The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth

by Fanny Howe

A meditation on time, violence, and chance by "one of America's most dazzling poets" ( O, The Oprah Magazine )

Fanny Howe's The Needle's Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual logic. The book contains filmic images that subvert the usual narrative chronology; it is focused on the theme of youth, doomed or saved. A fourteenth-century folktale of two boys who set out to find happiness, the story of Francis and Clare with their revolutionary visions, the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston, the poet George Oppen and the philosopher Simone Weil, two strangers who loved but remain strange, and the wild-child Brigid of all these emerge "from multiple directions, but always finally from the eye at the end." As the philosopher Richard Kearney writes, "Howe's ruminations and aesthetics are those of the fragmentary, but are unified by world thinkers like Arendt, Weil, Agamben, and Yeats." The Needle's Eye is a brilliant and deeply felt exploration of faith and terror, coincidence and perception, by a literary artist of profound moral intelligence, "recognized as one of the country's least compromising yet most readable experimentalist writers" ( The Boston Globe ).

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Mysticism, Literary Fiction

139 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Fanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fanny Howe is a poet and The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a poet's prose. There are many essays devoted to St. Francis of Assisi and one of my favorite quotes that Howe uses of him is "What we are looking for is what is looking," a quote that captures the tone of this entire slim volume.

"I have to say that I never got over my shock that there is a world and it is living" Howe's book is the embodiment of this quote: a world in which even the rocks are alive and there is joy and much suffering. The convents full of girls fleeing the brutality of the world and an old priest dying in rage. But this book is not religious. Or at least I did not read it as such but full of metaphors and a faith that goes beyond religions.

The book opens with a quote from Yeats, "All the stream that's roaring by/came out of a needle's eye." And Howe's book is full of the stream of life, "roaring by." Her meditation on life speaks of youth but of age as well.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling and often productively mystifying set of essays and poems and hybrid forms that live between the two. I think the book requires a certain kind of suspension of one's linear impulses—which is to say that everything felt like it belonged exactly where it was placed, and that everything could have been shifted around to the same effect. Howe's mind is an interesting one to follow on the page if for no other reason than its strange and singular ricocheting between philosophy, anecdote, meditation, mediation.

“We are all bound together in a tapestry that like the sea gives the impression of movement toward something but is actually just a maternal body of material.”

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't have dreamed how perfect this book would be for me - a meditation ranging from cinema to religious mystics to the whole strange nature of youth and growing into adulthood - I didn't comprehend it in the sense of being able to sort of encapsulate it in my mind, but I marveled at it and I wished I had someone to just read the whole thing aloud to.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

PERFECT READ FOR THIS POLITICAL MOMENT.

[Gus · Rating 5 out of 5]

parts of this made me want to cry, particularly "Kristeva and Me"

[Hannah Piette · Rating 5 out of 5]

you are a farmer in winter now.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few passages from The Needle’s Eye by Fanny Howe:



The almond tree with its white blossoms teaches him that fruition is a sign of completion, the moment of failure to which everything aspires. The trees have fulfilled their cycle, turn white, click off, and die.

*

The binder for liquid bole is animal-skin glue. Almost honey. Without glue binder, bole won’t stick to the icon board. And then there is the gold leaf, or flake, like a dry fleck of pollen, to gild the wood. Everything is stuck together when the gold has come.

The flowers buzz when the vibration of the bees stimulates their pistons and their molecules swell and their petals hum like cellos. Rocks are alive too, the firstborn of the natural world, somber without will.

There is no freedom from this universe we were born into, because it is our vague source of sensation, our soul, the container of our guilt.

Skins liquefy in heat. And when a bald baby swallow dies on your palm, you feel warmth pouring over your skin, a kind of burning fountain that scalds you like pepper spray.

Do you think this is a sign of the spirit ripping its energy into you to carry to the other side? I do. There are no actual objects over there, no materials but unformed steaming clouds, colors that harmonize musically, no gravity exists but elasticity composed of invisible mesh images.

Who will meet me on the other side, I ask you, to prove the error of what I say? Will it be someone who never loved me?

*

Did you know that Puritans believed a baby was only conceived during an orgasm? The Puritans had to spend a lot of time on making this happen, on sex, because without more children, there would be no settlement, no city.

