When Our Own Thoughts Speak
Plus Robert Pinsky reviews The Poems of Seamus Heaney, a new Julio Cortázar book, Adina Hoffman on Greek figurines, and the debate around Paul Kingsnorth.
In this week’s newsletter: several articles and essays I read this week including Robert Pinsky’s review of The Poems of Seamus Heaney, James Baldwin’s lecture about the artist, Adina Hoffman on Greek figurines, and the debate around Paul Kingsnorth. Plus a visual library and a chronicle I wrote.
Chronicle
Summertime Ghosts
There are ghosts that haunt me, ghosts from people who are still alive. They visit me at daybreak and at dusk, at night they hold me down. The night hag terrifies me, she keeps me bound to my bed, when I open my eyes she’s there. At dawn I move through my rooms, I place this in the right drawer and that on the left shelf, nothing moves forward with surprise. The days are paralyzed. I don’t feel my hands. I don’t feel my torso, my legs. I am entirely possessed by the ghosts of these people who are still alive. What will happen when they die?
The houses I lived in were sealed in white voile curtains. The windows were kept shut and only a sliver of light shined inside. The wind seeped through these windows as freely as air flows through a sand castle. She carried me to the patio where I sunbathed each morning. I fell and the muffled thud sunk, I cried and I was quieted. I can hear my sobs shrinking into ripples, soft small wrinkles opening on the shore.
Not all homes built of sand disappear. The water seeps through the towers, melts the sand, but the imprint, the memory, dense and rigid, will never seize to exist. From a cliff I plunge into the sea, into a dull roar where there is no human life, when my hands, my arms, my head pierce through its waves back into fresh air, I’m still here. My body floats to the top and into comfort, I find solace in the sea.
Blue waves, green waves, they can’t exist without that breeze, even the fish in mid-stream need to breathe. From the room I hear a bird sing, and then another bird, and another bird, they sing different, they sing random, but their song travels through the trees. And when the gardener turns on the string trimmer, they blow away towards the blue sky and their chorus falls broken, buried. I now see the beaches where big waves crash, I see windows open without curtains and hardwood floors flooded with wet leaves and rain. I see a woman standing, her child breathing, but she is haunted by the ghosts of these people who are still alive.
New Books
Why I’m Buying These Books
Renunciation by Ross Posnock
Because I watched Ross Posnock’s lecture at Yale, On The Pleasures of Self-Misunderstanding, and I’m interested in knowing more about his theory on the need for great thinkers to renounce the institutional framework.
Letters to Friends, Family & Editor by Franz Kafka
Because this volume includes a selection of the conversation slips Kafka used to speak with people at the end of his life, when he was advised not to talk.
Untimely Meditations by Friedrich Nietzsche
Because one of the essays in this collection is Schopenhauer as Educator.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
Because I’m interested in how the philosophers Labatut observes dealt with their own existence while grappling with difficult existential questions, some of them made important discoveries that came to change how we perceive human life and many became isolated and mentally ill people.
The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach
Because I’m curious about Feuerbach’s humanistic approach to religion. It was an important book for Leo Tolstoy, and it was translated by George Eliot.
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks by Susan Sontag
Because I want to see how she was writing about her influences in the fifties.
For a New Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Because I have yet to read his theoretical approach to the novel, although you can deduce a lot about his approach in all his writing.
Suffocating Mothers by Janet Adelman
Because Adelman’s reading of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays feels pertinent to my own research and work around the absence and presence of the mother.
The Visual Library
Portraits
Currently at Rue de Chabrol
Seven Articles I Recommend This Week
Adina Hoffman is fascinated by ancient Greek figurines, so much so that she’s writing a book about them: “The uncertainty that hovers over the origin of these “Keros” objects makes them not so much outliers as something like emblems.” Read
For the past few weeks, several critics have reviewed Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine, where he warns about technology’s war against nature, and human nature. In a video interview with the New York Times for the opinion section, Kingsnorth talks openly about his perspective on how detrimental technology can be to our spirit. Watch
In the Wall Street Journal, James Campbell takes us through Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein only to ask us an important question: “What stands in for modernism in our own era?” Read
New Directions published a series of new stories, A Certain Lucas, by the late Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. In Martin Riker’s review, he offers a new way to read Cortázar and reminds us of the importance of artistic freedom over popular success. Read
In The Mysteries of Love, James Tussing offers a new approach to reading Alice Munro. Read
Robert Pinsky reviews the The Poems of Seamus Heaney in the New York Times. Read
Carl Rollyson revisits Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Read
Six Essays and Lectures I Recommend This Week
Thinking and Moral Considerations by Hannah Arendt. Read
The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read
Of Experience by Michel de Montaigne. Read
The Struggle of the Artist by James Baldwin. Listen
The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t, statesmen don’t, priests don’t, union leaders don’t. Only the poets.
Unspeakable Things, Unspoken by Toni Morrison. Read
Translating Truths by Nadia Abu El-Haj. Read
My Morning Read
It’s my first time reading The Portrait of a Lady, I’m coming to it after The Wings of the Dove and The Turn of the Screw.
My Daughter’s Evening Read
Vita is fascinated with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, we’ve been reading it over and over again. I’m hoping this is going to open the gates for Hansel and Gretel, The Twelve Brothers, and so on. In French, we’re reading Toc Toc Zinzin, where each planet in this galaxy has a zinzin, and when one planet’s zinzin goes missing, we need to visit all seven planets to find out who took it. When I read this to her she said it’s for babies.
What My Husband is Listening To
Cryptophony by Reeko and Jonathan by Yung Lean
A Movie I’m Thinking About
Arco by Ugo Bienvenu
A Poem
The Flowers by Stéphane Mallarmé
From golden showers of the ancient skies,
On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars,
You once unfastened giant calyxes
For the young earth still innocent of scars:
Young gladioli with the necks of swans,
Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream,
Vermilion as the modesty of dawns
Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;
The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright,
And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose,
Hérodiade blooming in the garden light,
She that from wild and radiant blood arose!
And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily
That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends
Through the blue incense of horizons, palely
Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends!
Hosanna on the lute and in the censers,
Lady, and of our purgatorial groves!
Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer,
Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love!
Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom,
Formed calyxes balancing the future flask,
Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam
For the weary poet withering on the husk.