i keep thinking about how a lot of people seem to engage with existing works as like, summaries of themselves. There are a lot of concepts we just come into contact with now but might never actually fully engage with or understand, even though to live our lives in might be helpful to think about them for longer than 5 minutes at a time. Obviously like skimming wikipedia pages to add knowledge of something to your personal party-chatter bank but also like, hearing about a book and buying it and starting to remember yourself as having read the book based on hearsay even if you never actually did. that freaks me out. But a lot of us seem to feel a distinct humilation in having to say “im not familiar with that” so we skim enough off the top of dozens of weighty subjects and works just to avoid that sensation. I know growing up i felt like being well-read was a competition and that there wasn’t enough…. cultural time to finish a book and engage with it “the right way” because i’m such a slow reader. And i wanted to quantify how long it would take to “get” something so i could move on. it makes me wonder about what purpose art and culture and even theory serve now when it all gets ground up into content
Emily Dickinson, 1878, Emily Dickinson Collection, Box 4 Folder 54, Amherst College, Amherst, MA
/ One note from One Bird / Is better than a Million Words / A scabbard holds (has - needs) but one sword /
(Source: acdc.amherst.edu)
can i legally have no name ? 3am thoughts
“The two sides of a secret are repression and expression, just as the two sides of the poem are the told and the untold. We must be careful not to take the word as the meaning itself; words do not ‘capture’ a moment as much as they ‘communicate’ it—they are a bridge that, paradoxically, breaks isolation and loneliness without eradicating it. It is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: ‘oh, somebody else is lonely, too!’”
Mary Ruefle, from Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012)
2.5.18
Nothing stands still in this world. When I say to you sky, I mean field more than sky. And when I say field, I mean more sky than field. The words move the water out from under us; still we are more words than water. The tree that is hollow is not always hollow and not always tree. It is the tree that hollows. The self that speaks is not wholly spoken, not wholly self. It is the one that is the other. Nothing stands still, and yet there is a nothing to speak, and a world in which to speak of it.