Night Philosophy

by Fanny Howe

Night Philosophy is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn't matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist and the victim–perpetrator model controls citizens.

This book is a prism through which Earth's ancient songs and tales are distilled; restored to light. It is also a manual for surviving evil. The most important thing for you to understand is that Fanny Howe is a rebel, down to the cellular level. She walks with the prophets and with the unborn. There is no writer like her.
– Ariana Reines

Fanny Howe is simply one of the best and most innovative writers alive.
– Dawn Lundy Martin

Night Philosophy is sharp and precise. All the time, like a powerful undercurrent, a voltage charger, or Cordelia speaking, language itself exerts its primacy; it insists on remaining true not just to human hope, human feeling, or the questing spirit, but to some idea of a power beyond ourselves.
– Colm Tóibín

History and images of what we do to each other are illuminated, and then made to sing lurid, fluid truth.
– Yusef Komunyakaa

Fanny Howe is a hallowed voice of the violent and brutal twentieth century. A sacred idiot, a wise friend who passes a bottle of warmth through the icy night, who fishes for what haunts the depths.
– Kazim Ali

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Philosophy

124 pages, Paperback

Published January 28, 2020

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

[Kirstin Halliday · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contained some real deep cut nuggets and poetic glimmers. particularly in relation to political prisoners and on how to fight against the states attempt to systematically wear down one’s soul. those bits really stuck with me. it’s very much a compilation of pretty varying extracts of writing, some of which i found much more compelling than others. ultimately worth the fluff for the nuggets.

[Yvonne Rambeau · Rating 4 out of 5]

“My accident had thrown my head against the humming heart of things, and the heart never stopped beating.” Hum hum hummm humm

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A star in our firmament no doubt, Fanny Howe's Night Philosophy remixes her own work from as far back as thirty years ago, in daybooks and documentary narrative texts, including world health and NGO memoranda on the child to create a meditation on our indifference to our own nature, metonymized in the figure of the pieta. Some of these fragments swiped from earlier Howe books are marvelously transgressive, like the ferocious "Doctor, Doctor," that leans into a sequence of anecdotes of compulsory mis-education at the heart of denominational technologies (i.e, orthodoxy). Howe is a beguiling writer who follows her thought like no one else, however her publisher, Chris Kraus' Divided Publishing, seems to regard this little volume as a collection of short stories, so I find myself puzzled and off my nature. The stipulation is genre-non-conforming, to say the least. I loved the evangel The Needle's Eye: Passing Through Youth, where the warrant was to speak about the Tsarnaev Brothers, but the present book, that includes a good deal of material from that earlier volume, reads those passages through a strange light here. It's a bit like Musicor deciding to rerelease George Jones sessions after the singer had moved onto Billy Sherrill's Epic. "Bewilderment" and "Catholic" are Fanny Howe at full splendor and are also in The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003).

[H]

“For Howe, the purpose of literature is to transport both writer and reader into a heightened awareness of the invisible forces that shape our material lives” (119)


"Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace. In other words, nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light" (7)

"My eyes meeting his eyes was more disturbing than the naked encounter of our two whole faces in the light of day. It reminded me that no one knew what I had done except for the person I had done it with. And you God" (19).

"Poetry is backwards logic. You can't write poetry unless you have a knowledge of, or taste for, this backwards way of finding truth" (21)

"To be truly open you don't need dogma or a pen./ You are either facing the endless open or you are letting it face you" (21)

"This is an effort to resolve the question: what was this strange preoccupation that seemed to have no motive, cause, or final goal and preceded all that writing I did. Did it begin in the environment of childhood, or was it formed out of alien properties later? If I had known what I was doing all along, would I have done it? What guided me? What could I call what I was calling?" (22)

"The source and destiny of each life are the same: an unknown that is unknowable. Unknown before; around and unknown now; and unknown after unless already fully known before... For some persons, meditation, contemplation, prayer indicate that there is an emptiness already built into each body and it is that which (paradoxically) makes them feel at home in the cosmos" (40-41).

