Conorthoughts

Accusation

 

You let me down, I feel. I thought that you would see me through that difficult period, thought that your ability to dig and make things flow and free up laughter would be enough, thought that you were in touch with some layer in me that simply needed visiting for the day-to-day to right itself. I have lost faith in you, but not completely. Otherwise I would not be writing this. Now that I want to return to you, need to, all I can do is trust you more blindly than before, give myself over to you to speak and dance and play.

 

This is a letter, short, to the writer in me whom I believed could unlock, sentence by sentence or page by page, me.

Here is a paragraph from Roland Barthes (If you need me to translate it, please leave a comment):       

 

Mais en même temps, écrire (au sens curieusement intransitif du terme), écrire est un acte qui dépasse l’œuvre: écrire, c’est précisement accepter de voir le monde transformer en discours dogmatique une parole qu’on a pourtant voulue (si l’on est écrivain) dépositaire d’un sens offert; écrire, c’est remettre aux autres de fermer eux-mêmes votre proper parole, et l’écriture n’est qu’une proposition dont on ne connaît jamais la réponse. On écrit pour être aimé, on est lu sans pouvoir l’ être, c’est sans doute cette distance qui constitue l’écrivain. (From his essay  Littérature et Signification, published in Tel Quel in 1963, reproduced in Essais critiques, Editions du Seuil, 1964, p. 275)

 

I am writing this in an attempt to love myself.  Perhaps you cannot write to be loved without doing so to also love yourself and, perhaps, if you can't love yourself, you cannot write. 

Almost

I've stopped writing here. I've stopped writing but here I am so I have only almost stopped. Maybe this will be a new beginning. Here, in lieu of a thought, in the hope that copying something that gives me pleasure will help my writing juices at least trickle, is a poem by the American A.R. Ammons (1926-2001). It is taken from the Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Helen Vendler. I read poetry mainly on the toilet and read this for the first time this morning:

 

                          The Eternal City

                         After the explosion or cataclysm, that big
                         display that does its work but then fails
                         out with destructions, one is left with the

                         pieces: at first, they don't look very valuable,
                         but nothing sizable remnant around for
                         gathering the senses on, one begins to take

                         an interest, to sort out, to consider closely
                         what will do and won't, matters having become
                         not only small but critical: bulbs may have been

                         uprooted: they should be eaten, if edible, or
                         got back in the ground: what used to be garages,
                         even the splinters, should be collected for

                         fires: some unusually deep holes or cleared
                         woods may be turned to water supplies or
                         sudden fields: ruinage is hardly ever a

                         pretty sight but it must when splendor goes
                         accept into itself piece by piece all the old
                         perfect human visions, all the old perfect loves. 

 

 

Here is another one by him that I've just read, not on the toilet this time, on my sofa, two for the price of one:

 

                        Grace Abounding
                        for E.C.

                        What is the misery in one that turns one with gladness
                        to the hedge strung lucid with ice; is it that one's
                        misery, penetrating there as sight, meets neither

                        welcome nor reprimand but finds nevertheless a picture
                        of itself sympathetic, held as the ice-blurred stems
                        increased: ah, what an abundance is in the universe

                        when one can go for gladness to the indifferent ghastly,
                        feel alliances where none can ever take: find one's
                        misery made clear, borne, as if also, by a hedge of ice.

 

 

It is midsummer here.