“It really is a nation”

“There comes a time in the history of a nation when its artists and intellectuals no longer feel a need to assert at all times that it really is a nation, with a culture of its own.”

— From “Brazilian Poetry Today”, by Paulo Henriques Britto, in the Los Angeles Review of Books

And they all lived

Happily
iffer
after.

When the horizon is a tightrope

Still from Touch (video, 2002), by Janine Antoni

Balance is a process, not a state. It means holding steady a centre of gravity: a negotiation among mass and momentum and energy. On this depends stability and mobility. The tightrope walker keeps moving, or else she falls, and her successful journey is an ongoing compromise between her own mass, tension in the wire, and universal gravity.

— From “A fine balance”, in the November 2013 Caribbean Review of Books

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On the Rio Paracauary, Ilha do Marajó; 26 August, 2013

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— What is wrong with a poem?
— All the right things.

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Overheard

At the cash register in a Manhattan bookshop:

Customer: I give Autobiography of Red to everyone I have a secret crush on.

Clerk: Does it work?

Customer: Not yet.

.
It took longer to read about those months than to live them.
.

Now We Are Ten; or, Decline and Fall

Oh yeah, I have a blog. I forget sometimes. And two days ago it was this blog’s tenth anniversary — I forgot that too, until this afternoon. Not surprising, considering how infrequently I show up here these days, but ’twasn’t always so. Here’s a quick and scrappy graph depicting the plummet in the number of blog posts per annum, with the final point, weakly hovering just above zero, representing 2012:

I have no moral to draw from this pattern of hills, valleys, and plateaus, no autobiographical insights, apart from the obvious ones: I’ve grown busier (or “busier”) as I’ve grown older; and as online media proliferate, I’ve felt more and more ambivalent about using this particular medium to share personal “observations, discoveries, complaints, questions, obsessions.” (That’s what Twitter’s for, right?)

The graph does suggest when that ambivalence set in — about five years ago, which is roughly when I removed the blog’s traffic counter. I decided I didn’t really want to know how many people were reading it, and I’d henceforth treat the blog as a kind of semi-public scratchpad or commonplace book. And the past couple of years I’ve been keeping an actual daily (or near-daily) notebook, genuinely private, where I keep track of what’s going through my head with ink and paper. I suspect that’s where my blog “went”: into an older medium, one which feels more durable, one in which (I convince myself) I can think more “clearly,” whatever that means.

•••

Or I could sum up my tenth anniversary thoughts like this:

 
Untitled (Cousin Arthur Plays Mas)
. 

A city of millions, towers, halls, houses, streets, tunnels, bridges, smokestacks, wires, trains, walkers, drivers, buyers, earners, children, thieves, glass, iron, stone, arches, spans, windows, rooms, floors, tables: and somewhere one glass of water which is the poem.

Comrade stargazer

 

☿ (Mercury), by Nikolai Noel

2012; 27 x 19.5 inches; silkscreen on archival paper
Edition of 70, numbered and signed by the artist 

O come astronomer of freedom
Come comrade stargazer
Look at the sky I told you I had seen
The glittering seeds that germinate in darkness
And the planet in my hand’s revolving wheel
and the planet in my breast and in my head
and in my dream and in my furious blood.

— Martin Carter, “I Am No Soldier”

boundless and contagious

Some time alone

“Enduring trove of wars”

One more time

In my other life
my hands don’t shake.

And I am a fool

(Some days it’s like this.)

It is hard to say

In the end

Time is the condition of delightfulness and of perishing both.

— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet