a tribe lost by finding it
The subject line is from Plainwater, the Anne Carson book that I force onto everyone, and no one ends up reading. My favorite book of illumination. I've been re-reading the bits about the pilgrimage to Compostela:
How can you see your life unless you leave it?
...
Animals ride on top of one another. Animals ensnare themselves in plants and tendrils. These are two motifs that may be seen repeatedly in reliefs and other works of art along the pilgrims' route. Signs are given to us like a voice within flesh, that is my question. Signs point to our virtue. I want to ask how is it this man and I are riding on top of one another, and how ensnared, for it is not the customary ways. We take separate rooms in hotels. Carnal interest is absent. Yet tendrils are not. A pilgrim is a person who is up to something. What is it? A pilgrim is a person who works out an attitude to tendrils and other things that trammel the feet, what should that be? Chop them as fast as they grow with my sharp pilgrim's knife? Or cherish them, hoarding drops of water of every kind to aid their struggle? Love is the mystery inside this walking. It runs ahead of us on the road like a dog, out of the photograph.
I want to buy a copy of this book for everyone I know, but no one would read it.
So far, I have 25 Theses & Imperatives for the New Year, nailed to my own door:
1. Go to Spain. And maybe the French Provence.
2. Hire a personal assistant so I can travel and suffer minimal work-related guilt.
3. Take more walks.
4. Cook something provocative once a week.
5. Finally get around to watching every single episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
6. Publish my first self-published poetry chapbook by summertime.
7. The super top-secret, covert, extremely undercover Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia goes public.
8. Cook more Asian food (particularly Schezuan).
9. Exer-what?
10. Less coffee, more tea.
11. Play my guitar more often, and with more calloused fingers.
12. Find a way to ship my piano from Mississippi to Portland.
13. Put the piano in a room.
13a. Play the piano.
14. No more cats.
15. Eat more often.
16. Drink more water, even if it's flavored.
17. Write more paper letters.
18. Deep breaths.
19. Go backpacking again, for a longer stretch.
20. Swell in solitude.
21. Appreciate languor.
22. Climb Mt. Hood.
23. Life as archaeology.
24. Life as architecture.
25. A tired parable, I'm sure, but love people for who they are, not for who you want them to be.
26. Apply to medical school, maybe? Eek!
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were you serious about that last one? my mom's best friend always thought i'd be a doctor. narcolepsy, however, tends to inhibit that pursuit. i'd read the book.. did you send it to me? xo, dan p.s. if you sent me a letter, i'll write back and include a bad painting.
Regarding Plainwater, it really is the best. I now feel like you, Becky, and I are the Plainwater triumvirate.
And as for 23 and 24 in your list, I once wrote a story about two kinds of love I had experienced. The first kind (my favorite) seemed to come from a place that was beyond this life, and I described the characters who experienced it as archaeologists worshipping sacred ruins. The second kind was love that didn't feel at all familiar (or even intense at first) but that built on shared experiences. I described the characters moved by that type as architects. The metaphors did -- and do -- have a kind of potency that can only be evoked using *those* words. Archaeology. Architecture. I'm interested in what made you list those two, if you ever feel like sharing.
And I think you were in my dreams last night.