“Mythical heroes are of obviously superhuman dimensions, an aspect which helps to make these stories acceptable to the child. Otherwise the child would be overpowered by the implied demand that he emulate the hero in his own life. Myths are useful in forming not the total personality, but only the superego. The child knows that he cannot possibly live up to the hero’s virtue, or parallel his deeds; all he can be expected to do is emulate the hero to some small degree so the child is not defeated by the discrepancy between this ideal and his own smallness.”
Alan Warner belongs to a certain group of writers who came of age in Scotland in the last decades of the 20th century. Those with more recognizable names would included Irvin Welsh who gave us Trainspotting, James Kelman with his unique voice of urban rootlessness, Ian Banks (who died last week) and A.L. Kennedy with their distinctive fictions, and Ian Rankin who gave us Inspector Rebus and his Edinburgh detective novels. Among these, Alan Warner seems the one who has gained less recognition over here in the States. And that is a shame.
Warner’s first novel Morvern Caller was a magnificent tale of a young woman who steals her dead boyfriend’s novel from his computer, changes the name on the manuscript and quickly and decadently burns through the advance that the novel garners, moving from her dilapidated Scottish town through the ravages of the European rave scene. A later novel with the unfortunate title The Sopranos follows a group of high school choir girls from a rural western outpost on its class trip to Edinburgh. Both novels are memorable for their voice, for the seeming accuracy of Warner’s portrayals of 16 and 17-year olds. And both are fun.
Warner returns to the same locale from which Morvern Caller and the girls from The Sopranos escape in his newest novel, The Deadman’s Pedal. And again, he is dealing with characters of a certain age, characters who are between childhood and adulthood, characters who are innocents even as they are losing their innocence.
The novel takes place around “the Port,” Warner’s fictionalized treatment of the town of Oban in western Scotland and is held together by the train line that serves the area and which is dwindling in impact. In fact the title “Deadman’s Pedal” refers to a device that on a runaway train is set to brake in the case of an engineer losing consciousness.
Simon Crimmons is turning sixteen and wants to quit school, get a motorbike, and get a job. He is considered well-to-do by his companions because his father owns a trucking company, but wealth is a relative thing, and the Crimmons family is certainly working class in comparison to the lordly Bultitude’s. In fact, Simon, the town and the novel itself are greatly aware of class distinctions. And this is a running theme throughout.
Yet it is in terms of young Simon’s desires that the class distinctions are most evident. For he is torn between the beautiful and always available Nikki Caine from the Estate houses and the enigmatic Varie Bultitude–of the town’s legendary, aristocracy. Managing such affairs is always risky and managing one between such two disparate worlds is like being on a run-away train.
When Simon mistakenly gets a job as a trainee train driver–he thought he was applying for a hospital position–he discovers the extent of these class divisions. He says to Vaire, “I’ve got the whole railway telling me I’m not working class enough and I’ve got you telling me I’m not middle class enough. This country needs to sort out the class question. As far as it applies to me.”
And to make matters more difficult, Simon’s father is caught up in it as well. He sees his son’s work on the trains as a betrayal, as his son’s working for a competitor that could ultimately put him out of business. It’s never easy being sixteen. It seems much harder for Simon Crimmons.
The joy of the novel–apart from the very real depictions of young desire, lust, and confusion–is the language itself. Some may find the dialect off-putting at first, but it quickly becomes second nature, but the narration itself is pure genius: A funeral for a dead train man is told with humor, nostalgia and poignancy; Simon’s first kiss is described as sweet, anxious, innocent and thrilling; the grounds of the Bultitude property are given an almost gothic eeriness and grandeur. (The Bultitudes are said to bury their dead in glass coffins…the aristocracy is always with us!)
Early in the novel, Simon and his friend Galbraith show Nikki the secret hideout they have built out in the wilds. They make her promise not to mention it to the other boys knowing that it is a childish thing and that the others would tease them for it. It is here that Simon and Nikki first have sex– in a short scene that is both innocent and knowing. It is a scene–positioned in his boyhood escape– that captures the very tension of this novel, the tension between innocence and adulthood, between desire and attainment, between the people and their landscape.
Alan Warner Photo: Jayne Wright
Alan Warner is an extraordinary writer. That his name is little known outside Britain is an injustice, but one that may be set aright by Deadman’s Pedal–a novel that is larger than its Scottish setting, a novel that is universal in its wonders, its desires, and its struggles.
