A most uncommon strength
Colette, Kerouac, Hudson, Whitman, Vuong, Camus, Rukeyser, Loy
Restrooms notwithstanding, there are two semi-enclosed spaces at the otherwise open concept bookshop/publick house: the plumbing closet (my office), and the poetry room. I alternated between both of these small habitats on a recent, lively spring day, transcribing the excerpts below, and the same thing happened every few minutes: someone would peek around the doorjamb and, startled by my presence, slink away.
It’s remarkable to hear a loud conversation go suddenly silent, or a bold explorer go suddenly meek, as a direct response to my person—as though something about my sheer existence is a numbing agent against all prior confidence and enthusiasm. There am I, Smeagol-like, polishing my paperback Precious with a distant look in my light-starved eyes, remembering the gleam of its letters against the desolate walls of the water closet.
In my years of exercising this effect, sometimes I reassure the unsuspecting visitor by saying hello or telling them to pretend I don’t exist; other times, I grin wickedly as they leave, reveling in my strange dark dissuasive power: “All will worship me and despair!”1
Here’s the thing: My office is past the book arch and around the corner—who in their right mind would not walk under the book arch in search of hidden treasure? And the poetry room—it’s around the corner at the top of the sunlit stairs, with a hand-painted metal sign that says “Poetry.” Who in their right mind would not peer into the book-filled room at the top of the sunlit stairs? One is manifestly supposed to do these things.
Why, then, when abiding such obvious invitations, does one flinch at the presence of another in these little literary promised lands? I’ve always chalked up the stymied curiosity to propriety or shyness. But the other day, while collating these cairns, it dawned on me that something more interesting, even tragic, is happening: people’s dreams are being dashed, dashed against the bookseller-shaped rocks of contingency.
The person crossing a particularly imaginative or ancestral threshold—walking under an arch made of books, or up the solitary bookshop stairs—begins to dream. Though dreaming is collective, dreams are positively individual; entering the room beyond the threshold is tantamount to entering a realm of your own creation. The living person already inside of—but as yet hidden within—the dream room suggests, instantly, that reality is much greater, much more compelling than you can possibly account for. Anything could happen. Sometimes, it is best to retrace your steps.
Not everyone turns away from the dream room, as a scholar-friend attested while these thoughts were forming in my head. What is the answer? Put on the Ring of curiosity and disappear into the space between living and lived. — Joe
The Pure and the Impure by Colette
As that word “pure” fell from her lips, I heard the trembling and plaintive “u,” the icy limpidity of the “r,” and the sound aroused nothing in me but the need to hear again its unique resonance, its echo of a drop that trickles out, breaks off, and falls somewhere with a plash. The word “pure” has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it—in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.
Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
I pray at the feet of man, waiting, as they.
As they? As Man? As he? There is no He. There is only the unsayable divine word. Which is not a Word, but a Mystery.
At the root of the Mystery the separation of one world from another by a sword of light.—
Patagonian Memories by W. H. Hudson
That instinctive state of the human mind, when the higher faculties appear to be nonexistent, a state of intense alertness and preparedness, which compels the man to watch and listen and go silently and stealthily, must be like that of the lower animals: the brain is then like a highly-polished mirror, in which all visible nature—every hill, tree, leaf—is reflected with miraculous clearness; and we can imagine that if the animal could think and reason, thought would be superfluous and a hindrance, since it would dim that bright perception on which his safety depends.
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
I am not afraid—I have been well brought forward by you;
I love the rich running day, but I do not desert her in whom I lay so long,
I know not how I came of you, and I know not where I go with you—but
I know I came well, and shall go well.
I will stop only a time with the night, and rise betimes;
I will duly pass the day, O my mother, and duly return to you.
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Red is only black remembering.
Early dark & the baker wakes
to press what’s left of the year
into flour & water. Or rather,
he’s reshaping the curve of her pale calf
atmosphered by a landmine left over
from the war he can’t recall. A fistful
of hay & the oven scarlets. Alfalfa.
Forsythia. Foxglove. Bubbling
dough. When it’s done, he’ll tear open
the yeasty steam only to find
his palms—the same
as when he was young.
The First Man by Albert Camus
Actually the contents of these books mattered little. What did matter was what they first felt when they went into the library, where they would see not the walls of black books but multiplying horizons and expanses that, as soon as they crossed the doorstep, would take them away from the cramped life of the neighborhood. Then came the moment when—each of them provided with the two books they were allowed, holding them close against their sides with their elbows—they slipped onto the boulevard, dark by this time; they squashed underfoot the fruits of the big plane trees while calculating the delights they were going to extract from their books, comparing them already with those of the previous week, until, having arrived on the main street, they would first open them by the uncertain light of the first streetlight, to pick out some phrase (for ex.: “his was a most uncommon strength”) that would heighten their joyous and avid hopes. They would part quickly and dash to the dining room to open the book on the oilcloth by the light of the kerosene lamp. A strong smell of glue rose from the crude binding that also was rough to the touch.
The Speed of Darkness by Muriel Rukeyser
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women
Brave, setting up signals across vast distanes,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
“Moreover, the Moon — — —” by Mina Loy
Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.
Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.
Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,
touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles
Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle becomes an elf.
Galadriel, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Joseph you are a beautiful writer
Bachelard would be proud of this one.