cartesian rebirth (aragon)

I realized that man is sopping with gods like a sponge immersed in heaven. These gods live, they reach their prime, then die, bequeathing their perfumed altars to other gods. They are the very law behind the total transformation of everything in this world. They are the necessity of movement. So, I ecstatically strolled among a thousand divine concretions. I began to formulate a walking mythology or, more accurately, a modern mythology, which is the name under which I conceived it.

- 95, "Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

crunchtime (aragon)

Sick with logic, like all mankind, I mistrusted sanctified hallucinations.

- 93, "Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on the beauty of public baths and the draw of mystery and transgression (aragon)

BATHS is all it says on the façade, and that word covers a multitude of veracious signs, the thousand pleasures and maledictions to which our bodies are heir. But who knows? Perhaps one will find, beneath its roof, the promised water, limpid and singing. The unknown is a powerful temptation, and danger even more so. Modern society scarcely takes into account these instincts of the individual; it believes it has suppressed both temptations. And perhaps, in our latitudes, only the heart readily intoxicated may be susceptible to the unknown. As for danger, you can see with your own eyes how things grow increasingly tame from day to day. In love, however, whether it declare itself as this physical fury, or this specter, or this spirit of diamond whispering in my ear a name which sounds like freshness, there is a principle outside the law, an irrepressible urge to violate, a scorn of prohibitions, and a liking for rapine. You can always try confining this hydra-headed passion to your own house or even giving it the run of palaces: it will still crave its freedom, always bursting forth wherever it wasn’t asked to cool its heels, wherever it can unleash its unruly splendor. Let it grow where it was not planted: how vulgarity makes it convulse!

- 40, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on identification/projecting (amy hempel)

Every time you see a beautiful woman, someone is tired of her, so the men say. And I know where they go, these women, with their tired beauty that someone doesn't want--these women who must live like the high Sierra white pine, there since before the birth of Christ, fed somehow by the alpine wind.

They reach out to animals, day after day smoothing fur inside a cage, saying, 'How is Mama's baby? Is Mama's baby lonesome?'

The women leave at the end of the day, stopping to ask an attendant, "Will they go to good homes?" And come back in a day or so, stopping to examine a one-eyed cat, asking, as though they intend to adopt, 'How would I introduce a new cat to my dog?'

But there is seldom an adoption; it matters that the women have someone to leave, leaving behind the lovesome creatures who would never leave them, had they once given them their hearts.

- Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom: Stories

on crazy weekends, crazy lives (aragon)

At last the senses have established their hegemonies over the earth. In the future what conceivable purpose can reason serve? Oh, reason, reason, yesterday’s flimsy ghost! – I had already expelled you from my dreams, here I am on the verge of seeing them couple with apparent realities: this place is filled with my self. Reason vainly strives to have me denounce the dictatorship of sensuality. It vainly cautions me against error, queen of this realm. Enter, Madame, my body is your crown and scepter. I stroke my delirium like a pretty horse.

- 3, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on wide open spaces (aragon)

Nowadays man no longer wanders through marshlands with his hounds and his bow; other solitudes have provided an outlet to his instinct for freedom. Empty lots of the intellect where the individual may escape social constraints. There, an unsuspected population dwells, heedless of its legend. I see its country houses, its laboratories of pleasure, its hand luggage, its ruses, its pitfalls, its diversions.

- 36, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on people-watching and stillness (aragon)

For years on end, this couple has sat within its molehill watching skirt hems and trouser legs shinning up the ladder of assignations. For years they have sat bound in the straitjacket of this absurd place on the edge of the arcades, two elderly souls who can be seen frittering away their lives, he smoking and she sewing, sewing, indefatigably sewing as if the fate of the universe hung from her fabric. God knows with what strange blooms their paired skulls are decorated, for in the lingering hours and in the darkness, the darkness which saves them the exorbitant cost of an electric lamp, lovely natural growths must, at their unrestricted leisure, pile up behind this united front of foreheads. So accustomed to one another that their daily chatter has at last thinned into silence, the two must now accompany the mechanical gesture of the pipe and the needle with such magnificent arabesques of the imagination as are generally expected only from poets. Seeing the footsteps of mystery and harlotry criss-cross outside their windowpane, what thoughts do they exhume from the bottom of their minds, these sitters bitten by advancing age and idleness of heart?