Before I began teaching at the school where I currently teach, I worked in an advertising agency. During the interview process at the school, the headmaster asked me what I thought would be the greatest difference. My answer was “Endings.”
In the advertising world, it was not unusual for some print ad for which I had written copy nine, twelve, eighteen months earlier needing to be re-tweaked later. We are changing our direction, the headline is too “downtown,” we want to downplay the price, emphasize the sponsor, etc., etc. Things never were truly complete. They were signed-off on, yes. But they were never done with.
Teaching, however, is one of those professions where there are periodic endings, arbitrary endpoints where the slate is wiped clean, one can review what went right, rue what went wrong, and learn from both.
It is the end of May now, but I know that I and many of my colleagues are already plotting out projects and readings, weighing shifts in focus and shifts in technique, and (always on my part) constructing schemes to stay better organized in the upcoming school year.
And besides a chance to start anew, the end of a quarter, a semester, a school year offers a chance to bury the past and move forward. To begin again.
I used to have the Beckettian quote, Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better, posted on the wall of my office. At the time, it was a personal mantra for me, for my own work. I was not thinking of teaching. This year it has become a buzzword/phrase throughout education.
All over in print and on the web there are articles about the value of failing, about the necessity of failing, of the embrace of failing. And we as teachers know that as well as anyone–for ourselves, if not necessarily for our students. For what is the end of each term but a chance to review our failings and resolve to “fail better” next time.
Now with the end of the school year, there is also the spate of “commencement speeches” that must be heard. Those talks given to graduating seniors in colleges and high-schools around the country that are especially inspiring, especially poignant, especially relevant.
David Foster’s Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon University has become legendary. For a long while it was shot all over the internet, and then capitalism took over and someone decided to release it as a book. It has been abridged and made into a wonderful short film, This is Water. Like all great commencement speeches, this is wise, humorous, and relevant without falling into clichés. It emphasizes compassion and empathy, warns graduates of the sometimes benumbing world of adulthood, and charges them to make their world better by understanding it more tolerantly.
Lately, Neil Gaiman’s 2012 speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia has been parsed and tweeted, analyzed and blogged about. It has been highly criticized and highly praised. It is about creativity and about personal freedom. And, of course, at this time of year, it is all over the place and referenced almost every time you log on.
And even Jane Lynch, the wonderful actress who has appeared in so many of the Christopher Guest films and now stars in the television show Glee, even Jane Lynch keeps appearing in my in-box and my twitter feeds and blogs that I follow because of the inspiring speech she gave in 2012 to the women of Smith College. It too is forthright and wise and commanding.
But it is the nature of graduation speeches to address an audience as they START OUT into something new. One of the joys/perks of teaching is that one gets to START OVER. My best and frequent companion these days is a 7-year old boy with whom I play a lot of games. Often when something goes wrong for him in a game we are playing, he is the first to yell, “Start Over” (though just as often he simply changes the rules!) Who knew that the gaming-strategy of a 7-year-old is the same spark that keeps good teachers fresh, engaged and effective?
It seems appropriate that there are three book-covers for John Banville’s Ancient Light. For confusion–or perhaps”uncertainty” –is the appropriate word for the various threads that form the cloth of Banville’s novel. Weaving together three stories (at the very least), Ancient Light details the aging actor Alex Cleave’s misted memories and the challenges of his present life.
Particularly important in his mind are the affair he had when he was 15 with the 35-year old mother of his best friend, his daughter who killed herself in Italy ten years before the novel begins, and the young “movie-star”with whom he–a respected stage actor– is filming his first movie. And hovering in the background, drinking tea in the kitchen while Cleave writes these “memoirs” is his wife, Lydia, who is struggling with their daughter’s death in her own way.
So who are the women represented on the book covers? Is that Mrs. Gray, his first love standing in front of the shop? Or his daughter waiting impatiently for his arrival? Is that the actress Dawn Davenport’s slip? Or Mrs. Gray’s? Or his daughter’s? And who can that be dancing? Mrs. Gray and young Alex seems obvious. But could it also be the characters that Cleave and Davenport are playing in their film? Or his daughter and the mysterious man she was working for (and whose child she was carrying) when she flung herself into the rock-strewn sea?
