Friday, March 28, 2025

Just as your face has been replaced by a question mark

How Do We Write Now?

The alternate title of this, of course, is how the fuck do we write now.

Just as the customary greeting of hello has been replaced with what the fuck is going on, and you grab your friend’s arm almost against your will and shake her a little bit and say no seriously, what the fuck is happening.

Just as your face has been replaced by a question mark immediately followed by an exclamation mark immediately followed by another question mark.

Just as your heart has been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach.

Just as your blood now carries in its current the Jaws theme.

Patricia Lockwood Tin House

image: Damon Winter/The New York Times

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: This is so perfect because hello has gone bye bye to be replaced with WTF in various versions.; March 28, 2025 at 8:24 PM

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“Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.”

—	Queen-Anne’s-Lace, William Carlos Williams (via sketchofthepast)

Then there was someone else I met,

whose face and voice I can’t forget,

and the memory of her

is like a jail I’m trapped inside,

or maybe she is something I just use

to hold my real life at a distance.

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower

plucked from a river of lava

and held aloft on a tightrope

strung between two scrawny trees

above a canyon

in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it

everywhere, for years,

while right behind you,

the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes

falling

Damiel;

It's great to live by the spirit, to testify day by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth. I'd like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say "Now." Now and now" and no longer "forever" and "for eternity." To sit at an empty place at a card table and be greeted, even by a nod. Every time we participated, it was a pretense. Wrestling with one, allowing a hip to be put out in pretense, catching a fish in pretense, in pretense sitting at tables, drinking and eating in pretense. Having lambs roasted and wine served in the tents out there in the desert, only in pretense. No, I don't have to beget a child or plant a tree but it would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat, like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever and blackended fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck by an ear. To lie! Through one's teeth. As you're walking, to feel your bones moving along. At last to guess, instead of always knowing. To be able to say "ah" and "oh" and "hey" instead of "yea" and "amen."

Catherine Hessling, La fille de l’eau, Jean Renoir, 1924.

secretfragileskies

Friday, March 28, 2025

Just as your face has been replaced by a question mark

How Do We Write Now?

1 comment:

august

an altered space

“The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.”

Dead men make such convenient Heroes

falling

secretfragileskies

Friday, March 28, 2025

Just as your face has been replaced by a question mark

How Do We Write Now?

1 comment:

august

an altered space

“The world is airtight yet held together by what it does not house, by the vanished. They are everywhere.”

Dead men make such convenient Heroes

falling

“The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.”