May 11

May 11 Notes on Beauty, Books, Imagining, the Soul’s Skeleton, and a Smoking Angel

— I missed last week here, and in the mode of Julia Childe, I won’t apologize. Being Canadian though, it’s hard not to say sorry :)

— Article I’m reading this Sunday morning before dashing around to get ready for work, is “To Share is Your Duty” by Hermion Lee at New York Book Review. (I signed in for the one time free read).

— Virginia Woolf on Montaigne from the above: “He wishes only to communicate his soul. Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty;…to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.” I found this review via an instagram post and it was exactly what I wanted to hear this morning. I repeat, to share is our duty! Communication is health!

— I would also add that poetry is health. Art is health. Communicating our soul is health. Clarity is health. Listening to music is health. Photography is health. Eye contact is health. Acknowledging each others’ existence as we walk by each other is health.

— I get reticence, I really do.

— And then, one of my favourite poems by Jean Valentine:

I came to you

I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence of this world
no, not the world, not reticence, oh
Lord Come
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground

— A quotation by the Irish writer, Edna O’Brien:

“Books are the Grail for what is deepest, more mysterious and least expressible within ourselves. They are our soul’s skeleton. If we were to forget that, it would prefigure how false and feelingless we could become.”

— Um, books as our soul’s skeleton???? Amazing. Also though and yes: have we forgotten that books are the grail? And we see how the false and feelingless have attempted to infiltrate…but will never win in the end because the soul skeleton is strong. No one can take away the grail.

— I recently read the short book, brief notes on the art and manner of arranging one’s books by George Perec. I’m immersed in reading about the history of classification as it regards books right now for the novel I’m writing. Perec also says interesting things about the daily, the habitual. “The daily papers talk of everything except the daily,” he says. And, “How should we take account of, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the back-ground noise, the habitual?” He goes on: “To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as it if weren’t the bearer of any information.”

— I still think it’s worth considering the opposite.

— Well speaking of books, Have you read Fahrenheit 451 or are you just living it, like those of us in Alberta where the spectre of bill 28 hangs over us. If you live in Alberta or know someone who does please send them this link to take action.

— Did I mention that this post in going to be somewhat random? I recently found out that Chip Conley mentioned my poem, “In Lieu of Flowers” on his blog. And my publisher, Palimpsest Press mentioned it on their blog, making me feel all happy and fancy at once. All very sweet.

— We’ve had a busy time of late, my 60th birthday (like omg 60? I’ve debated on whether or not to keep that number to myself but then also, why should I?). It was our 33 anniversary, Rob had an art show in Banff, and 12 other variously good, very sad, interesting things have happened.

— A quotation by Rebecca Solnit has been hitting me beautifully this past week and I found it randomly on the internet and I need to source it but first here it is:

“I still think the real revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.”

— I don’t think anything can be more true than that but also, the chances of it happening any time soon are slim. Still, this is what I want. I really think it would be the best revolution. It would save the world. (I’ll work on getting the source/where she said it, for that quotation).

— I recently picked up Imagining What We Don’t Know by Lisa Samuels, admittedly because the title refers to something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: Imagining, the imagination, our power of imagination, the importance of our imaginations.

— From the Lisa Samuels book: “Beauty is a problem for poetry because we no longer imagine beauty as a serious way of knowing. But it is. Beauty wedges into the artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not know.” She notes that taking beauty seriously and working on theories of beauty “is out of fashion.” But she says, “Forms of beauty are resistant structures, imaginative structures that present an impenetrable model of the unknown. Beauty is therefore endlessly talk-inspiring, predictive rather than descriptive, dynamic rather than settled, infinitely serious and useful.”

— To reiterate: beauty is a serious way of knowing! Yes.

— You know of my angel fixation in literature and film and music. (At least I hope you do :) ) If you want to support me consider purchasing a copy of my novel Everything Affects Everyone hey? So when I heard there was a new Keanu Reeves movie where he plays an angel I immediately put it on hold at the library. Such is my budget. We watched Good Fortune last night and I adored it. A smoking angel? It’s like I invented the character myself. I loved the movie for the classic Keanu, for the messages about workers, the digs at the 1 percent, and for the good laughs. A lot of other angel movie references too, if you’re a fan of Wings of Desire, for example.