inexplicable arrival. Here is a sentence that withstands me, to which I submit, a sentence that couldn’t have known its own end when it started, as I cannot know its end as I begin reading. And I am wholly delighted by the jittery plunge I must take. By the mirror the sentence becomes, in which I see my own surprise.
I love a line cast cleanly out, a shape gently filling the neat spot prepared for it.
And I love a veering, careening ride, the ramble and torque and purifying shock of landing hard.
Freud tells the story of taking a summer walk in the country with a “taciturn friend,” a “young but already famous poet.” They are ambling along, it’s August 1915, the war’s on, so imagine the overall heaviness of heart in the slow summer air:
The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us, but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendor that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.
But Freud disputes “the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.” Then he tries to figure out how mourning works—since that must be what the two are experiencing, each in his own way, he believes—a mourning over impending death, life’s brevity and fragility. Mourning comes to its own “spontaneous end,” he reasons. “Mourning consume[s] itself ” he says, and leaves us freshened and ready to attach our love to new objects.
I think Freud must have seen many beautiful nests-with-eggs on that walk to come up with this thought. Is there anything more snugly held, more promising a sign of spring than a surprise cluster of eggs in a nest? I imagine they would have been robins’ eggs, blue of the beloved book of my childhood, Little Bear’s Mother, where first I encountered the color in any meaningful way (as backlit morning playground, then dusky sky, then shadow of the mother over the bear) and was held by it, felt some thirst commence, and drank and drank, and felt, at that stream, the never-enough, never, never, never-enough of pleasure held only briefly still (then gone, but refreshed upon reading— Again! Please , read it again! ) Freud saw—must have seen—a nest, and constituted therein his response, which was a kind of rivulet of blue between his friend’s adamant darks. He must have held his own mourning in his own warm hand—that summer marking the first year of the war—until out came an orange-breasted flame from the blue.
(Often I prefer anger in the face of my own various losses. But too, I have my blue robins’ eggs, and looking at them makes me content. In fact, I collected a bowlful over the past year on the walks I took, sometimes three a day, to quell the factions, to run the warring out of my body.)
Recently I was walking to the park and, as I dropped the letter I was carrying into the mailbox, I was stilled by the notion, almost a prediction, that I would find a reindeer, a really tiny one about the size of a lemon. This is the way the image came to me: it “popped in” (maybe fell? down from some nest?). Maybe the weather, a very cool June afternoon, encouraged the weird image’s arrival. I attempted to exchange the reindeer for something more seasonal, more discernibly trinkety and likely to surface (clover, bottle cap, penny) but the reindeer was stubborn.
I suppose I might dig around a bit, psychewise—perhaps the reindeer is standing in for something delicate and hidden, meaningful in a way I cannot yet understand.
Along the way there were white tulips so robust they reached to my waist. I saw some kind of evergreen whose uppermost branch shot out like a hooked cane into clear sky. Pink azaleas were dulling to brown and looked more like colonies of coral. And the
I love a line cast cleanly out, a shape gently filling the neat spot prepared for it.
And I love a veering, careening ride, the ramble and torque and purifying shock of landing hard.
Freud tells the story of taking a summer walk in the country with a “taciturn friend,” a “young but already famous poet.” They are ambling along, it’s August 1915, the war’s on, so imagine the overall heaviness of heart in the slow summer air:
The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us, but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendor that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.
But Freud disputes “the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.” Then he tries to figure out how mourning works—since that must be what the two are experiencing, each in his own way, he believes—a mourning over impending death, life’s brevity and fragility. Mourning comes to its own “spontaneous end,” he reasons. “Mourning consume[s] itself ” he says, and leaves us freshened and ready to attach our love to new objects.
I think Freud must have seen many beautiful nests-with-eggs on that walk to come up with this thought. Is there anything more snugly held, more promising a sign of spring than a surprise cluster of eggs in a nest? I imagine they would have been robins’ eggs, blue of the beloved book of my childhood, Little Bear’s Mother, where first I encountered the color in any meaningful way (as backlit morning playground, then dusky sky, then shadow of the mother over the bear) and was held by it, felt some thirst commence, and drank and drank, and felt, at that stream, the never-enough, never, never, never-enough of pleasure held only briefly still (then gone, but refreshed upon reading— Again! Please , read it again! ) Freud saw—must have seen—a nest, and constituted therein his response, which was a kind of rivulet of blue between his friend’s adamant darks. He must have held his own mourning in his own warm hand—that summer marking the first year of the war—until out came an orange-breasted flame from the blue.
(Often I prefer anger in the face of my own various losses. But too, I have my blue robins’ eggs, and looking at them makes me content. In fact, I collected a bowlful over the past year on the walks I took, sometimes three a day, to quell the factions, to run the warring out of my body.)
Recently I was walking to the park and, as I dropped the letter I was carrying into the mailbox, I was stilled by the notion, almost a prediction, that I would find a reindeer, a really tiny one about the size of a lemon. This is the way the image came to me: it “popped in” (maybe fell? down from some nest?). Maybe the weather, a very cool June afternoon, encouraged the weird image’s arrival. I attempted to exchange the reindeer for something more seasonal, more discernibly trinkety and likely to surface (clover, bottle cap, penny) but the reindeer was stubborn.
I suppose I might dig around a bit, psychewise—perhaps the reindeer is standing in for something delicate and hidden, meaningful in a way I cannot yet understand.
Along the way there were white tulips so robust they reached to my waist. I saw some kind of evergreen whose uppermost branch shot out like a hooked cane into clear sky. Pink azaleas were dulling to brown and looked more like colonies of coral. And the
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