“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” ~ Stephen King

“It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s own taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in… this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…” ~ Bret Easton Ellis, ‘American Psycho’

Did I mention that things would get dark here this fall? Yes, I did, and I meant it, more than you will ever know. The room darkens as I sit here – the tail end of a day all sadness and sorrow and growing ever dimmer by the minute. Yet I welcome the dark, leaning into it, nudging it gently, like an old familiar friend. Here, by my side, where the dark is the only thing that has never let me down, I find solace, and, as I’ve only been able to glimpse in solitude, a sense of the sublime. How strange and sad that my brushes with the sublime have always been by myself – it would seem to go against the assumed purpose of the world, if we can be so bold as to presume that such purpose is to love and be loved. Therein lies the profound conundrum of my mad existence. 

Don’t treat me special, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. 

“There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being – flesh, blood, skin, hair – but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn’t figure out why – I couldn’t put my finger on it.” – Bret Easton Ellis, ‘American Psycho’

Three days of rain – occasionally alternating with swiftly-moving clouds and a few brief breaks of sunlight, strange sunlight ever since the eclipse – seem to have had a wayward effect on my mood. Today is due to be overcast, but without any hard rain or wind, which characterized yesterday’s rollercoaster of emotions. This will likely be the only post of the day, and so I shall pepper it with lots of whimsical links so if your day runs into any doldrums, find your way back here and click away. I’m going to step off-line and find meaning there, where meaning has always resided. In my absence, a few lines from someone far more skilled than me.

A poem by e.e. cummings, who mastered an exquisite economy of words:

Spring is like a perhaps hand 

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.

While the Republican Party officially aligns with those who choose to attack ‘woke’ culture (i.e. being a moral and decent human being) certain racist and homophobic parents are working to ban books. Why would anyone want to ban a book that celebrates Americans is always going to be a mystery to me, but hateful people have never made much sense. In some small push against that, here are two books that you should definitely read as they are not only studies in exceptional Americans, they are also the work of amazing writers and stand-out citizens. If you’re against that, and if you want to ban or stifle such messages in any way, you are definitely the problem. If you don’t agree with them, that is absolutely your prerogative – it’s when you want to prevent the rest of from accessing and reading them that you become hateful. 

First up is Amanda Gorman’s ‘Call Us What We Carry’ – a collection of poems that contains ‘The Hill We Climb’, which is what she read at the Inauguration Ceremony for the 46th President of the United States. Just days after the January 6 insurrection, her words brought our country back together, healing and lending comfort to the resilience that is America. Find more of her work at her website here. 

The second book that is a must-read for the summer (and beyond) is Chasten Buttigieg’s ‘I Have Something To Tell You’ which was recently re-released in a Young Adult edition. How I wish something like this had been available when I was growing up. It wasn’t – and all the feelings I had made me feel like something was wrong, like I didn’t belong anywhere, like there was no one else like me. It was a feeling of isolation, and the world was once designed to make me feel like that. We have made some progress, and books like this remind me of how far we have come. Find links both versions of the book on his website here. 

“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s richly-resonant book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ is a wonderful way to wind up this winter season, and I’m taking my time getting through it so as to extend its wonderful spell. Kimmerer writes stories that weave Indigenous wisdom with scientific theory, held together by her love for this earth and our place in it. Her writing is compassionate and healing, the very things we need more of, especially at the tail end of winter. It reminds me to be more careful and considerate of what we take, how we take it, and what we give back – in deeds, in love, in thoughts and in action. 

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

“It was hypnotism. I was beginning to see that Phineas could get away with anything. I couldn’t help envying him that a little, which was perfectly normal. There was no harm in envying even your best friend a little.” ~ John Knowles, ‘A Separate Peace’

In lucky seasons, there is a summer read so good that it haunts me, and even though it’s not yet officially summer, I just finished this year’s stunner. ‘A Separate Peace’ by John Knowles tells the story of a friendship between two boys during the arrival of World War II. While the conditions that paved the way for war back then seem eerily familiar in today’s social climate, it was the descriptions of the tenuous yet unbreakable bonds of friendship that spoke most resonantly to me. This is a summer read that seers itself into the soul. 

“It was surprising how well we got along in these weeks. Sometimes I found it hard to remember his treachery, sometimes I discovered myself thoughtlessly slipping back into affection for him again. It was hard to remember when one summer day after another broke with a cool effulgence over us, and there was a breath of widening life in the morning air – something hard to describe – an oxygen intoxicant, a shining northern paganism, some odor, some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed on guard against it. It was hard to remember in the heady and sensual clarity of these mornings; I forgot whom I hated and who hated me. I want to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because these mornings were too full of beauty for me, because I knew of too much hate to be contained in a world like this.” ~ John Knowles, ‘A Separate Peace’

“A smile costs nothing, but is one of the best gifts you can give anyone.”

Miranda Hart has been a delightful muse and inspiration in these dark times, providing hope and laughter when we need it the most, and some hard-won wisdom that shifts perspective in the best possible ways. She wrote an adorable book that, while geared toward young adults, has appeal for all ages, and offers a whimsical tale designed to elicit a smile from everyone. Hart’s quirky voice and humorous way of addressing some rather serious issues makes this an enjoyable read that is more than your typical kids’ book., and ‘The Girl With The Lost Smile’ is a great summer jaunt for anyone looking for a little joy and whimsy. 

“I realized I could live a moral life, that I should, as an adult, live a life dictated by duty. If I chose I could find beauty by living in the real world; I could probably find beauty by working day after day at meaningful drudge. I often had that anxious, desolate feeling that I was wasting my time, that I was wasting an afternoon, a weekend, a whole life, by not choosing to do the right thing – the work that would simultaneously wear me out and sustain me. I was striving for the, ah, mature life. Here, I said to myself, I’ve been waylaid by the most sinful temptations, and if I don’t change now I might wander around forever wadded up with stupidity of my own making. I’d gotten distracted by laziness, by narcissism, and I’d also become clever in a despicable way, clever like a mild version of Milton’s Satan, Satan-lite, if you will. I could think rationally, but without any sort of spirituality. I was disconnected from anything moral, or from a sense of awe.” ~ from ‘The Short History of a Prince‘ by Jane Hamilton

SOLITUDE

By Antonia Pozzi

I have aching arms weakened

by an insipid desire to seize

something alive, that feels

smaller than me. I’d like to seize

my burden in one bound and carry it,

running, when it’s evening;

fling myself in the dark to defend it,

as the sea throws itself on the rocks;

to fight for him, as long as there remained in me

a shiver of life; then to fall

in the dead of the night on the road

under a swollen sky silvered

with moonlight and of birch; to curl myself

on that life that I hug to my chest—

and send it to sleep—and I sleep too, at last …

No: I’m alone. Alone I curl up

above my thin body. I don’t notice

that instead of a numb forehead

I am kissing like a madwoman

the tight skin of my knee.