it was only the beginning ~

ready for spring

I'm tired of it being so cold all the time; this morning when I was biking to church the air felt like spring. It was still cold but it smelled damp, like growing things.

Everything starts to feel so much more alive when green things are growing. I'm looking forward to coming out of my emotional hibernation.

a tiny thing that made me laugh today

thinking about writing a lot, recently (obviously), and so today was thinking about an article I had read online somewhere about kurt vonnegut and a term paper assignment he once gave students. I found the link (here) which was as lovely as I remembered, but in the process I also found an image of a letter vonnegut wrote to one of his peers back in the '60s. He was writing to someone hired to teach at the Iowa writer's workshop. My favorite line: "Every so often you will go nuts. All of a sudden the cornfields get you."

humans are so interesting, all the time. a challenge for this day - pay attention.

"it's really scary to be alive and to be human"

"I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid. And that the reasons...

That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we're so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we're here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we're not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion.

Well for me, as an American male, the face I'd put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing's enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there's a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff. And my guess is that that's been what's going on, ever since people were hitting each other over the head with clubs. Though describable in a number of different words and cultural argots. And that our particular challenge is that there's never been more and better stuff comin' from the outside, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole.

Personally, I believe that if it's assuageable in any way it's by internal means. And I don't know what that means. I think it's fine in some way. I think it's probably assuageable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin' yourself.

It's more like, if you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do this."

- David Lipsky, quoting David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace

I'm trying to write more

Thia gave me a book of poetry by Czeslaw Milosz for Christmas. He's a Lithuanian poet who lived through both world wars and, of course, the Holocaust. The book Thia gave me is a large collection of his works translated from Polish. The Foreword to the book (by Seamus Heaney, another poet I like) says, "His life and works were founded upon faith in 'A word wakened by lips that perish.' This first artistic principle was clearly related to the last Gospel of the Mass, the In principio of St. John: 'In the beginning was the Word.' Inexorably then, through his pursuit of poetic vocation, his study of what such pursuit entailed, and the unremitting, abounding yield of his habit of composition, he developed a fierce conviction about the holy force of his art, how poetry was called upon to combat death and nothingness..."

What a lovely thought, and one I want to strive to live into, in my own amateurish attempts at creative writing. The holy force of art. Mmmm.


Current Milosz poem that's caught my eye - a poem called "Notes," that is really a collection of epigraphs ranging on a wide variety of subjects. A small excerpt:

SUPPLICATION
From galactic silence protect us.

THE PERFECT REPUBLIC
Right from early morning - the sun has barely made it through the
dense maples - they walk contemplating the holy word: Is.

STRONG OR WEAK POINT
You were always ready to fall to your knees!
Yes, I was always ready to fall to my knees.

LONGING
Not that I want to be a god or a hero.
Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH
For two thousand years I have been trying to understand what It was.

thoughts in my head about writing, at the beginning of creative writing class

"… 'I want to perfect my craft so I won’t have to tell lies.' So often, when you’re stumped, the temptation is just to back down, but when you feel this is complicated or so tenuous that there’s no way you can say it, you have to persuade yourself you can say it, that there is a way of saying it, that there’s nothing that is unsayable. And this gives you strength for the next time.

"The poem, by its very nature, holds the possibility of revelation, and revelation doesn’t come easy. You have to fight for it. There is that moment when you suddenly open a door and enter into the room of the unspeakable."                  

 -Stanley Kunitz

Pre-semester musings

I'm about to start my last semester at EMU and I feel like I should have some kind of profound statement to put on my blog, but I don't. My thoughts tonight have been taken up with answering emails, making my bed, unpacking the bits of my life that I haul each break between Harrisonburg and Lancaster, and now contemplating the terrible sleeping habits I practice.

Such a strange thing, life. Important events happening right alongside the banal. Maybe it is a certain kind of mercy: no matter how I feel, whether I am excited or terrified or burned-out, life just keeps happening. Each day will happen, whether I am ready for it or not.