*Grande Sertão: Veredas, or, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Grande Sertão: Veredas, or, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands -João Guimarães Rosa
I think the novel itself is a form of bravery. Any novel. The poem may be truth, but the novel is good. There is so much badness in this book that I can’t explain exactly how soft it is. The place itself, the sertão, the text, is as dense as a heart. And though a heart is fragile, it is never short-lived.
A beautiful book.
“Don’t you know that one who is wholly brave, in his heart, cannot help being good, too?”
“Is God a trigger?”

*Beloved

Beloved -Toni Morrison
One of the most pure and powerful uses of language I’ve ever encountered. I don’t know in what possible way we, as humankind, are not like the love that terrorizes the characters of this novel. And yet. And yet. Sethe ends up dribbling in a rocking chair and yet she wins. She wins. She wins grace that her world isn’t ready for. Listen to her voice:
“And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew.”
“Now I can. I can sleep like the drowned, have mercy.”

*Our Lady of the Flowers

Our Lady of the Flowers -Jean Genet
In the long-evening half-light of mid-American dusk, the smell of barbecue and panting dogs and summer children, sun tea cooling on the gravel driveway and mosquitoes in helices around the porchlight in the deep green unmown lawns to the slow romance of the crickets, the dandelion is sexing itself. The starfish breaks an arm to fragment a new organism. The coffee tree is autogamous. Most amazing is the aphid, which is usually parthenogenic, generationally telescoping, born with a baby in the belly, sometimes born with a baby and a grand-baby in the belly. But the aphid will still have sex, Genet is idiodioecious, and under his covers he is only a man, hard-on, mind womb wound around a semi-gendered Darling who gains the male pronoun like the blooming phallic raceme of the foxglove but sometimes slips into the deep curtsy of a little girl.
This book inspired me to research the hymen, which is only present in the following animals: llamas, guinea pigs, manatees, moles, toothed whales, chimpanzees, elephants, rats, lemurs, seals, and horses.
Besides the hot sex, it was hard for me to pay attention to this book. I let the words, though, the slick hard style of it, gloss over me. Coat me. And I marveled at a phrase, a situation, but, especially towards the end, completely lost myself to its pages.
“The swan, borne up by its mass of white feathers, cannot go to the bottom of the water to find mud, nor can Jesus sin.”
“It was a smile that was enough to damn his judges, a smile so azure that the guards themselves had an intuition of the existence of God and of the great principles of geometery.”
“He was good-looking—as are all the males in this book, powerful and lithe, and unaware of their grace.”
“like violins being skinned alive.”

*The Duino Elegies

The Duino Elegies -Rainer Maria Rilke
For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror is to say that Birth is nothing but the beginning of Death. Then, ask me, ask, to what is the beginning of Death? The only medicament is Night. Oh and night: there is night... Because Light and Lovers are only masks—inadequately covering the terror. Masquerades of levity we are. And wasn’t it Goethe who said that if the world wasn’t inherently dark then we wouldn’t need light. And didn’t he also say that architecture is frozen music. What then is poetry, but unfettered dirt. Angels, chronologically, are pre-dirt. Man is post-rock. Poetry is un-rock. Music is etymologically earth-angel. Architecture, then, is to Poetry what an edifice is to marble slab. What then, Rilke, has mustered under his open window with the violin pealing along the breeze, is an unwieldy temple for metaphors (instead of vice-versa). On its altar shines a Mask to end all Masks. In which we disguise our dark souls with darkness and disappear into immortality. No, not even Women in Love can penetrate this totality, not even the Hero or Rome or Gaspara Stampa or Nietzsche or the Army of Children Crusaders can fade into the unremitting tides of eternity like Goethe’s Homunculus martyring himself to the lowest of forms, knowing in complete faith that over the millennia he will fall into the cycle of evolution and attain its highest state: a worthy lover. He died for worth. For boys drink wine, men drink port, but heroes drink brandy. Quaff, then, Ahab! Consecrate and Consanguinate! And then abandon. Complete, inexhaustible idealism. The poet is a Young Man—the only soul with the tension to withstand the bowstring, to fire the quiver into the unknown. For still stillness is worse than death. We must be, as Miller says, still as the hummingbird. For there is no place where we can remain.
You can remain in the beloved.
Restrain him.
Oh gently, gently, wash the atavistic graveyards with your soft steps, flicker away the battling phalluses like a fly on a hot day, landing to rub his feet in the sweet sweat-manna of your arms, a hot day, the glaze down your neck, flood the dried-up riverbeds with your tears of joy, with your birth-giving tears. For even lovemaking is a birth. And drown the rivers. But don’t be his mother. But don’t be his lover. And don’t hide his face.
Let it encounter all the world and be stunned forever.

