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.”

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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.

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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…..

April 21, 2024

I remind myself that there is melodrama in Sting’s lyrics for King of Pain so as to keep my comedic distance, these days. He sings,

There's a little black spot on the sun today
That's my soul up there
It's the same old thing as yesterday
That's my soul up there

and:
I have stood here before inside the pouring rain
With the world turning circles running 'round my brain

Songfacts tells us this about the writing of the song:

“He had recently separated from his first wife, actress Frances Tomelty, and was not getting along with the other two members of the band. Instead of repressing or deflecting the hurt, Sting dives headlong into it on this track, crowning himself the “King Of Pain.” Sting said in Musician magazine: “I conjured up symbols of pain and related them to my soul. A black spot on the sun struck me as being a very painful image.”

He recalled the specific incident and how future wife Trudie Styler inspired the song's title….: “I was sitting moping under a tree in the garden, and as the sun was sinking toward the western horizon, I noticed that there was a lot of sunspot activity. I turned to Trudie. ‘There's a little black spot on the sun today.’ She waited expectantly, not really indulging my mood but tolerant. ‘That's my soul up there,’ I added gratuitously. Trudie discreetly raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘There he goes again, the king of pain.’”

Sometimes our souls are in good shape, and sometimes not so great. If we can roll our eyes at our suffering, we’re probably going to be okay. So I tell myself. For the last long while I’ve been living with the line by Marcus Aurelius (as translated by Robin Hard, IMHO the best version of Meditations): “To what purpose, then, am I presently using my soul? Ask yourself this question at every moment…” Marcus also tells us to not lose heart, but return to the fray whenever we are thwarted in life. And lord I feel thwarted at present.

I’ve written many posts concerning the soul. Maybe this one here says the most for me right now. This from Thomas Moore resonates for me now:

“Let us imagine care of the soul, then, as an application of poetics to everyday life.”

And this from Parker Palmer:

“Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.”

In his book Light Inside the Dark, John Tarrant differentiates between spirit and soul: “…soul is not taken in the theological sense of an immortal being putting up for the night in the inn of the body — that is spirit. Soul is the part of us which touches and is touched by the world. Through soul we connect with each other and are made less lonely — not metaphysically, but in a tangible human way.” He goes on:

“It is with our souls that we truly inhabit our lives, tasting the fresh black coffee, so delicious, so bad for us, and the kiss, so brief and full of consequences. Soul is always learning, always fallible; it develops well or ill, it grows and deepens and responds to our late-learned tenderness toward it. Through soul we bless our lives and come to love them in all their moods and aspects.”

Thomas Moore, who wrote Care of the Soul, says,

““Soul” is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.”

Moore paraphrases Marsilio Ficino from five hundred years ago who says that we must be careful about choosing “colours, spices, oils, places to walk, countries to visit” because these are all “very concrete decisions of everyday life that day by day either support or disturb the soul.”

I think we’re all within our rights to be a little melodramatic from time to time and yawp at the darkness of the universe when the world is turning circles running 'round our brains, to paraphrase Sting. And then. When the yawping is done, we might ask: What are our obligations to simply witness the souls of others? What are our obligations to cultivate the daily circumstances in which the common person may apply poetics to their everyday life? How to get one’s soul back in alignment? How to make good use of whatever darkness arrives?

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A note on the photos: I took them in Rome at Palazzo Massimo where the frescoes from the Villa of Livia hang. If you follow me on IG you might have seen our visit here.

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April 12, 2023

A couple of nights ago, Rob and I watched Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. You can watch the trailer here, and here: a review in the Guardian by Wendy Ide.

Ide says,

“It should be the most soul-crushingly bleak film ever made – a Groundhog Day grind with added despair and urinal cakes. But Wim Wenders’s zen meditation on beauty, fulfilment and simplicity is quite the opposite: it’s an achingly lovely and unexpectedly life-affirming picture. It all depends – and this is central to the film’s gently profound message – on your way of looking at things. Hirayama looks at the world with his eyes, but sees with his heart.”