"An ethics of intentionality must stay at a practical, measurable level, and never become abstract. Don't ever argue principles, my father told me. Stay with the facts" (43)

"As I get older I don't remember what things are, only what they look like and are named. The way Los Angeles becomes hell at night after being purgatorial all day. When allegory enters time, it is the sign of profound danger" (45)

"I can't believe I can see. I can't believe I can hear. I can't believe I can speak or think. What are commodities but evidence of lost people. You cannot love a bathrobe so what can you love about your own texture" (46)

"The canyons are groomed and pocked with bourgeois housing developments that are built for eclipse. The spirit muscles its way out of disappointment and follows the body laughing. Jesus after Easter is laughing all the way down the road" (49)

"Aquinas set out to prove that what we seek is actually what we are already" (50)

"Doubt allows God to live" (51)

"Sometimes you are privileged with a glimpse of the other world, when the light shines up from the west as the sun sets and dazzles something wet. The world is just water and light, a slide show through which your spirit glides" (52)

"I think you can know more if you do things that are fearful or unpleasant, as long as they do not include hospitals or jails. Wanting to know is what makes me do things I don't want to do. Wanting to know how far I can go with what I know" (53).

"LA's a dirt heap, really, stuck with green nettles" (54)

"This is the year when half of my desire for you is the half of yours for someone else...still the mystery of your life is that it's yours" (59)

"I have forgotten most of my life but if I remember anything with the fullness of attention, I feel two things: that the original no longer exists and that she has been replaced with a paper reproduction" (60)

"From the ages of twelve to twenty, a person's memories are most powerful and last through their lives. Before then, it is the unconscious that builds the child's life-character, events and people coming in at him or her, without borders or defenses against them" (67)

"Models, film stars, dolls and cartoons fall into this category. Plastic and bright colors. Without perceptions. They just recieve our looks and do not pretend to be real. Glamour removes any possible chance of reciprocity, which is a huge relief" (70)

"The combination of thorough study with leaps of faith-- well, this is the most reliable approach to the truth that I know" (73)

"Simone Weil said: "If we behold ourselves at a particular instant-- the present instant, severed from the past and the future-- we are innocent. We cannot be at this instant anything other than what we are; all progress implies a duration. It forms part of the order of the world, at this instant, that we should be as we are. All problems come back to the question of time." For instance, at any time a life can seem complete enough" (84)

"Lovers like addicts are too big to manage themselves" (86)

"There is a strange power of resistance that takes hold of certain weak and incompetent people. They refuse to give up, despite a series of blows, errors, and disappointments. They annoy well-adjusted people because weakness is not meant to survive. There are many stories about weak children in folk and fairy tales and anyone can see that even if one of them has failed in the world, she still wants to live" (90-91)

"The present tense is the tense of emergency and ego. I don't like it telling a story. The past is the most convincing and carries a shadow on its back like a bag of stones. The past is always a little melancholy. Slate gray, sunless. The past is the best tense for storytelling. The storyteller drops the bag and sits down to look it over" (92)

"To believe in something means to understand it. I wonder if the reason haters can be great artists and soldiers is that they put so much good into their work that the extra goes to making hell for everyone else" (93)

"Language, as we have it, fails to deal with confusion" (105)

"The serial poem attempts to demonstrate this attention to what is cyclical, returning, but empty at its axis. To me, the serial poem is a spiral poem" (109)

"Every experience that is personal is simultaneously an experience that is supernatural. How you love another person might be a reflection of your relationship to God or the world itself, not to the other person, not to any other person, mother, father, sister, brother. Untrusting? Suspicious? Jealous? Indifferent? Abject? These feelings may be an indication of your larger existential position, hardly personal" (110-111)

"Bewilderment circumnavigates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement is the empty but ultimate referent" (111)

"After all, the point of art--like war-- is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn't" (114)

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An author of astounding brilliance, an obvious heir to Simone Weil’s Christian mysticism but infused with a strong will to live. Although the format of the book is almost like a mixtape, she is a master of sequencing and makes disparate parts work together as a whole rather than creating a waste book a la Lichtenberg with no internal structure. This is an immensely wide collection of writings.

[Restfulsimulation · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible! fanny forever. if you don’t pick this up i’d at least say try to read the final chapter, bewilderment, if it’s online somewhere. that conclusion blew my mind this morning.

[Mic Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Fanny we have faith

[birdbassador · Rating 4 out of 5]

the parts about how existence is absurd and how the search for g-d and the search for self are intertwined were good, but is there a disease in the water that makes people who lived in california think that driving in california is worth talking about?

[Marije de Wit · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Sometimes the syntax of poetry helps me to see what life is really doing, and to find the key to the open air.'

[Silas · Rating 1 out of 5]

This failed to grip me.

[Ali · Rating 2 out of 5]

i didnt get it :( some parts were powerful but others left me confused (bad). maybe i need to read her other stuff

[Max Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fanny forever ❤️
Bewilderment was an unreal way to end

[Bryce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dont like chris kraus but I love fanny howe