Teddy looked at him directly for the first time. ‘Are you a poet?’ he asked.
‘A poet?’ Nicholson said. ‘Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.’
J.D. Salinger
A disciple asked his master: ‘Sir, what is the most important human quality?’
The master answered: ‘Sincerity.’
The disciple asked: ‘Sir, what does it mean to be sincere?’
The master answered: ‘To be sincere is to plunge down the well of the self and never hit bottom.’
From the writings of Po Ma, an imaginary 5th-century Chinese sage.
Lane lit a cigarette as the train pulled in. Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.
J.D. Salinger
The old whiskey priest, who’d taken her in when she was on the run from her family’s religion and let her make her mistakes, sat looking at the floor, his eyes veiled with worry. She stumbled in from the streets with a head full of beer. But that night she hadn’t shaken off her brother. They’d sent him out to find her and drag her back by the hair if necessary.
He told the priest:
‘So this is where she stays. I should have known. Look at her, she’s up and down, laughing one minute crying the next, she runs away and drinks every night, she has no control over herself!’
The priest turned his chair to face them both.
Her brother told him:
‘All she does is avoid learning anything from anyone.’
She held back the tears.
‘She thinks she’s some kind of princess who deserves special treatment’, said her brother. ‘Why do you encourage her?’
The priest softly held his gaze.
‘She wants to trade judgement for shelter’, he said at last. ‘Like us all. Who isn’t a Joseph looking for a manger?’
The brother glared and was about to say many things, and the priest stayed still.
‘Who knows whose finger it is that pulls her up and pushes her down’, he said. ‘Sometimes God instructs us by contradiction. And who’s to tell what’s up and what’s down in the first place?’
‘Clearly not you’, countered the brother at once. ‘We all know about you. She belongs with her family, not someone like you.’ He looked around the room. ‘So you sit here and get each other drunk. Marvellous. Instead of her being with her own people, who know her better than she knows herself, and can save her from herself.’
‘Perhaps sometimes we need to be ourselves rather than to be saved from ourselves.’
‘You would say that. You’re living in a contradiction, you’ve lost your own self-control. You’re not to be trusted.’
The stare-down continued until each of the three people in the room reached his own dead end.
Still she kept her face stiff, though she knew now what would happen.
Her brother turned to her and pointed at her bag.
On the way out, on the pretext of fetching something else, she grabbed the old priest’s last bottle from the kitchen and put it in her bag, and drank it alone in her room later that night.
From a letter to the Countess M.:
… Ultimately, each of us experiences only one conflict in life which constantly reappears under a different guise, — mine is to reconcile life with work, in the purest sense; and where it is a question of the infinitely incommensurable work of the artist, the two directions stand opposed. Many people have helped themselves by taking life easily, by snatching what they needed from it apart from the conflict, or by turning life’s values into an intoxication whose wretched enthusiasms they hurriedly flung into art; others have no alternative but to withdraw from life — asceticism — and this way is of course much cleaner and truer than that rapacious cheating of life for the sake of art. But for me even asceticism cannot be considered. Since in the last analysis my productivity proceeds from the plainest adoration of life, from the daily, inexhaustible wonder of it (how could I have been productive otherwise?) — I would see it as a lie to reject any one of the currents that flow towards me; in the end every such failure must express itself in your art — however much art may gain potentially from it — as a certain hardness, and there take its revenge: for who can be open and affirmative on such sensitive ground if he has a mistrustful, restrictive and anxious attitude towards life! So one learns, oh how slowly, that life travels over endless starting-points — to what end, finally, can one apply one’s little abilities?
Rodin often brooded on this in his old age. Sometimes, at five in the morning, I found him standing in the garden, lost in contemplation of the slopes of Sèvres and St. Cloud which slowly rose out of the wonderful autumn mists of the Seine, as though they were coming into the world faultlessly fashioned, — there he stood, the old one, and pondered: “What end can I serve when I gaze in wonder at the richness of it all, this morning…?” A year later, and he did not understand even this, simply could not understand it, had long been unable to, for an influence, a fatality far inferior to him had wrapped him round and swallowed him up in darkness and confusion from which no ray of splendour shone!
Rilke (trans. R.F.C. Hull)
Hither I come to seeke the spring,
And at mine eyes, and at mine eares,
Receive such balmes, as else cure every thing;
But O, self traytor, I do bring
The spider love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert Manna to gall,
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.
John Donne
To the spy in my body;
the abstract better man
who listens to me splutter
in violent moments:
I’m armed and mad
I demand that you show yourself.
