Day 37: Robert Creeley, Helene Bessette, Elizabeth Hardwick
Abandoning the CaLD theme and will just be reading anything now..
Poem: Robert Creeley - The Rain
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
.
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
Full poem here
I like this simple poem a lot. It makes me feel peaceful and calm and I can hear the rain. Nice.
Novella: Helene Bessette - Lili is Crying
A short novel written in sparkling free verse about an mutually over-dependent mother and daughter, the mother being a classic Emotionally Unstable personality. The story is filled with melodramatic intensity, of betrayals and gossip and tragic affairs - but the clear direct poetry keeps it feeling special and honest.
I devoured it in a single sitting (5 hours lying in bed) and enjoyed it a lot, but now I don't remember so much about what made it great. Written as poetry, it just felt really great to read, whereas if it had been written more conventionally, I don't think it would be the kind of story I'd feel excited about.
But I liked this book a lot.
Essay: Elizabeth Hardwick - Rosmersholm
I also read Ibsen's Rosmersholm today, which was a pretty good play with a lot to analyse, but it did not feel as cohesive or shocking as his other more famous works. Still, Hardwick's essay on the book made me appreciate it more, and inspires me to reread it again in the future.
Hardwick is a wonderful literary essayist. She really pulls out the most interesting things from the texts, and occasionally veers off into doing her own philosophy or cultural-work. Here is what she says about love triangles:
There is always something vulgar about a triangle. Even in the most elevated circumstances, the struggle is one of consumption, of "having" or "getting" something that is not, so to speak, on the free market. The victors are degraded by slyness, corruption, and greediness; the losers by weakness and humiliation. Heartlessness, ignobility, and ambition are the essence. it is a struggle for the experienced, not for the very young. only those who have lived and endured have the understanding of the narrowness of opportunity within one lifetime. this experience provides the energy and the brutal decisiveness necessary to persist.
Here are the closing remarks of the essay which I think are great:
If [Ibsen's plays] have any moral it is that, in the end, nothing will turn out to have been worth the destruction of others and of oneself.