a shandean commonplace book

I know no way of judging of the future but by the past. Patrick Henry

Yes, I saw a lamb where they’ve built a new housing     estate, where cares are parked in garages, where streets    have names like Fern Hill Crescent. I saw a lamb where television aerials sprout from     chimneypots, where young men guun their motorbikes,     where mothers watch from windows between lace     curtains. I saw a lamb, I tell you, where lawns in front are neatly     clipped, where cabbages and cauliflowers grow in back     gardens, where doors and gates are newly painted. I saw a lamb, there in the dusk, the evening fires just lit,     a scent of coal-smoke in the air, the sky faintly bruised     by the sunset. Yes, I saw it.  I was troubled.  I wanted to ask someone,     anyone, something, anything . . . A man in a raincoat coming home from work but he was     i...

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.  Unless I can do that I can do nothing.  I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone.  A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been. . . . Withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death. Margaret Atwood

I don’t know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at when he writes of lust springing from the bowels or do I it could be the bowels of the earth to lie flat on the earth in spring, summer or winter is sexy you feel it stirring deep down slowly up to you and sometimes it gives you a little nudge in the crotch that’s very sexy and when someone looks sort of raggedy and dirty like Paulette Godard in Modern Times it’s exciting, it isn’t usual or attractive perhaps D.H.L. is thinking of the darkness certainly the crotch is light and I suppose any part of us that can only be seen by others is a dark part I feel that about the small of my back, too, and the nape of my neck they are dark they are erotic zones as in the tropics whereas Paris is straightforward and bright about it all a coal miner has kind of a sexy occupation though I’m sure it’s painful down there but so is lust of light we can never have enough but how would we find it unless...

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. Epictetus

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks: Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat, Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat, Select the prince from a row of identical masks, Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote, Or learn the phone directory by rote. Always it’s impossible what someone asks— You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe That you have something impossible up your sleeve, The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak, An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke, The will to do whatever must be done: Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son. A.E. Stallings

We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is--if you're old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it's someone else's brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, "No, we're not hiring today," for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who's not beside you or behin...

No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin with the simple exercises first  and slowly go on trying the hard ones, practicing till strength and accuracy become one with the daring to leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggio or faulting the full sentence of the fugue. —And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once before we’ve even begun  to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin in the midst of the hardest movement, the one already sounding as we are born. At most we’re allowed a few months of simply listening to the simple line of a woman’s voice singing a child against her heart. Everything else is too soon, too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat heard ever after from a distance, the loss of that ground note echoing  whenever we are happy, or in despair. Everything else seems beyond us, we aren’t ready...

My thoughts through yours refracted into speech transmute this room musically tonight, the notes of contact flowing, rhythmic, bright with an informal art beyond my single reach. Outside, dark birds fly in a greening time : wings of our sistered wishes beat these walls : and words afflict our minds in near footfalls approaching with a latening hour’s chime. And if an essential thing has flown between us, rare intellectual bird of communication, let us seize it quickly ; Let our preference choose it instead of softer things to screen us each from the other’s self : muteness or hesitation, nor petrify live miracle by our indifference. Muriel Rukeyser

Like all miracles, it has a rational Explanation; and like all miracles, insists On being miraculous. We toiled In the old car up from the lacklustre valley,  Taking the dogs because somebody had to,  At the heel of a winter Sunday afternoon Into a sky of shapes flying: Pot-bellied, shipless sails, dragonflies towering Still with motion, daytime enormous bats,  Titanic tropical fish, and men, When we looked, men strapped to wings,  Men wearing wings, men flying Over a landscape too emphatic  To be understood: humdrum fields With hedges and grass, the mythical river, Beyond it the forest, the foreign high country.  The exact sun, navigating downwards To end the revels, and you, and me,  The dogs, even, enjoying a scamper,  Avoiding scuffles. It was all quite simple, really. We saw The aground flyers, their casques and belts And defenceless legs; we saw the earthed wings Being folded like towels; we saw The sheepskin-coated wives and mothers Loyally...

We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could  a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. Rainer Maria Rilke

Of what avail is an open eye, if the heart is blind? Solomon Ibn-Gabirol

I’m not going to cry all the time, nor shall I laugh all the time, I don’t prefer one “strain” to another. I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie, not just a sleeper, but also the big, overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says “That’s not like Frank!”, all to the good! I don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera, often. I want my feet to be bare, I want my face to be shaven, and my heart — you can’t plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry, is open. Frank O’Hara

They say that this lot is bitterest:  to recognize the good but by necessity to be barred from it. Pindar

If we had never left this room the wind would be a ghost to us. We wouldn’t know to read the storm into the havoc in the glass but only see each bough and leaf driven by its own blind will: the tree, a woman mad with grief, the bush, a panicked silver shoal. Something hurries on its course outside every human head and no one knows its shape or force but the unborn and the dead; so for all that we are one machine ploughing through the sea and gale I know your impulse and design no better than the keel the sail —  when you lift your hand or tongue what is it moves to make you move? What hurricanes light you along, O my fire-born, time-thrown love? Don Paterson

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. Confucius

On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax After coming home from the mill, & ask me to write a letter to my mother Who sent postcards of desert flowers Taller than men. He would beg, Promising never to beat her Again. Somehow I was happy She had gone, & sometimes wanted To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou Williams’s “Polka Dots & Moonbeams” Never made the swelling go down. His carpenter’s apron always bulged With old nails, a claw hammer Looped at his side & extension cords Coiled around his feet. Words rolled from under the pressure  Of my ballpoint: Love, Baby, Honey, Pleas. We sat in the quiet brutality  Of voltage meters & pipe threaders, Lost between sentences . . .  The gleam of a five-pound wedge  On the concrete floor Pulled a sunset Through the doorway of his toolshed. I wondered if she laughed & held them over a gas burner. My father could only sign  His name, but he’d look at blueprints & say how many bricks Formed each wall. This ...

