We'll See what happens: Archive

My Memory "Assignments"

For Dr. Jackson:

Quandary, by Robert Frost

Never have I been glad or sad
That there was such a thing as bad.
There had to be, I understood,
For there to have been any good.
It was by having been contrasted
That good and bad so long had lasted.
That’s why discrimination reigns.
That’s why we need a lot of brains
If only to discriminate
‘Twixt what to love and what to hate.
To quote the oracle at Delphi,
Love thy neighbor as thyself, aye,
And hate him as thyself thou hatest.
There quandary is at its greatest.
We learned from the forbidden fruit
For brains there is no substitute.
‘Unless it’s sweetbreads, ’ you suggest
With innuendo I detest.
You drive me to confess in ink:
Once I was fool enough to think
That brains and sweetbreads were the same,
Till I was caught and put to shame,
First by a butcher, then a cook,
Then by a scientific book.
But ’ twas by making sweetbreads do
I passed with such a high I.Q.

For friends:

God’s Grandeur, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oilCrushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 5 And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soilIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 10And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Apr 28, 2011

Jealousy, after Billy Collins

Last night, I saw that settledthingsstrange had posted a rendition of Billy Collins’ ”Not Touching.” I thought that I might post my Billy Collins inspired poem. As I was typing it up, I realized how bitter, ill-informed, and all around bad it was. So, I’ve saved it onto my computer, and once I have a better substitute for it, I’ll publish that.

Apr 28, 2011

“

Wendell Berry in his essay “Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community” writes that

in sex, as in other things, we have liberated fantasy but killed imagination, and so have sealed ourselves in selfishness and loneliness. Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead us away from ourselves. It is by imagination that we cross over the differences between ourselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love—the virtues without which neither we nor the world can live.

” —http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/04/pride-and-prejudice-and-porn/

Apr 28, 2011

“Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many directions. Alice Haskett—Alice Varick—Alice Waythorn—she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides.” —The Other Two, by Edith Wharton

Apr 27, 2011

“He shook his head in complete surrender now. ‘It hasn’t yet come. Only, you know, it isn’t anything I’m to do, to achieve in the works, to be distinguished or admired for. I’m not such an ass as that. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were.’
‘It’s to be something you’re merely to suffer?’
‘Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly breakout in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves.’
She took this in, but the light in here eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. ‘Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation—or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people—of falling in love?’” —The Beast in the Jungle, by Henry James

Apr 27, 2011

“Literate culture is the most democratic culture in our land: it excludes nobody; it cuts across generations and social groups and classes; it is not usually one’s first culture, but it should be everyone’s second, existing as it does beyond the narrow spheres of family, neighborhood, and region.” —E.D. Hirsch, Jr.

Apr 25, 2011

“This gives us a good working definition of the Fall of Man: You do not know who you are, and you don’t really want to know, and even if you did, you wouldn’t know how to find out.” —http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/04/everyone-walks-on-the-wild-side

Apr 25, 2011

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
–John Donne” —

Settled Things Strange:

Apr 24, 20111 note

Apr 22, 201116,401 notes

“‘I have been seeing you for some hours’, he said
‘And I appraise you as all wonderful.
The longer I observe and scrutinize you,
The less do I become a king of words
To bring them into action. They retreat
And hide themselves, leaving me as I may
To make the best of a disordered remnant,
Unworthy of allegiance to your face
And all the rest of you. You are supreme
In a deceit that says fragility
Where there is nothing fragile. You have eyes
That almost weep for grief, seeing from heaven
How trivial and how tragic a small place
This earth is, and so make a sort of heaven
Where they are seen. Your hair, if shorn and woven
The which may God forbid, would then become
A nameless cloth of gold whiter than gold,
Imprisoning light captured from paradise.
Your small ears are two necessary leaves
Of living alabaster never of earth,
Whereof the flower that is your face is made,
And is a paradisal triumph also—
Along with your gray eyes and your gold hair
That is not gold. Only God knows, who made it,
What color it is exactly. I don’t know.
The rest of you I dare not estimate,
Saving your hands and feet, which authorize
A period of some leisure for the Lord
On high for their ineffable execution.
Your low voice tells how bells of singing gold
Would sound through twilight over silent water
Yourself is a celestial emanation
Compounded of a whiteness and a warmth
Not yet so near to heaven, or far from it
As not to leave mean wiser for their dreams
And distances in apprehending you.
Your signal imperfection, probably,
Is in your peril of having everything,
And thereby overwhelming with perfection
A man who sees so much of it at once,
And says no more of it than I am saying.
I shall begin today to praise the Lord,
I think, for sparing an unworthy heart
An early wound that once might not have healed
If there lives in me more than should be told,
Not for the world’s last oyster would I tell it
To the last ear alive, surely not yours.’” —Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Tristram

Apr 22, 2011

“For some of us, books are important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life—wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded…” —Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, pg. 15 (via settledthingsstrange)

Apr 22, 20115 notes

“It is no more to the point, of course, for me to investigate whether Homer or Hesiod was the older poet, than to know why Hecuba, although younger than Helen, showed her years so lamentably. What, in your opinion, I say, would be the point in trying to determine the respective ages of Achilles and Patroclus? Do you raise the question, “Through what regions did Ulysses stray?” instead of trying to prevent ourselves from going astray at all times? We have no leisure to hear lectures on the question whether he was sea-tost between Italy and Sicily, or outside our known world (indeed, so long a wandering could not possibly have taken place within its narrow bounds); we ourselves encounter storms of the spirit, which toss us daily, and our depravity drives us into all the ills which troubled Ulysses. For us there is never lacking the beauty to tempt our eyes, or the enemy to assail us; on this side are savage monsters that delight in human blood, on that side the treacherous allurements of the ear, and yonder is shipwreck and all the varied category of misfortunes.Show me rather, by the example of Ulysses, how I am to love my country, my wife, my father, and how, even after suffering shipwreck, I am to sail toward these ends, honourable as they are. Why try to discover whether Penelope was a pattern of purity, or whether she had the laugh on her contemporaries? Or whether she suspected that the man in her presence was Ulysses, before she knew it was he? Teach me rather what purity is, and how great a good we have in it, and whether it is situated in the body or in the soul.” —Seneca

Apr 21, 2011

WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

Walking into my grandparents’ church.

Apr 21, 2011

“

Ah, but we die to each other daily.

What we know of other people

Is only our memory of the moments

During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

To pretend that they and we are the same

Is a useful and convenient social convention

Which sometimes must be broken. We must also remember