polish footnotes

woke up in the dirty almost -dawn to court miss insomnia yet again. going out to get cigarettes because the will is weak and desire is rampant, and not to be controlled at this sick hour.  

"

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart, and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

James Baldwin. [1949] 1984. ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel.’ in Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press: p. 14.

this goes a tad bit far, but i essentially agree

(Source: james-bliss, via hookedonsemiotics)

caroline bird - ‘the fairy is bored with her garden’ (by TongueFuTales)

this is going to be an only partly coherent rant on chance and fate and absurdity as defined by popular philosophy and as digested by an amateur acrobat who very awkwardly tightrope-walks those heights. pursue this only at your own risk.

it is our habit to connect dots that do not in actuality connect and proceed to deem it reality. we generate our very own gestalt pictures, and then gaze at them in a complacent manner as if it was the only way in which the pattern could be arranged - and thus the whole concept of fate. but in fact, it is the ultimate chaos of life and Chance that have most to say in the matter. if only that pin didn’t get lost or if only that traffic light did turn green 1/2 a minute earlier, we would be elsewhere. mere trifles decide about our existence & a trifle could sweep us out of the world of the living. and yet what is the point of over - analyzing, of thinking in third conditional? precisely that if we refuse to do this, we will fall pray to Chance’s pranks. there is no way of evading this entirely, but we could at least decrease odds of mis- fortune (that word again! it shows how deeply the concept is embedded in our thinking)

considering things like choosing a partner, people often ask themselves why should i prefer this person over so many others? without being able to answer. this is mostly because a) the reasons are too insubstantial, i.e. a positive association with someone else’s voice or style of dress, merely living in the same location etc. 2) because in fact, it could have been anyone else. but suppose one has a real repulsion for this thing i have conceptualized as chance, wouldn’t one then try to answer that question with all confidence? this might perhaps lead to rationalizing love, but why should this be a negative thing at all? isn’t rationality and deliberation also beautiful?

having ruled out fate, an artificial construct i touched on at the beginning, and yet knowing that chance does exist and is precarious, one would want to put once hand on the wheel for once. true, the road is only party paved (with extant preconditions) and Chance isn’t going to let us steer all the way (because we simply are not good drivers). but we can perhaps improve, and if analysis and profounder insight could lead to less regrettable decisions and less insomnia, then it’s to be seen as a good precept, even and especially as concerns areas of life which we tend to romanticize.

"I seem to remember that I once used to rhyme a mean rhyme, but it all seems awfully long ago"

Elizabeth Bishop 

“There is reason to hope that the ever fragile but somehow perennial traditions and virtues of solidarity, curiosity, self-reliance, courtesy, voluntary simplicity, and an instinct for beauty will survive, even if underground for long periods. And cultural rebirths do occur, or at any rate have occurred”

feathers of horses - the drought

as for music with a capital m, the cracow’s philharmonic is playing stravinsky (is going to play him soon) my soul is already sitting in that seat.

“one art” a collection of bishop’s letters is hands down the best piece of literature i have held in my hands since a long time. i still can not shake the whole impression, my hands still tremble and eyes still sweep over the text. i shall write down a proper review once i finish this behemoth of a book.

when i travel with elizabeth bishop (she was a connoisseur of travel - the geography she described in her poems was never stationary) i travel backwards. and again i learn to relish the american language which she handled so well. its sound and its particular syntax, the stutter of consonants, the slide of vowels. how deeply one wishes to burrow oneself inside that - especially as memories come with the package. within a wild tangle of signifiers i find myself, as i was when i lived in that speech; say, on a street in chicago. stepping out of the train station, the roof of which bulged with cacophony of that music i sensed buildings carry notes and conduct electricity to the turbulent sky. and i, always rushing, was high on that terrible tenor. and i ambled through howard or michigan avenue, surrounded entire with english names. and now, the more i feed on those words which weaned me, the stronger the pull from across the atlantic & the louder that city calls. what a magnet, what music, what memory! and no one could tell me that words have no power. they are the very blood and the marrow in our bones. and what’s more, they carry us through, forward and backwards, better than anything else could.

mollifying mediocrity. the dulling opium of peace. cigarettes and reading. french and latin. and thus far - no writing.