"I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However... who said that thing about 'the littleness of life that art exaggerates'? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamed about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

But time... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought were were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time... give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."

--Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

"I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does."

--Jeanette Winterson, The Passion.

"Everywhere dense the space between them seemed a series of incremental frames that defined their passion's dark encompassment, man ostensibly engrossed in dressing, woman nude and on her side (a horizontal dune anagrammatized), neither failing to be aware of the sediment of recent links and distances, that variable material suspended in the air, living instants of their time within each other, sweat and re-echoing flesh serving to confirm the urgent nature of their act, the industry involved, the reconnoitering for fit and placement, the fundamental motion, the pursuit of equable rhythm, the readjustment of original position, the effort of returning to oneself, of departing the aggregate, and in the slightly pasty daze in which they now remembered their fatigue, their sense of well-merited weariness, it was possible for each to examine even further the substance of that space between them, so reflective of their labor, the odors transposed, the strand of hair in the mouth, the experience of the whole body breathing, the failure (or instinctive disinclination) to produce coherent speech, the bright cries, the settling, the eventual descent to slackness, the momentary near sleep in milkiness and cling, the recapturing of normal breathing tempo, the monosyllables and blocks of words, the raw awareness of the dangers of exchange, the oddly apologetic uncoupling, mutual recognition of the human demonology of love."

--Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star.

Clouds are so amazing.

"Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

[...]

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. We are alone in this quest, and Fortunata is right not to disguise it, though she may be wrong about love. I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I'm missing the point -- perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain. But they don't seem to care about who they are. Some of them have told me that the very point of searching for God is to forget about oneself, to lose oneself for ever. But it is not difficult to lose oneself, or is it the ego that they are talking about, the hollow, screaming cadaver that has no spirit within it?

I think that cadaver is only the ideal self run mad, and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God. After all, He has no need for us, being complete."

--Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry.

"When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me.

He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.

It would have been better if he had hated me, or if he had abused me, or if he had packed his new suitcases and left.

As it was he continued to put his arm round me and talk about building a new wall to replace the forgotten fence that divided our garden from his vegetable patch. I knew he would never leave our house. He had worked for it.

Day by day I felt myself disappearing. For my husband I was no longer a reality, I was one of those things around him. I was the fence which needed to be replaced. I watched myself in the mirror and saw that I was no longer vivid and exciting. I was worn and grey like an old sweater you can't throw out but won't put on.

He admitted he was in love with her, but he said he loved me.

Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don't want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don't know what to do, give me time.

Why, why should I give you time? What time are you giving me? I am in a cell waiting to be called for execution.

I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn't use language to make a war-zone of my heart.

'You're so simple and good,' he said, brushing the hair from my face.

He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic.

But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life.

Eventually, when he had been away with her for a few days and returned restless and conciliatory, I decided not to wait in my cell any longer. I went to where he was sleeping in another room and I asked him to leave. Very patiently he asked me to remember that the house was his home, that he couldn't be expected to make himself homeless because he was in love.

'Medea did,' I said, 'and Romeo and Juliet, and Cressida, and Ruth in the Bible.'

He asked me to shut up. He wasn't a hero.

'Then why should I be a heroine?'

He didn't answer, he plucked at the blanket.

I considered my choices.
I could stay and be unhappy and humiliated.
I could leave and be unhappy and dignified.
I could beg him to touch me again.
I could live in hope and die of bitterness.

I took some things and left. It wasn't easy, it was my home too.

I hear he's replaced the back fence."

--Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry.

Rethinking Regret

Let's thank our mistakes, let's bless them
for their humanity, their terribly weak chins.
We should offer them our gratitude and admiration
for giving us our clefts and scarring us with
embarrassment, the hot flash of confession.
Thank you, transgressions! for making us so right
in our imperfections. Less flawed, we might have
turned away, feeling too fit, our desires looking
for better directions. Without them, we might have
passed the place where one of us stood, watching
someone else walk away, and followed them,
while our perfect mistake walked straight towards us,
walked right into our cluttered, ordered lives
that could have been closed but were not,
that could have been asleep, but instead
stayed up, all night, forgetting the pill,
the good book, the necessary eight hours,
and lay there -- in the middle of the bed --
keeping the heart awake-open and stunned,
stunning. How unhappy perfection must be
over there on the shelf without a crack, without
this critical break -- this falling -- this sudden, thrilling draft.

