January 12, 2024

Night and Day

When I'm very sociable, or writing casually, or journaling, the same thing really, I find my words form about a dozen "raps" at any time. These could be good ideas or nonsense or folly, but more than that, they feel like scripts. And they only get so far: half-baked. We ought to be able push the thought further—make it clearer, more certain, more pithy—or we ought to be changed by it, or we ought to act on the thought, or let the world reshape it. But sometimes none of that happens, and we find ourselves once again curiously arguing something, maybe very intensely, and can't remember why. Maybe the frustration of not actually moving in the four directions I mentioned—the self acting on thought, thought acting on the self, thought acting on the world, the world acting on thought—manifests as the pebble in the shoe or the pea under so many mattresses. But isn't that my problem, not yours? Is this the origin of the argumentative character? Some hope then that writing essays or aphorisms could be a positive exercise, that life might be better if we took things a little closer to the limit on our own time.

That's one potential use of a newsletter.

But of course I'll probably also use this "space" to talk about upcoming events, to close read out loud, to stage little fights with the newspaper, to post bits of work in progress, to tell you about a movie I saw, who knows what else. Mostly just blogging.

Here's a few good things, an aphorism by S.D. Chrostowska, a poem by Wallace Stevens which it reminded me of, and a nightjar.

More later,

Jackie

Carpe noctem

Catching myself in the act, without reflection, I release myself from all restraints. This is what is called trusting oneself. Without this apperception, this shock and benediction, there is blindness and intuitive action but no trust. As though suddenly realizing a wild horse is carrying us through pitch blackness. Without trust, the rider is not fully a rider (in control) and the horse not fully a horse, more something shot out of a cannon or a catapult: lost in space, without coordinates, every breath potentially the last, every moment a possible arrest as this projectile strikes in its path something that is not necessarily the target of its obscure trajectory. With trust, however, rider and horse are one, and thus complete. We cling to the animal’s neck, as far as it will carry us, and the neck (like the fin of a dolphin) has the stability of a statue already mounted on a plinth. A conspiratorial whisper completes the effect: I’m with you no matter what.

—S.D. Chrostowska, Matches: A Light Book

Mrs. Alfred Uruguay

So what said the others and the sun went down
And, in the brown blues of evening, the lady said,
In the donkey's ear, "I fear that elegance
Must struggle like the rest." She climbed until
The moonlight in her lap, mewing her velvet,
And her dress were one and she said," I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud. Your innocent
ear
And I, if I rode naked, are what remain."

The moonlight crumbled to degenerate forms,
While she approached the real, upon her mountain,
With lofty darkness. The donkey was there to ride,
To hold by the ear, even though it wished for a bell,
Wished faithfully for a falsifying bell.
[...]
—Wallace Stevens