The film was originally called Komorebi, which if you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last 10 years, you’ll have seen the term somewhere.

Of course you might know of my obsession with Wings of Desire, often called Wim Wenders’s masterpiece. When I wrote Everything Affects Everyone I watched it a few times. My characters in EAE are also using the analog technology, cassette tapes, film cameras, which are in Perfect Days so beautifully. One of those nice little confluences in art, I suppose.

I had been re-reading a book of essays and conversations by Wenders prior to watching the new film, and his thoughts on cities really enhanced my viewing. For example:

“So you live with architecture differently than you do with a film, but even so, both ask the same question, ‘How should we live?’ Before you make a film and before you change a city, you ask the same question.” And then, “The less architecture asks itself at the outset, ‘How should we live?, the more it suppresses the question, the more someone will probably have to suffer for it later on.”

And then, important to Perfect Days, he says, “On old bridges you always had the feeling you were crossing over something.” And, that “I think it’s possible even today to build bridges that provide an experience…” “A bridge should be a place that makes you ponder, and feel the act of crossing!” He also talks about the new bridges being built that you can cross and you can “drive over it without even realizing it’s a bridge.”

I really felt like the city, the bridge, and the way the main character was on bicycle in his own neighbourhood and drove across the bridge for his job meant so much.

There’s a lot more to say about the music in the film, the cassettes, what the character was reading, and about the beauty of ordinary life. If you’ve read my essay in Apples on a Windowsill (sorry I guess I’m always bringing things back to me…lol), on ordinary life, you’ll know that I’ve been thinking about how ordinary life really isn’t accessible for everyone, or at least that it is and isn’t. But maybe that’s just because I have spent too long working at an inner city library.

I did love the experience of watching Perfect Days….in the end you feel like you’ve lived another life, even if only for an interval, and isn’t that a gift? I was reminded perhaps strangely of the Star Trek episode, TNG, when Picard lives a whole other life, or seemingly, when an energy beam from a probe finds him.

April is poetry month, and I’ve been reading poems as part of my morning ritual. I also dug a book out of my TBR pile about writing poetry, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, essays by Craig Morgan Teicher. The title comes from a Wordsworth poem, the lines, “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Of course, it doesn’t have to end in madness. Teicher talks about how “poetry is a conversation, an extended one, occupying, perhaps, the span of an entire life.” He says, “language is humankind’s greatest technology, inexhaustible, endlessly adaptable, a mirror of a poet’s own time and, hopefully, of the endless unfolding of all time.” He quotes from the poem by Cavafy that he says gave him hope as a young writer:

“Even if you are on the first step, you ought
to be dignified and happy.
To have got this far is no small thing;
what you have done is a glorious honour.”

And I liked this, because the advice to be dignified and happy works, no matter what step you’re at, as a writer, or in whatever field you pursue. (Much like the character in Perfect Days). All of it, being here, is a glorious honour.

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And the reminder to get to the simple things, to honour where one happens to be, has been timely for me, as the black dog has been walking a bit closer to my heel these days. I always find that looking at darkness, the wedge shapes of it, helps a little, so I took an old book off my shelf, John Tarrant’s The Light Inside the Dark. Tarrant says, “In even the narrowest circumstances, life is a plenitude. To welcome life instead of fighting it, to befriend the moments of night, is to respect our embodiment and fulfill its tasks.” Or you know, hello darkness my old friend.

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There’s a poem titled “Suitcase” by Adam Zagajewski. In it he is travelling, and says,

“Only in Athens did I glimpse the sun, it
turned the air, the whole air,
the whole immense flotilla of the air
to trembling gold.”

He goes on,

“I’m just a tourist in the visible world,
one of a thousand shadows…”

The poems ends,

“I’m just an absentminded tourist,
but I love the light.”

So, onward, befriending night, darkness, shadows, adopting the stance of the absentminded tourist, who sees with her heart, and may or may not chance into some ordinary patch of light….

(Photos from Rome, 2023)

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April 8, 2024