Elegance & Hope
Once you hear the phrase, “Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite” it sort of gets between your ribs and into the cage and soul of you. I first read it via Hélène Cixous in the Reader of her work. I read it in my undergrad years, so long ago now. The line is extracted from the conversation slips of Kafka which he wrote while dying, unable to speak because of his condition. The phrase is translated differently elsewhere, but this one by Clara Winston and Richard Winston is memorable. All this to point out the elegance of the phrase, and then pass along some quotations from the Cixous piece:
On writing the “last book” “as a way of forgiving myself for not.” And, “Only the last one is elegant.”
“…one is no longer concerned with the false elegance of politeness.”
This last book, the ultimate book, is to be unadorned “which doesn’t mean ungraceful” and will be titled: Espérance. Cixous talks about the “elegance of words ending in -ance.” (The word fragrance jumped into my head because of one of the photos below). In a footnote, it is noted that “in Brazilian Portuguese (the language of Clarice Lispector), the same word (esperança) can signify either “hope,” “expectation,” as in French, or a tiny green winged insect.”
We’d gone to the mall in our neighbourhood aka West Edmonton Mall, and took photos, had lunch, and looked at things and bought almost nothing.
The above display was in the Louis Vuitton window and below the handbag is in the Gucci window. Window shopping — that lovely pastime. To want nothing is to possess much. I took a lot of photographs at the mall, and came away feeling that I’d shopped a lot! I felt full.
I liked the below photo because the handbag is tethered which seems to be also why it’s off centre on its little festive plinth. And I liked the window display of what at first glance I took to be the medusa and on second glance must be a spring flower fairy? I’m not sure. But I like that my eye had to make that adjustment.
The poem by Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is quoted by Tim Carpenter in his book To Photograph Is To Learn To Die, and the line sticks out for me: “The final elegance, not to console / Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.” Stevens says we ought to put ourselves “relentlessly in possession of happiness.” And Carpenter says, “…this is really truly attainable and rest assured: no other force on earth is going to step up and do any of this shit for you.”
When I think of elegance, I think of the book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. I like being reminded that: “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale.” I like being reminded of the way complex patterns arise “out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” All the information we have to make good change is already here. We have it. I repeat, relatively simple interactions. I’m a big fan and believer, myself, in these simple interactions, which so many are out of the habit of making. If you can’t say hi to someone as you pass by I really do think the world is a mess.
Brown quotes Gibrán Rivera, who asks, “What is the next most elegant step?” And she says that “an elegant step is one that acknowledges what is known and unknown, and what the capacity of this group actually is. An elegant step allows humility, allows people to say “Actually we need to do some research” or “Actually we need to talk to some folks not in this room” etc.
Another insight by brown: “I have learned that feeling matters, that feeling is an important and legitimate way of knowing.”
Do you know the poem by Linda Gregg, titled Elegance? {source}
Elegance
by Linda Gregg
All that is uncared for.
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.
The definition of elegance is, “dignified gracefulness or restrained beauty of style” and “scientific precision, neatness, and simplicity.”
Linda Gregg mentions that there is elegance in what has been uncared for and isn’t it beautiful to find it there? But also, in human terms, brown says, “There is a lot be careful of.” When we are trying to change our small worlds, because there is an urgency, we might “forget our complexity.”
I like that Carpenter says no one is going to step up to put you in the way of happiness. And elegance, too for that matter. The next elegant step is for you to take. Every book is the last book. And lemonade everything was so infinite…..