That we can not be sure is part of the joy and wonder–and admiration–one feels in reading Ancient Light. Banville is an exquisite writer–and I do not use that word lightly. Character description, dialogue, setting, interior life–all are rendered with keenly sensitive language and thoughtfulness. At one point, the sky is the color of “wetted jute“; at another, it is described as “a layering of bands of clay-white, peach, pale green, all this reflected as a vaguely mottled mauve wash on the motionless…canal.” Some of the writing is heart-wrenching in its perfection; some is amusing. Here is Cleave describing a “researcher” sent by the movie company to help him with his role:
Billie, however, is obviously a native of these parts, a short pudgy person in, I judge, her middle to late thirties. She really is of remarkable shape, and might have been assembled from a collection of cardboard boxes of varying sizes that were first left out in the rain and then piled soggily any old way one on top of the other. The general effect was not improved by the extremely tight jeans she was wearing, and the black polo-necked jumper that made her large head look like a rubber ball set squarely atop those precariously stacked cartons.
Here is what the aging Alex has to say early about love:
I should like to be in love again, I should like to fall in love again, just once more.
He is aware of both the poignancy of those words and the sadness of the thought in the presence of his wife.
What Ancient Light is most surely about is the past. Cleave–believing he is nearing the end of his career–is enamored by it, by the love affair with Mrs. Gray (he notes the inexactness of this phrase) and by the death of his daughter.
Because I am getting old and the past has begun to seem more vivid than the present, he states, and then later, when he learns of what he mis-remembered, he concludes that often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing.
When in Italy with Dawn Davenport he meets a mysterious Argentinian, (a ghost? his doppelgänger?) who over a bottle of wine says this too him:
“Even here,” he said, ” at this table, the light that is the image of my eyes takes time…to reach your eyes, and so it is that everywhere we look, everywhere, we are looking into the past.”
But the past is slippery for both Cleave and the memoir he is writing. He notices instances when the progression of time seems to slip, to miss a cog:
There are moments, infrequent though marked, when it seems that by some tiny shift or lapse in time I have become misplaced, have outstripped or lagged behind myself.
Cleave’s stories ultimately come together in subtle and satisfying ways. There are coincidences, but Cleave does not believe in coincidences. There are “apparitions,” though Cleave is reluctant to but wishes to believe in an afterlife. (Twenty years ago, Banville did write a novel Ghosts.) There is doubling and there are doubles. There is a subtle knowledge of and reference to Greek mythology, and a faint feeling that the ancient gods are still at work in the lives of these mortals. And it is all done in a lush, rich style that is the very antithesis of modernity’s spare and sparse writing.
John Banville is an author who writes intelligent and dense books that deserve a much wider readership. His novel The Sea won the Man Booker Prize (much to the dismay of critics who felt it wasn’t commericial enough.) And lately he has also been writing detective novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. And I just learned, when I mentioned Ancient Light to a friend that this novel is in fact the third of a loose triology featuring Alex Cleave, his wife Lydia and their daughter Cass.
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) illustration by jpbohannon 2013 (based on painting by Juan Bastos)
There is a danger in reading memoirs, diaries, journals. Certainly, there are times when our angels are shown to have feet of clay. Or other instances, when we weigh the turmoils and angst of a particular life with the end product that impelled you to read the memoir in the first place.
But with Sontag it is quite, quite different.
Next to even her young self, I feel so inadequate, so shallow, so wasteful of time.
Here is a young woman–14 years of age when the journals begin–embarking on a intellectual career that would put most of us to shame. Her reading lists, her “to-do” lists, her debates with herself, her analysis of events, readings, concerts and people she meets, her experiences, all are more fervent, more intelligent, more thoughtful in the years between her 14th birthday and her 30th, than mine have been for most of my life.
I teach a group of extremely bright 18-year old boys. They have great intelligence, and some are quite creative. But every so often they need to be reminded that their superior intelligence is frequently measured within the very small pond of our school. Here’s what I read them from Sontag’s journal:
…Yet we do exist, + affirm that. We affirm the life of lust. Yet there is more. One flees not from one’s real nature which is animal, id, to a self-torturing externally imposed conscience, super-ego, as Freud would have it–but the reverse, as Kierkegaard says. Our ethical sensitivity is what is natural to man + we flee from it to the beast…
I ask them to describe the person who would write this in his or her personal journal. And they are always far off…in both gender and age. Sontag wrote this (a snippet of a much larger journal entry) two weeks after she had turned 17! Already her depth of reading and understanding and active thoughtfulness is evident.
