“OH THOU SWORD of the wilderness, when wilt thou be quiet?”
(Cotton Mather, from vol. 2 of Magnalia Christi americana, p. 639, quoted on p. 40 of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson.)
Category Archives: commonplace
st. john of the cross
“Anyone who is to find a hidden treasure must enter the hiding place secretly and once he has discovered it, he will also be hidden just as the treasure is hidden.”
(source unknown, thanks m.e.m.)
so simple and clear to me then
“It seemed so simple and clear to me then. It still does. But like many beginning computerists, I mistook a clear view for a short distance.”
(Ted Nelson, Literary Machines (1993), p. 1/26.)
and how often do we need mountains
“I caught sight of a splendid Misses. She had handkerchiefs and kisses. She had eyes and yellow shoes she had everything to choose and she chose me. In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I. In looking at the sun she read a map and so did I. . . . In loving the blue sea she had a pain. And so did I. In loving me she of necessity thought first. And so did I. How prettily we swim. Not in water. Not on land. But in love. How often do we need trees and hills. Not often. And how often do we need mountains. Not very often.”
(Gertrude Stein, from “A Sonatina Followed by Another”, quoted in the preface to Davenport’s Sappho.)
nor be comfortable in his unbelief
“Hawthorne on Melville: ‘He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.’ ”
(Paul Metcalf, from “Manacle Your Icicle”, p. 60 in From Quarry Road.)
back to metcalf
“A unique poem or narrative may have a good deal more than what we call voice; or there may be a good deal more embodied than the term implies. The realized work is an organic animal, impinging itself, possibly, on all the senses, but primarily, of course, on sight and sound: the layout of the language on the page (and here the designer and the printer collaborate with the author) – and the appeal to the inner ear, the way we find ourselves hearing it as we read.
In a curious way, there is verification of what I’m talking about, in the appeal to the eye: I refer to the radical transformations a piece of writing goes through, in the journey from gestation to birth. A hand-written manuscript is one thing; run up on the typewriter it is something organically different. This is not often recognized, or comes to one as a shock: that the mode of presentation may fundamentally affect the substance of what it presented. The next transformation is from typescript to galley proofs; and when these arrive on the author’s desk, he may feel a curious mixture of loss and pride: the work is distancing, but it is coming nearer to its own final realization. The final transformation, of course, is from proofs to book. The work is at last born.”
(Paul Metcalf, “The Eye Hears, the Voice Looks”, pp. 55–56 in From Quarry Road.)
against ideas
“10 December 1858
The sadness and melancholy of modern times spring from the accumulation of books, in other words from the growth of ideas. The idea is the old age of the spirit and the disease of the mind.”
(Pages from the Goncourt Journal, trans. Robert Baldick.)
one dancing
“The fourth was one who in a way was one dancing. He was in a way being one doing that thing. He was one in a way completely meaning that thing completely meaning being one being dancing. He was in a way then dancing. He was one being one asking and answering in dancing being asking. He was one asking in dancing being existing. He was one answering in dancing being existing. He was one in a way dancing that is he was one coming to be one asking and answering. He was one asking. Dancing was existing. He was one answering. Dancing was existing. He was one asking and answering. He was one meaning that thing meaning that dancing had come to be existing. He was one not dancing. He certainly was not dancing. Any one could be one dancing. He was not then dancing. He was then meaning the thing meaning that something is existing and that something is one thing. In a way he was doing nothing that was not something that was meaning something had been existing, that dancing had been existing. He could be one dancing. Dancing was existing.”
(Gertrude Stein, from “Orta or One Dancing”, pp. 290–1 in the Library of America Writings 1903–1936.)
textuality
“. . . we are only beginning to see in certain bodies of work not only the words but the process of composing. For Stein and others – one thinks of the poet Susan Howe’s variant readings of the poems of Emily Dickinson – the word text includes that process. The energy of a piece comes in part from the act of writing, which enters it as value that can be read, just as hues and brush strokes can be read in a painting. A text must be transcribed with attention to the evidence of its making. Print, while it cannot always reproduce that process, need not wipe it out. Inside a text are the lines that carry the words, the hand moving on paper, line breaks and spaces dictated by notebook or leaf, size and folds of paper, pen or pencil forming words, the shape of a draft visible in the way it is copied into a notebook, and even the effort to end a work in the space of one notebook.”
(Ulla E. Dydo, p. 7 in the introduction to A Stein Reader.)
the audience
“In the manuscript of Identity A Poem [Gertrude Stein] made a personal comment about her frustration in a sentence that she rightly eliminated. ‘I know now when one is [xd creating] writing and nothing has been printed and therefore there is no audience every single word every scrap of writing is important because there being no audience.’ In the deleted sentence she had already revised ‘creating’ to ‘writing.’ ”
(Ulla E. Dydo, p. 5 in the introduction to A Stein Reader.)