--Elaine Sexton

"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"

--Don DeLillo, White Noise, p. 198.

Beautiful Dreamer

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away!

Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life's busy throng, --
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea
Mermaids are chaunting the wild lorelie;
Over the streamlet vapors are borne,
Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.

Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart,
E'en as the morn on the streamlet and sea;
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart, --
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

--Stephen Foster

When you are weary with age,
and the hearth is cooling with the dying embers of the evening fire,
remember, my darling: you were loved.
Oh, how you were loved.

When the kettle whistles for an era gone
as you shuffle a waltz to the stove. When
the wind clutches at your bones with an ice impenetrable.
Pause. Consider.

You were loved, through and through. And I was too. I was too.

12th May, 2.30am
Moon-talk. I wake to a ferment of ideas. Is this what Laura means when she talks about the excesses of her premenstrual state? She tells me that women can have heightened states of awareness and wild proliferations of ideas, hormonally, just before menstruation. In my premenstrual migraine I usually feel clumsy and inept and want to shut the world out. But tonight it is full moon, I am bleeding, my belly aches with menstrual cramps and I feel like squatting and baying at the moon. I surrender to the flow of ideas--patterns rather than words. It is a wild connectedness where images merge and fire off each other and my mind explodes. What is this other kind of thinking that happens in the night?

--From Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals

...Some things

you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

--From Philip Levine, 'The Simple Truth'

Shall I compare thee to a winter’s night?
By river’s edge, with inky rolling waves.
Although the ocean’s wind has fearful bite,
In quite no other dark do stars behave.
The autumn flowers wilt at violent rate
And trees in spindly stature bring no shade,
But the most valued of the bulbs do wait,
For winter is when Nature’s start is made.
There is a depth in loss, beauty concealed
That none may understand but those who seek
Such comforts in renewal: a truth revealed
To those in quiet thought who do not speak.
So long as seasons turn to snow and storm,
So long these words aflame may keep you warm.

If I love
I will love beyond today--
beyond the sensuous tingling of the body--
beyond the imprisoned slavery of the mind--
I will love freely
as love was meant to be--
like the white wings of a gull
on a journey to the sun--
like the wonder of tomorrow
and the wonder of a thousand tomorrows
with the faith of a thousand yesterdays
which have freed me
to love this way--

--Nan Witcomb

The One Certainty.

Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith,

All things are vanity. The eye and ear

Cannot be filled with what they see and hear.

Like early dew, or like the sudden breath

Of wind, or like the grass that withereth,

Is man, tossed to and fro by hope and fear:

So little joy hath he, so little cheer,

Till all things end in the long dust of death.

To-day is still the same as yesterday,

To-morrow also even as one of them;

And there is nothing new under the sun:

Until the ancient race of Time be run,

The old thorns shall grow out of the old stem,

And morning shall be cold and twilight grey.

--Christina Rossetti

let me count the ways.
I want neither Lethe, nor wolf-bane,
and there are no buds in May.
honesty is lonely if dullness is homely, and
wine is sweeter under the winter sky's carpet of stars.
people will come and speak with us,
strangers, sometimes, meek and mild,
and we will dream of the river dragging silt through time.

and yet.
there is something in it.
beyond the page, something in the cells of our skin,
the narratives of the human,
the poet, the lover, the friend.
the parts we play to keep death entertained and
too busy to lead us astray into the.
what else.
what else is there to do but try.
try with all the might of those who will die.

we danced with the heat of a thousand suns rising

It's as simple and as difficult as giving it everything.

Wake, the parting of water, this design of ripples they are making. This pattern on pattern made in the shock waves of uncompleted mourning.

--Gail Jones, Five Bells

What are words but little islands of lies? Little islands of pretenses and pretends. The coward's retreat, the scholar's beloved contract with passivity. They serve only as the run-up to activity, a preparation or declaration or mitigation of something that remains imaginary until it leads to action. Words, and words alone. More words, and more still. And for what?