Manuel Alvess, Gauloises Bleues, 1971-72
Theda Bara as Cleopatra, 1917
“Most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea … It is a life dignified, I think, by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement.”
Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry
Hamish Fulton. Untitled (Looking at Tomorrow), 1974
「Untitled」 ✖️ 撮影：荒木経惟 (1970) MoMA
Funeral Parade Of Roses (1969), dir. Toshio Matsumoto
Anna Cassel (Swedish 1860-1937), Untitled Series II No. 34. 1915. Oil on canvas. 55x40.5cm.
Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.
“I am alien to the noises of cities, of people, to the greed of machinery that does not sleep, the hum of power that eats up the night. Where rain, sunlight and darkness are contemned, I cannot sleep. I do not trust anything that has been fabricated to replace the climate of woods or prairies. I can have no confidence in places where the air is first fouled and then cleansed, where the water is first made deadly and then made safe with other poisons. There is nothing in the world of buildings that is not fabricated, and if a tree gets in among the apartment houses by mistake it is taught to grow chemically. It is given a precise reason for existing. They put a sign on it saying it is for health, beauty, perspective; that it is for peace, for prosperity; that it was planted by the mayor’s daughter. All of this is mystification. The city itself lives on its own myth. Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fictions which contemn nature and seek only to use it up, thus preventing it from renewing itself and man.”
— Thomas Merton • Raids On The Unspeakable
Richard Long. On this Hillside..., 1972
It turns out that, in life, improvisation isn't within genre but induces genre as a conventional resting place for use when making it all up gets too tough, too exhausting. What happens in sex, therefore, is not just a figure for the social at its best and worst extremes, but a training in how simply hard it is to be in the room with another person, even someone you want there: because it is hard to show up fully to sociality in general, and once there, to maintain an openness toward the objects about which one feels aggressive, has variable confidence, few skills, and little trust that the world will be patient for your self-inconstancy. It is toward building skills for recognizing, explaining, and finding temporary housing for the discomfort of these inconvenient genres of the intimate that this […] is written.
—Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022)