Things which are not.
Jan. 6th, 2004 03:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaBlehh. First day back at work after a quiet week of movies and reading and good talk. Horrible deadlines and tedious tasks and so forth, but somehow, somehow I just couldn't care.
In these short, dark solstice days (the light so fugitive, the air so muffled) the world draws in on itself; blood moves slowly in the veins. I feel only half-awake at best, and the part of me that thinks and feels is sluggish and dull.
And besides, my friend the Devil's Sidekick has now packed his kit and gone off for, alas, at least a month, on one of his noble and worthy projects, thank god not in a war zone this time, though in the thick of the AIDS epidemic, and probably with limited phone and computer access, damn his dangerous blue eyes.
So this seems an excellent time to indulge in a winter melancholia--that pleasingly gloomy state of mind neither too somber nor too black, but crepuscular and forlorn and, well, wintery.
Sat around yesterday afternoon with a couple of friends, digging up all the most heartbreaking poems we could think of, about fading youth and the evanescent beauty of the world, and so on. Had a nice time comparing Dylan Thomas's Poem in October with Yeats's Wild Swans at Coole--two autumn poems about ..., well, about a sort of deadline (" O may my heart's truth / Still be sung / On this high hill in a year's turning"). That 59th swan, the one with no partner, always makes me cry.
Was very pleasant.
And so back to the office today, where, god help me, I found this online and spent a good 20 minutes staring at it--and not, believe me, because I was interested in the rather crummy song lyrics. I kept it open all day on my screen, tucked conveniently behind the manuscript I was editing and the emails I was answering, and kept looking at it, mesmerized.
OK, so it's cheesy. It looks like something out of GQ, I admit it: I have no class at all. But even so, sweet jesus.
At least I know I'm not actually dead. The prettyprettyboys keep the blood stirring in the dark days, do they not? Better than soup, even.
* * *
Loff NYC
I was shopping at Cathedral (Westside) Market, on 110th and Broadway yesterday. This store is the United Nations not only of foodstuffs but of staff. It is like the whole of Atlantic Avenue stuffed into one storefront. This is the place in my neighborhood to go if you want to buy your tabouli and morbier and papayas in French laced with an African lilt, or in Serbian, or half a dozen different flavors of Spanish. This is a market whose express checkout announces, elegantly, "10 Items or Fewer." I appreciate a grammatically correct express lane.
But spelling is a problem for people whose mother tongue is not English. And so I found myself standing before a big pile of fresh green produce, flat crisp vegetable pods, labeled cheerfully:
Snop Peans
I still don't know if they were snap beans or snow peas, but I bought a pound of them.
And they were delicious.
And finally, here, just in time for Twelfth Night, is the Solstice poem that beats all others:
A Nocturnall upon St. Lucie's Day
Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not . . .
... the rest is here.
In these short, dark solstice days (the light so fugitive, the air so muffled) the world draws in on itself; blood moves slowly in the veins. I feel only half-awake at best, and the part of me that thinks and feels is sluggish and dull.
And besides, my friend the Devil's Sidekick has now packed his kit and gone off for, alas, at least a month, on one of his noble and worthy projects, thank god not in a war zone this time, though in the thick of the AIDS epidemic, and probably with limited phone and computer access, damn his dangerous blue eyes.
So this seems an excellent time to indulge in a winter melancholia--that pleasingly gloomy state of mind neither too somber nor too black, but crepuscular and forlorn and, well, wintery.
Sat around yesterday afternoon with a couple of friends, digging up all the most heartbreaking poems we could think of, about fading youth and the evanescent beauty of the world, and so on. Had a nice time comparing Dylan Thomas's Poem in October with Yeats's Wild Swans at Coole--two autumn poems about ..., well, about a sort of deadline (" O may my heart's truth / Still be sung / On this high hill in a year's turning"). That 59th swan, the one with no partner, always makes me cry.
Was very pleasant.
And so back to the office today, where, god help me, I found this online and spent a good 20 minutes staring at it--and not, believe me, because I was interested in the rather crummy song lyrics. I kept it open all day on my screen, tucked conveniently behind the manuscript I was editing and the emails I was answering, and kept looking at it, mesmerized.
OK, so it's cheesy. It looks like something out of GQ, I admit it: I have no class at all. But even so, sweet jesus.
At least I know I'm not actually dead. The prettyprettyboys keep the blood stirring in the dark days, do they not? Better than soup, even.
* * *
Loff NYC
I was shopping at Cathedral (Westside) Market, on 110th and Broadway yesterday. This store is the United Nations not only of foodstuffs but of staff. It is like the whole of Atlantic Avenue stuffed into one storefront. This is the place in my neighborhood to go if you want to buy your tabouli and morbier and papayas in French laced with an African lilt, or in Serbian, or half a dozen different flavors of Spanish. This is a market whose express checkout announces, elegantly, "10 Items or Fewer." I appreciate a grammatically correct express lane.
But spelling is a problem for people whose mother tongue is not English. And so I found myself standing before a big pile of fresh green produce, flat crisp vegetable pods, labeled cheerfully:
Snop Peans
I still don't know if they were snap beans or snow peas, but I bought a pound of them.
And they were delicious.
And finally, here, just in time for Twelfth Night, is the Solstice poem that beats all others:
A Nocturnall upon St. Lucie's Day
Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,
Lucies, who scarce seaven houres herself unmaskes,
The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;
The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers bee
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingnesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:
He ruin'd mee, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not . . .
... the rest is here.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-21 03:00 pm (UTC)love
La Rattoncita
no subject
Date: 2004-01-21 06:59 pm (UTC)Someone sent me an mp3 clip of Dean going completely insane and shrieking like Gollum on the lip of Doom. I wish I could figure out how to post it in my LJ, or frame it or something. If through some extravagant witticism on God's part he should gain the White House, will he dance on the lawn crowing, "Mine! Mine! Precioussss!!"?
Or no, that role's already filled, isn't it?
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
no subject
Date: 2004-01-21 09:39 pm (UTC)I saw the whole speech live on cspan. He was totally hoarse from shouting so much. Really kind of loopy.