Poetry, Classic Retellings: Jorie Graham

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance,
the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

already in him, there, shiny in the rubble, hissing Did you want to remain
completely unharmed?--

the point-of-view darting in him, shiny head in the ash-heap,

hissing Once upon a time, and then Turn now darling give me that look,

that perfect shot, give me that place where I'm erased . . .

The thing, he must have wondered, could it be put to rest, there, in the
glance,
could it lie back down into the dustyness, giving its outline up?

When we turn to them--limbs, fields, expanses of dust called meadow and
avenue--
will they be freed then to slip back in?

Because you see he could not be married to it anymore, this field with
minutes in it
called woman, its presence in him the thing called

future--could not be married to it anymore, expanse tugging his mind out
into it,

tugging the wanting-to-finish out.

What he dreamed of was this road (as he walked on it), this dustyness,
but without their steps on it, their prints, without
song--

What she dreamed, as she watched him turning with the bend in the road
(can you
understand this?)--what she dreamed

was of disappearing into the seen

not of disappearing, lord, into the real--

And yes she could feel it in him already, up ahead, that wanting-to-turn-and-
cast-the-outline-over-her

by his glance,

sealing the edges down,

saying I know you from somewhere darling, don't I,
saying You're the kind of woman who etcetera--

(Now the cypress are swaying) (Now the lake in the distance)
(Now the view-from-above, the aerial attack of do you
remember?)--

now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be recalled,
now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be taken in,

(somewhere the castle above the river)

(somewhere you holding this piece of paper)

(what will you do next?) (--feel it beginning?)

now she's raising her eyes, as if pulled from above,

now she's looking back into it, into the poison the beginning,

giving herself to it, looking back into the eyes

feeling the dry soft grass beneath her feet for the first time now the mind

looking into that which sets the______________in motion and seeing in there

a doorway open nothing on either side
(a slight wind now around them, three notes from up the hill)

through which morning creeps and the first true notes--

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible swiftly took hold.

-Jorie Graham - Orpheus and Eurydice

LOUIS ARAGON – LE PAYSAN DE PARIS

Instead of weighing the behavior of men, look over the women passing by. They are large fragments of glinting light, flashes still clad in winter fur, brilliant and mobile mysteries. No, I don’t want to die before I have come near each one, at the very least touched her and felt her give way; let this pressure overcome her scruples, then she can beat it! (pg 3)

Man live with their eyes closed on the edge of magical precipices. They innocently handle dark symbols; their unknowing lips repeat terrible incantations, formulae dangerous as pistols. The sight of a bourgeouis family drinking its morning café au lait, oblivious to the unknowable which peeps through in the red and white squares of the tablecloth, is enough to make you shudder. I shall not speak of the thoughtless use of mirrors, of obscene graffiti scrawled on the walls, of the letter “W” used nowadays without the suspicion it should arouse, of the cabaret songs one hums without knowing their lyrics, of foreign languages introduced into everyday life before any investigation of their demoniacal origins, of obscure evocative words mistaken for telephone calls, and of the Morse code, whose mere name should give one pause. With all that, how could men become aware of magic spells? This passerby they jostle, haven’t you noticed something amiss? It’s a stone statue walking, that other is a giraffe transmogrified into a bookmaker, and the third, ah, him, shhhh: he’s a man in love. (pg 144)

God is rarely to be found in my mouth. (pg 166)

