Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating, your conception of reality.
Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.
When in the presence of a child, get on the floor.
The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.
I always tell my students: “A style is a means of insisting on something.” A line of Sontag’s.
To think of a hate crime as the most uniquely heinous of crimes seems to lend it, in my mind, an undeserved aura of power. I’d rather something else. The police are investigating this crime as an acute abjection. The police are investigating this as a crime pitiful as it is appalling, pathetic as it is monstrous.
Since that moment, one form of crisis has collided with another, and I am no more a Stoic now than I was when I opened that ancient book. But I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.
Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different.
A dream was a house your brain made without your permission, precisely to preserve memories and experiences and wayward impulses for all eternity, even the dead ones that only caused you pain, the ones from which you most wanted to be free.
And yet, in my case, I can’t let it go: old habits die hard. I can’t rid myself of the need to do “something,” to make “something,” to feel that this new expanse of time hasn’t been “wasted.” Still, it’s nice to have company. Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do “something,” that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.
War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate. People find themselves applauding a national health service that their own government criminally underfunded and neglected these past ten years. People thank God for “essential” workers they once considered lowly, who not so long ago they despised for wanting fifteen bucks an hour.
There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.
People find themselves applauding a national health service that their own government criminally underfunded and neglected these past ten years. People thank God for ‘essential’ workers they once considered lowly, who not so long ago they despised for wanting fifteen bucks an hour.
Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.
We don’t always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don’t have to take it personally. We can also just let it be.
Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of ‘fittingness’: that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it – no matter how small or insignificant both might be – are matched exactly, are fitting.
Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.
Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, it’s an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world – and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand – than by those surrounded by “loved ones”.
The only force comparable to an Ainsworth enthusiasm was the speed with which it passed.
Time is not what it is but how it is felt...