Immediately in this first volume of the journals, one meets a brilliant, thoughtful intelligence. She attended Berkeley at the age of 16, transfered to University of Chicago, married Phillip Reiff–a sociology professor–at 17, taught at the University of Connecticut when she was 19, and attended graduate school at Harvard, where she got her degree in philosophy and theology. And throughout these years, she recorded her thoughts and criticisms and interpretations, as well as her fears, her doubts and her insecurities. As her marriage began to falter, she received a fellowship to Oxford and then moved to Paris. When she moved back to New York in 1959 (26 years old), her marriage was dissolved and she had gained custody of her son. Established in New York, she began teaching at various colleges, completed her first novel, The Benefactor, and witnessed her reputation as part of New York’s intelligentsia begin to grow.
These are the years covered in the volume. Aside from the inquisitiveness, interpretation, and analysis of what she reads, sees and watches (she was a rabid film-goer), there is the struggle of understanding who she was. The marriage was unsatisfying, the lovers often hurtful, and in reading the journals we see a young woman trying to discover herself and come to terms with her own individuality, her own bi-sexuality, her own identity. There are times when one feels she is too hard on herself…when one wants to warn her, NO, this is going to end bad, but then again, one can’t.
Beginning when she was 14 and ending when she was 30,the journals are remarkable for their honesty and the peek into her rigorous mind. But at the end, one is moved by the ever-going struggle between her sexuality and her intelligence, by the vulnerabilities and insecurities she reveals in her two major love affairs with Harriet Sohmers Zwerling and Irene Fornés. For her extraordinary mind struggled continually to understand the extraordinary pull of the flesh.
Her last two entries for 1963 read:
The intellectual ecstasy I have had access to since early
childhood. But ecstasy is ecstasy.
Intellectual “wanting” like sexual wanting.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Reborn is the first of a proposed three volumes of journals. The next volume–As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh– covers the years 1963 to 1964, when Sontag develops her reputation, her political activism, and her writing. It is now on my “to-read” list.
The actual title of Olivier Assayas’ new film is Après Mai–a reference to the months following the student and worker demonstrations of May 1968 in France. And that, in many ways, is the focus of the film: young, sincere characters trying to maintain the commitments of 1968, but somewhat too young still to be a real part and unprepared for the crashing ordinariness of the life to come.
The film begins with high-school students’ listening to their teacher’s monotonous reading of Pascal’s Penseés. Within minutes of screen time, these same students are scrambling away from overzealous police dispelling a student demonstration. The life of the classroom and their political/social/activist lives are much, much different. The teachers give them Pascal and they are reading Gregory Corso, Chairman Mao and listening to Phil Ochs.
Early riot scene in Something in the Air
I had a friend who was a student in Paris at that time in 1968. When I asked her about it, she sort of shrugged. “The only difference,” she said, “was that afterwards we were permitted to call our professors tu rather than vous.
But for Gilles, Alain, Christine, Rachkam la Rouge, they want very much for the spirit of May 1968 to be carried on, to be carried through. They believe that May was not the climax but the beginning of the revolution. Stuck in their sleepy village outside of Paris, the students join political parties, pack debating halls, distribute the radical free-press, and organize guerrilla graffiti forays against the local establishment and police. One of these night raids goes wrong and a guard falls into a coma when hit with a bag of cement mix. The students decide to scatter.
Gilles (Clémont Métayer) and Christine (Lola Créton) hitch up with a radical collaborative on its way Italy where they become lovers and later part as she continues with the collaborative to make a film on Italian workers.
Christine and Giles on the road to Italy
Gilles (Clémont Métayer) and Christine (Lola Créton)
Gilles is torn in his radicalism–for his passion is art, and he is not convinced that his art must always serve the “cause.” Alain (Felix Armand) and Leslie (India Menduez), an American he meets in Rome, go East to Afghanistan, he an artist and she a dancer looking for spirituality. Disillusioned over time, they all return to France, and ultimately to Paris.
But there is another story running through Gilles life. Of course, in a story of a teenage-boy there needs to be friction between him and his father, a successful movie director. While there is never dramatic conflict between the two, as he grows, Gilles is able to tell his father how superficial and wrong-headed he believes his film adaptations are. (The father makes adaptations of George Simenon’s Maigret novels.)