LOUIS ARAGON – LE PAYSAN DE PARIS: The Passage de L’Opera: Itty Bitties

I am putting aside my microscope for a while. Needless to say, writing with one eye screwed to a lens, even in this white room, decidedly impairs one’s vision. My eyes, assigned to cross purposes, reel before finally teaming up again. The thread of a screw behind my forehead unwinds in slow spirals trying to retrace its point: the most inconsequential objects loom gigantically large’ a pitcher and an inkwell bring to mind Notre Dame and the Morgue. My writing hand seems too close; my pen is a skewer of fog. As objects resume proportion, the microcosm which I once irradiated with my mirrors and filtered through the tiny diaphragm of attention recedes like a dream erased in the morning. Following the natural bents of our heart, drifting after its delirious interpretations, only then are we able to credit you, glorious bacterial dramas, with the passionate motives designed in the likeness of our own real sorrows. Love is the one feelings whose stature is so great that it can be ascribed to the infinitely small. But, for once, let’s formulate your power struggles, microbes; let’s think about your domestic squalls. What mistakes in reckoning the budget, what fraud in the account books, what municipal concussions preside—alongside the physical phenomenon—over observable phagocytoses? Move, move as if your life depended on it, tragic bacilli dragooned into a complicated adventure where the observer can perceive only the satisfying, rational games of biology’s fixed laws! Neon signs of distress, itty-bitties raising a whirlwind of enigmas in my field of vision, what are you inscribing there? What’s the meaning of this film depicting your migrations, like the dance of colloids. I am trying to decipher this speedwriting: the only legible word in the constantly shifting swarm of cuneiform letters is not Justice, but Death. On, death, charming, dusty child, here is a small palace for your flirtations! Come closer to me on your shapely heels, smooth out your taffeta dress, and dance. All the subterfuges of the world, all the artifices extending the power of my sense, astronomic lenses and eyepieces of every description, narcotics like fresh wild flowers, alcohols and the pneumatic drills, surrealisms, they divulge your presence everywhere. Death, round like my eye, I was forgetting you, I was ambling along oblivious of having to come home, my good housekeeper, home where the soup is already turning cold in the bowls, where you nonchalantly munch on radishes and twist the hem of the tablecloth with your bony digits, waiting for me. Goodness, don’t fret, I’m still feeding you peanuts, a whole rasher of boulevards on which to sharpen your darling teeth. Don’t taunt me; I’ll return. (25-26)

From: The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Frank Kafka

REFLECTIONS ON SIN, SUFFERING, HOPE, AND THE TRUE WAY
4. Many shades of the departed are occupied solely in licking at the waves of the river of death because it flows from our direction and still has the salty taste of our seas. Then the river rears back in disgust, the current flows the opposite way and brings the dead drifting back into life. But they are happy, sing songs of thanksgiving, and stroke the indignant waters.
16. A cage went in search of a bird.
20. Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrifical pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.
32. The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.
39a. One cannot pay Evil in installments—and one always keeps on trying to.
51. The mediation by the serpent was necessary: Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
68. What is gayer than believing in a household god?

From: The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Frank Kafka (Third Notebook)

THE SILENCE OF THE SIRENS
Evidence that even inadequate, indeed childish means may serve to save one.
In order to be safe from the Sirens, Odysseus stopped his ears with wax and had himself chained to the mast. All travelers, from the very beginning, could of course have done something of the kind, but it was common knowledge throughout the world that this was simply of no avail. The Sirens’ song penetrated through everything, and the passion of those who heard its magic would have snapped more than chains and a mast. But Odysseus did not think of that, even though he may have heard tell of it. He relied solely on the handful of wax and the network chains, and in innocent delight over his little stratagem he voyaged on towards the Sirens.
Now the Sirens have a weapon even more terrible than their song, namely, their silence. True, such a thing has not happened, yet perhaps it is thinkable that someone might have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. Nothing earthly can withstand the sense of having overcome them with one’s own resources, and the overwhelming arrogance resulting from it.
And in fact, when Odysseus came, the mighty singers did not sing, either because they believed the only way of tackling this opponent was with silence, or because the sight of the utter bliss on Odysseus’s face, as he thought of nothing but wax and chains, caused them quite to forget their singing.
But Odysseus—let us put it like this—did not hear their silence, he thought they were singing and that only he was safe from hearing it. Fleetingly he saw first the poise of their necks, their deep breathing, their eyes brimming with tears, their half-open mouths, but he believed this went with the arias that were resounding, unheard, around him. Soon, however, everything slid away from his gaze, which was fixed on the far distance, the Sirens simply vanished in the face of his resolutions, and in the very moment when he was nearest to them he had already forgotten them.
But they—more beautiful than ever—stretched and turned, letting their dread hair float free upon the wind and tightening their claws upon the rocks. They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus.
If the Sirens had possessed consciousness, they would have been annihilated at that time. As it was, they remained; only Odysseus escaped them.
For the rest, tradition has a note to add to this. Odysseus, it is said, was a man of so many wiles, was such a cunning fox, that even the goddess of destiny could not penetrate into his inmost being. Perhaps, although this is beyond comprehension by the mind of man, he really noticed that the Sirens were silent, and confronted them and the gods with the pretended trick described above only, so to speak, as with a sort of shield.

