What of the blind photographer?
The one who measures distance
by the warmth of the sun on her eyelids,
the one who hears the picture and snaps
that sound when you hear only silence,
the one who lists fourteen colors of the rain.

You imagine her cloaked and hooded
in a black cloth, a photographer from long ago
who grew images like lichen on glass and copper,
her fingers running over the plates
as if they spoke to her in Braille.

There are days when you blind yourself
with too much longing. Light is
tactile then. With its many hands
it washes the dullness
from your skin, touches all
that can’t be seen and makes it glow.

— from The Wild in You: Voices from the Forest and the Sea (Greystone Books, 2015)

— Malcolm X

Nox by Anne Carson. It’s for the dissertation. It’s not the first time I’ve read it. It’s interesting, and occasionally beautiful, but it’s long, and cumbersome, and my personal desire to not be working on this project right now is probably interfering with my ability to objectively evaluate any of the works I’m (supposed to be) writing about.

Watching…

The most recent seasons of Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow. At this point, Legends is the only one that I’m particularly interested in, but they are just interconnected enough that I feel obligated to keep watching the others. BUT I read an article about casting changes for the new seasons of a bunch of shows, and there are good things (as far as I’m concerned) happening for Arrow and Legends, so maybe those two will survive in the rotation of “things I watch.”

Listening…

A lot of 70s/80s. A LOT of Jackson C. Frank. It’s good for the soul.

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years —
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres —
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
Fro a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

— This is the fifth and final section of “East Coker,” the second poem in Eliot’s Four Quartets

— Hillary Clinton, in What Happened

What Happened by Hillary Clinton. It’s important.

Watching…

Good Girls Revolt. Fantastic writing. Kickass costumes. This show will make you want to stand up for something. And that is just about the most important thing these days.

Listening…

The The Is Us soundtrack. It’s so good. So. Good. For a show that makes me cry every single episode, the soundtrack makes me oddly happy. Plus, I’ve been waiting years for a new song from Mandy Moore, and she kills it on her cover of “Willin'”

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

— from Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats (The Modern Library, 2001)

— L.M. Montgomery

How they’re all around us, these gentlemen
in chamberlain’s dress and jabots,
like a night growing ever darker
around its Order Star, implacably,
and these ladies, slight and fragile, yet
made large by their dresses, one hand in their laps,
small, like a tiny dog with its collar:
how they’re around us all: around the reader,
around the peruser of these bibelots,
of which several remain their property.

Tactful, they let us live life undisturbed
as we conceive it and as they fail
to understand it. They wanted to blossom,
and blossoming is being beautiful. But we want to ripen,
and this means being dark and taking pains.

— from The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition, trans. & ed. Edward Snow (North Point Press, 2009)

— Vincent Van Gogh