Day 44: James Wright, Breece D'J. Pancake, Simone De Beauvoir
James Wright - Miners
The police are dragging for the bodies
Of miners in the black waters
Of the suburbs.
Below, some few
Crawl, searching, until they clasp
The fingers of the sea.
Somewhere,
Beyond tipples and drowsing woodchucks,
A strong man, alone,
Beats on the door of a grave, crying
Oh let me in.
Many women mount long stairs
Into the shafts,
And emerge in the tottering palaces
Of abandoned cisterns.
In the middle of the night,
I can hear cars, moving on steel rails,
colliding
Underground.
I love the imagery of this poem. In very few words it creates such a magical picture. There is something in each stanza that doesn't belong - take the last line of the first one:
The police are dragging for the bodies
Of miners in the black waters
Of the suburbs.
It would be nowhere near as odd without the last few words. I like that the people in this poem live atop a vast underground world of tunnels, cisterns and tombs. It makes me long for the days of my late adolescence playing Minecraft.
Also I only just learned what a cistern is. Cisterns are cool.
Breece DJ Pancake - Trilobites
I watch the cattle play. A rain must be coming. A rain is always coming when cattle play. Sometimes they play for snow, but mostly it is rain. After Pop whipped the daylights out of me with that black snake, he hung it on a fence. But it didn’t rain. The cattle weren’t playing, and it didn’t rain, but I kept my mouth shut. The snake was bad enough, I didn’t want the belt too.
This story made me feel very sad. It reminds me of the beautiful song "Elk River Blues" about a whole land that was flooded by a hydroelectric dam.
The story takes place on the last day of a young man's life before he will be dispossessed of the family home in the mountains. He drinks some coffee with the locals, hunts and (horribly) kills a turtle and meets up with his childhood friend and occasional lover. The ending is devastating.
From memory there is a lot of grim sex in Pancake's stories. I tried to read them a few years ago and found them too bleak. I feel like he was working out his own demons before he shot himself in the head at 26.
This story is great, not in terms of plot, but in description, tone, atmosphere and how it handles flashbacks and past information. How it gets you into the characters tortured head. It is a bit like the Quentin chapter in Sound and the Fury.
The first time I didn't know whrte it was going and kept drifting off, occasionally woken by a jarring image:
One time I used an old black snake for a bullwhip, snapped the sucker’s head off, and Pop beat hell out of me with it. I think how Pop could make me pretty mad sometimes. I grin.
Occasionally classically poetic language:
My father is a khaki cloud in the canebrakes, and Ginny is no more to me than the bitter smell in the blackberry briers up on the ridge.
And a few sentences later:
The pool smells like rot, and the sun is a hardish brown.
I like how brutal and sensitive the language is here. I'll keep reading.
Simone de Beauvoir - Existentialism and Popular Wisdom
In this incredible essay, De Beauvoir, paragraph by paragraph, rebuts the popular accusations that existentialism is:
- miserable
- love and friendship denying
- egoistic
- subjective navel gazing
- dismissive of human life/effort.
She boingflips this to say that it is actually the commonsense, everyday ideology that is all these things. That this pessimistic nihilism is the view most people unconsciously accept and that existentialist beliefs offer a way out.
I identified with a lot of these nihilistic, hopeless beliefs. I felt like she was calling me out while also saying, everyone else believes this too, they just won't admit it.
There are too many cool bits and I can't be bothered quoting them. You can find the essay in The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy which has been all hits so far.