*

Still, hope was like a throng of singers that circled the world both here and there having died and echoed over and over. What is a song but a call from the other side?



.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sixteen is a year of revulsion toward grown-ups. Adolescents announce themselves in a way that is both ingratiating and righteous; they have a kind of blindness toward consequences, so every act of daring is suicidal, point blank.

The April 2013 [Boston Marathon] bombing in retrospect is like an accident where a train goes off the rails in a village, but of course it isn't exactly that, because it was intentional. It's more like a drone that hits Afghan toddlers playing. It's like a little skirmish off to the sides of the thundering warriors. It's like youth suicide, honor killing, self-sacrifice, war.

North America is part of the global war being fought by the young on rampages across the deserts and mountains, Iraq and Syria. So no wonder red blood sprays all the way back to Boston's tar and dust and leaves, it turns the stones brick red over time, and spreads in the pollen of spring. You can't wash it out before the red sinks in. The stain seeps into the human shoes and is carried around town and over the billions of bones scattered by pillage underfoot.

Avenging ancestors scratch at the soles of your feet when you cross the Cambridge Common where General Washington gathered his troops for battle.

The reaction of the Boston brothers to their parents' complaints and nightmares might have unleashed the catastrophe, a need for revenge, implosion primed by inner ancestors, the dispossessed genetic materials, where deeds, traumas, and sorrows are said to glue themselves to each newborn's bones and blood.

What is free choice anyway? For one, is it remorse to the point of dying, and for the other rejoicing on the path of martyrdom? One runs away from his murderous action; another includes himself in it.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The front yards in East Cambridge, under the spectacular silver-eyed walls of MIT's spanking new technology buildings, are tacky and torn. The kids still walk down to the Charles River to watch the black water flow while they joke and smoke, with cars whipping at their backs. The compromised jargon of neoliberalism is tossed around pharmacies and coffee shops. The kids lie by the water at night: egg-shaped lights, reds and blues, Shell and CITGO, Pass joints and go to school by day. Then they would change into someone else completely on leaving high school, become schoolteachers and rabbis, entrepreneurs and jailbirds, mothers and community workers, poets, musicians, and insane solitaries.”

“Goethe noticed that the Greeks didn't yearn for eternal truths, but felt at home on earth. So did unknown women who stood up from their labors to watch the sun go down. They looked on the present as if it were a cemetery teeming with full-bodied spirits who hadn't noticed they were already gone. These women cooked for everyone whom they welcomed into their house. And washed the bodies that would be buried in dirt.”

“On this journey she had to repeat to herself that being away from France would be temporary and involve her in some vital war effort made from New York. She was a French patriot and resistance fighter.
Nonetheless, she said, "If we plan to do to the Germans what they did to us, we should be defeated."
There are many correspondences between Weil's and Oppen's thoughts, and on the surface we can identify certain common interests in Marx, Maritain, Heidegger, Trotsky, collectivity, trade unions, and the plight of factory workers. They shared a commitment to social justice and both were antibourgeois from bourgeois backgrounds.
Both engaged with the historical moment in which they lived and let it take root with such a grip that their lives became expiations for the social wrongs being done around them. Weil felt that one must continually compensate for violence done to others.
Both kept notebooks, but Oppen turned his notes into poetry, the other turned hers into essays on a variety of social and metaphysical questions.
In his serial poem called Seascape: Needle's Eye, abstract thoughts of his and hers converge: necessity, obedience, decreation, and the mystery of the sea.

She sailed from Marseille in the summer and returned to England on a winter ocean, which is when she contracted tuberculosis. She was writing in her notebook all this time and coming closer to an experience of egolessness.
She wrote: "The thing we believe to be our self is as ephemeral and automatic a product of external circumstances as the form of a sea wave."

