Category Archives: lit

from Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko:

The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.

…

Ceremony

I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.

You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.

Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.

He rubbed his belly.
I keep them here
[he said]
Here, put your hand on it
See, it is moving.
There is life here for the people.

And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing.

There’s a famous Chinese saying that “the misery of the state leads to the emergence of great poets” (guojia buxing shijia xing)–or more literally, “when the state is unfortunate, poets are fortunate.” These words come from a poem by the Qing dynasty historian Zhao Yi (1727–1814), observing the phenomenon in which classic works of poetry often appear during times of calamity: war, famine, dynastic downfall, and so on.

Your ancestors will be poor and destitute
if no one burns cars, money, food, houses, clothing, iphones etc.
If enough spirits are neglected, then they may come back from the other realm
and cause calamities like earthquakes, droughts, locusts, civil wars, invasions, etc.

A dark man – what could he want
But a never-ending embrace,
Dolphins in the water, a wood of birches
And a hill from which to watch the Aurora Borealis?

What could he want, this dark man,
But a boat floating on warm oceans without course,
The planes of a treasure island, and a house
That looks over the beach of lost days?

What could he want, this dark man
But a little world, three truths,
Some breadcrumbs for the birds,
And a glass of wine that reflects dreams and cities?

Crossing Half of China to Sleep With You
by Yu Xiuhua (translated by Ming Di)

To spend or to be spent, what’s the difference if there is any?
Two bodies collide — the force, the flower opened by the force,
and the virtual Spring brought by the flower — nothing more than this,
and this we mistake as life restarting.

In half of China, things are happening: volcanoes
erupt, rivers run dry,
political prisoners and displaced workers are abandoned,
elk deer and red-crowned cranes get shot.
I cross the hail of bullets to sleep with you.
I press many nights into one morning to sleep with you.
I run across many of me and many of me run into one to sleep with you.

Of course I can be misguided by butterflies
and mistake praise as Spring,
and a village similar to Hengdian as home.
But all these are absolute
reasons that I spend a night with you.

a medicine cuisine
star of the earth
a certain fatty substance
emitted from the earth
rot from the stars
spit of moon
river polishing a stone
youtube self help
spiritual pollution
every manner of bourgeois import
from erotica to existentialism
Is this a planet of life?
seek truths from fact
no new ghosts
time to territorialize death
these memories are shaped
by the needs of my present
And so I call to you,
my shadow catcher —
                                          feast

“As far as I understand it, they’re egalitarian because they respect the individual so much, right? And you can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

So an abstract individual is someone who forgot, for some time, that they are part of a larger unit, and owe respect to all the other choosing individuals.”

…

“It is the only crime we have…To take the choice of another…to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to…for all we individuals to have…our choices.

Your…institutions – talking and talking of individuals…but crushing them in layers and hierarchies…until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.

We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone…And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.”

– China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

Hartfield says this about good writing: “Writing is, in effect, the act of verifying the distance between us and the things surrounding us. What we need is not sensitivity but a measuring stick” (from What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, 1936).

I began fearfully scanning the world around me with a measuring stick in hand the year Kennedy was shot, which was fifteen years ago now—fifteen years spent jettisoning one thing after another. Like an airplane with engine trouble, I started by pitching out the cargo, then the seats, then, finally, the poor flight attendants, getting rid of everything while taking on nothing new at all.

Was this the right way? How the hell should I know! Sure, life is easier like this, but I get scared when I imagine what it will be like to be old and facing death. I mean, what will be left after they incinerate my corpse? Not even a shard of bone.

My late grandmother used to say, “People with dark hearts have dark dreams. Those whose hearts are even darker can’t dream at all.”

The night she died, the first thing I did was reach out and gently close her eyes. And in that moment, all the dreams she’d seen in her seventy-nine years vanished without a sound (poof!), like a summer shower on hot pavement. Nothing left.

– Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing

Is this a planet of life?
Then why do people die?
This is not life, this is death.
Can’t you understand?

You’re only dreaming.
You’re not real here.
You’re only dreaming
      you did all the things
      you did before you died.

You’re asleep.
Wake up before it’s too late
    and you die in a dream.

This world is not the real world.
It’s all illusion. It’s not real.
Can’t you feel that this world is not real?
Someone cast a magic spell
      on the people of planet Earth.

If you do right they put you in jail.
If you do wrong they put you in jail.
You can’t win.
You got to do something else.
You got to get away from here.

You make death your master.
You’re not free.
If you’re free, why do you bow to death?
Is that what you mean by liberty?
Stop bowing down to your master called death.
If you’re free, prove it.

– Sun Ra

from Kuki’s Metaphysics of Literature:

“The past is not simply something that has already gone. The future is not simply something that has not yet come. The past comes again in the future; the future has already come into the past. If we follow the past far enough, we return to the future; if we follow the future far enough, we return to the past. Time forms a circle; it is recurrent. If we locate time in the present, we can say that this present possesses as present an infinite past and an infinite future and, moreover, that it is identical with a limitless present. The present is the eternal present with an infinite depth; in short, time is nothing but the infinite present, the eternal now.”