To Philip Glass, to Virginia Woolf, and to Michael Cunningham

The music of Philip Glass has moved me more than any music I have ever heard. I recently obtained a copy of Glass’s music to the movie, The Hours, and in the CD booklet is an essay by Michael Cunningham. This essay has explained to me my unexplainable and odd fascination with Glass, and in addition, with the work of Virginia Wolf. I guess I am one of the “wild and lonely ones,” because I often listen to Einstein on the Beach (and any other work of his that I have collected) on repeat, especially while writing.

Let Us Consider, by Russell Edson

I stumbled on this by accident while doing research for my unit of instruction on modern poetry. It gives me the chills every time.

Another:

Another:

Everyone’s everyone.

[over radio]

Millicent Weems: Now it is waiting and nobody cares. And when you’re wait is over this room will still exist and it will continue to hold shoes and dress and boxes and maybe someday another waiting person. And maybe not. The room doesn’t care either.

Millicent Weems: What was once before you – an exciting, mysterious future – is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone’s everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It’s yours. It is time for you to understand this.
Millicent Weems: Walk.
Millicent Weems: As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving – not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are…
Millicent Weems: Gone.

—- Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York

Great is language….

“Great is language….it is the mightiest of the sciences,

It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the

earth….and of men and women….and of all

qualities and processes;

It is greater than wealth….it is greater than buildings or

ships or religions or paintings or music.”

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass:  Great are the Myths (1855)

Fall in Love

Hush. Calm yourself. Life is flux and change. The cost of existence is high. Think of the burning and sun converting four hundred tons of hydrogen into helium every second! Think of the bill to pay for human consciousness. Stop whining. It is all on loan. Accept your life with cheerful affection. Fall in love. Fall in love outward. Fall in love with this moment, with this earth now. In that response will be the seeds of right action or right nonaction. Fall in love and see what happens.

– Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist, Sharman Apt Russell

Words on Supermarkerts by David Foster Wallace

“By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

Day in day out

even
in the repetition
there is poetry
to be found