…And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

*The Ladder of Divine Ascent

The Ladder of Divine Ascent -St. John Climacus (intro by Kallistos Ware)
from Ware: “the progress of eternity,” that is, “The essence of perfection consists paradoxically in the fact that we never become perfect, but advance unceasingly ‘from glory to glory’.”
and from St. John Climacus: “War against us is proof we are making war.”
“So then, keep running, brother athletes, and again I say to you, keep running… Keep running, athlete, and do not be afraid.”
“It is one and the same fire that is called that which consumes and that which illuminates.”
“By dispassion I mean a heaven of the mind within the heart.”

*The Symposium

The Symposium -Plato (translated by Christopher Gill and Desmond Lee)
2 books in a row on Love, whose parents, according to Plato, are Poverty, a drunk beggar woman, and Resource, the wily son of Invention, who conceived a child to put the Gods in order and make poets of men. I wasn’t expecting such a tipsy, homoerotic text. Nor, a sarcastic eulogy of Socrates.
“All human beings are pregnant in body and mind.”
“Yes, sexual intercourse between men and women is a kind of birth.”

*The Song of Songs

The Song of Songs -translated by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch

How wonderful you are, O Love,
how much sweeter
than all other pleasures!

But to try to quote from the Song is like hunting for a rabbit’s foot. Or trying to cook only a spoonful of soup. The lovers are stoked with the such desperate passion, that no matter the circumstance, the politic, or the law, they bestow on themselves and, now, thanks to the translation, on us, a profound innocence. In that split moment before tears begin to well. Before pain is translated into reaction. Or desire hits the brain. No wonder the Song flaunts such a pure animal presence. The lovers living between the heartbeats. I can see the Shulamite stealthing around the city at night. Silent, almost rolling, footsteps. The lovers collision always in the softlight of dawn. The air cold.

Hurry, my love! Run away,
my gazelle, my wild stag
on the hills of cinnamon.

*Cat Attacks

Cat Attacks -Jo Deurbrouck and Dean Miller
I can see them. Feel the unprecedented silence of the pounce. We are at complete oblivion to their eyes. And before I hear a sound the back of my neck is in the hot mouth of a lion.
The way they run, while stalking, so close to the ground, so graceful, almost rolling, and silent. I’ve never before seen an animal become a complete blur. We lock eyes. Or maybe it locks on my eyes and I paralyze. Or maybe I rip off my sunglasses to compensate for the depth of its stare, which takes in most of the canyon’s light. Don’t look away, I say to myself. Don’t look away. I start backing up and run into a bush. For one split moment I glance down, and then back up and the lion has halved the distance between us and is still as if it never moved. I unbutton my shirt with my left hand. Don’t look down. I pull it away from my body, assuming more girth. I snarl. Scream. Hoist my crosier in the air like some hellish cataclysm and the lion doesn’t even flinch. When my echo dies, the lion, without sound, takes about six lightning steps forward and stops again, now less than fifteen yards from me. Don’t look away. With my left hand I reach across my body and unbuckle the sheath to my knife. The lion takes two more steps. It’s still enough to be dead. My eyes water and the lion blurs into the camouflage of the sand. As if it could sense my slightly obscured vision, it creeps closer. Now I know it’s a male. Too big to be a female. But still, probably weighing less than my one forty-five. I unsheath my knife and again raise my crosier in the air. Without reason, during the scream, I feint forward and I see the lion tense. I feint again. Snarling and brandishing my crosier like some lunatic samurai. The lion doesn’t move. I feint and stamp the ground and slash the air with my knife and feint. The lion doesn’t move. Then it charges.
v

*The Black Book

The Black Book -Orhan Pamuk
The first hundred pages and the last forty were stellar. But the middle few hundred were very static. Lots and lots of “becoming” going on. Lots of very subtle “revelations.” Lots of time spent watching characters read and write. The last line even named writing as “the only consolation,” which is fine. I do look forward to reading one of his later books, after Pamuk himself comes to and gets over coming to writing. And great to glimpse Turkey in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So many nouns in this book. I liked too, the notion of finding Latin letters in the lines of faces.
“and that the universe is he who is seeking the mystery.”
He like Tolstoy’s lips as well: “I loved seeing how you pushed out your upper lip when you were reading, just like a character in a Tolstoy novel.”

