The Relic

This was definitely on my test (the formatting should be different, e.g. there should be stanzas, but blogger is thwarting me):

When my grave is broke up again

Some second guest to entertain,

—For graves have learn'd that woman-head,

To be to more than one a bed—

And he that digs it, spies

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,

Will he not let us alone,

And think that there a loving couple lies,

Who thought that this device might be some way

To make their souls at the last busy day

Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mass-devotion doth command,
Then he that digs us up will bring
Us to the bishop or the king,
To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men.
And, since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.

First we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we loved, nor why;
Difference of sex we never knew,
No more than guardian angels do;
Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals,
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free.
These miracles we did; but now alas!
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.

Reading Donne, whom I had never really read before, was one of the great unexpected pleasures of all the studying I did. The line, "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" is impossible for me to forget. It reminds me of Old English verse: It is alliterative, for one. But it also makes poetry out of these weird, but very concrete, images. It isn't fantastic, but it's imaginative. It's sort of pedestrian, and very physical, but also almost ghoulish and really beautiful. Donne also wrote these pretty famous lines:

"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string"

John Donne, that is kind of GROSS. Also kind of sexy. It's like, I love my girlfriend so much, I think I'll pop my eyes out. I don't think that last sentence will make much sense to people other than Emily and Katie M. , but trust me, it is very funny.

This is a portrait of Donne he had commissioned a few months before his death, while he was ill:

It is how he expected he would look when he rose from the grave. I'm not sure how exactly he decided what that would look like. I can only hope that when I rise from the grave I will have such fetching head-gear. But I will probably be wearing kale. Donne had this hung on his wall so he could look at it while he was dying and be reminded of the transient nature of life. John Donne was not fucking around.

Only someone so totally unafraid of dying could have written the way that he did about death. The writing about death in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (which title I am totally stealing from him) might actually turn you religious-- it just sounds like the truth:

"...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness."

And now you believe in God. You can thank me later.

I want to go see this

Luck to Me

In honor of the GREs (I hope this is on the test. When I am practicing and I see a poem or story I like, it's like, "Hello old friend here to help me! I didn't know anyone at this party and I am so glad you are here now."):

W.H. Auden

"Musee des Beaux Arts"

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Halloween + Shoes

I haven't posted in a long time. But I am putting up:

1) My Halloween headgear

2) A picture of someone's old shoes that are going to be my new shoes (from The Selby).

Lines & Shapes

The new volume of this is out:



I just ordered it. I love port2port, and have some of Mav's photographs in my house:

It's not just because I secretly want to live in Maine, either. Though I do spend time at work using the googlemaps satellite function to look at various towns in Maine. I pretend I am a gull on my way from Nova Scotia....

You Can Never Be Too Young or Too Dead

When I started this blog (such an ugly word, that. Can I call it something else? When I started this ripple? this elderberry? this donnybrook? I don’t know, those are just some words I like...) I imagined that it would be a place for me to explore my more enlightened, high-minded interests. This is not only because I am a little bit of a snob, but also because it seemed like it would be more interesting to read and write about the geological history of Eastern Parkway, or the great tradition of pet biographies (POST TO COME) than, say, "Magazines I Like to Read". I notice that I just called pet biographies high-minded. So be it.

But life is not all glaciers and marmosets. Life is also diet Dr. Pepper and lawn ornaments. And I embrace it all! Yes, life is about so very many things, but above all, perhaps, it is about this simple fact: We are all going to die someday.

A little morbid, yes, but true nonetheless. And if there is one woman who has made it her mission to constantly remind us of this fact, and who yet gives us the same kind of pleasure provided by the aforementioned diet Dr. Pepper, that woman is Lurlene McDaniel.

Either you were just drowned by a warm, wonderful flood of childhood memories, or you have no idea what I am talking about.

Ms. McDaniel is the author of many young-adult fiction books, almost all of which feature a terminally ill teenager (usually a girl). Sometimes they have cancer (they in fact often have cancer, for cancer, as we know, bespeaks innocence, pathos and wasted beauty), sometimes they need a heart transplant, sometimes they have cystic fibrosis. Occasionally it is the boyfriend of the female protagonist who is tragically ill. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The point is they are young, they are very, very sick and they are not getting better.

I loved these books when I was a kid. Particular favorites included Don’t Die, My Love; Sixteen and Dying and Baby Alicia is Dying. I could write an entire post about that last one, the cover image and jacket copy of which can, I think, speak for themselves:

"Desi thinks it's totally unfair that innocent baby Alicia was born HIV positive. Now the eight-month-old Alicia lives at Childcare because she was given away by her sick teenage mother. Desi can relate to feeling unloved. Her parents give her all the material things she needs, but there seems to be a wall between her mother and herself."

Something to chew on, hm?

BAID aside, I mostly enjoyed stories about young, white, relatively privileged kids-- kids like myself-- slowly dying. I hoped feverishly that the characters would recover, while in my heart of hearts I felt a deep, sick satisfaction in knowing that they would not. McDaniel doesn’t really write books with happy endings. In response to a question in the "Ask Lurlene" section of her website, she writes,

‘I know sad stories aren't for every reader, but it's the kind of story that most of my readers like from me. When I write "happy" books, many readers complain. So I focus on what I do best---stories that might bring a tear, but that focus on real life (where happily ever after rarely occurs). And while the books may not have "happy" endings, I try to give readers a satisfying ending---life is full of trouble and matters out of our control. How we deal with troubles determines our own character.’

So true. I think the key here, aside from the universal human fascination with death, is that all the characters in McDaniel's books are just a little older than I was when I read them. They are TEENAGERS, which is all I dreamt of being before I became one. And not only are they teenagers, they are teenagers who are made old before their time. And there is a certain type of child, of which I was one, who really wants to be old before her time. She wants death thrust upon her, if only imaginatively, because it seems a small price to pay to gain the wisdom, glamor and prestige of the dying.

I also have a chronic illness myself, but let's not discuss that here! (I will only say, in relation to that, that McDaniel started writing about dying children when her own son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which seems to be just a little bit twisted and melodramatic. But who am I to judge?)

I had completely forgotten about these books until recently. I remembered individual titles, but not that they were all written by the same person. I think this is really a testament to the fact that these books loomed large in my youthful mind, each one its own distinct world of graceful misery. Lord, I just can't wait to have kids, so Lurlene can teach them what this life is all about.

I leave you with a sampling of Lurlene McDaniel titles:

She Died Too Young

Mother, Help Me Live

Please Don't Die

Mourning Song

The Girl Death Left Behind

Someone Dies, Someone Lives

When Happily Ever After Ends

The first of many re-starts to come

I didn't really want to make this a blog about writing, or about me, or about--heaven forbid--blogging. But it was been about six weeks since I last posted, so I will write:

Why This Is Difficult


This is difficult because it is immediate.
This is difficult because it is short.
This is difficult because I've already asked people to look at it.
This is difficult because it is new.
This is difficult because I am careful.
This is difficult because it is, improbably, local. By which I mean that it exists primarily for an already-established community, that is, my friends and loved-ones.

To put something small and decent onto the earth, and to do it frequently, is a good kind of work. It is a plodding, modest kind of work that can eventually make something bigger. Or not. It need not add up to anything to have a value.

So I suppose: A small thing, of its own modest value, can be decently placed in the world, frequently.