the thoughts of others

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.

In the pit of it, you fantasize about dying, tripping on a sidewalk and stumbling into the path of an oncoming car. A gas leak silently offing you in your sleep, a machete weilding madman on public transit, falling down the stairs but drunk so you flop, limb over limb, like a marionette and feel no pain. Anything to make it stop. You have forgotten that leaving is an option.

I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people's lives a commentary of my own.

'Beauty,' Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1859, ... 'always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness.' 'It is this touch of strangeness,' the poet goes on to explain, 'that gives it its peculiar quality of beauty.' 'This dash of strangeness,' Baudelaire insists, 'constitutes and defines individuality (without which there can be no beauty).' Observation by observation, a consensus of sentiment begins to ricochet across centuries: greatness is strangeness.

Writing about one’s own depression is difficult. Depression is partly constituted by a sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together – and this voice is liable to be triggered by going public about the condition. Of course, this voice isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all – it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables said if I could get down 13 turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness is.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

Oh, the miracle of a clear and possibly elegant sentence emerging from the sticky ink and wending its way between the blots. It is the black of meaning wrung from the black of matter.

She keeps a pen behind her ear in case she's got something to say she puts it in a notepad she's gonna write a book someday

Writing is a perceived transition from inside to outside, and that motion is in itself a step in the right direction, a passage into a dialogical space that can be seen. […] Because written language exists in this between space, not the writer as her body, but the writer as her words for a reader […] writing lifts us out of ourselves …”

Time is thick in the present, a distension, not a series of points, subjective time, that is, our inner time. We are forever retaining and projecting, anticipating, the next note in the tune, recalling the whole phrase as we listen.