Quote du Jour: The Truth About Suicide

“The truth is that no one is interested in why you want to kill yourself, no one really believes that you will, until you’ve already done it, and then it becomes morbidly intriguing to try and map it backward.”  ~ THIS CLOSE TO HAPPY - A Reckoning With Depression, by Daphne Merkin

Quote du Jour: The Idol is a Colored Rag

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I have been so preoccupied since April with the precipitous decline, death, and funeral arrangements for my mother that I have paid little attention to Rodak Riffs. It must also be admitted that the instant gratification of Facebook has played a major role in the precipitous decline of this blog. Mea culpa.


That said, I came across a passage this morning in The Bridge to Nothingness that I thought worthy to share, and I offer it up as a Quote du Jour:

…Parents are programmed metaphysically and biologically, conditioned psychologically, and indoctrinated culturally to reproduce and rear offspring, so that their loss is tantamount to the destruction of their ontological raison d’etre. The loss of a parent for an adult child is many times painful, but it is ultimately accepted as the natural course of life. The loss of a young child, on the other hand, is inevitably experienced by the parents as a catastrophic blow, usually resulting in a permanent emotional handicap and, in many cases, in mental incapacitation. The death of a child causes for most parents a traumatic change of their weltanschauung, and in some cases a radical change in their order of priorities, meanings, and even the course of their lives. “There is no armistice for bereaved mothers,” and the patriotic glee of victories in wars is rarely shared by bereaved parents whose sons were killed in these wars. They feel cheated and experience rage at themselves for having either actively or tacitly participated in the sacrifice of their ontological sequel and embodiment to the mirage of patriotism--to abstract notions of glories, ideologies and creeds reinforced by the waving of colored rags, the shouting of slogans by bemedaled marionettes, and the self-important verbosity of hypocritical politicians. Worse still, their pain can never be communicated to anybody who has not experienced the same loss, and even communication with their partners in bereavement cannot dull the pain.

Dick frickin’ Cheney -- this man has your number. Parents--examine your priorities. It seems almost certain to me that a new universal draft is on the way; a draft to feed a global war, designed by our super-rich overlords to arrest the economic decline before it reaches the private beaches and tennis courts, the ballrooms and plush parlors of their loot embellished palaces.

Prepare yourself now to resist the evil, so that when it comes you will be ready with a plan.
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Quote du Jour - re: William Blake

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from Blake and the Bible by Christopher Rowland

Blake espoused what might be termed an inclusive version of the Body of Christ doctrine in which redemption is the recognition of the fact that one was already as a human being part of the divine body and in this space has the awareness to practice forgiveness of sins and the annihilation of selfhood. [p.200]
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Quote du Jour - Expert Advice

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Here, in one succinct sentence from an essay by Charles Simic, is the very essence of what one needs to keep in mind, if one's project is create good poetry:

An archangel is much more interesting in the company of a pig than a saint in prayer.

Think about it. With whom are your imagined angels keeping company?

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Quote(s) du Jour: Simic on Poets and Poetry

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Some ratiocination of Charles Simic on the subjects of poets and poetry:

There are three kinds of poets: Those who write without thinking, those who think while writing, and those who think before writing.

Awe (as in Dickinson) is the beginning of metaphysics. The awe at the multiplicity of things and awe at their suspected unity.

To make something that doesn’t yet exist, but which after its creation would look as if it always existed.

The never-suspected, the always-awaited, the immediately recognized new poem. It’s like Christ’s Second Coming.

“What do poets really want?” I was asked that once by a clever professor of philosophy. It was late at night and we were drinking a lot of wine, so I just said the first thing that came into my mind: “They want to know about things that cannot be put into words.”

Metaphor offers the opportunity for my inwardness to connect itself with the world out there. All things are related, and that knowledge resides in my unconscious.

The poets and writers I admire stood alone. Philosophy, too, is always alone. Poetry and philosophy make slow solitary readers.

A recent critic has enumerated what he calls “the lexicon” of recent poetry. The words mentioned as occurring repeatedly are: wings, stones, silence, breath, snow, blood, water, light, bones, roots, jewels, glass, absence, sleep, darkness. The accusation is that the words are used as ornaments. It doesn’t occur to the critic that these words could have an intense life for a mind with an imaginative and even a philosophical bent.

[all excerpts from pp. 44-45 of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth]

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Quote du Jour: More Charles Simic

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History is a cookbook. The tyrants are chefs. The philosophers write menus. The priests are waiters. The military men are bouncers. The singing you hear is the poets washing dishes in the kitchen.
xxx~ Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

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Quote(s) du Jour: Poetry Is...

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The poet sits before a blank piece of paper with a need to say many things in the small space of a poem. The world is huge, the poet is alone, and the poem is just a bit of language, a few scratchings of a pen surrounded by the silence of the night.

[...]

The task of poetry, perhaps, is to salvage a trace of the authentic from the wreckage of religious, philosophical, and political systems.

~ Charles Simic, "The Flute Player in the Pit"; The Unemployed Fotune-Teller
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Quote du Jour: The Hazards of Poesy

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one of my friends has razor scars running all along his left arm. the other jams pills by the bucketloads into a mass of black beard. they both write poetry. there is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff’s edge.
xxxxx~ Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
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Quote du Jour: Eat Me!

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from The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander:

I knew once the primmest old invalid lady who could well have offered her helplessness to God but had a grievance with Him because He had not permitted her to be eaten by a cannibal for the Faith; she could not accept herself as a sick woman but she would have achieved heroic virtue as a cutlet!

Seems quite clear to me...

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Quote du Jour: A Poet's Confession

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I was just sitting here, reading Charles Bukowski’s introduction to Notes of a Dirty Old Man, the 1969 collection of his pieces for the Los Angeles underground newspaper, Open City. Bukowski was waxing enthusiastic about the freedom given him to write and publish absolutely anything he wanted to as a columnist for Open City. During the course of this he writes something that brought to mind a slightly controversial exchange I had with members of my online writers group. In that exchange I had voiced my reasons for being content to share my poems only on my blog, or on Facebook, where I have pretty much total control over them. I explained that the effort necessary to be successful in “getting published” was not worth the frustrations involved. Nor was the payoff for that success great enough to change one’s life.

It therefore amused to me to read Bukowski saying the following about writing his column for Open City:

For action, it has poetry beat all to hell. Get a poem accepted and chances are it will come out 2 to 5 years later, and a 50-50 shot it will never appear, or exact lines of it will later appear, word for word, in some famous poet’s work, and then you know the world ain’t much. Of course, this isn’t the fault of poetry; it is only that so many shits attempt to print and write it.

Btw, this introduction also contains the following paragraph:

It’s all very strange. Just think, if they hadn’t airbrushed the cock and balls off the Christ child, you wouldn’t be reading this. So, be happy.

Dig it. What Charles said.
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Quote du Jour: Poetry

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from “On Poetry and Language” – Robert Lax

xxx.

(language is a
phoenix

poetry a phoenix

reborn
from its
own

ashes

xxx.

(let the language
fall to ashes

& poetry
will arise)

let the language
fall to ashes

& new language
will arise

xxx.
xxx
XX[…]

Poetry may express
the poet

xxx.

It may serve as discourse
from man to man

More truly it moves
between man & God

xxx.

The psalmist David
sang for the Lord,

& the spirit of the
Lord replied

xxx.
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Quote du Jour: Where It's At

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…I agree that the conquest of naturalism has been a good thing. The struggle for man to adapt himself to an anthropocentric universe is tragic; yet if he had ever really become Christian man would see and understand his present position much better. It is because men never really understood or believed in Christ that we have reached the present position. This is not a cliché, and certainly it is not meant in the sense that “men never became devout Christians.” On the contrary, there have always been devout Christians, but frankly they solve no problems for anyone, least of all the world. Christ did not die on the cross merely so that there might be devout Christians. ~ Thomas Merton; letter to Czeslaw Milosz, 16 September 1961
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Quote du Jour: Just For the Hell of It

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"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
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Quote du Jour: Indirect Objects

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The following is a short excerpt from a much longer, and excellent poem by Sandra Agricola, entitled, "Nocturnes: The Gift of Suicide":

[...]

Indirect objects -- all of us -- of someone else's
misguided actions.
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It would be pointless and tiresome to go into my personality,
my childhood, my body language. Sometimes things transpire for
no particular reason. Dams burst and engineers stand around
scratching the seats of their courduroy britches. People fall
in love with victims everyday for no apparent reason. Falling
away from someone can be understood in the same way.
XXXXXX____

[...]

"Indirect objects--all of us." Aye, and there's the rub.
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Quote du Jour: Don't Leave 'em Laughin'

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What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously. We are rather insignificant little bundles of energy and vitality in a vast organization of life. But we pretend that we are the very center of this organization. This pretension is ludicrous; and its absurdity increases with our lack of awarness of it. The less we are able to laugh at ourselves the more it becomes necessary for others to laugh at us. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr
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Quote du Jour: Art for Our Sake

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As quoted in Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South:

Amidst such a terribly dehumanized world as ours, the function of art, says [critic Lionel] Trilling, is to rehumanize us. What we least need, says Trilling, is the anonymous and silenced voice of many modern novelists. …Hence Trilling’s call for novelists whose voice is not banished from their books: “Surely what we need is…the opportunity to identify ourselves with a mind that willingly admits that it is a mind and does not pretend that it is History or Events or the World but only a mind thinking and planning – possibly planning our escape.”
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Quote du Jour: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

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In her memoir And a Voice to Sing With, Joan Baez succinctily sums up the residuals of her affair with Bob Dylan and of that period known as "the 'Sixties:

Even now, in the the 1980s, "Farewell, Angelina," a beautiful little love song laced with cockeyed imagery, is enough to transport a festival audience of forty thousand people in France back to the meaningful days of the sixties, and to give them a sense of empowerment, because for a few minutes they can become a part of a dream from the years when "everything was happening," life seemed to have a purpose, and everyone made a difference. And that, dear Bob, is not fuckin' bad.

We thought we could sit forever and fun, but our chances really was a million to one.
xxxxx~ "Bob Dylan's Dream"
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Update: check out how beautiful Joan is here, in a live clip that unfortunately truncates the song.
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Quote du Jour: All and Everything

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[Solovyov's] goal was the full reconciliation of the divine and the human--or spirit and matter, male and female--not through a motley, syncretic accumulation of beliefs or a crude dualism that privileged either the material world or the world of spirits, but through a triadic and ultimately mystical operation of faith. Sophia provided him with the third element to effect this interpenetration.
xxxx~ Divine Sophia - the Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
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Quote du Jour: Historico-Spiritual Amnesia

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Western Christians have forgotten that before the coming of Islam utterly transformed the situation in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, there was a good chance that the center of gravity of Christian faith might have moved east to Iraq rather than west to Rome. Instead, the ancient Christianity of the East was nearly everywhere faced with a destiny of contraction in numbers, suffering and martyrdom which still continues.
xxx ~ Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Can you picture conservative Irish or Bostonian Catholics lobbying for a return to the traditional Arabic Mass?
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Quote du Jour: Awesome

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A line from a David Foster Wallace story with a title too long to cite:

xxxxHer nipples the color of a skinned knee.

What a tender and subtle image of the human condition!
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