Annotated Florilegium

On Death

"Sometimes you can hear it, your own sense for death. It has been brought to the fore from its concealed state, deep within you, constantly alert but subsumed in your humdrum daily life of tasks and responsibilities. Walking home, it will become impossible to ignore how large the moon is - that it is impossibly large, and you cannot unsee in it the image of an eye peering from the infinite darkness of an abyss. The shadows at night stalk you, and there is no one to be seen, not on the streets nor in any of the many houses you pass; but the windows are woefully apparent to you in their oblivious pictures, the warmth of cozy living rooms in their totally inaccessibility to you, as though entire realities away…

It isn’t until you reach your own apartment and slump against the closed door that a hint of comfortability returns, and the fear, slowly, begins to dwindle, like steam from a kettle, though of course the screech is still in vision, in that warble of the darkness, the hall, and the far window. And when you come to a certain level of ease, you come to the window to look again at the moon, to confirm that it is not impossibly large, and was distorted by the illusory facet of your fear. And it is normal, thankfully. But with great astonishment, you see a man on the street, gazing at you. However, he is only thinking about a reflection in your window, particularly in wonder about the size of the moon. After some time, he is satisfied, and calmly walks down the street, presumably to go home."

 

Annotation: Often our more “existential” moments are highly individualistic; Heidegger says that no-one can die our death for us, and that in some sense, we essentially die alone. While retaining this crucial aspect of our experience, the author wonderfully illustrates how we can also recognize, if somewhat hazily, a similar such experience in the other and the profundity of such a recognition. The result is a strange sort of companionship that, on the one hand, is constituted by respective and mutual alienation and, on the other hand, nevertheless offers some quaint comfort.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Lives in the Dark

"That motel kind of darkness, shielded by thick, commercial navy-blue curtains, as though repurposed from blankets, some kind of cheap feeling — shielded from the child-blue dawn light. That darkness housed all sorts of moments, moments that allowed the entry of certain feelings, ones who found few other moments habitable: superbly drowsy feelings,  stumbling, stupor feelings, a gravity of problems becoming murk which preceded the closing eyelids - the moment where the insomniac finally nods off; or the two newfound lovers let the night die far beyond its normal limits, collapsed in each other’s arms; or the man who cried for the first time in what must have been a year, whose shivers were the same color as the dawn light; and the moment where children rise for school, completely unaware of the company they share, so out of the ordinary at this time of day."

 

Annotation: Our moods and thoughts tend to swallow up the environments around us, in such a way that the environment itself bears the distinct stamp of its inhabitant. It takes a special awareness — one, I think, beautifully expressed in this passage ­— to clearly and empathetically recognize in some given moment that the same environment houses rather different inhabitants in rather different situations, and that for these inhabitants, the features of the environment will mean something entirely different. Related to this idea, it is worth noting that the man’s shivers, if they are the same color as the dawn light, are “child-blue,” and that at the same moment the man shivers, the children rise for school. Thus, there seems to be a suggestion of some vulnerability or innocence common to both the man and the children, yet we look upon the man with sadness and the children with hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Love and Loneliness

"How do you know if you truly love someone? It’s not intuitive, given everything our history has to say. But here, I’ll tell you: if you do love someone, it is because you want them - I reiterate, you want them, and them alone. If love is by necessity, it could be anyone - for no reason at all, except that you cannot stomach your loneliness. But I will tell you a secret: no one erases the loneliness. Some people, thrilling as they are, sedate your awareness, so, momentarily, it disappears - but it’s still there. It never went away, was never defeated - rather, you addled yourself, distracted yourself, only made yourself more susceptible to its warfare. And that person you love? They are the instrument of your distraction. And I ask you: is that love? How can it be? No, love must be a reification of the loneliness, a substantiating of it, a sublimation, an emboldening, an electrification of the loneliness, a purification, not an atonement - a true lover doesn’t erase you, doesn’t have you disappear in him, but makes you feel the most you that you have ever been."

 

Annotation: The author takes note of and, perhaps to some extent, resolves the conflict that I myself have observed: In love, one seeks a certain completion (if we should believe the Aristophanes of the Symposium), yet it is precisely the dependent lover, the one who most fervently desires completion by the other, that is the worst beloved, inasmuch as the essence of the beloved requires something independent to be loved, and as a bad beloved, so becomes a bad lover. The author would perhaps say, then, that the bad lover is as bad as he is since he wishes for someone to “erase the loneliness;” this is what the bad lover understands by “completion.” But in fact, genuine completion integrates the loneliness, substantiates it as the insuperable border between I and thou. It is in so doing that the lover maintains the difference, distance, and therefore essential vulnerability of love since the other insofar as she is understood qua other is concomitantly understood as wholly capable of rejecting the lover, and the lover must permit this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sun, Sea, Salt, Fragrance

After - the death          -           I’ve come back -

-            Thrown -        to the -             outer rim         - the border                                       

 

• the bleak universe       [...]

 

- I’ve had to    - travel back to this little                     room,  

 

To my body    - the wind, the green - wind- [            ] oh - [  ] shivered -

My stomach, -             the - touch, her [                     ]           - fingers [        ]

 

• Sun, sea, salt,  -   fragrance -                                                                                                   

 

My own beautiful eyes - my hands above a meal -

- the warmth - - [--]

 

For so long, away -     I’ve had to walk from - [         ] nowhere.

