lost libraries

"... We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.  The procession is very long and life is very short.  We die on the march.  But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.  The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language."

— from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, quoted by James Gleick in The Information

01.14.2014 (night)

The feral cats howling behind my building at night make me think of France, of Auvillar.  The echo of cats hissing across the cobblestone square there, dusted with rain, where I would be alone in the phone booth, typing out an infinite string of numbers to finally connect with a human voice, speaking in English.  "Where are you?" I asked.  "I'm sorry if that's weird; I mean you sound American."  The operator said yes, he worked at a call center in Kansas or Nebraska, I don't remember which.

I was alone so much in France.  Not lonesome, but alone—a singular thing in a large landscape.  Like looking in a mirror the size of the world wherein I could see clearly the size of myself.  That perspective.  And I had this room there—not mine, but no one else's either—to sit in alone and it was exactly the right size for the size of me.  Empty but a desk, a chair, an old typewriter, cobwebs thick in the corners by the ceiling, and one big window with wooden shutters—no screen.  Looking out at the main road into the town, and past that the river, a view of the bridge.  Pounding the keys until the string of letters connected into something.  Old ribbon, the ink faint and uneven.  Cracks in the plaster of the walls and around the window frame like a geologic measurement of time in the space of solitude.  That is a room of one's own, the way it's supposed to work at least.  If you sit long enough and just listen, the howls of the cats fade, transforming from something visceral—the urge to throw something, to just shut them up however violently—to the sound of the world simply turning at its own pace, outside of you and always.


That, I can almost see now, is what the whole cherry tree was about it.  What hurt about its missingness.  How it could be inside me and outside me at once—and neither of them stable, not one of them real.

another valentine

To Plath, to Sexton

So what use was poetry
to a white empty house?

Wolf, swan, hare,
in by the fire.

And when your tree
crashed through your house,

what use then
was all your power?

It was the use of you.
It was the flower.

-- Jean Valentine, The River at Wolf

difficult loves

The boy swung the muzzle of the gun around again.  It was strange, thinking it over, to be so surrounded by air, separated from other things by yards of air.  When he aimed the gun, on the other hand, the air was a straight invisible line drawn tight from the mouth of the rifle to the target, to the hawk flying up there in the sky with wings that did not seem to move.  When he pressed the trigger, the air was still as empty and transparent as before, but up there, at the other end of the line, the hawk was folding its wings and dropping like a stone.  From the open bolt floated the good smell of gunpowder.

                                                                       -- Italo Calvino, "The Crow Comes Last"