But the more important sub-plot is about Gilles and his true love, Laure (Carole Combes). When she first appears early in the film, there is a jarring film switch from the smokey riots of their village to an Edenic, woodsy scene. She has come to meet Gilles and is in flowing white and the sun illuminates both her and the shimmering foliage around her. I felt however that I was in a 1970’s shampoo advertisement and that any minute I would hear Donovan singing “Wear Your Love Like Heaven.”
Gilles and Laure
Laure is a bit more worldly than Gilles and his mates, and her wealthy bohemian parents are taking her to London, as the father is the light-man for a fledgling rock band. She is willowy and bright and airy and full of sunshine. And she leaves a mark that even Christine knows she cannot undo. Later, when his father informs him that she has returned, he ventures out to her parents’ chateau for a party. Throughout the party, I was reminded of when the Stones had moved to the south of France in the early ’70s and had worked on Exile on Main Street. There was the same louche, blowsy freedom, the same drug use, the same music, the same comings-and-goings.
The party is important, though I am not positive how it ended. Gilles leaves. Laure jumps from a burning building and that is it.
And then real life steps in. Gilles is a “go-fer” for his father’s film company (although a left-wing broadsheet has begun using his drawings), Leslie abandons her “spirituality” and returns with her father to New York and Julliard, Rackham le Rouge leaves the Trotskyites for inconsequential anarchism, and Christine discovers that the earnest leftism of the man she is living with and the collective they are part of does not carry forward to women.
Olivier Assayas–who wrote and directed–gives us a nostalgic film, a film that even looks from an earlier period. The colors, the lighting, the cutting, the soundtrack all capture a particular moment in time. And the two leads, Créton and Métayer are likeable and familiar–we do care about them and their decisions.
Frequently in the film, we watch characters watching films–and these films within a film are rendered in wavering, sincere, gaudy, and innocent beauty. (Perhaps part of that innocence is the knowledge in hindsight that much of it is not going to last.) Indeed, film and film-making is such an integral part of the story that now I am not sure if Apres Mai (Something in the Air) isn’t a dissertation on film of that era disguised behind a story of that era.
In the end, Gilles is working on a science fiction film in London that features giant lizards and Nazis (and Dolores Chaplin, the granddaughter of Charlie and Oona!); Christine’s collective is releasing its first commercial documentary on Italian workers (though free to workers’ unions) and Gille’s dad is still turning out the Maigret mysteries. However, Apres Mai ends with a haunting, new wave, almost psychedelic clip of a willowy woman walking towards the camera.
We recognize her by the end.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
And for a treat, here’s the Stones live in 1972 doing “Tumbling Dice” from Exile on Main Street.
In the office of a colleague a while back I noticed a towering pile of books on the desk, as if he were re-arranging his book shelves or carting out old titles to a different location. But no, it was his “to read” pile, and it was impressive and imposing.
Among the authors gathered, there was one whom I had not heard of–Adam Phillips. A psychoanalyst by trade–specifically a children’s clinical psychotherapist–Phillips read literature at Oxford, specializing in the 19th century British romantics. And as the “science” of psychoanalysis has always been symbiotically tied to literature, a degree in literature seemed the perfect training ground.
Adam Phillips photo: Andy Hall
And so I decided to dive in.
Of Phillips’ seven or so titles, Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature seemed a reasonable starting point. And, the frantic busyness at the end of the school term made a collection of independent essays more attractive and less of a task.
“As poets struggle to find a place in contemporary cultural reality, psychoanalysts, implicitly or explicitly, are still promoting the poets as ego-ideals.”
Philips, “Poetry and Psychoanalysis”
The crux of Phillips’ essays is the mutual relationship between literature and psychoanalysis…and psychoanalysts’ established reverence for creative writers. Literature, according to Freud, gave birth to psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis often gives resonance to literature.
And so go his essays.
He begins with the essay “Poetry and Psychoanalysis” and brings in the young poet Keats–a former medical student–who famously stated that science ruined poetry when Newton reduced the rainbow to a prism. Not so, Phillips says, for poetry (and you can read “creative writing” where Phillips says “poetry”) can do what the sciences cannot. Indeed, much of his argument is that the science of psychoanalysis is bringing understanding to the vision of poetry. Freud said, Phillips tells us, that the poets had long before discovered the unconscious, and that he only had devised a way to study it.
