“Of their insides we know nothing, because we cannot understand the words that turn those insides out”
– Joanna Walsh, Vertigo 2015
Writing Becomes a Place to Live
“For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.”
– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
[See Andrea Barrett, Mary Ruefle and Rachel Cusk.]
An Essential Discomfort in the World
“We moved house often, and each time it appeared that it was the perfecting of our environment that was causing us to leave it, as though living there had been a process of construction that was now complete. (…) To continue creating, a person perhaps has to maintain an essential discomfort in the world.”
– Rachel Cusk, “Making House: Notes on Domesticity,” The New York Times Magazine 31 August 2016
[See Andrea Barrett and Mary Ruefle.]
There is an Arrival
“Taos pueblo affects me rather like one of the old monasteries. When you get there you feel something final. There is an arrival.”
– D. H. Lawrence, ‘Taos,’ Phoenix (1978)
Minus the Time-Consuming Mechanics of Plot and Story
“There’s a lot of stuff like this in Minima Moralia, the kind of observations you might get in fiction, minus the time-consuming mechanics of plot and story.”
– Geoff Dyer, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (2016)
Somewhere Else
“We are here to go somewhere else.”
– Geoff Dyer, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, 2016
Is it Easier?
“Is it easier to surrender to death than life?”
– Deborah Levy, Hot Milk, 2016
Centring the Margins
Jeff Bursey, Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews, 2016: 14
In 2011 Andrew Gallix, in the Guardian, wrote a piece on unread difficult books, and he mentioned “an anthology of blank books [edited by Michael Gibbs] entitled All Or Nothing.”
The Not-Being I Have Already Been
“The not-being that I have already been. I whisper it to myself, like a mantra, or a lullaby.”
– Jenny Diski, In Gratitude, 2016
Lessons in Unlearning
Simon Critchley, ABC of Impossibility, 2015
The poet issues reminders for what we already know and interprets what we already understand but have not made explicit. Poetry takes things as they are and as they are understood by us, but in a way that we have covered over through force of habit, a contempt born of familiarity, or what Fernando Pessao’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro calls ‘a sickness of the eyes’. Poetry returns us to our familiarity with things through the de-familiarization of poetic saying, it provides what Careio calls ‘lessons in unlearning’ where we finally see what is under our noses. What the poet discovers is what we knew already, but had covered up: the world in its plain simplicitly and palpable presence.
ANDREW GALLIX 