November

N ovember strikes, and I’ve got a bit more security in my life, though once again I find myself scattered. There are two primary states between which I oscillate: one in which I’m absorbed in reading, because I’m tired of myself. The other involves being tired of others and immersing myself in my own production. I am given cause to move from the second to the first when I feel impotent as a writer, which happens whenever I read something I write and fail to edit it. Then I lose myself and experience the world with very little structure, wandering about other peoples’ texts. And then, when I am impotent as a reader, I move back into conversation with my own body, typing and scrawling away on glass. Is this cycle additive, progressive, or am I simply returning to where I began each time I give up on one or the other?

I’m currently mad at my poems for being bad, and mad that I don’t know how to edit them. My frustration with work leads me to realize the extent of my ambition, and that I’ve failed this site’s originary purpose as a repository for exploring the state of being named in its title: “Against Public Life.” What does that even mean? Is it a simple excuse for isolating myself so that I may eventually produce something truly special? If so, this is really just a staging ground for public life, and for the interpersonal bonds that exist in parallel with a career. The promise of dedicating myself to a profession is the same as the promise of dedicating myself to a person; nobody can exist with anyone else to the exclusion of a third, the third being a world, a child, a house, etc. I may wish to write something which defines an epoch, a movement, but I don’t see how I can do that without being sustained by the weirdness and effortful stabs at meaning-making that surround a person, the person, that person.

There is in all these straying songs the freshness of clear wind and purity of blowing rain: here a perfume as of dew or grass against the sun, there a keener smell of sprinkled shingle and brine-bleached sand; some growth or breath everywhere of blade or herb leaping into life under the green wet light of spring; some colour of shapely cloud or mound of moulded wave. The verse pauses and musters and falls always as a wave does, with the same patience of gathering form, and rounded glory of springing curve, and sharp sweet flash of dishevelled and flickering foam as it curls over, showing the sun through its soft heaving side in veins of gold that inscribe and jewels of green that inlay the quivering and sundering skirt or veil of thinner water, throwing upon the tremulous space of narrowing sea in front, like a reflection of lifted and vibrating hair, the windy shadow of its shaken spray. The actual page seems to take life, to assume sound and colour, under the hands that turn it and the lips that read; we feel the falling of dew and have sight of the rising of stars. For the very sound of Blake's verse is no less remote from the sound of common things and days than is the sense or the sentiment of it.

(Swinburne on Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, qtd. in Andrew Kay's "Swinburne, Impressionistic Formalism, and the Afterlife of Victorian Poetic Theory," p. 280)