Various Literary Quotes: Lawrence, On Joyce, On Helton and Poetry

The satire, which in The Man of Property really had a certain noble touch, soon fizzles out, and we get that series of Galsworthian ‘rebels’ who are, like all the rest of the modern middle-class rebels, not in rebellion at all. They are merely social beings behaving in an anti-social manner. They worship their own class but they pretend to go one better and sneer at it. They are Forsyte antis, feeling snobbish about snobbery. Nevertheless, they want to attract attention and make money. That’s why they are anti.
Phoenix (1936) by D.H. Lawrence (pg 547)

Streets intersect, shops advertise, homes have party walls and fellow citizens depend upon the same water supply; but there is no co-operation between human beings. The individual stands motionless, like Odysseus becalmed in the doldrums.
James Joyce (1944) by Harry Levine pg 96

"Roy Helton’s: 'May Jones Takes the Air'
Proud queens, old queens, pale and dead and fair,
Who will be waiting to match her beauty there?
The night is nailed aloft with gold, the wind is on her hair.
And love is searching through her eyes; if time has love to spare
Bring love! Show love! Raise it like a crown!
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town!

Nations are marching. Cities yet unseen
Roar on the pavements where her feet have been:
New Worlds! Wise Worlds! Worlds all gold and green!
This is your birth night. Rain your splendours down!
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town.

“A little street walker seen through a poet’s eyes! Plato is right in calling him divinely mad.
Rapture may be a force that rushes imperfect poetry to great heights.” (183, Flaccus)

From "The History of Surrealism" by Maurice Nadeau

Defrocked by his bishop, he had lost his mistress, who loved him only in his cassock, and had happened to pick up an issue of La Revolution surrealiste at the moment he was about to commit suicide.

From "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Gertrude Stein

"I always liked Alice Derain. She had a certain wild quality that perhaps had to do with her brutal thumbs and was curiously in accord with her madonna face." (Pg 29)

"We talked hats. Fernande had two subjects hats and perfumes. This first day we talked hats. She liked hats, she had the true french feeling about a hat, if a hat did not provoke some witticism from a man on the street the hat was not a success. Later on in Montmarte she and I were walking together. She had on a large yellow hat and I had on a much smaller blue one. As we were walking along a workman stopped and called out, there go the sun and the moon shining. Ah, said Fernande to me with a radiant smile, you see our hats are a success." (Pg 19)

Quotes from "An Introduction to the English Novel: Volume I (Defoe to George Eliot) & Volume II (Henry James to the Present)" by Arnold Kettle

I.
"Tender little parasite"

"Prose arises later as science gradually supercedes magic and conscious control replaces instinctive emotion. Prose is a later, more sophisticated use of language than poetry precisely because it presupposes a more objective, controlled and conscious view of reality." (Pg 37)

II.
"If life escapes his clutches it is because he cannot bring himself or his main characters to participate fully and sympathetically in life as it actually is." (Pg 95)

"‘Middle-brow’ literature –not to beat about the bush—is inferior literature adapted to the special tastes and needs of the middleclass and of those who consciously or not adopt the values of that class. It may be inferior for any number of reasons—every bad book has its own particular quality of badness—but to come within the category of ‘middle-brow’ it must maintain, whatever its particular brand of inferiority, certain properties sacred to the bulk of readers of the more superior lending-libraries. Though permitted to titillate with the mention and even the occasional vision of the unmentionable, it must never fundamentally shake, never stretch beyond the breaking-point, certain secure complacencies. It is worth making this point because it would be quite wrong to see ‘middle-brow’ literature as merely qualitatively mediocre, better than bad literature but worse than good. Its distinctive feature is not its quality but its function." (Pg 96)

THE GUARDIAN Q&A

Please answer a minimum of thirty-five questions, including the first two and last two. Where the question demands a yes or no answer, perhaps you would be kind enough to expand on your response.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
2. What is your greatest fear?
3. Which living person do you most admire and why?
4. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
5. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
6. What has been your most embarrassing moment?
7. What vehicles do you own?
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
9. What is your most treasured possession?
10. Where would you like to live?
11. What makes you depressed?
12. What do you most dislike about your appearance?
13. Who would play you in a movie of your life?
14. What is your most unappealing habit?
15. What is your favourite smell?
16. What is your favourite word?
17. What is your favourite book?
18. What is your fancy dress costume of choice?
19. Radiator or air conditioning?
20. Cat or dog?
21. Is it better to give or to receive?
22. What is your guiltiest pleasure?
24. To whom would you most like to say sorry and why?
25. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
26. Which living person do you most despise and why?
27. Have you ever said "I love you" without meaning it?
28. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
29. What has been your biggest disappointment?
30. What is your greatest regret?
31. When and where were you happiest?
32. When did you last cry, and why?
33. How do you relax?
36. What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
37. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
38. What keeps you awake at night?
39. What song would you like played at your funeral?
40. How would you like to be remembered?
41. What is the most important lesson life has taught you?