Baby, I love your mind.

I often wish that i had a chandelier hanging from my ceiling, but instead of thousands of sparkling crystals swinging, there would be thousands and thousands of sparkling words. Words that shine brighter than cut glass. Here are a few quotes, specifically by writers, and by writers that have often spoken right deep into me.

"I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love. "
-Dave Eggers

"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it."
-Sylvia Plath

"The past beats inside me like a second heart."
-John Banville

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition.”
-Graham Greene

"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."
- Ted Hughes

"I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep."
- Dave Eggers

And the last words to Joan, the classiest of girls, oh I love her.

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

-Joan Didion

"A Certain Weariness" by Pablo Neruda

I don't want to be tired alone,
I want you to grow tired along with me.

How can we not be weary of the kind of fine ash which falls on cities in autumn,
something which doesn't quite burn,
which collects in jackets and little by little settles,
discolouring the heart.

 I'm tired of the harsh sea and the mysterious earth.
I'm tired of chickens -- we never know what they think,
and they look at us with dry eyes as though we were unimportant.

 Let us for once--I invite you-- be tired of so many things,
of awful aperitifs, of a good education.

Tired of not going to France,
tired of at least one or two days in the week which have always the same names
like dishes on the table,
and of getting up--what for? -- and going to bed without glory.

Let us finally tell the truth:
we never thought much of these days that are like houseflies or camels.
I have seen some monuments raised to titans,
to donkeys of industry.
They're there, motionless,
with their swords in their hands on their gloomy horses.
I'm tired of statues.
Enough of all that stone.

If we go on filling up the world with still things, how can the living live?
I am tired of remembering.
 I want men, when they're born, to breathe in naked flowers,
fresh soil, pure fire, not just what everyone breathes.
Leave the newborn in peace! Leave room for them to live!
Don't think for them, don't read them the same book;
let them discover the dawn and name their own kisses.

I want you to be weary with me of all that is already well done,
of all that ages us.
Of all that lies in wait to wear out other people.

Let us be weary of what kills
and of what doesn't want to die.

I carry your heart in me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

-- E. E. Cummings

Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hand

-- E. E. Cummings

The fray

These nights of youth run fraying now -
Careful stitched seams
rough rended in the dark
of love and disregard.

Fresh hearts arrive like parcels
in the daily post -
We tear apart and throw away
the ones we love the most.

These nights of youth,
all swinging and bright -
Like so many strung out yellow lights
that fade to nothing with the sun.

The headaches are eternal now,
our keepsakes mostly lost.
Like fraying hem, time proves us,
we all will come undone.

Pictures of you

Life is at its closest to art when I awake inside this quiet lover's tangle, and ponder the open face of the next two hours at least. Here, right there beside me, is the wondrously touchable outcome of all the bumbling messes in the daily toss and fro. These mornings, that follow the fizzy bright yesternights of shiny eyes and exaggerated gestures, they are the meaty heart of the art of things, the times to believe that all of life could be naked, true and never boring. The rises and falls of a pretty young face, the thud, thud, thud of artery thick with life I hardly know, a whole streaming system of mystery. There is no picture in all of Europe more lovely to contemplate. They could be Gods of anything.

In the suburb

Beauty and perfection, they live on different blocks.

But beauty and youth, they are neighbours sneaking in each other's windows in the night.

MANifestRAYtion

I have always thought it an understating of us that women's bodies are referred to as being "hourglass". An hourglass is a hard thing. It is always the same. It doesn't move, except the sand inside - a depressing beige representation of the waiting nothing we're inching downward to. An hourglass is transparent. When you flip it, its form remains the same. It sits on a sideboard, a dead remnant.

For obvious reasons, Man Ray was more correct when he turned us into a viola.

A friend once gave me a card with a Man Ray photograph on the front and wrote inside: "To a very Man Ray girl". One of the best compliments of my life!

Joan

I love Joan Didion. Her writing is all hammers and nails. Bang bang perfect hard and sharp.

I wish she would come to my place for a cocktail and a smoke. She has one of those great old lady voices that make you wish you had five decades of cigarettes lurking in your throat.

Incidentally, I tried my first Old Fashioned this weekend, and I must say those Mad Men were onto something. I reckon Joan (Didion, not Holloway/Harris), would knock back an old fashioned like nobody's business.


