truthfront

Category: writing

  • Echoes of silence

     

    notes

    I imagined him leaning over the page by candlelight while the rest of the hospital slept, night after night, his true voice pouring from the pen in measured strokes, filling the void of sound in his throat and in that quiet building with the voices of multitudes. The cold winter months abated, new growth sprouted in the crystalline valley below Clyvesell, and Wade was there looking out the window and writing. Sun scorched the mountain relentlessly in the summers and Wade was there with his notepad, cloaked in the solitude of night, stealing sleep during the day when he could. He worked his jobs, he attended therapy sessions, events, activities when required, which was often. But he lived for the night, when the echoes of silence throughout Clyvesell could not hush his mind, his pen.

  • I Will Return (Neruda)

    Snow

    Some other time, man, or woman, traveler,

    later, when I am not alive,

    look here, look for me

    between stone and ocean,

    in the light storming

    through the foam.

    Look here, look for me,

    for here I will return, without saying a thing,

    without voice, without mouth, pure,

    here I will return to the churning

    of the water, of

    its unbroken heart,

    here, I will be discovered and lost:

    here, I will, perhaps, be stone and silence.

    — Pablo Neruda

     

  • The writer who does not write

    He is the writer who does not write, though no one knows him by that name.

    No one knows him. He does not write.

    Perhaps he’d be known if others read him, but they don’t. He does not write.

    By not writing, he deprives himself one of his greatest tools. He is a flightless bird.

    No trace of him will remain.

  • Others

    MadTree

    Last week I drafted a short piece in my notebook about other people, namely my aversion to them. Today I read a passage in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet that puts my piece to shame. This from Pessoa:

    Isolation made me in its own image. The presence of another person — one person is all it takes — immediately slows down my thinking … When I am alone, I can come up with endless bon mots, acerbic ripostes to remarks no one has made, sociable flashes of wit exchanged with no one; but all this disappears when I’m confronted by another human being. I lose all my intelligence, I lose the power of speech, and after a while all I feel like doing is sleeping. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my spectral and imagined friends, only the conversations I have in dreams, have reality and substance, and in them the spirit is present like an image in a mirror.

    The whole idea of being forced into contact with someone oppresses me. A simple invitation to supper from a friend produces in me an anguish difficult to put into words. The idea of any social obligation — going to a funeral, discussing something with someone at the office, going to meet someone (whether known or unknown) at the station — the mere idea blocks that whole day’s thoughts and sometimes I even worry about it the night before and sleep badly because of it. Yet the reality, when it comes, is utterly insignificant, and certainly doesn’t justify so much fuss, yet it happens again and again and I never learn.

    ‘My habits are those of solitude, not men.’ I don’t know if it was Rousseau or Senancour who said that, but it was some spirit belonging to the same species as me.

  • Churchill on landlords

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    Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is affected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.

    — Winston Churchill, 1909

  • Another memory in algorithm

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    I remember the smell of him alive
    sweat and cologne
    hair and a day’s work
    in other words, the opposite of death.
    I remember the smell of death
    that overtook him
    sour and aggressive — singular
    devouring him inside-out.
    Both scents linger
    memories enforce them, time fades them
    years accumulate
    as do fragrances
    but the dead are still dead — shadows
    the living are measured against them.

  • Neruda’s The great urinator

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    Pablo Neruda, From Selected Failings (Defectos Escogidos) 1972-1973

    The Great Urinator (El Gran Orinador)

    The great urinator was yellow
    and the stream that came down
    was bronze-colored rain
    on the domes of churches,
    on the roofs of cars,
    on factories and cemeteries,
    on the populace and their gardens.

    Who was it, where was it?

    It was a density, thick liquid
    falling as from
    a horse, and frightened passersby
    with no umbrellas
    looked up skyward,
    meanwhile avenues were flooding
    and urine inexhaustibly flowing
    underneath doors,
    backing up drains, disintegrating
    marble floors, carpets,
    staircases.

    Nothing could be detected. Where

    was this peril?

     

    What was going to happen to the world?

    From on high the great urinator
    was silent and urinated.

    What does this signify?

    I am a pale and artless poet
    not here to work out riddles
    or recommend special umbrellas.

    Hasta la vista! I greet you and go off

    to a country where they won’t ask me questions.

  • Montaigne on introspection

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    If no one reads me,

    have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts? … I have no more made my book than my book has made me — a book consubstantial with its author …

    Have I wasted my time by taking stock of myself so continually, so carefully? For those who go over themselves only in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith, with all his strength.

    Indeed, the most delightful pleasures are digested inwardly, avoid leaving any traces, and avoid the sight not only of the public but of any other person.

    — Michel de Montaigne