“This is what Oppen named "the bright light of shipwreck." Oppen too was an analyst of the collective, and he too hammered away at an impersonal, ethereal, needle s-eye view of the world as seen by a single individual.
On the open water no other way
To come here the outer
Limit of the ego
Weil sometimes wore a monk's robe, and almost always she kept her body swaddled in cloaks.
She was an automonastic without an order.
She taught girls philosophy, worked in an automobile factory, joined the Brigades in the Spanish Civil War; like a child she traveled with her parents in Europe, had a mystical encounter with Christ in the church of St. Francis of Assisi, wrote for politically left newspapers and trade union journals, worked in vineyards in the south of France and for the Resistance.
She is rarely included in academic courses in philosophy and social history. Instead she is an influence, a presence widely quoted but too elusive for scholars. Her unsystematic philosophy is rooted in her physical affliction, her blinding migraines, pleurisy, awk-wardness, and, finally, tuberculosis. In Waiting for God, she speaks of "a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time." Between the ages of twenty nine and thirty-four, when she died, she was seized by idea after idea, each of which she scribbled into her notebooks. She never mentioned her health or the weather.

There is a legendary gate in Jerusalem called the Needle's Eye where a camel had to be unloaded and kneel down in order to pass through its portal. Unburdening is the message of Christ in the parable of the camel passing through a needle's eye.
"The Holy One said, open for me a door as big as a needle's eye and I will open for you a door through which tents and camels may enter."
Remember how you lift the silver needle to the light to see all the way through the eye and out the other side. The eye is shaped like an eye.
In Seascape: Needle's Eye, Oppen writes and here is Weil being directly quoted:

‘... as if a nail whose wide head were time and space."
at the nail's point the hammer-blow undiminished’”

“According to a thirteenth-century source, the Royal Chronicle of Cologne, the Children's Crusade began around Easter or Pentecost of 1212: "Many thousands of boys, ranging in age from six years to full maturity, left the plows or carts they were driving, the flocks which they were pasturing, and anything else which they were doing. This they did despite the wishes of their parents, relatives, and friends who sought to make them draw back. Suddenly one ran after another to take the cross.
Thus, by groups of twenty, or fifty, or a hundred, they put up banners and began to journey to Jerusalem." Most were never seen again.
The boy, their leader, had a tongue like a silver flute and he, like the Pied Piper, could persuade them with a whistle and a few words to march for miles, onward to Jerusalem.

On the way the children and teens destroyed ancient temples and monuments, and anything else that reminded them of the past. The righteousness of childhood was theirs to act upon. They knew they could do way better than the grown-ups in creating a safe and verdant land.
Many children had grown up on the stories of witches and the pale sifting sandman and their clogs clapped backward on the stones when they wanted to go home. However, their heads were twisted right off their necks if they dared to turn back.”

“Although it seems that things cannot occupy the same place at the same time, and so necessarily limit one another, each vying for its own place, in fact things do not limit each other so much as influence their direction.”

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading fanny howe is like mysticism, like remembering my child-self somewhere in the "thickets of experience", wanting to be loved and find her life. howe creates a narrative combining the desires and existences of francis of assisi, the boston marathon bombers, simone weil, films that act as documentaries, her own genius best friend. what is it like to remember the thoughts of childhood and teenagehood, vulnerable to violence and sex and wandering, "submerged", half-lit, half-formed, ripe with failure, ready to plunge and risk it all. under memory and time's eraser, we are taught to forget this kind of youthful experimentation and bewilderment, and condemn it. through these lives throughout history, fanny howe studies spontaneity, rage, and confusion of the world.

she weaves together essays and poems in a way that feels so inspiring for my own practice, a hybrid book yet truly cohesive tangle that spins through time without warning. the histories don't feel so far away in this way. francis becomes close by. sometimes the essays will conclude in a completely different era, a long-ago voice, a "flashing insight or vision". she must have had to dig deep into translations, biographies, and other documents to create this work, but it doesn't feel like a piece of research at all, but more like a fragmented collage of philosophical yearning and imagined scenery.

i wrote in my notebook the entire time i read it. i saved this book for my spell of house-sitting at an older friend's house by the mississippi river this summer, where i am often bored and stuck in myself. i finished the last pages of "the needle's eye" on the patio at night, where the river is seen ahead like an unfathomable ribbon of rushing, barges and strange boats going by in a linear form. i never know where or why. the moon has been full, seeping out of the cloud's cuts, reflecting on the blackness of dark river in fabric light. her language is sometimes so bold, weird, so broadening, always about what it means to live through time:

"the inactive is much greater than the active, it has to stay at a remove, weak beyond our abilities to see or hear it, or we would not survive. or be sane."

