“Yet you still value the things you’ve lost the most. Because the things you’ve lost are still perfect in your head. They never rusted. They never broke. They are made of the memories you once had, which only grow rosier and brighter, day by day. They are made of the dreams of how wonderful things could have been and must never suffer the indignity of actually still existing. Of being real. Of having flaws. Of breaking and deteriorating. Only the things you no longer have will always be perfect.”
― Iain Thomas ''A postcard takes about fifty words gracefully, which is how to write one.'' GK
Abruzzo was great. Perfect weather. Ate a lot. Met a beautiful mountain rescue dog. Drank wine and beer like in medieval times. Played cards by Iranian rules by candlelight. Reminds you how harsh life must have been like in remote mountain villages. My head itches slightly - too much sun. J- Is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it by Frank O’Hara Always where you are
In what I do Turning you hold your arms My touch lies where you turn Your look is in my eyes Turning to clasp your arms You hold my touch in you Touching to clasp in you The one shape of our look I hold your face to me Always where you are My touch to love you looks into your eyes - Harold Pinter “Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell at your keys when you lose them, and laugh, loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol, gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming. You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents of what you packed were written inside the boxes. Because you think swans are overrated. Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence. Because you underline everything you read, and circle the things you think are important, and put stars next to the things you think I should think are important, and write notes in the margins about all the people you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there. Because you make that pork recipe you found in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed over the windows, you still believe someone outside can see you. And one day five summers ago, when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments-- there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, which you paid for with your last damn dime because you once overheard me say that I liked it.” ― Matthew Olzmann “I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer "Tell me that you have been dreaming of me. That you wake up in cold sweats, gulping in air. You feel like you’ve drowned. You wake up and still feel like you’re drowning. Tell me that you’ve spent a great deal of time gazing at stars, thinking that sometimes things look better farther apart. That constellations are only beautiful because we have the space to connect the dots. Now take it back. Tell me that you’re sorry. That you know we’re not stars. We’re just people. Tell me that you know there’s nothing poetic about plane tickets. Tell me that you want to buy them anyway. Ask me to stay." — Ask Me To Stay, Trista Mateer “People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they're assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don't know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience--think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouces: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter--poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart.''
Garrison Keilor You read the cards
But I lied about the number of letters in her name So now I don’t know if all the things you foresaw Were about her Or someone else. “Watch me knock over every cup of coffee poured in this house. Watch me rip the pits out of fruit just to throw the whole thing away. I don’t know how to be angry with you. I don’t know why I thought the sound of your voice could make up for all of the bad things that ever happened to me. I tried to write poems about you leaving before you left me because I was scared; now I write them because I don’t know what else to do in your absence. You have ripped something from both of us but I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry I have to lie to make it easy.” — “We Both Know What It Is” Trista Mateer You smiled and talked to me of nothing and I felt that for this I had been waiting long.
Rabindranath Tagore “I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a colour? Colour is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. Because I’ve listened to souls whispering – like the susurrus of the wind – from book to book and object to object for tens or thousands of years, allow me to say that my touch resembles the touch of angels. Part of me, the serious half, calls out to your vision while the mirthful half sours through the air with your glances. I’m so fortunate to be red! I’m fiery. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted. I do not conceal myself: For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness nor in subtlety, but through determination and will. So, I draw attention to myself. I’m not afraid of other colours, shadows, crowds or even of loneliness. How wonderful it is to cover a surface that awaits me with my own victorious being! Wherever I’m spread, I see eyes shine, passions increase, eyebrows rise and heartbeats quicken. Behold how wonderful it is to live! Behold how wonderful to see. I am everywhere. Life begins with and returns to me. Have faith in what I tell you.” ― Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red "We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away."
Rebecca Solnit - The field guide to getting lost ''The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not … abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
[…] Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.'' Rebecca Solnit - The field guide to getting lost I know the place. It is true. Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you. - Harold Pinter But in the meantime, let's drink coffee...
Pablo Neruda - If you forget me
1. It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those who we are least attracted to. My feelings for Chloe meant I lost any belief in my own worthiness. Who could I be next to her? Was it not the greatest honour for her to have agreed to this dinner, to have dressed so elegantly (‘Is this alright?’ she’d asked in the car on the way to the restaurant, ‘it had better be, because I’m not changing a sixth time’), let alone that she might be willing to respond kindly to some of the things that might fall (if ever I recovered my tongue) from my unworthy lips?
2. It was Friday night and Chloe and I were seated at a corner table of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a French restaurant that had recently opened at the end of the Fulham road. There could have been no more appropriate setting for Chloe’s beauty. The chandeliers threw soft shadows across her face, the light green walls matched her light green eyes. And yet, as though struck dumb by the angel that faced me across the table, I lost all capacity either to think or speak and could only silently draw invisible patterns on the starched white table-cloth and take unnecessary sips of bubbled water from a large glass goblet. 3. My sense of inferiority bred a need to take on a personality that was not my own, a seducing self that would respond to every demand and suggestion made by my exalted companion. Love forced me to look at myself as though through Chloe’s imagined eyes. ‘Who could I become to please her?’ I wondered. I did not tell flagrant lies, I simply attempted to anticipate everything I believed she might want to hear. ‘Would you like some wine?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t know, would you like wine?’ she asked back. ‘I really don’t mind, if you feel like it,’ I replied. ‘It’s as you please, whatever you want,’ she continued. ‘Either way is fine with me’. ‘I agree’. ‘So should we have it or not?’ ‘Well, I don’t think I’ll have any,’ ventured Chloe. ‘You’re right, I don’t feel like any either,’ I concurred. ‘Let’s not have wine then,’ she concluded. ‘Great, so we’ll just stick with the water’. 4. The first course arrived, arranged on plates with the symmetry of a formal French garden. ‘It looks too beautiful to touch,’ said Chloe (how I knew the feeling), ‘I’ve never eaten grilled scallops like this before’. We began to eat, but the only sound was that of cutlery against china. There seemed to be nothing to say. Chloe had been my only thought for too long, but the one thought that at this moment I could not share with her. Silence was damning. A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. A silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party. 5. Silence and clumsiness could of course be taken as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant. Alain de Botton - Essays in Love You're someone I care about and think of often and every time I do you make me smile. Weather's great. Wish you were here. To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
― Alain de Botton, On Love |