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Anne Sexton. The room of my life.

7/27/2016

The Room of My Life.

Here,
in the room of my life
the objects keep changing.
Ashtrays to cry into,
the suffering brother of the wood walls,
the forty-eight keys of the typewriter
each an eyeball that is never shut,
the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,
the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,
the sockets on the wall
waiting like a cave of bees,
the gold rug
a conversation of heels and toes,
the fireplace
a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,
the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,
the phone
two flowers taking root in its crotch,
the doors
opening and closing like sea clams,
the lights
poking at me,
lighting up both the soil and the laugh.
The windows,
the starving windows
that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
Each day I feed the world out there
although birds explode
right and left.
I feed the world in here too,
offering the desk puppy biscuits.
However, nothing is just what it seems to be.
My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.

The theme of life as space (as opposed to life as words or life as a sum of tangible things you leave behind) has long been interesting to me. The pic above is called "Naked Lady". The one below is called "Mirror". The message is to take care of the space you call your life.

Anne Sexton

7/27/2016

Interesting fact: Anne Sexton was born in Newton, MA and stayed around Boston all her life.

HER KIND
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Emily Dickinson

7/23/2016

XLVI

A THOUGHT went up my mind to-day
That I have had before,
But did not finish,—some way back,
I could not fix the year,

Nor where it went, nor why it came
The second time to me,
Nor definitely what it was,
Have I the art to say.

But somewhere in my soul, I know
I ’ve met the thing before;
It just reminded me—’t was all--
And came my way no more.

From Emily Dickinson (1830–86).  Complete Poems.  1924

Dickinson's poem about power of words - click "read more":

Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, MA

Photography Kim Høltermand

7/20/2016

I like how calm this guy feels apparently both in a city setting and in the backcountry. At least that's what I feel looking at how he chooses to take pictures.

http://nordicdesign.ca/discover-work-photographer-kim-holtermand/

Words and talking in person vs. having an audience

7/20/2016

Another quote about importance of words comes from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!"

The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

Words, secondary worlds and Milan Kundera

7/16/2016

There is a world out there and around us and then there is what we make of it. Words help navigate through the world by means of letting us name objects/events and in doing so face them. Experiencing something and being able to say "this is [insert word]" is like dropping an anchor, like tying yourself to the world, like building a bridge. People often don't agree on what a word means : what's funny for one person might not be funny for somebody else. The mismatch, albeit confusing at times, also helps us make sense of the world -- helps notice differences , similarities, all sorts of interesting effects.

I like the idea of this secondary personal world that has the features of the actual world, yet different from it and unique. It's singularity arising not only from the unique combination of events/places one has encountered but also from the words that this person chooses to refer to them (= from the way he/she relates to those events).

This quote from The Joke by Milan Kundera led me to thinking that the personal world of words is not the only secondary world possible:
"Once more I was amazed by the incredible human capacity for transforming reality into a likeness of desires or ideas".

Anne Sexton. The room of my life.

Anne Sexton﻿

Emily Dickinson

Photography Kim﻿ Høltermand

Words and talking in person vs. having an audience

Words, secondary worlds and Milan Kundera

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Anne Sexton

Photography Kim Høltermand