emily > Recent Status Updates

‘I don’t know if you can call language ‘technology.’ Technology is—involved w/ tools. Language is something we emit—we have to learn it—Language is strange. That deeper meaning is where poetry approaches music—you can't put that meaning in words in an intellectually comprehensible way. It’s just there—you know it’s there—sound—carries it. This is extremely mysterious—rightly so—Some can hear it & get it / not get it’

‘Great thirsty heat—trembling—tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst—People are full of surprises—even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough—it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget—the madness of the denial of pain—the world—mostly divided between madmen who remember & madmen who forget. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘faint heart never won fair athlete, that’s for sure.’’

‘Carrying the letter at his chest—set out for Shanghai—When he opened it, he saw that it contained only two simple lines—Then he saw that at the bottom there was a line that had been blacked out with ink. He held the letter up to the light coming through the window—‘as leaves fall back down to their roots, so must one return to one’s hometown’—He lowered his head—dried his eyes—his figure—receding into the sunlight—’

‘My face is like a face you have seen many times—I can see her—tense—glittering—surrounded by the light which fills the salon of the ocean liner—drinking—too fast—laughing—That was how I met her—in a bar in St. Germain des Pres—she was drinking & watching, & that was why I liked her—That was how it began—And these nights—under a foreign sky—no penalties attached—Life gives these & also takes them away—across—ocean—’

‘To assume—the present tense is literally “now” & the past tense literally remote in time is extremely naïve—The present tense is a narrow-beam flashlight in the dark—limiting the view to the next step: now, now, now—Third-person limited is—similar to first person—it is one point of view only—You know where you are, whose eyes you are seeing through, but you don’t have the sense of being jerked from place to place—'

‘The ceremonial ringing—a summoning to full wakefulness—It sets into motion—the authority of Time—& everything—exposed—including things about themselves they cannot fully realise—we're humanly responsible not only for our own acts but for those performed against us—Time, like the possibility of death, is the invisible adversary—I've no difficulty justifying boxing as—sport because I've never thought of it as a sport’

'An enterprise of such pith required—less talking than consideration. The first thing they did in carrying it out was to return to the railway station—The heat of the morning—intense—she saw him emerge from the nook that had screened him, cross the white fringe of foam, & walk into the undulating mass of blue—attributed the change to the influence of the local breezes after the hot-house atmosphere of the mainland.'

‘—its bamboo awning into the docks—willow tree growing at the water’s edge—embroidery—featured three branches of plum blossoms—each time she cooked rice she would make enough to eat for two days—because it was already past mid-autumn festival, the rice would keep for that long without spoiling—once again said he would eat some cold rice with some pickled vegetables—‘I’ll make some fried rice in soy sauce’ she said—’

‘Weeds are just flowers or plants that people have decided to call weeds because people decide they don’t want them there—It’s a flower—Daisy told us there were times when she hated her name—it means the day’s eye—it’s called that because daisies open when it’s light & close when it’s dark—Her eyes are open, lit, black & imperturbable. They look like home—What gliff means: To glimmer like sudden unanticipated light.’

‘Every string has a potential tale: jagged / leafy, rueful / resilient. For first-time listeners, it may sound like two guitarists playing—in judicious harmony—modest instrument made glancingly symphonic—Nothing on Pretzel Logic is overstressed / overplayed—The drums—a rising heartbeat squall of saxophones—thick membrane of sound flows forth and hovers in the room—incredibly plush—you begin to see—the askew texture—’

‘—after his blurry end—a fond graffito rose—sprouted all over—Even if you’ve loved this music for half a lifetime, you can find the algebraic lingo of jazz theory about as clarifying as a book of logarithms baked in mud—You develop certain muscles at the expense of others—‘Love perfection because it is the threshold / But deny it once known, once dead forget it.’—'In the Wee Small Hours' flicker—sleep, dream, waking’

‘To write about boxing is to write about oneself—however elliptically—unintentionally. & to write about boxing is to be forced to contemplate—the perimeters of civilisation—what it is, or should be, to be human—Perhaps boxing has always been in crisis, a sport of crisis—I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.’

‘There were a lot of flowers—somebody whose name wasn’t Rose but—a kind of symbolic rose to the singer—a person who’s been east & west—never been alone because of this rose—wherever they are. When the singer’s boat is wrecked by sea storms—the rose alone withstands the storms—the rose keeps the singer alive—telling them stories of all the other possible places—Like learning that time can sing & that it’s old & young’

‘For ten days her mind was elsewhere, and everything she put in her mouth tasted like dust—This fate was determined in a previous life—flames flickering on the wick of the lamp until late that night—consumed two jin of rice wine—filled with a thousand different feelings—someday they would all return to their hometown—his head tilted to the side, giving her the feeling that he could drop into the water at any moment—’

‘This foreign language—he claimed to make use of—to spare his own—possessed its privileged words—its singular turns of phrase—unrivalled beauties. Already, in a letter from 1907, Rilke confessed to—Norlind—to beware of the temptation to write in a foreign language, that sometimes he used—to say certain things that would have been simply impossible to express in another language—some shortcomings of the native tongue’