“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget." - Joan Didion

The weather inside

It is not the when or how of it even, though it doesn't help to dwell, that is for sure. The afterwards is the thing that makes my heart squeeze in my chest. Even if i can't ever be alive anymore and forever, i want some little few atoms to stay awake out there, to know that once i did rent my tiny plot of galaxy. I want those few specks of dust to remember how I loved it there, my life in its all consuming inconsequence. For what are we, if we are not everything and nothing at once? I often wonder, how will it be when I can not listen to my favourite songs, and don't even know i had them? When there is not even a thing called music, not so much as a single Middle C floating through space? Every perfect sentence i've ever read erased from every beige page I've ever turned. Every chink of glass, every chew and swallow. Every time i have felt the sun in spring and thanked the world for waking up and joining me again. Every melody i've gotten the intonation of just right, sitting at my piano. All the pretty young mouths I've kissed and faces that make me smile just in the seeing of them, just in the thinking of them. Winter nights run ragged right through, summer days lolled away in patchy grass, gathering not much but freckles. All the butterflies, light like dust, skittering about in matching pairs, and the ocean of a trillion, million tonnes. All the people who know what's right and wrong with me better than I ever will. All my loves uncountable. A jar of air, weightless and unknowing.

California

There is a special kind of kindness inside the Californian dreamers, liberals and crackpots and their endless directions and the way they look you right there in the middle of your face and crack a smile and don't look away. They paint their letterboxes there and don't seem to lock their doors at night. They serve you up food that tastes more like food than anywhere else. They are proud and so they should be. For they live right there on the edge of God's paradise with their horizon a few inches longer than the rest of ours under their big bold American sky.

Two blank pages

Let Fate, with arrowed aim, open her notebook
on our two blank pages facing.
As she begins to scribe us in,
let her forget all centuries lessons,
for ours is not a fable penned
for the wizening of children.
It is a brazen thing, a spear shooting upwards to
the empty waiting clouds.

Let her not flit about the volumes of our past for tilt of future,
for there lies nothing that came to anything.
Have her set them aside unopened,
for what we need, we will remember.
She should not care for where our lives began,
for we were born into cities, mere dots on paper maps,
built by other men.
Fold all charts away and tuck them into drawers,
we have no need for careful lines, plotted by strangers.

For we are not for these straight spheres
where life is scribed in slanted even hand.
We are not our named brown lands
or the lettered seas that split them,
or even the trammelled mountains
streaking the sky with blaring flags atop.
We are symbols carved on rocks, in deserts long forgotten
and never trodden anymore.
We are indigenous abandon,
two lost secrets tethered to the very weather.

We need not heed the tick, the steady tock of chiming time -
let the hands fall from its face, revealing nothing underneath.
Slip minutes through the floorboards, hurl rocks and shatter the weeks.
Let, instead, uncalculated, the heartbeat of youth
throb in our ears forever.

Let her, our Fate of diamond stare, remember this
as she rests her chin on delicate wrist
and conjures us up our future brave.
For we are life intercepted by the Gods -
who will carry us straight, high and away
and spread before us the galaxy
from which all our atoms exploded once,
and remind us of our wonder.

A most magnificent tree

Last night as I wandered through the lonely, dark woods I stumbled at the roots of the tallest, broadest, Most Magnificent Tree I have ever come across.

Now I have been tripped up by many a Tree before. All the Ones I have Loved eventually Fall. Down. Flat.

For a while after they Fall, maybe a month, maybe more, they are Even More Beautiful than they were before. They grow green and moist and soft to touch. I find my way through gaps in their trunks and hide away in the darkness, remembering just how high and wide they reached above me. And how their leaves tickled my skin when the season was right. And how their swaying boughs kept me cool and pale and whispered safely “shhhhhhhhhhhhh” into my upturned ear.

But then they rot away and become invisible. A gap in the forest. Blue sky above. It is almost like they were never there.

I hope this new Tree does not Fall Down Flat. It is the tallest, broadest, Most Magnificent Tree I have ever come across.

Photo: http://www.guystephens.com/found/

The wonder year

The work and world of Lissy Elle is indeed dreamy – sometimes creamy, sometimes screamy. Each day for a year she posted a photo and the results are magical. What I love is that over the course of the year you can feel her mood changing and her style developing... If we all did a similar project, we could chart the hearts of one another. When a new romance began...and ended. When the daffodils sprang and the cold winds blew through our bones. Click. Click. Tick. Tick.

My favourites are the fairytale beautiful ones, and the very haunted ones.






http://www.flickr.com/photos/lissyl/4576312341/