Breakage

Fragment. No suggestions.

Did she say who sought refuge
in unhappy love

Day by day, we're moving into night



Slight accent, and the falling
"Leave a window open"


"Which of these is life? the true life?"


It's meant to be sad and bright, lit up
like the boat of the dead

I thought 2 hands would be 2 people.

--Kate Greenstreet
"Which of these is life? the true life" Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals

I'm re-reading case sensitive by Kate Greenstreet, or at least I'm re-reading it by skipping around and looking again at the poems in a kind of random way to see how they stand. At the same time I'm also reading a great book called The Unfolding of Language, which looks at the "invention" of language, though the author maintains that language wasn't actually invented but keeps happening and is always in process as it continues to change -- new words are added, tenses die out, cases disappear over time. I haven't exactly found the direct connection between the books. Maybe one will teach me about the other. Lately, it occurs to me that language works like human nature in that factors like survival, convenience, necessity, beauty, hunger,desire -- impact language's process the way they impact people and our interactions. The other thing on my mind as I read Greenstreet is story-making, story-telling. I guess I have been obsessed with narrative as a writer for a long time -- primarily because I'm no good at plot. It seems to me that stuff happens in a kind of fragmented way and later we make a story out of events to help us make sense of it all, to understand why we did certain things or behaved in a particular way. And then we turn to myth, to religion, to psychology, to art even. Or we make a mythology out of our lives so that we can believe there was a reason for the choices we made. Wasn't it Stanley Kunitz who said we should make a mythology of our lives?

Building Happiness

Having finished de Botton's small book, The Architecture of Happiness, I want to capture some of the ideas, the words he covers in his ruminations on how to design buildings, houses, and other spaces that engender feelings of joy or at least comfort. In a bit of synchronicity re a thread that seems to have asserted itself from the start of this blog, I'll open with a quote from the end of the book: "To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap."

How mindless we are about such gestures. That indeed is the gist of the book. That we must pay attention to, think about and recognize the importance of place, be it work or home. Which seems like a rather obvious notion, certainly one that's already been taken up by commercial enterprises like Pottery Barn and Bed, Bath & Beyond (so clever the name -- beyond into what?). De Botton tries to investigate the premise more deeply by summarizing architecture's history, especially its aesthetic trends. These were the parts of the book that captured me. He briefly describes movements that have celebrated beauty as occuring in ornately designed buildings filled with busy details versus more recent trends toward simplicity and spareness of line and form.

This is of course occuring in the arts in general, poetry included. The stand-off now between poetry that is filled with narrative and description versus poetry that is about the fragmentation of language fills me with questions as I work with words. I like both. Each ideal of beauty serves me in different ways.

Perhaps this is the confusion of our time and it's best to ricochet between poles, slowing for awhile at various points along the way. Perhaps the image of these being poles at opposite ends of a spectrum is not so useful -- IE abstract VS realistic. The place in between may just be the place of my time, like finding happiness in not-knowing.