HOLD ON TIGHT

HE SAID, MARIE, MARIE, HOLD ON TIGHT And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. ~ The Waste Land, "The Burial of The Dead", Eliot Wednesday, January 03, 2007 IV Adrienne Rich: who watch for my mistakes in grammar, my mistakes in love Perhaps it’s a problem of syntax. I'm thinking of you on Zuma, nineteen and recovering from brain surgery, writing haikus in a private language. Merleau-Ponty: we move through language like a fish swims through water. I read Merleau-Ponty like any other poem; I might have made the line up; I've forgotten the rest of the essay but I love the economy of that line. We move through language, not language through us, or exactly that: we move through language and it moves through us. Locke thought that words were signs superimposed on ideas, ideas were the stuff of thoughts/of our minds, words take meaning from the ideas they overlay. Merleau-Ponty said (Saussure said) words take meaning from the relations between them. To see the edge of each word and not to fall into the space between them, we have to move like a fish swims through water. In its element. Of necessity. As a fish takes in air by filtering the water through its gills, keeping the water out. If we are to breathe underwater, if we are not to drown in language, if we are not to suffocate outside it. Coming back to language, after all. The fierce joy circling beneath the words. Whatever else is there. [This is the poem I was afraid to write: What happens after grief has dried up? You learn to breathe again.] V (Digression) I still think you romanticise New York too much. Last day in New York, I took the train down to Coney Island to look for Woody Allen's house under the roller-coaster and to see the old Russians in fur coats on the beach. I couldn't find either, but I did find the Aquarium and went in with all the little kids to see the jellyfish and the penguins and the whales (were they the beluga whales Geryon saw, as alive as he was / on their side / of the terrible slopes on time?). You brought me back a penguin the time you went with Laurie and Stevie and his friend. Perhaps I should have gone with you, to race along the Boardwalk with the kids, to be bewildered and charmed by your second family, the Jewishness, the closeness, the startling normality of it all. I didn't go with you and the Levines to Chinatown, either, to celebrate the end of Passover (was it Passover?); I stayed at home to read Hannah Arendt and later slipped out to a bar down on 96th to hear Carolyn Leonhart sing the glass songs. At home; it was home for me in that unsettled way, the tiny rooms on 110th, the dim crowdedness of the Hungarian, the winds that ran straight along the city grid. I never stopped marvelling at the way the city was laid out all in grids; it made getting lost so much less permanent. I didn't come from a place of mountains and ocean, as you did; I came from three years of rain and cobblestones and the heartbreaking beauty of the Radcliffe Camera; I came from a desire to run away and to stop running away and simply to stop, for a time; I was content to let the city stay strange, indifferent, inexhaustible. (Oxford, you see, I am bound to; I knew every corner of it.) It's a different city I remember now and a different city from what we shared, whatever we had of it; memory lights a different city every night, and it was always a city that wore other memories; it was Woody Allen's city, and Susan Sontag's city, and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's and there was the West End where they had gotten drunk, and W. H. Auden’s dive on 55th Street, and Adrienne Rich's this island of Manhattan is island enough for me and of course the city of Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, you gave them to me later. You're mixed up in my memory with New York, inseparable from the city you hate and equally fictitious. What kind of grand love affair was it, could it have been? Three months, maybe a little more, to get used to the idea of leaving. I have a spindleful of CDs, fond memories of bagels, the collected Stevens; what did I leave you with? – that no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible. (Edward Said, Reflections on Exile) By Koh Tsin Yen QLRS Vol. 3 No. 3 Apr 2004 I can see her poem. The streets. The sense of departure. Yes, leaving for New York will steal your soul, capture your imagination and possibly break your heart. posted by dawn # 11:38 PM Comments: Post a Comment << Home		[publishing] Publishers Weekly . Dystel & Goderich . New York Center for Independent Publishing . Association of American University Presses . Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators [people] clarisse . nurul . aunty zarina (ummi's bakery) . jeremy . pak . cyril . softblow . karen & kenny (booksactually) . eric . joel . [other loves] digitaljournalist . ballet dictionary . poetshouse . urbanwordnyc [me] dawn, singapore, new york city, ithaca. 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HE SAID, MARIE, MARIE, HOLD ON TIGHT

And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

~ The Waste Land, "The Burial of The Dead", Eliot

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

IV

Adrienne Rich:
who watch for my mistakes in grammar,
my mistakes in love

Perhaps it’s a problem of syntax.

