It's a Jumble

  “Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown. Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away and blown off by the least breeze. It brought me to writing poetry many years ago, initially for its own gratification, but eventually as a way of life. True, frustration and rejection were almost enough to bring this spirit to silence, and sometimes pride brought it to the brink of vanity. From the writing of the very first line, it has found no contentment as it was torn by one doubt after another. This windblown spirit considered the security of court life at one point; at another, it considered risking a display of tis ignorance by becoming a scholar. But its passion for poetry would not permit either. Since it knows no other way than the way of poetry, it has clung to it tenaciously.”         --Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) from his travelogue, T he Knapsack No...

These are strange times, to put it mildly. Again and again on Twitter I see people posting something along these lines: In these times of social distancing/quarantine/lockdown, so many of us are streaming movies/television, listening to music, and reading books to get though the day. Don’t ever say again that art is useless. Some of the art I’ve been consuming: TV I remain obsessed with the Chinese fantasy drama The Untamed (which I wrote about at the end of my last post here ) . I am still losing myself in this rapturous, epic love story; still watching fanvids, still swooning over the beauty of this show and grieving over the terrible losses the characters endure. If you want to be swept into another world, into other lives, to feel intensely and cry over problems that are not your own—this is the show for you. Music I’d never paid much attention to K-pop, but when BTS released their latest album, Map of the Soul:7, I clicked on the performance music video o...

It was a literary pilgrimage, of sorts. It had been over twenty years since I last set foot in Great Britain. I was a college student back then, in Cambridge for six weeks on a summer study-abroad program. I was taking courses in poetry. I was in love with the English Romantics, and I was in England for the first time. Twenty-five years later, I was back with my husband and children. Our daughters’ first time in Europe. We wanted to do touristy things—the Tower of London, the London Eye, Westminster Abbey (we never did get to that last, but it’s another story). We took a boat ride on the River Thames. Became familiar with the  Tube. Walked through Piccadilly Circus, Soho, Chinatown, and all over until our feet hurt. We saw the great contrasts of London, the startling juxtapositions of history: the ancient walls of the Tower of London, over a thousand years old, on one side of the Thames; the glittering Shard, that thrusting skyscraper of glass, on the other side. We ...

Nearly two years ago, in the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, I sat down to write my usual bimonthly blog post of short story recommendations. And I wrote this:   “ I don’t know what good a story does. I don’t know what a single poem or song can do. I don’t know, I don’t know.” It’s twenty-two months later, and I still do not know. But—quite apart from the chaos and darkness of this present moment—I have never known. Since my teens, I have asked myself this question: “What good is fiction? What good are books and stories? What do they do ?” I know what stories have done for me. I know the light and comfort that books and art bring into my life. And I also fear that it’s all frivolous. I think of Keats’ letter to a friend, where he compared poetry to “a mere Jack o’lantern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance." (Letter to Benjamin Bailey, March 13, 1818). I wonder if he's right in that sentence. I wonder if a protest song has...

Alexander Chee on writing: “All my life I’ve been told that this isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter, that it could never matter. And yet I think it does. I think this is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it’s the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing." --Alexander Chee, from his essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

I have been listening to sad songs in languages I cannot understand. It started when I stumbled on a Twitter link to  this song . I cannot understand Mandarin; I had not, until recently, ever followed either of the musical artists featured in the video. I am not in exile, far from home and family. And yet I’ve been obsessed with this song of homesickness, listening over and over to the ache in the vocals, the clear longing in every line.* There is a word in Portuguese for longing. Months ago, I stumbled upon  this BBC travel article   describing it:  saudade . Saudade is untranslatable, writer Eric Weiner asserts before translating it thus: Saudade is a longing, an ache for a person or place or experience that once brought great pleasure. It is akin to nostalgia but, unlike nostalgia, one can feel saudade for something that’s never happened, and likely never will. At the heart of saudade lies a yawning sense of absence, of loss. Saudade, writes scholar Aub...