Beckett on the afterlife

Samuel Beckett, on what it will be like in the afterlife: "We'll sit around talking about the good old days, when we wished we were dead." — Louis Menand, "Notable Quotables," in New Yorker, February 19 & 26, 2007.
 

There's no

There's no care except hunger
No favors but from an enemy
Nothing edible but a bale of hay.
No lookout but there's a man asleep
No clemency without crime
No safety but among the frightened
No good faith but a disbeliever's
Nor any cool heads but lovers.
— François Villon, from "Ballade," translated by Galway Kinnell

Winter

These are the desolate, dark weeks
When nature in its barrenness
Equals the stupidity of men.
— William Carlos Williams, cited by Lourie's Word of the Day, 2/11/07.

First snow day of this winter. Class cancelled, streets white.
Septentrional: pertaining to winter.
Thanks, Jeffie!
 

on Regular Information

Every check we write is drawn on exactly one bank, for precisely one amount, and each has exactly one check number. If we need to record checks, we don't need to worry about checks that are not drawn on a bank, or where "check number" is not a number, or where "amount" is a poem or a drawing.
— Mark Bernstein, The Tinderbox Way, 43.

This blog is made with Tinderbox. The book is more than useful in figuring out how to use a software program. It helps find useful ways to think about all the information we seem to have been put here to herd. I wish there weren't so many typos, but I love the calm reassuring voice, and the examples are — well, exemplary.
 

Of Love and Other Disasters

Of Love and Other Disasters

The punch-press operator from Flint
met the assembler from West Virginia
in a bar near the stadium. Neither
had anything in mind, so they conversed
about the upcoming baseball season
about which neither cared. We could
be a couple, he thought, but she was
all wrong, way too skinny. For years
he'd had an image of the way a woman
should look, and it wasn't her, it wasn't
anyone he'd ever known, certainly not
his ex-wife, who'd moved back south
to live with her high school sweetheart.
About killed him. I don't need that shit,
he almost said aloud, and then realized
she'd been talking to someone, maybe
to him, about how she couldn't get
her hands right, how the grease ate
so deeply into her skin it became
a part of her, and she put her hand,
palm up, on the bar and pointed
with her cigarette at the deep lines
the work had carved. "The life line,"
he said," which one is that?" "None,"
she said, and he noticed that her eyes
were hazel flecked with tiny spots
of gold, and then — embarrassed — looked
back at her hand, which seemed tiny
and delicate, the fingers yellowed
with calluses but slender and fine.
She took a paper napkin off the bar,
spit on it and told him to hold still
while she carefully lifted his glasses
up on his forehead, leaving him half
blind, and wiped something off
above his left cheekbone. "There,"
she said, lowering his glasses, "I
got it," and even with his glasses on
what she showed him was nothing
he could see. He thought, better
get out of here before it's too late, but
knew too late was what he wanted.
— Philip Levine, New Yorker, February 5, 2007

Leaving The Road

In the evening the murky shape of another coastal city, the cluster of tall buildings vaguely askew. He thought the iron armatures had softened in the heat and then reset again to leave the buildings standing out of true. The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake. They went on. In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 229.

---

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate* patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes, a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
— The Road, 241. Last passage. The end.
* marked with close wavy lines. from medieval Latin vermicularis, from Latin vermiculus, diminuitive of vermis, worm.

The black shape of it

He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distand low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting in the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small penknife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 220.

Sitting over words

Riding the W train headed for South Ferry, on the adrack above the windows:

Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in the pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of every thing that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence
— W.S. Merwin, Poetry in Motion, from Migration: New and Selected Poems, 2006.

Lost patterans

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches drod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sister-world in the ancient dark beyond.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 152-3.

Where men cant live/with the last god

Where men cant live, gods fare no better.
— Old man in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, 145.

---

... to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing...
Ibid.

If only...

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath. Trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 9-10.

Make notes

Pure Balance

Wherever we are is unlikely.
Our few kisses — I don't know if
they're of goodbye or of
what — or if she knows either.

Neither do I understand why it's
exhilarating — as well as the other things it is —
to know one doesn't have a future,
or how much longer one won't have one.

Future tramples all prediction.
Hope loses hope. Clarity
turns out to be
an invisible form of sadness.

We look for a bridge to cross
to the other shore where our other
could be looking for us
but all the river crossings

all the way to the sea
have been bombed. We look for a tree —
touch it — touch
right through it — sometimes nowhere

is there anything to hitch oneself to,
and we must make our way by pure balance.
This is so and can't be helped
without doing damage to oneself.
— Galway Kinnell, Strong Is Your Hold, 64.

---

... Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
balone on white with fluorescent mustard?
... What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is blaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of a wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song...
— Ibid., from "Why Regret?", 65.

Make notes and make notes and make notes.
The music will appear.
 

Reservation

Bethlehem Diner

Overheard at breakfast:

Widows Club. Reservation for 14. 1 o'clock.

 

Practical use from a torn up life

A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life, Gabriel decided. She likes mending it and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure: "What can I do with this remnant? How long does it need to last?" A man puts on his life ready-made. If it doesn't fit, he will try to exchange it for another. Only a fool of a man will try to adjust the sleeves or move the buttons: he doesn't know how.
— Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories, 183.

Xmas in Bedlam

On the corner of 1st Ave & W Market Sts, a yard hanging: 3 towel-headed snowpersons point their carrot-nosed faces at a star cross in the sky; so do their 5 sheep, who are not made of snow. The legend: Believe.
 

And we all shall be changed

• Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines or one million machines can join together and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.
— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 26, describing principles of the Singularity (which is Near).

---

• As virtual reality from within the nervous system becomes competitive with real reality in terms of resolution and believability, our experiences will increasingly take place in virtual environments.
— Ibid., 29.

---

• In virtual reality we can be a different person both physically and emotionally. In fact, other people (such as your romantic partner) will be able to select a different bocdy for you gthan you might select for yourself (and vice versa).
— Ibid., 29.

Let him decide

... Let him decide. Here are the three choices: ...
[] Tear it up.
[] Don't publish it but give me a copy.
[] OK, publish it, on the chance that somewhere someone survives of all those said to die miserably every day for lack of the small clarifications sometimes found in poems.
— Galway Kinnell, "It All Comes Back," Strong Is Your Hold, 7.

Aw, you guys...

Aw, you guys are the best friends a giant dufus could have.
— Homer, The Simpsons, Paul Bunyan episode.

Anything can be settled

Anything can be settled for a few days at a time, though not for longer.
— Mavis Gallant, "Irina," Paris Stories, 49.

Any command

Any command is a release, in a way.
— Mavis Gallant, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street," Paris Stories, 23.