*The Ramayana

The Ramayana (retold by Ramesh Menon)
this was a sea of love they plowed through, their chariot a ship of sorrow

“It is you who seem to have lost your reason, and tread a path of madness called Rama.”
list of animals appearing in Ramayana:
nilgai, chital, sambur, bison, leapard, tiger, krauncha bird, langur, filigree keepers, swans, tame deer, peacock, elephant, wolves, black bees, sarasa, chakravaka, geese, migrant teal, scarlet ibis, pelican, wild pig, crane, painted stork, koyal, owls, gigantic eagles, rabbits, vulture, kite, horse, squirrel, vanjaluka bird, honey bees, bear, ghandarva, kinnara, panther, monitor lizard, butterfly, firefly, scarlet-footed pigeons, mynahs, moths, boar, chameleon, duck, crocodile, cur, dolphin, whale-eating giant squid, jackal, deer called srimara and chamara, hyena, whale, sea serpent, shark, timming ala, vidyadhara, kokilas, bhringarajas, hamadryad, kitten, cobras, ants, worms, horse, and cows.
list of trees and plants appearing in Ramayana:
pipal, nyagrodha (pipal sap), kadamba, mango, aswattha, valkala (tree bark clothing), palasa, badri, yamala, bamboo, eucalyptus, early pine, sala, asvarkana, madhuka, apple, peach, pear, darbha grass, scented pala trees, karnikara, asoka, lodra flower, tilaka, sara reeds, kritamala, kumsuka flowers, patala, priyangu, punnaga, arjuna, chandana, mandara, bakula, ketaka, kusa grass, sandalwood, japaa flowers, gajapushpi vine, aguru, desdar, shimshupa, champaka, punnaga, parijata, deodar, asana, nipa, saptaparna, atimuktaka, mandara bakula, jambu, and kovidara.

“And in the heart of the forest, his spirit was opened to him: a secret, mystic bloom, thousand-petaled.”

*The Pilgrim’s Progress

The Pilgrim’s Progress -John Bunyan
I am not very well acquainted with physical violence. Sad and desperate for the arduous tasking of Christianity, of religion. Death is a presence that lives in healthy, beaming children. This life however is more than thorn. Moses scourged the pilgrim, clobbered him over and again on the head until he was pulled to safety (further thorn-tripping) by a Jesus angel. I know that I’m not a “good” writer. I know I owe penance and honor and every ounce of me to my creator, but I know too that dues have been paid, and if I, and Bunyan, and the weak and the strong and the eloquent can swallow this freedom than the terror of thorns is painless, soft-petaled. I don’t want a walk in the park. I couldn’t. Nor would I turn away a man who came into the path of righteousness but “not at the wicket gate,” who “camest hither through that same crooked lane,” and not through the path of travail, through the Slough of Despond or through the trial at Vanity Fair, or after fighting the terrible Apollyon. Is there not a path through pure beauty. If I wasn’t so measly, write it, to write it. My roommate and his girlfriend storm drunken into his room. The wall is thin and she complains, “I’m so cold.” I revile the sound of my typing that I know they can hear. These words. They’re so drunk.

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald
A beautiful way of thinking. Robert Silman, in a blurb on the front cover, says, “Stunning and strange… like a dream you want to last forever.”
I fell asleep reading this book two days ago and dreamt of strange Chinese mass suicides and woke up with a leg and an eye twitching.
Sebald transitions, often within a paragraph, from glowing herring to the history of citylights to a forgotten maritime battle to an English hurricane to a biography of Joseph Conrad. And all done seamlessly, in the logic of interest and exploration and awe, which is closer to reality (the logic, the “storyline”) than any book I have ever read.
If I were the surgeon general of the west, I would readily prescribe afternoon constitutionals with W.G. Sebald.
“It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal.”
“…but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air.”
“An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow.”

*The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan
I was introduced to this text as a letdown. I scanned briefly the section on the tulip, which seemed immediately paltry and dry compared to Anna Pavor’s The Tulip. I went to a Pollan reading at Black Oak’s with the Berkeley crowd wearing sandals, hemming, healthy, and terrifically pleased with themselves to confront their two favorite topics in one setting: advocacy and organics. So I was doubtful of the seriousness of the writing, and expecting mere fasciculation of the old, pro-, hippyish themes. The book is divided into four sections, or, as Pollan puts them, Desires. He explores the idea that plants have adapted themselves to meet our desires for reasons of self-propagation, or, another way of looking at it, is that certain plants have taken advantage of our desires, have, in the same way we use plants to gratify ourselves, used us to “gratify” their own unyielding desire for life. So Johnny Appleseed wasn’t delivering healthy teeth and Red Delicious to the Midwest, it was instead eccentric evangelism and applejack that came from his makeshift canoe of seeds. Basically, bringing liquor to the thirsty. Similarly, Pollan combines anecdote and the unmystification of botany and history concerning the Tulip, Marijuana, and the Potato. He shines most clearly, or, perhaps the potato does, in the last section, explaining away the human desire for control.
“Banality depends on memory…”
“Memory is the enemy of wonder.”