everything in its soft mouth. It didn’t feel like sickness. It felt like endless opening and expansion, and pleasure that would never end. The songs before that were mostly about pleasure, too – having it, wanting it, or not giving enough of it and being sad. But they were finite little boxes of pleasure, with the simple surfaces of personality and situation.

Then it was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it, and walk through. The door didn’t always lead to someplace light and sweet. Sometimes where it led was dark and heavy. That part wasn’t new. A song my father especially loved by Jo Stafford was “I’ll Be Seeing You.” During World War II, it became a lullaby about absence and death for boys who were about to die and kill. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you. In the moonlight of this song, the known things, the tender things, “the carousel, the wishing well,” appear outlined against the gentle twilight of familiarity and comfort. In the song, that twilight is a gauze veil of music, and Stafford’s voice subtly deepens, and gives off a slight shudder as she touches against it. The song does not go any further than this touch because the veil is killing and dying, and the song honors killing and dying. It also honors the little carousel. It knows the wishing well is a passageway to memory and feeling – maybe too much memory and feeling, ghosts and delusion. Jo Stafford’s eyes on the album cover say that she knew that. She knew the dark was huge and she had humility before it.

The new songs had no humility. They pushed past the veil and opened a window into the darkness and climbed through it with a knife in their teeth. The songs could be about rape and murder, killing your dad and fucking your mom, and the sailing off on a crystal ship to a thousand girls and thrills, or going for a moonlight drive. They were beautiful songs, full of places and textures – flesh, velvet, concrete, city towers, desert sand, snakes, violence, wet glands, childhood, the pure wings of night insects. Anything you could think of was there, and you could move through it as if it were an endless series of rooms and passages full of visions and adventures. And even if it was about killing and dying – that was just another place to go.

Photos of Edward Burtynsky

“As we destroy that which is natural, we eat ourselves alive.” -- William Kittredge

From AR Ammons' book-length poem "Garbage"

We are primates: apes: we’re meat wrapped round
Knotchbone spine: we can’t untangle ourselves

Productively from stalwart lacing, bone, artery.
Nerve compact but, turned around, there is the

Spiritual face, thoughts lightbeam light,
Twinklings like minnows surfacing waves, the

Rosy rushes that rouge or loft flesh, the
Interface of meat and madness, love and lumbar:

It is, I think, remarkable that we are there in
The form of apes: mulling apes: walky apes:

But Newton, a lone one in his room, flowed
Figure into calculus that found on a sheet of

Paper the slow Saturn fell into passing Jupiter:
This kind of ape will join his fellows in a

Dirty street and hack another fellow who has
Done ungroupliness to death, axe him right

In the pleading face and let him bleed reconciled:
Purity of cluster will override good or bad in

Us: I have a low view of us: but that is why
I love us or try and move to love us:

From Tony Hoagland's What Narcissims Means To Me

Patience

“Success is the worst possible thing that could happen
to a man like you,” she said,
“because the shiny shoes, and flattery
and the self-
lubricating slime of affluence would mean
you’d never have to face your failure as a human being.”

There was a rude remark I could have made back to her right then
and I watched it go by like a bright blue sailboat on a long gray river
of silence,
watching it until it disappeared around the bend

while I smiled and listened to her talk,
thinking it was good to let myself be stabbed by her little spears,
because I wanted to see what I was made of

besides fear and the desire to be liked
by every person on the goddamn face of the earth—

To tell the truth, I felt a certain satisfaction in taking it,

letting her believe that I was just a little bird
opening my mouth and swallowing
the medicine she wanted to administer

--a mixture of good advice combined with slow-acting poison.

Is it strange to say that there was something beautiful
in the sight of her running wild, cut loose in an
epileptic fit of telling the truth?

And anyway, she was right about me,
that I am prone to certain misconceptions,

that I should never get so big or fat that I
can’t look down and see my own naked dirty feet,

which is why I kept smiling and smiling as she talked--.

It was a beautiful day. I felt like crying.

I knew that if I could succeed at being demolished,
I could succeed at anything.

From Donald Barthelme's Essay Not-Knowing

“The problems that seem to me to define the writer’s task at this moment (to the extent that he has chosen them as his problems) are not of a kind that make for ease of communication, for work that rushes toward the reader with out-flung arms – rather, they’re the reverse. Let me cite three such difficulties that I take to be important, all having to do with language. First, there is art’s own project, since Mallarme, of restoring freshness to a much handled-language, essentially an effort toward finding a language in which art is possible at all. This remains a ground theme, as potent, problematically, as it was a century ago. Secondly, there is the political and social contamination of language by its use in manipulation of various kinds over time and the effort to find what might be called a ‘clean’ language, problems associated with Roland Barthes of Writing Degree Zero but also discussed by Lukacs and others. Finally, there is the pressure on language from contemporary culture in the broadest sense – I mean our devouring commercial culture – which results in a double impoverishment: the theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer.”

More thoughts on language

Language and the systems we devise for our understanding present their own kinds of problems. Describing this philosophical dilemma, concerning the language of mathematics, David Foster Wallace writes in his book on infinity, Everything and More, that “the hyperdimensional jump from math as a practical abstraction of real-world properties to math as a Saussurian ‘system of symbols … independent of the objects designated.’[produces] ‘displacements that are incalculable…’; because the abstract math that’s banished superstition and ignorance and unreason and birthed the modern world is also the abstract math that is shot through with unreason and paradox and conundrum and has, as it were, been trying to tie its shoes on the run ever since the beginning of its status as a real language. Re which, again, please keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world [emphasis mine], with its own shadowlands and crevasses – places where statements that seem to obey all the language’s rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.”

Samuel Beckett

“But for me sitting near my sun-drenched hives, it would always be a noble thing to contemplate, too noble to be sullied by the cogitations of a man like me, exiled in his manhood. And I would never do my bees the wrong I had done to my God, to whom I had been taught to ascribe my angers, fears, desires, and even my body. I have spoken of a voice giving me orders, or rather advice. It was on my way home I heard it for the first time. I paid no attention to it. Physically speaking it seemed to me I was now becoming rapidly unrecognizable.”