Who sends you to keep watch over my moods
even on this still winter night?
State your case.
Make your judgement.
Let me off your hook.
A young man sat on a train going he knew not where. He was in the midst of one of his ‘spells’, as his mother called it. He looked alternately out the window into the sky and askance at the other passengers. They averted their eyes when he looked at them.
He didn’t give a thought to where he was going or what he would do when he got there or what to tell the ticket inspector. I alone am preventing this train from crashing with my good thoughts if I keep them good, he thought, then became confused. Can this be true? He considered it. No. But I’m away. I’m away from her and her crocodile friends. The ones who come and sit so still and smiling when she’s happy and come and turn on too much light and stand too tall against me when she cries. Float when everything is dead inside me as if all was well and cured, then snap when I… But they always have the snap inside. Sometimes it just rests. And me…? A plus B isn’t Dream. Dream is bigger than you.
This last he said aloud, so that everyone in earshot looked at him, then away.
He had escaped before, but did not remember how it had ended. His memory didn’t function normally when he was in this state of mind. Yet when he wasn’t having his ‘spells’ he sometimes longed for them.
Suddenly his eyes were wide and shiny and his jaw relaxed. He gazed out the window again and whispered, with the utmost joy: All is Dream. Nightmare or wonder, but Dream’s I torn apart. All connected in adrift, crocodiles and prey, even when they come for me. Everyone to find home in homelessness!
The ticket collector was making his way up the aisle.
As a student of still life photographs, Stuart Westly would wander the New York Museum of Photography during his lunch hour and during the weekends whenever there was a new exhibit to such an extent, the admissions lady would usually wave him through the turnstile and the guards would recognize him and nod, occasionally letting him stay long after closing. While he loved the stark reality of the black and whites, he was always drawn to “Exhibit 582: Digichromatographic color print from a glass plate;” otherwise known as “Unidentified Girl, New York, 1907,” photographed by Randolph Morton Phillips, a renowned Gilded-Age portrait artist and protégée of legendary Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, but what always lured him to the print was the fact that it was a full length, life-size photo of a stunning, young dark-haired Gibson Girl-type, head playfully cocked, caught in half-smile, her beautiful brown doe-like eyes looking out from beneath a large flowery hat spoke to him across the ages in a way women his age did not and could not. Even though he had researched extensively online and among the dusty shelves at the New York Public Library, he knew too little about her and yearned to know more; what she was like, if she had a happy life, what was her world like, had she been a lover of the photographer as some had surmised, what happened as soon as the shutter clicked and possibly, most importantly, why that taunting smile upon her blossoming lips? He would linger in front of the portrait for such extended periods that visitors to the museum would cautiously walk around him and the guards even once brought him a chair, which he never used, believing it would demonstrate impassivity. Feeling as if he somehow knew her all of his life and aware that he had fallen hopelessly in love with her, it did not disconcert him the one rainy afternoon when the museum was virtually empty that her hand somehow reached out to him, imploring his in return. Instinctively, he took her hand and was gently guided into her Victorian world, forever leaving his world behind, all of his questions soon to be answered; the true nature of the smile being revealed as having grown from a young lady who too was looking at a museum painting of a man she felt she had known all of her life, but had never met, until now.
When she spoke to him, she always seemed to be speaking from elsewhere: through a maze of personality into which she sought to draw him so that he’d be as lost in her as she herself was. When he smiled, she frowned. When he turned away with an impotent sneer, she laughed. They sabotaged each other’s dignity with the organs of sex, and moaned in false counterpoint. He stared down her beauty while she slept and broke its hold on him. When at last he saw that her only aim was to seal her own escape routes one by one, he looked at her almost tenderly, but it was too late. She had gone too far into hiding now to want anyone’s tenderness, much less compassion: she turned from him as one turns from a stranger’s rude advances, and opened the gate to someone else - just enough.
This time she got what she wanted, though her desires were cryptic even to herself. Having learned to be more circumspect, she revealed emotion to this new lover with perfect timing, letting him in and pushing him out at will. His stare was off-putting when he told her he’d never forget the whirlpool in her eyes. The instant he declared his undying love she felt a surge of disgust - for him, for herself, for the very rules of seduction. For once in her life she was shocked. Having achieved her aim she found herself hollowed out: she had got her revenge and her punishment at one stroke.
.
(Entering the Maze, by William Max Miller)
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 | One Penny Profiles on How she grew out of death |
 | Anonymous on Ring the bells that still can… |
 | Galan on I stopped to listen |
 | Paige on The winter academy |