Phillips graciously gives way to “poetry” saying that the short history of psychoanalysis has been an attempt to study the unconscious that poetry reveals. And since both poetry and psychoanalysis–the “talking cure”–depend on language, and often, coded language, the two are intrinsically welded together.
And so he is off.
There are marvelous literary essays on Hamlet, Hart Crane, Martin Amis, A.E. Housman and Frederick Seidel, all informed by an accessible shading of psychoanalytic theory, as well as masterful psychoanalytic pieces on Narcissism, Jokes, Anorexia and Clutter, informed by a broad knowledge of literature/poetry. It is Phillips’ contention–his modus operandi, if you will–that the two disciplines can or should depend on each other for clarity.
The collection ends with the title piece, “Promises, Promises.” In it, Phillips examines the “promise” that both literature and psychoanalysis offer. He writes:
“If we talk about promises now, as I think we should when we talk about psychoanalysis and literature, then we are talking about hopes and wishes, about what we are wanting from our relationship with these two objects in the cultural field.”
What does reading literature promise us? What does analysis promise us? Phillips contends that both promise us, to a degree, “the experience of a relationship in silence, the unusual experience of a relationship in which no one speaks.” Of course, ultimately, the analyst must speak. But it is in that silence that often we become “true to ourselves.”
Reading psychoanalytic theory can often be dry and dusty, but Phillips’ writing never is. Bringing in an encyclopedic knowledge of both creative literature and psychoanalytic literature (and, at times, arguing that there might not be a difference), Phillips imaginatively and wittily plumbs past and current trends, canonical and esoteric literatures, clinical practice and private correspondence to bring to light his vision of psychoanalysis and literature’s potential and promise.
As I said in “The End of April…part 1,” the month got away from me. What I mean is that all the great ideas I had for celebrating National Poetry Month were just that…great ideas. Just so much smoke. And so to make up for it, I am trying to put up several posts about a variety of poetry collections that I read during the month of April.
Back in the fall, I went to a conference of poets and heard Catherine Barnett read. I also bought her book The Game of Boxes which had just won the 2012 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. And like too many of the books that I buy, it joined the stacks of “to read” books that are now towering next to my bed and next to my desk. Then, as if to increase my guilt for not reading it yet, in April, the Academy sent me a copy in the mail. (Fortunately, I was later able to give that away as a birthday gift to another poet.)
Assailed with the guilt of owning two copies and not having cracked the spine yet, I dived in. And was I glad.
Barnett’s collection is divided into three parts: “Endless Forms Most Beautiful,” “Of All Faces,” and “The Modern Period.” The poems in each section are informed by a mature wisdom and wonder and understanding and befuddlement while dealing with those very issues that simply befuddle a younger world. Lust, love, family loyalty, parents and parenting, self, partnership, Barnett touches upon all of these, assuring us that none of us ever really get a grip on everything swirling about us. The middle section, “Of All Faces” is subtitled “Sweet Double Talk-Talk” and delineates the love/lust/comfort/discomfort of a partnership worn smooth over time. This is my favorite part of the collection.
From the outset, there is an immediate comfort in their age and a delight in their familiarity:
It’s a different beauty, Your torso is stained and creased, you say your an old man–
the backs of your hands might be an old man’s hands but the tips of your fingers —
little shocks of pure mind, and I like theme there,, yes, ageless persuasion’s design and rush. (Sweet Double Talk-Talk, i)
There is a weariness in famliarity:
Sometimes he’s everything to me: yesterday, tomorrow, regret and shame.
And sometimes he’s nothing to me, an old cushion on an old couch:
a pin-cusion: something I think I can replace. (Sweet Double Talk-Talk, xvii)
But overall, there is a comforting lust and an accepted love:
I’m afraid you’ll die, and tonight’s your birthday, it’s no different, in fact it’s worse, come drink some wine–
Let’s sit at the bar. It’s winter, so I’m in your coat, I’m in your promises, your smooth worn promises sliding in and out of my own love of death so slick with want–
Soon, you say, your breath still warm in my ear. (Sweet Double Talk-Talk, xviii)
I cannot say why, but I love this couple. I love their honesty, their quirks, their enduring lusts, their enduring second-guessing. And while this section could almost be considered a narrative, each section is similarly anchored by a wise understanding of time and love and others.
"Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.."- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
j. p. bohannon 