‘Readers with some knowledge of the languages involved will necessarily be in a position to travel more deeply into this terrain, but those with English alone will at least be able to define features within the panorama—One day in January—envelopes—containing a letter and the other printed matter, departed separately—Sometimes the colour of the wax or seal would change—like dehiscent fruits—’

‘—the purple-red foothills—there was usually a pleasant moment of stillness during—sunset—from such a remote outpost, the entire desert seemed motionless—but there was also a slight buzz under it all. For everyone working at the telescopes—day started at this hour & the darker the sky got, the more it impressed upon all of us that we had a busy night ahead. As long as the weather cooperated—forecasting connoisseur—’

‘—the interviewer is going to discuss the influence—of Schopenhauer—Wittgenstein/Adorno—none of whom I have ever read—or will demand my opinion of queer theory/string theory—instruct me to tell—what Taoism is—or (likeliest of all) ask me about The Future of Mankind. That I know the immensity of my ignorance doesn’t mean I like to display it—There are advantages and disadvantages to living a very long time as I have.’

'There used to be more than two hundred and seventy different types of bees when I was small. And—hornets, I think they’re beautiful as well as frightening. Like flying fuchsias, with their long legs hanging down
? Flowers, it’s a kind of flower. Did you know you can eat fuchsias? Why was it different calling a person something from calling a horse a name? It was different, I’d never thought about it before—'

'At the end of a numb day—I put on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue in an attempt to really hear it again—to catch the original lure through all the intervening time-fuzz—Unearthly sonic signatures woven from everyday air; flurries of notes like Rimbaud’s million golden birds set free: no one else could do this one thing he did, exactly the way he did it—So why does this—astringent music touch so many of us, still?'

‘People—sprouted up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain—a mix of northern and southern accents—reached the Guanyin temple—When they wrote down their names at the ‘eight immortals’ table, they saw that there were already—names in front of theirs—When the forest is big, you get all kinds of birds—‘Here, some things my mother made you—to eat on the road.’—Take good fucking care of yourself—we’ll meet again some day—’

‘—at the Guanyin temple—behind them—like cats in the middle of the night—'You’re a bandit—not a monk. No one wants to see your Bodhisattva’s heart'—yellow rice wine from Shaoxing; “fortune & faith” from Hangzhou; “three whites” from Songjiang; “red pal” from Yixing; quince wine—Yangzhou; “hundred flowers” from Zhenjiang; xiaruo—Tiaoxi; lahuang—Huai’an; pujiu—Pukou; xunjiu—Zhexi; sharendou—Suqian & wujiapi—Gaoyou.’

‘Barely audible—brief moans shooting like meteorites over the desert—the framed space of the hotel room & the dream—a few stray words. Quickness, urgency, speed, agility—The words tunnelled through the rarefied air of the room like virulent roots through dead flesh. Our culture—said a voice. Our freedom—The stillness of her body, something reminiscent of inertia—defenselessness—you're missing your fucking shadow—’

‘History is full of tribulations & errors—One day I jumped over a fence because I really wanted to eat ddeokppokki—Time suddenly seemed to refuse to flow in just one direction—One minute per minute, one second per second, we’re flowing into the future—we will unwittingly reach the future 0.00000001 seconds earlier. This is because the measurement of time and space are inseparable—You know this better than me—’

‘Olga does not desire immortality. She even refuses to believe me—I tell her—this tiny monstrosity. With almost poetic inspiration, I describe its pointed little head—covered in a hard skin—like vellum—Our blood, thick and black at first—becomes red and thin—As of tomorrow, gas lamps shall no longer light the city streets—I have bestrewn the second-hand bookshops on Nikitskaya, Mokhovaya, Leontievsky and Kamergersky’

‘Have you seen her? they asked. I have, said the gallery owner—Her first impulse was to go down to the bar—but—she decided to go to bed. The hum continued & she thought it must be the air-conditioning—the Pacific Ocean, producing an enormous curvature of space. It made a person hungry to travel in that light, although also, and maybe more insistently, she thought, it made you want to bear your hunger until the end.’

‘—frozen birds—dropped from the trees, making soundless dents in the snow. The trees on either side—creaking—snapping—it was almost like the sound of crackling wood in a forest fire—rays of light on the windowpane—spread out—as if they were about to cut through the room like a saw—sunlight greeted him like crashing waves—Winter passed, spring arrived—When green buds burst forth from the frozen scars of the trees.’

‘He believed in redemption. Deep down—may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand—obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane—in that osseous implosion, we find communion—night plunged—’

‘Gaspar—read every word of El Gráfico—about River Plate & having to stomach their unbeatable team—he had to admit he wanted to play like Francescoli—there was no other player he liked as much—not even on the San Lorenzo team. He hated River Plate because they had Francescoli—3AM in Buenos Aires—not much light except for the moon—three fourths of the universe is darkness—full of purple flowers—plants that eat flies—’