- 14, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

love, and agreed misunderstanding/imaginings (aragon)

A fiction like this, for people who fail to see in it the reverse side of our several existences, will seem infantile. Make no mistake: the imagination never goes unrequited; this is the first giant step toward an achievement, and the myth would lead those few people who had presided over its birth a long way indeed.

- 111, "The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on you are the new day (aragon)

Each day alters the modern feelings of existence. A mythology takes shape and comes undone. It is a scene of life belonging only to the innocent, a living science which engenders and kills itself.

- 5, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

and all the rest: tidbits from henry miller

Part One: The Oranges of the Millennium

What was inaugurated with virginal modesty threatens to end as a bonanza. (11)

Artists never thrive in colonies. Ants do. (13)

Part Two: Peace and Solitude: A Potpourri

The longing to be reunited, with a common purpose and an all-embracing significance, is now universal. (57)

Nobody suffers. Only literature suffers. (67)

Men have an ingrained tendency to regard these irruptions of the spirit as closed dramas. (135)

It is abundance we worship, then common sense would dictate that we cease wasting our time and energy on the manufacture of destructive products and destructive thoughts. (141)

The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay, if we accept everything created is also creative. (144)

- Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Henry Miller

on going somewhere (miller)

And if one moves fast enough the gap can become tremendous, painful too for those unable to follow.

-132, "Part Two: Peace and Solitude: A Potpourri," Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Henry Miller

on false beginnings (miller)

As for spiritual resources, has there ever been a deficiency? Only in man’s mind.

The air is full of theories about the new order, the new dispensation. Marvelous pictures are painted of the period just around the bend, when we of this earth will see the end of making war, when atomic energy will be utilized for the benefit of all mankind. But no one acts as if this glorious age which is dawning were an imminent, wholly realizable, thoroughly practicable one, indeed the only viable one. It is a beautiful subject for discussion at cocktail hour, when all the current topics have been chewed to a frazzle.

- 131, "Part Two: Peace and Solitude: A Potpourri," Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Henry Miller

on always be unsatisfied (miller)

The longing for paradise, whether here on earth or in the beyond, has almost ceased to be. Instead of an idée-force it has become an idée fixe. From a potent myth it has degenerated into a taboo. Men will sacrifice their lives to bring about a better world—whatever that may mean—but they will not budge an inch to attain paradise. Nor will they struggle to create a bit of paradise in the hell they find themselves. It is so much easier, and gorier, to make revolution, which means, to put it simply, establishing another, a different, status quo. If paradise were realizable—this is the classic retort!—it would no longer be paradise.

- 24, "Part One: The Oranges of the Millenium," Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Henry Miller

on being weighted down - equality! (miller)

The world presses down on all alike. Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent, shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artist. They are suffering from the fact that art is not the primary, moving force in their lives. They are suffering from the act, repeated daily, of keeping up the pretense that they can go their way, lead their lives, without art. They never dream—or they behave as if they never realize—that the reason why they feel sterile, frustrated and joyless is because art (and with it the artist) has been ruled out of their lives.

- 57-58, "Part Two: Peace and Solitude: A Potpourri," Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Henry Miller

on work and weariness, part iv (tennyson, the lotos eaters)

VII. But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly,
How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly)
With half-dropt eyelids still,
Beneath a heaven dark and holy,
To watch the long bright river drawing slowly
His waters from the purple hill—
To hear the dewy echoes calling
From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine—
To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling
Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine!
Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine,
Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine.

VIII. The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone:
Thro' every hollow cave and alley lone
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie relined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer—some, 'tis whisper'd—down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

on work and weariness, part iii (tennyson, the lotos eaters)

V.

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!
To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,
Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;
To hear each other's whisper'd speech;
Eating the Lotos day by day,
To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy
Heap'd over with a mound of grass,
Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

VI. Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,
And dear the last embraces of our wives
And their warm tears: but all hath suffer'd change;
For surely now our household hearts are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold
Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain.
The Gods are hard to reconcile:
'Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labour unto aged breath,
Sore task to hearts worn out with many wars
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

on work and weariness, part ii (tennyson, the lotos eaters)

IV. Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

on work and weariness, part i (tennyson, the lotos eaters)

In the afternoon they came into a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.

I.

THERE is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

II.

Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown:
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
'There is no joy but calm!'—
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

III.

Lo! in the middle of the wood,
The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-steep'd at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.
Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days,
The flower ripens in its place,
Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil.