repulsive theory

by Kay Ryan

Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it's got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending-off —
extending far beyond the personal,
I'm convinced —
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.

Not that I could tell quantum teleportation from the other kind

From Chris Moriarty's SF blog:

"I cannot count the number of recent SF novels I've read in which writers got quantum teleportation wrong. And I don't mean sort of wrong. I mean totally, unmistakably, irredeemably, inexcusably, unfudgeably wrong. The kind of wrong that no amount of goodwill or benefit of the doubt can help a writer out of. The kind of wrong that once caused a college friend of mine to get a mathematics exam handed back to him with the following sentence written on it in lieu of a grade: How did you become so terribly lost?"

mm

The Moon on the Crest of New-Fallen Snow

Pain

Has its place—and pity, too—but it is not here.
Here all is calm and cold and luminous.
The snow has smoothed over the tracks of the deer.

- Thomas Disch

How To Pack Books (When Moving After 18 Years)

What my sister and I pack, in order of importance:
1. Books we have read and remember fondly;
2. Books we read in childhood;
3. Books we remember seeing on the shelves for so long a time we might as well have read them;
4. Books we might read some day, maybe;
5. Books that would be cool to keep - history, philosophy, poetry, novels by authors who seem vaguely familiar, and anything that looks old;
6. Books by the same author (either someone in the house must like the author or the library had a lot of surplus books by that author at the sale);
7. Books we feel sorry for.

What my father packs:
1. Everything we didn't.

Play it as it lays

Not just because I like Joan Didion's writing voice, but because this is something in the neighbourhood of what what I imagined it would be like. And because I've read The Year of Magical Thinking.

Right after I meant not to write

but something reminded me of Frank O'Hara:

...I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart --
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

And then a line from Audre Lourde, which I think I first saw in something of Yisheng's:

love is a word, another kind of open.

And Larkin:

On me your love falls like an enormous yes

And some times, other times, I am afraid. For what that might mean, for both and either of us.

Another kind of explanation

From Joan Didion's collected essays, I find this:

I remember one trip home, when I sat alone on a night jet from New York and read over and over some lines from a W. S. Merwin poem I had come across in a magazine, a poem about a man who had been a long time in another country and knew that he must go home:

...But it should be
Soon. Already I defend hotly
Certain of our indefensible faults,
Resent being reminded; already in my mind
Our language becomes freighted with a richness
No common tongue could offer, while the mountains
Are like nowhere on earth, and the wide rivers.

- From "Notes from a Native Daughter", in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

If anyone can find the Merwin poem, I would be grateful.

One kind of explanation

I meant not to write publicly, not until I felt that I had made enough of a start at writing again, so I didn't sound like a parody of myself - doesn't it feel like one is always starting again? without having gone anywhere, and yet starting again - but an essay by Susan Sontag reminded me of this passage from Iris Murdoch.

The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair.

What I hadn't remembered was how the passage continued:

The refusal to attend may even induce a fictitious sense of freedom: I may as well toss a coin. Of course virtue is good habit and dutiful action. But the background condition of such habit and such action, in human beings, is a just mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the world as it is. A philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality. We act rightly ‘when the time comes’ not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachments and with the kind of energy and discernment which we have available.

It's not even a question of fear, or of desire, or at least not foremost a question of fear or desire. But - which way does courage lie? An exercise of justice and realism and really looking.