"they looked on the present as if it were a cemetery teeming with full-bodied spirits who hadn't noticed they were already gone."

[Jessica Cuello · Rating 5 out of 5]

A haunting montage of memory and historical detail. (Does anyone know if these facts about St. Francis and Claire are true? Can anyone recommend a good St. Francis biography?) The intersection of Weil, Oppen, St. Francis, the nuns of Louden, the brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon was evocative--precisely because it was not linear. Brought up uneasy questions about the connection between violence and mysticism, especially the violence born out of isolation & neglect, particularly in children and their feral energy.

[Brian Beatty · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think my review and rating reflect my own limitations more than the quality of this work. Simply put, although I used to love poetry much more and write some of it, as a scientist, writer, and editor, I think I might be too far gone into data, reality, and linear thought. I just couldn't process this, it just left me frustrated. Admittedly, the common religious themes and even capitalization of "God" soured it for me too.

[Michele · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn’t like this book – The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth. Fanny Howeseemed, to me, to be hinting at a greater depth in her writing than she ultimately reveals. Perhaps this is a poetic form she’s using? I was left with the impression that this is more blog, than book.

The writing, apparently previously published essays and poems for the most part, comes off stylistically choppy. The innocence of childhood, perverted by the world; the visions of St. Francis and St. Clare; the author’s relationship with a celibate Russian translator; the cinema in general and Bergman films, especially – all her expositions on these left me ultimately cold, and not really caring about the subject of her writing.

There were some interesting moments, when Howe reveals some surprising tidbit, only to abandon it in the very next sentence. Others may appreciate this stylistic choice, but I found it distracting in the extreme. In my opinion, non-sequiturs do not make a memoir experimental, they confuse and ultimately irritate the reader.

[Ian Yarington · Rating 4 out of 5]

This had a lot of great stuff in it, poetry is so hit and miss, but I enjoyed a lot of this book. I read a few negative reviews saying this book is sporadic but I have to wonder what poetry book isn't somewhat sporadic. I feel like Howe has some good stuff to say and even if you don't agree with some of what she says I'm sure you can appreciate her style and how she presents her work.

[Nicholas Galinaitis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I worship Fanny Howe, but...not my favorite of her novels. Loved the ones collected in "Radical Love," like Indivisible and The Deep North. I recommend those instead. This one is too scant and though it has some lovely lines, it feels like she wrote it too fast, or could've gone deeper in her writing.

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Preachy, rude, tries to garner sympathy for dzhokar dudayev who participated in boston bombings, im not interested in having sympathy for someone who resorts to violence. the whole book seems sloppy undisciplined, confetti.. there are some goof parts, but i would pass over most of the book.

[Elena · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's anthropologically interesting how many bohemian writers marry proximity to poverty in their youth with wide-eyed credulous yuppiedom later in life, but without self-awareness of that juxtaposition, there's only so much the work can say. Nice sentences tho.

[Clara Martin]

"Language had lost its mind. Grandier was in a no-win situation, at the heart of a double bind. Words were the problem. A vocabulary had lost its truth value. No one believed what anyone else was saying."

[Bryce · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the top two or three best books of essays I have ever read.

[Jenna Murray]

pushes the boundaries of what we consider poetry (hot)

[Steven Gripp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the mystic qualities of all the participants in this book, but all parent should pull out the pithy quotes about the beauty and quality of childhood and adolescence. Relevant to me now bc I have two teen boys and it helped me glean on their magical imagination.

[Lex Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5. Slightly too much Freud influence for my taste, but very beautiful.

