Oy. Do you ever go through one of those periods where all you seem to do is admin, maintenance, schedule appointments, do things over, be interrupted every two seconds, suffer insomnia, and everything seems to be breaking down at once?: cars, teeth, phone, garbage disposal, bathroom plumbing?…
I think, as always, of mothers: HOW DO THEY DO IT? And comfort myself with the realization that we can sleep when we’re dead.
Meanwhile, life is in session and how incredibly lucky am I to be more or less up and running?
Lacking coherent thought and devoid of compelling reflection, I offer a smattering of quotes from recent reading:
“Obedience for contemplatives is like the inner compulsion of an artist drawn to hours of hard work by a fever of love for creating things of beauty. No grue artisst will say he trudges to work in reluctance and distaste, forcing his soul to the task. Contemplatives are similar in their response. In a sense they recognize the cross almost like their chosen art: no more to be evaded or refused than an artist running from the sight of beauty rising before his eyes.”
–Fr. Donald Haggerty, Contemplative Enigmas: Insights and Aid on the the Path to Deeper Prayer
“The mirror, orginally created to give pleasure, had become an instrument of anxiety like the clock.”
–Robert Musil
“Real human bodies are the opposite of capitalism though they are its material: they are not liquid, they wear out and decay.”
–Joanna Walsh
“One part of us is sane, the other half of us is nearly mad…and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
–Rebecca West
“Everything in excess: food, sex, drink, drugs, cigarettes; but also work. Fassbinder gives the lie to the idea that productivity is in itself a ”healthy’ thing. There is nothing necessarily ‘healthy’ about the pursuit of any demanding or difficult or very personal art. There may be cruelty involved. It throws into question what we might consider a ‘healthy’ productive life at all. The line between self-medication and lethal dose become increasingly thin. The same thing that cures you of one malady exacerbates another. Suddenly crying jags, mad hungers, humid sweats. Sleep now a grand prix or slalom; a shark chasing its own turbulence. Un-health as its own form of exercise or momentum. Life life at a hurtling rate: beyond a certain point impossible to tell whether it’s speeding up or skidding down or whether finally these amount to the same thing.
By the time of his death he didn’t seem young or old; he had entered some kind of shamanic or bodhisattav or saint-like state of beyond caring.”
“What ultimately defines our own personal ideas of failure and success? How deep are the roots of all the bad decisions we make? Was there, perhaps, some unlikely moment in our childhood when something resembling failure made an indelible impression upon us? And seemed vastly preferable to then prevalent notions of success?”
–Ian Penman, from Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors
“[Rich and powerful do-gooders think] We must–we must endeavor to make a difference, to win, to change the world, to get things right. What is difficult to see is that such thinking, even if it originates in real compassion, is ultimately patronizing or even tyrannical. It begins from a hidden fantasy of divine power, that the poor and their poverty depend on me, that benefit to others flows out from me, while I remain impassive and impermeable, receiving nothing. Mere words might be fruitlless to break the spell of our imagined superiority. But it dissolves like wax before the fire in real life with poor people.”
–Zena Hitz, The Religious Life
“When I’m writing, I don’t like there to be daylight at the window.’ He usually starts at about 11 p.m., when the rest of the house is asleep, and keeps at it ‘as long as the thread is coming.’ When exhaustion sets in, at noon or so the next day, he’ll stop, pour a Scotch, open his fourth pack of cigarettes, slip in a disc into the compact disc player, perhaps ‘Creole Love Call,’ and lie on the settee until sleep comes. When he wakes, it’s back to the desk again. His daughter or his wife will carry food up on a tray–quietly, so as not to have their heads snapped off.”
–Description of a 1988 interview by Dennis Potter with The New York Times Magazine, from the Potter biography by Humphrey Carpenter
“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”
–Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore
“How often do we consider the fact that the treasures and riches of the world were created from time immemorial by slaves? From the irrigation systems of Mesopotamia, the Great Wall(s) of China, the pyramids of Egypt, and acropolis of Athens, to the plantations of sugar on Cuba and of cotton in Louisiana and Arkansas, the coal mines on Kolyma and Germany’s highways? And wars? From the dawn of history they were waged in order to capture slaves. Seize them, chain them, whip them, rape them, feel satisfaction at having another human being as one’s property. The acquisition of slaves was an important, and frequently sole, cause of wars, their powerful and even undisguised motivation.”
–Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus
“All this calm, all this peace, this sober equilibrium that underlies the works of Giorgio Morandi and found in [works of] Max Ernst and Giorgio di Chirico masks the uneasiness that something threatening is about to explode.”
–Salvador Dali
“It was not easy to obtain a painting from Morandi. He rarely allowed buyers to choose; instead, Morandi himself would decide which work would be sold to which buyer. Moreover, when he finished a painting he would not immediately turn it over to the eager collector. Instead Morandi would hang it on the wall over his bed with others that explored the same theme and observe the sequential development of that particular series.At that time he would often write the name of the future owner on the wooden stretchers of the finished painting, but the canvas would remain on Morandi’s wall until he felt he had studied it sufficiently.”
–Janet Abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence
HE LIKED BOTTLES
“As I’ve gone through life, I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.”
–Walter Murch, from The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film with Michael Ondaatje
Here’s a video, even more amateurish than usual, that I worked up for Advent, when we’re both superaware of time, and somehow outside of time…
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