The Wit of the Staircase

New Beginning

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.

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 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.

--T. S. Eliot
East Coker
Four Quartets

Link: whiskey river

Storytelling On The Staircase

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

--Reynolds Price

Gen X Librarians

"Now, there is a public librarian who writes dispatches for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a favored magazine of the young literati. Unshelved, a comic about librarians — yes, there is a comic about librarians — features a hipster librarian character. And, in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology."

Link: A Hipper Crowd of Shushers - New York Times.

An Important Thing Rescued

Naturally Wit is a Scorpio, children of the Staircase.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Before I suggest to you what your next assignment should be, read this passage from poet Adrienne Rich. "Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language-this will become not merely unspoken, but unspeakable." What I hope you will do in the coming week, Scorpio, is rescue from obscurity any important thing that is on the verge of becoming unspeakable. Be a retriever of that-which-is-about-to-disappear. Be a rememberer of that-which-is-close-to-being forgotten.

Link:

village voice > people > Free Will Astrology: Free Will Astrology by Rob Brezsny .

Top Ten Books About Outsiders

3. The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens

If poetry has more than its fair share of outsiders, American poetry has some of its oddest. Stevens spent his whole working life as vice-president of an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut. He composed some of his greatest poems whilst walking to work and had his secretary type them up. Belonging to no movement, never hanging with any group, with few influences, he is almost a poet sui generis. Stevens was a unique and independent pedestrian amidst the world's flux (or perhaps it's more accurate to say the "flux of being" disclosed as the permanent world), and the enterprise was to fix it poetically in the intensest language. Stevens is the creative outsider operating alone.

Link: Neil Griffiths' top 10 outsider books | Top 10s | Guardian Unlimited Books.

Kafka At Hell's Gate

Happy Birthday Franz Kafka, from The Wit Of The Staircase.

"We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me an look at me, what do you know of the grief that is in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell."

--Franz Kafka

Link: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Poets Do The Darnedest Things: Shelley Was A Total Asshole

"His two latest biographers perpetuate the Jekyll-and-Hyde tradition, one exploring his spiritual journey, the other totting up the emotional and moral cost of his unearthliness and inhumanity. In Death and the Maidens, Janet Todd confronts more frankly than anyone has done before the fact that Shelley spent virtually his entire adult life trying to lure young girls away from the protection of their families. All of them were vulnerable, inexperienced and underage. Two killed themselves on his account. Most of the babies they bore him died while in his care. The character who emerges from this book was as manipulative as he was mesmeric, self-absorbed and ruthlessly self-righteous.

'It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all-sufficing passion,' he wrote to Harriet Westbrook, who had run away from school to marry him only to find herself dumped after three years for 16-year-old Mary Godwin. Shelley insisted there was 'little to regret' when Harriet was fished out of the Thames two years later, pregnant at 21 with her third child (which, as Todd argues persuasively, may well have been his). 'Everyone does me full justice - bears testimony to the uprightness & liberality of my conduct to her,' Shelley wrote, and married Mary a fortnight after the discovery of the body...."

Link: Shelley: poet, predator and prey | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books.

Above, Death and the Maidens by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Wigged Out British Twins Make For One Riveting Tale

"The tale of the Gibbons girls is one of sibling rivalry that seemed in danger of turning murderous, featuring a baffling childhood pact of silence that propelled them, via educational exclusion, to become teenage outcasts who responded to dashed literary ambitions and bungled sexual adventures with a life of petty crime that would lead them ultimately to Broadmoor Psychiatirc Hospital.

Jennifer, born 10 minutes after June, imagined her older sister to be cleverer, prettier, more beloved. Jennifer feared she would be left behind. Later, June would write of Jennifer: 'She wants us to be equal. There is a murderous gleam in her eye. Dear lord, I am scared of her. She is not normal ... someone is driving her insane. It is me'.

Anne Treherne, an expert on elective mutes, met the twins and became convinced a game was going on: that by secret eye signals Jennifer was stopping June speaking, controlling her as if she were a robot. The twins spooked her colleagues: moving extremely slowly in perfect time, they seemed inhuman, like 'zombies', drinking cups of tea or taking off their coats in eerie unity. A head teacher even called Jennifer 'evil'...."

Link: 'Have I the strength to kill her?' | Classical and opera | Guardian Unlimited Music.

Twins from Kubrick's The Shining, above.

Beware The Undertow

Fog, like reason, settles on the peeling district.
This is the new money. The new economy.
Where my lover lives. When I left him,
I left books, coats, silverware. Things.
It wasn't charity; it was an impure,
commonplace case of forgetting. (May he find some use

for my low-rent betrayals.) Land ends
with miles of aloe along the Great Highway.
Surfers strip off their suits, half-naked
to the naked sea. The sand's ignored
BEWARE OF THE UNDERTOW signs:
these are the notes of the drowned.

The Sunset, by Randall Mann

Link: The Sunset by Randall Mann.

Via: un regard oblique.

Above, Surfer by Catherine Opie

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

--Sylvia Plath

Link: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".