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Ferguson Quotes

7/7/2017

nFrom Between the Bridge and the River

Like many of her sex, Sophie was fiercely competitive with other women, working on the crackpot theory that if she could be better in some way, men would like her better, respect her. Make her happy. She never cottoned on the fact the men she was attracted to, the men who found her attractive, didn't like women.
They liked variety. And fucking.

He realized [his wife] didn't really like him. (...) When he was nice to her it was to calm her down or to stop her from being upset. Not very good reasons, he thought. He realized now he had been patronizing her for years. "I'm sorry", he said.

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An interesting twist of thought.

5/28/2017

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"
And so, according to a brief perusal of women writer's comments online over the past few days, men are: overly confident, predatory, helpless, psychopaths, terrified of women, fascists, the reason why the world is in this mess, literally so stupid, and the problem here.

Of course what these women really mean is that they themselves are not overly confident, not predatory, not helpless, and on down the line. It's just easier to say that men are these things, rather than you are not these things. People would rightly become suspicious if you suddenly started going on about how amazing you were. They'd start looking for the proof you weren't. But by attributing these negative behaviors and traits to your opposite group, it's an easy, critisism-proof way of saying, I would never behave like this.
"
from Why I Am Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin, 2016

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A quote from RIlke

5/28/2017

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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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Margareta Ekström

1/15/2017

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Song of the ant

In the raspberry jam
from the reputable firm
lay an ant.
I was so pleased:
an ant, a real ant
an ant not listed in 'ingredients'
that proves there is a summer.

Outdoors, the arctic fog lay thick.
Indoors, the ant lay on my plate
as if enclosed in amber.

The ages met.
The rooms collided.
Raspberry time and raspberry room
with newspaper time and breakfast room.
And the time of the ant,
so pitifully thwarted by the jam
came to land
in a jar.

Not even the National Museum of Natural History
can surprise us so!

From "To Catch Life Anew. 10 Swedish Women Poets"

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William Meredith

1/4/2017

The Illiterate

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

William Meredith, “The Illiterate” from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1997 by William Meredith.

Interesting fact: Meredith spent his childhood in Lenox, MA (western MA).

May Sarton

12/28/2016

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before--"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

More Dickenson

12/27/2016

Tell all the truth but tell it slant -

Tell all the truth but tell it slant --
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --

Billy Collins

12/27/2016

Aimless Love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

Robert Pinsky

12/22/2016

Poem about People

The jaunty crop-haired graying
Women in grocery stores,
Their clothes boyish and neat,
New mittens or clean sneakers,

Clean hands, hips not bad still,
Buying ice cream, steaks, soda,
Fresh melons and soap—or the big
Balding young men in work shoes

And green work pants, beer belly
And white T-shirt, the porky walk
Back to the truck, polite; possible
To feel briefly like Jesus,

A gust of diffuse tenderness
Crossing the dark spaces
To where the dry self burrows
Or nests, something that stirs,

Watching the kinds of people
On the street for a while--
But how love falters and flags
When anyone’s difficult eyes come

Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique
Soul, its need unlovable: my friend
In his divorced schoolteacher
Apartment, his own unsuspected

Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice

12/7/2016

18th century music, piano arrangement

Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orpheus and Eurydice, composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck (sometimes known as "The Melodie") in different renditions.
I enjoy how Mark Hambourg and Guiomar Novaes play it. Rachmaninov's version gets a special mention because it is Rachnaminov and is shows, it is however slightly too romantic a rendition for me.

November 30th, 2016

11/30/2016

Amazing Anne Hartigan, second Irish female author that I feel grateful for discovering this year.

The Big Grieving

The honesty of touch skin asks for,
peeling off the outer, unnessary layers,
wool, cotton, nylon, polyester
or smelly socks.

(skin, white as an almond
delicate, pure water)

She needs to say, I love you,
because, simply, on this floor
on this rough blanket, under
this floating duvet, she does.

He says, Sssh, when she has tears,
touches her eyes, but its good to weep;
bodies become so simple by removing
wool, cotton, nylon, polyester,

then the big grieving of the world
slips from them, down through
the floorboards, washed through
the drains of the earth.
© Anne Le Marquand Hartigan
(http://www.annehartigan.ie/biggrieving.htm)

Kristina Lugn

9/25/2016

From To Catch Life Anew: 10 Swedish Women Poets, 2006

I need silence

I need silence
and solitude
and a well-fitting word supply.
I need a secret
and an enduring sense of reality.
My assignment right now
is to try to free myself
from my own formulations.

Living is a work of sorrow.
If you don't understand that
you will never be happy.

Ted Hughes

9/25/2016

Crow's Theology

Crow realized God loved him --
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

And he realized that God spoke Crow --
Just existing was His revelation.

But what
Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?

And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung up mummifying crows?

What spoke the silence of lead?

Crow realized there were two Gods --

One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

Crow's First Lesson

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
"Love," said God. "Say, Love."
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.

"No, no," said God. "Say Love. Now try it. Love."
Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito
Zoomed out and down
To their sundry flesh-pots.

"A final try," said God. "Now, Love."
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man's bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,
Jabbering protest --

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept --

Crow flew guiltily off.

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".

Orpheus and Eurydice.

6/29/2016

There is this an idea of romantic love out there, an idea of love so dedicated, so complete that one who feels it is believed to be unable to see any flaws in her/his beloved. Which leaves those loved ones feeling insecure and misunderstood somehow because not all of them is acknowledged, their flaws overlooked for a time being sure to become an issue later on. While they may be afraid of embracing that "complete romantic love" this is what the other person might be feeling:

Eurydice Talking

Sometimes we make it to the landing.
I do this for you, after
All, even agony prolonged becomes a joy,
And this is repetition.
The garish snapshot in your mind,

Why am I so patient?
When you place your hand
Upon the rail, I know my name
Rumors light like running water

As you stray between the yes and no
Then turn to flood the darkness.
What can I tell you?
Desire cannot be commanded.

Once is now, this undertow
Forever. Keep turning.
It was your carelessness
That makes the song worth singing.
Mark Irwin

[Oh no, girl... No no no no.]
Here's a piece of advice to Eurydice more eloquently put:

Orpheus and Eurydice
Peter Paul Rubens
Fragment

This painting adds layers to the portrait of Eurydice: it shows Eurydice who, even though feeling the way she does in the poem, would cling to Orpheus out of selfish indulgence and would have
....that idiotic,
witless glance, ebullient but oblivious

as Steve Kowit puts in in his excellent poem Eurydice

Ferguson Quotes

An interesting twist of thought.

A quote from RIlke

Margareta Ekström

Song of the ant

William Meredith

The Illiterate

May Sarton

Now I Become Myself

More Dickenson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant -

Billy Collins

Aimless Love

Robert Pinsky

Poem about People

Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice

18th century music, piano arrangement

November 30th, 2016

The Big Grieving

Kristina Lugn

I need silence

Ted Hughes

Crow's Theology

Crow's First Lesson

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

Orpheus and Eurydice.

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