[hjh]

"You can't imagine the hell of not being heard" (11)

"To return to infancy: to be without speech" (13)

"Hollowed out, each image will lose its definition bit by bit" (13)

"No wonder the kids believe that they will get to paradise, no matter what. And so do the old people because the longer they live, the more incomprehensible any permanency becomes" (14)

"the divine child can continue as a preteen, an international boy or girl poised before vanishing into the lost years between nine and thirteen" (16)

"They were both real boys and children of the clouds" (30)

"she became the colors that surrounded her" (47)

"when the childhood of the world was almost over, a boy organized a children's crusade" (72)

"Languge had lost its mind...A vocabulary had lost its truth value. No one believed what anyone else was saying" (79)

"The mental chaos that followed his giving me that drug ripped open a hole in my inner veil that could not be stanched. It was open, palpable, like a textile with supernatural life in it, and a reminder of how close to madness the love of God must be, because only through debasement and terror did mercy shine, shine around the lines" (83)

"movies are the fastest way to readjust your relationship to the real" (84)

"We keep adapting to whatever we ourselves invented. Only boredom will free us from these devices, or a cosmic catastrophe" (86)

"Suffering is actually a jewel, precious and personal. Some might even say that it holds up the heavens with its radiance. How a person manages her suffering, and how it is managed by others, is often surprising. Some people never speak of it, and some give it away, some hold it tight, and some drop it on the path and run" (88)

"Without a libido, colors brighten, and tears come to your eyes if you look too closely at the purple of a lilac. Every natural piece of the place you are in intensifies in shape and color, because it contains within it all the earlier times you saw it" (91)

"You're being herded into an invisible lake where what is coming and what has passed twirl around you in concentric circles so there is no distinction, only concentric circles" (92)

"Gold is only pure when it is torn from the stuff that is foreign to it" (95)

Michel de Certeau has noted, mysticism "provides a path for those who 'ask the way to get lost'... It teaches 'how not to return' (96)

Stan Brakhage has written in his lectures that "motion pictures are a medium of both supernature and underworld-- an instrument in unveiling the natural through reflection...and also the gateway for an alien world underneath the surface of our natural visual ability-- an underworld that erupts into 'ours' through every machine which makes visible to us what we cannot naturally sense" (99)

"Light is the Truth and the Truth unfailingly manifests itself" (100)

"the patron saint of failure" (114)

"After the rape of Persephone, it seems the animals broke apart into mortals, millions of them pounding around as near-apes and hairless weaklings who only had words" (116)

"What we are looking for is what is looking" -- Francis of Assisi

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fanny Howe mourns the loss of a golden age, including the death in her lifetime of a person who functions very much like a secular mystic to her, Simone Weil, about whose energies she writes, "For many the loss of faith in communism was more crushing than the loss of religious belief. The ideologies were alike and it may have been this troublesome overlap that weakened them both at the center." Howe's style in The Needle's Eye slides like screens or gems in order to re-arrange this center-space. At times lapidary and plain, at other times swiftly abrupt and premonitory, Howe's prose probes analytically lyric parabolas and the invectives of the Greek gospels, about which she rhapsodizes, and center-speaks, reminding me a little of Laura Riding. Riding was a culturally Jewish, radically humanist non-religious poet-cum-apostate to Poetry; Howe is a culturally Catholic (a convert only after having been accepted culturally by her parish, she accepted the Universalism by which her mixed race children could be, and were, welcomed), spiritually mystic, and politically anarchistic poet committed, like her sister, Susan Howe, to the analytic lyric. One fabulist force in emphasis and idea in The Needle's Eye is the life of St. Francis, whose biography Howe splits into segments and slides into resemblances with her other spiritual mentors from the mystical traditions. Howe's mysticism is a difficulty, because it's premised on a reflection on Boston (where her conversion occurred) and the Tsarnaev Brothers, who were responsible for the Boston Marathon Bombings in 2013. No one familiar with Howe's work will be surprised that she defends the Brothers, their family, and the mystical forms of Islam from which their misfortune emerged. That misfortune was, she argues, St. Francis', too. It is also hers. The insight is meant to trouble you, and it did me.

[Ashley Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book through Goodreads Giveaway. This was nothing what I thought it was going to be. I found the writing sporadic, disconnected, and moved from subject to subject without seeming to finish a thought before moving onto the next. That being said I may have missed the passing through youth part of the novel. There were a few paragraphs about youth but like I have stated it didn't seem to have anything to do with passing through youth. While this was not the book for me, I would recommend that readers find out for themselves.

[Derek Fenner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fanny is firing in all cylinders in this book. A fantastic mix of genre poetics and deep inquiry.