To the stars [               ]  pillars of creation, chasms between color, [                ]

-  a rainbow station.    [           ] The train --   vacant, but for a  -

 

-- man, by the window. The green light, his face in the shallow, the bands-

- the light from an empty planet [       ] - he turned, and said to me,

 

• “All that space...for - no one? - 

• • Could -            Could a single heart fill it all?”

Then he turned back to the window. His        -           hat, on his head,

His coat on his [          ] arms, eyes     [ ]        Eyes

Full: water to the brim of the glass                 swirls,  green.


- the wheels turned   --            - the tracks squeal, screech -

That was it.     [           ] - the stars lurched in the window, and finally

Careen, away, -           -           waving. Like interstellar-       parents,

• And their children       -           the host family            - on the station. [         ]

- their smiles, their -- hands ---  [      ] leave me, by the edge of a window frame.

 -          [ ]        - the train moves -       those hands and -        smiles

[           ]           the “farewell!”

Return, and-    return- and -                return- [                       ]    - return- in the next

window and - -disappear again, and   [                       ]           - again

And return      [!]        -           -           -again,- minutely.

I think: like a cosmic film. -   [...] and they leave, again, - and return,

 

Infinitely, until so- divided - [ ]  a mist - [      ] - on the eyes, a - [passion?]

[...]      - tingle, on my lips.

 

                                    But I                [           ]           didn’t know

• Where to         -           go.

But the - [warmth, the light, the green whirlwind] -

I remembered,    -       in the car  - family      [           ] - on my cheeks, the  -            sun.    -          

Sun, sea, salt, fragrance - shadow                              death.  [           ]

Yes, that [        ] the death.      - included, a    part,     shadow, -

• A way to follow Ariadne home.

 

                                    -------

 

(        - The feeling, floating   -          

I   [      ]   emerged from the dark water,  a   breath,

Towards the surface   -           my eyes -        the surface, broken - 

To?      -pupils [           ] All of a sudden - the [           ]  - me, - the light - [   ] 

[distillate grey]

 -  there, in the the living room.          [           ]          

the shoes by the door  -           still warm, damp         [           ] gravel dust coats -  lightly)

                                    --------

 

As necessary as the sun. -       [           ] the hand in the creek, the beams of light, -

the house by the beach, through the foliage, [            ] the waves,     - the garden.

[…]     the fingers on the moss, the image -               -           all along, it  - waited.

 

            For love   -                                          [        ]

 

And I knew - [             ] myself.

 

a bituminous Polyphemus, he had                  - hurled me,    [           ] (dark, but the shine)

 

I was arced -    to nowhere -                (stars)                          - but

Your smile, your         balm, your                               scent!         

 

The train - [         ]  lost no longer -                “conductor! -                          [           ]           “Conductor!”

Yelled -                                                                 I  -

[           ]

                                    “A ticket elsewhere.”
-”oh?”                                                                                                             -

 

-                       -           -

 

                        -                       -                       -           “Well? Where to, then?”

His cap, it shone-,       blue and gold, the rim, gold - and below, like fires, his eyes.

 

I said it to those, [       ] a sacrifice.    -           “Sir,”   [           ]

“To the blue house      - with the sun and -     [           ] - the - 

Garden, the garden - [ ] with the red window and the white [     ]

Lillies, - and the rosemary, and the    green -

Time. - -           -           -           -                       -                       -                       -                 [--]           

 

Annotation: The sensual earthiness of the fricative in “fragrance” is striking, standing out among the sibilance of the words, “sun, sea, salt” (as well as, perhaps, their referents); the image it evokes is not unlike Picasso’s “Figures Beside the Sea.” This image contrasts sharply with that of the cosmic train in the poem, which is faintly reminiscent of the “Star-gate” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The resulting contrast is one between the celestially sublime and uncanny, on the one hand, and the nostalgia for worldly feeling, on the other hand. It thus seems to span the entire breadth of what is most significant in the human experience, its most elevated limits — death, the heavens, and the other. It is, as it were, a less prudish rendering of Kant’s famous statement in the second Critique: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

The disparity between the cosmic order and our spatiotemporally insignificant yet semantically (in the original Greek sense) bountiful lives upon the earth is also found in other passages of To Arcadia — for instance, the passage below:

We operate in the thin horizon of conditions between heaven and earth, in an equilibrium of possibilities, infinite to their own accord, but a mere distance of 1 to 2 in the infinity of scale of the universe. The truth is we bind a spiritual world to the conditions of a material world that possesses its own life, and whose rugged body houses the more fragile body of our thoughts; and when one crumbles, lashes out, bends, stretches, grows, so the foundations for our dreams cause ripples and distortions in our dreams. 

(It is also perhaps worth noting that, near the beginning of To Arcadia, the author mentions a book by name, The Galactic Railroad, which at first, appears to be an extraneous detail. Not only is there, as we can see, a galactic railroad present here, but the repetition of the idea melds well — if perhaps, coincidentally — with the theme of return present in this poem.)