Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Oh, Coward, Every Time.

It's one thing to recognize that a poet's character speaks, but not for the author, that the writer speaks, but not on behalf of his time. It's a whole other beast to internalize that belief, to understand that it's both the very heart of the matter and completely unnecessary to look at creative individuals, these thinkers and these dreamers, these ticking time bombs of suicide and rage and love, all emotion amplified, all decisions exemplified, all voices testifying to one Purpose, and think that we'd untangle to the heart of some mythic Zeitgeist.

How easy it is, likewise, to call Stalin the WRITER of his era, like Tolstoy rules his flock, a higher calling controls the stock and hollow tocks upon the hammer's anvil. Instead we hear the cacophony of voices, the pigeons cooing all amass, and moving to those pitched out crumbs from higher hands their teeth to gnash. Multiple hands, and though strings might pull upon the birds' shit wings, they are so many and so invisibly tangled there can be no thought about cause and effect. So I should just STOP IT already. It has to be a path of thick description; it must be the game of articulating magic the likes of which no one will like but, like, maybe me alone.
His [Pasternak's] wife recalled that when they got to the shore [after their boat almost capsized] he was "white as a sheet" - but, as even the Romans noted, the best soldier is the one who pales after the danger's passed: the coward is afraid before the fight, the brave one - afterwards.
I hate flying.

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