A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. Joseph Conrad

One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed with one idea rooted in his head: to graft his orange to his lemon tree. It took him the whole day to work them free, lay open their sides, and lash them tight. For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years the limbs would get themselves so tangled up each bough looked like it gave a double crop,  and not one kid in the village didn’t know the magic tree in Miguel’s patio. The man who bought the house had had no dream so who can say what dark malicious whim led him to take his axe and split the bole along its fused seam, then dig two holes. And no, they did not die from solitude; nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;  nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring for those four yards that lost them everything, as each strained on its shackled root to face the other’s empty, intricate embrace. They were trees, and trees don’t we...

 . . . what we were and what we are today is not to be tomorrow . . . There is no thing that keeps its shape; for nature, the innovator, would forever draw forms out of other forms.  In all this world--- you can believe me---no thing ever dies. By birth we mean beginning to re-form, a thing's becoming other than it was; and death is but the end of the old state; one thing shifts here, another there; and yet the total of all things is permanent. Ovid, Metamorphoses trans. Allen Mandelbaum

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing  as a symbol of ruined childhood  and there are people who don't interpret the behavior  of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.  There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool  and think about past pleasures unrecoverable  and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.  I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings  do not send their sinuous feeder roots  deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives  as if they were greedy six-year-olds  sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;  and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without  debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.  Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?  There are some people, unlike me and you,  who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of mo...

Why is there no mark engraved upon men’s bodies By which we could know the true ones from the false ones? Euripides, Medea

What the great historians give us . . . is a renewed sense of sorrow and anger and pity for history’s victims—for some luckless middle-aged Frenchman standing in the cold gray, shivering as he watches the members of his family being tied up and having their heads cut off. . . . It is not for history to supply us with a sense of history.  Life always supplies us with a sense of history.  It is for history to supply us with a sense of life. Adam Gopnik

In the hickory scent Among slabs of port That glistened with salt, I played Indian In a headdress of redbird feathers & brass buttons Off my mother’s winter coat. The smoke wove A thread of fire into meat, through November. The dead weight Of the place hung around me, Strung up by tendons —  Tied up with sweetgrass. The hog had been sectioned,, As if a map Were drawn on its skin; Opened like love, From snout to tail, The goodness No longer true to each bone. I was a wizard In that hazy world, & knew I could cut Slivers of meat till my heart Grew more human and flawed. Yusef Komunyakaa

A dark building. Crossed boards, nailed up, create A barrier at the entrance, or a gate When you go in. Here, in the gutted foyer, The ivy snaking down the walls is wire Dangling. And, over there, the twisted metal Columns rising from the undergrowth of rubble Are tattered tree trunks. This could be the brick Of the library, you don't know yet, or the sick Grove of dry white aspen where, stalking birds, You met a Lithuanian dusk stirred From its silence only by the wails of hawks. Now walk carefully. You see whole blocks Of ceiling caved in by a recent blast. And above, through jagged tiers of plaster, A patch of blue. Pages of books lying Scattered at your feet are like fern-leaves hiding A moldy skeleton, or else fossils Whitened by the secrets of Jurassic shells. A remnant life so ancient and unknown Compels a scientist, tilting a stone Into the light, to wonder. He can't know Whether it is some dead epoch's shadow Or a living form. He looks again At chalk spirals eroded...

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it. Seneca

I knew we had to grieve for the animals a long time ago: weep for them, pity them. I knew it was our strange human duty to write their elegies after we arranged their demise. I was young then and able for the paradox. I am older now and ready for the question: What happened to them all? I mean to those old dumb implements which have no eyes to plead with us like theirs no claim to make on us like theirs? I mean— there was a singing kettle. I want to know why no one tagged its neck or ringed the tin base of its extinct design or crouched to hear its rising shriek in winter or wrote it down with the birds in their blue sleeves of air torn away with the trees that sheltered them. And there were brass fire dogs which lay out all evening on the grate and in the heat thrown at them by the last of the peat fire but no one noted down their history or put them in the old packs under slate-blue moonlight. There was a wooden clotheshorse, absolutely steady, without sinews, with no mane and no mea...

Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? Thomas Wolfe

True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive. Mignon McLaughlin

Everyone’s always alone on the earth’s breast pierced by a ray of sunlight: and suddenly it’s evening  Salvatore Quasimodo translated by Gian Lombardo

Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at here, and smiled a little, subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily on the walls of the dams, now, when the white storks, returning, are transformed in the middle of the firmament into fleets of jet planes, we will feel again how strong are the ribs and how vigorous is the warm air in the lungs and how much daring is needed to love on the exposed plain, when the great dangers are arched above, and how much love is required to fill all the empty vessels and the watches that stopped telling time, and how much breath, a whirlwind of breath, to sing the small song of spring. Yehuda Amichai (Translated from the Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier)