Simultaneous existence of incompatible things
Leduc, Galvin, Baldwin, Gray, Weil, Beachy-Quick, Bond, Indermaur, Abram, Lax
Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc (tr. by Derek Coltman)
“Seasons, lend us your tattered dresses. Let us be wandering gypsies with hair lacquered to our heads by the rain. Will you come with me, Isabelle, will you set up house with me on some roadside bank? We’ll crunch up our dry crusts with lions’ jaws, we’ll find our spices in the storm, we’ll have a house, with lace curtains at the windows as the caravans roll by and disappear toward the frontiers. I’ll undress you in the growing wheat, I’ll find you lodgings in the hearts of haystacks, I’ll cover you in the water under low, overhanging branches, I’ll nurse you on a mossbank in the forest, I’ll make love to you in the fields of lucerne, I’ll haul you up into the haycarts, my Boadicea.”
Elements by James Galvin
“If things aren’t things
So much as happenings,
Or a confluence even
More complex,
Then there’s no such thing
As sky, though sky
Is real, and we
Have not imagined it.
The everlasting
Never began.
Everything, then,
Is the direction everything
Moves in, seeming
Not to move.
I am waiting
For something very
Nice to happen,
And then it happens:
Your long dark
Hair sweeps
Across my chest
Like sweeps of prairie
Rain. Loveliest
Of motion’s possessions,
Hold me still.”
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
“The cathedral at Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them. Perhaps they are struck by the power of the spires, the glory of the windows; but they have known God, after all, longer than I have known him, and in a different way, and I am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt, down which heretics were hurled to death, and by the obscene, inescapable gargoyles jutting out of the stone and seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced. I doubt that the villagers think of the devil when they face a cathedral because they have never been identified with the devil. But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth.”
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E’en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.
Contradiction by Simone Weil
“Simultaneous existence of incompatible things in the soul’s bearing; balance which leans both ways at once: that is saintliness, the actual realization of the microcosm, the imitation of the order of the world.
“The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul—like pincers to catch hold of God.”
Therapon by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond
“Some books I love as I love my children.
In the midst of a conversation I remember
A sentence that—like the child walking home
From school, reciting the names of bones—
Steps suddenly into the room, and says:
It is very unhappy, folks, this discovery we’ve made,
But too late to be helped, that we exist.”
I|I by Katherine Indermaur
“The moon knows her luminous face; she watches it glide over oceans. See, sea—sister words. The moon’s yearning tugs at every ocean’s weight, fractures it to waves.
“It is not loneliness that calls out her longing—it is seeing her light, and having no way to hold”
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
“The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth. The invisible shapes of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, and the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. Our own reflections, we might say, are a part of the play of light and its reflections. ‘The inner—what is it, if not intensified sky?’”
A Thing That Is by Robert Lax
“the
sun
’s
first
ray
the
sun
’s
last
light
the
burst
of
day
the
fall
of
night”