a shandean commonplace book

Even when you know what people are capable of, even when you pride yourself on knowing, on not evading history, or the news, or any of the quotidian, minor, but still endlessly apparent and relevant examples of human cruelty—even now there are times it strikes you anew, as though you’d spend your whole life believing that humanity was fundamentally good, as though you’d never thought, like Schopenhauer, that it was all blind, impersonal will, never chanted perversely, almost gleefully, the clear-sighted adjectives learned from Hobbes— solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short — even now you’re sometimes stunned to hear of some terrible act that sends you reeling off, too overwhelmed  even to weep, and then you realize that your innocence,  which you had thought no longer existed, did, in fact, exist—that somewhere underneath your cynicism you still held out hope. But that hope has been shattered now,  irreparably, or so it seems, and you have to go on, afraid that there is...

There is a kind of love called maintenance, Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;  Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;  Which answers letters; which knows the way The money goes; which deals with dentists  And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains, And postcards to the lonely; which upholds  The permanently ricketty elaborate Structures of living; which is Atlas.  And maintenance is the sensible side of love, Which knows what time and weather are doing To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring; Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps My suspect edifice upright in air, As Atlas did the sky. UA Fanthorpe

We have been telling the story wrong all along, how a king took Philomela's tongue after he had taken her body, and how the gods turned her into a nightingale so she could tell the night of her grief. Even now the streets wait for her lamentation—strays minister to bones abandoned on a stoop, a man sleeps on the ghosts of yesterday's heat, pigeons rest on top of the church and will not stir until they hear music below them. Inside, a woman warms up the organ and sings Via Dolorosa about a Messiah who wanted to save everyone from the wages of pleasure. But how can I keep a man's fingers from my mouth? How can I resist bare trees dervishing on the sidewalk? A woman outside the train station asks, Is there a city underneath this city? I say, Let me tell you a story, and tell her that after Longfellow put out the fire in his wife's dress, after he buried her, after his burns turned to soft pink skin, he translated the Inferno. There is a place deep in the earth for the ravi...

Years before ever seeing California, I wrote a story titled “Oakland in Rain.” Rain served as an easy metaphor for the unexpected in a place known for abundance, and it provided a texture of melancholy. The nameless protagonist—an exiled drunk who was, of course, a thinly veiled version of myself— had lost her mind and believed the weather communicated with her: rain meant soberness, that she had been absolved of some sort of punishment. Plagued by her wild inner life, I imagined her wandering the city, intent on getting lost in the Catholic cemeteries, where she took note   of lemons in the wet grass (an offering?), the sky, a hawk on a tree. But no matter where she went, nothing was ever quiet enough. Despite my best efforts, the narrative was bleak; it lacked tension and a convincing resolution. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, one day I woke up and it had been raining in the Oakland of my actual life. Outside my window, the cottonwood trees looked like the day before, ...

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbors with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. George Eliot, Silas Marner

Back then I was going steady with fog, who could dance like no one’s business, I threw her over for a leaf that one day fluttered first her shadow then her whole life into my hand, that’s a lot of responsibility and a lot of relatives, this leaf and that leaf and all the other leaves hung around, I told her I needed space, which was true, without it I’d only be a soul, and no one’s sure that wisp is real, that’s why we say of real estate, location, location, location, and of speech, locution, locution, locution, and of love, yes, yes, yes, I am on my knees, will you have me, world? Bob Hicok