I'm thinking of you on Zuma, nineteen and recovering from brain surgery, writing haikus in a private language.

Merleau-Ponty: we move through language like a fish swims through water. I read Merleau-Ponty like any other poem; I might have made the line up; I've forgotten the rest of the essay but I love the economy of that line. We move through language, not language through us, or exactly that: we move through language and it moves through us. Locke thought that words were signs superimposed on ideas, ideas were the stuff of thoughts/of our minds, words take meaning from the ideas they overlay. Merleau-Ponty said (Saussure said) words take meaning from the relations between them. To see the edge of each word and not to fall into the space between them, we have to move like a fish swims through water. In its element. Of necessity. As a fish takes in air by filtering the water through its gills, keeping the water out. If we are to breathe underwater, if we are not to drown in language, if we are not to suffocate outside it.

Coming back to language, after all. The fierce joy circling beneath the words. Whatever else is there.

[This is the poem I was afraid to write:

What happens after grief has dried up?

You learn to breathe again.]

V (Digression)

I still think you romanticise New York too much.

Last day in New York, I took the train down to Coney Island to look for Woody Allen's house under the roller-coaster and to see the old Russians in fur coats on the beach. I couldn't find either, but I did find the Aquarium and went in with all the little kids to see the jellyfish and the penguins and the whales (were they the beluga whales Geryon saw, as alive as he was / on their side / of the terrible slopes on time?). You brought me back a penguin the time you went with Laurie and Stevie and his friend. Perhaps I should have gone with you, to race along the Boardwalk with the kids, to be bewildered and charmed by your second family, the Jewishness, the closeness, the startling normality of it all. I didn't go with you and the Levines to Chinatown, either, to celebrate the end of Passover (was it Passover?); I stayed at home to read Hannah Arendt and later slipped out to a bar down on 96th to hear Carolyn Leonhart sing the glass songs. At home; it was home for me in that unsettled way, the tiny rooms on 110th, the dim crowdedness of the Hungarian, the winds that ran straight along the city grid. I never stopped marvelling at the way the city was laid out all in grids; it made getting lost so much less permanent. I didn't come from a place of mountains and ocean, as you did; I came from three years of rain and cobblestones and the heartbreaking beauty of the Radcliffe Camera; I came from a desire to run away and to stop running away and simply to stop, for a time; I was content to let the city stay strange, indifferent, inexhaustible. (Oxford, you see, I am bound to; I knew every corner of it.) It's a different city I remember now and a different city from what we shared, whatever we had of it; memory lights a different city every night, and it was always a city that wore other memories; it was Woody Allen's city, and Susan Sontag's city, and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's and there was the West End where they had gotten drunk, and W. H. Auden’s dive on 55th Street, and Adrienne Rich's this island of Manhattan is island enough for me and of course the city of Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, you gave them to me later. You're mixed up in my memory with New York, inseparable from the city you hate and equally fictitious. What kind of grand love affair was it, could it have been? Three months, maybe a little more, to get used to the idea of leaving. I have a spindleful of CDs, fond memories of bagels, the collected Stevens; what did I leave you with?

– that no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible. (Edward Said, Reflections on Exile)

By Koh Tsin Yen

QLRS Vol. 3 No. 3 Apr 2004

I can see her poem. The streets. The sense of departure. Yes, leaving for New York will steal your soul, capture your imagination and possibly break your heart.

posted by dawn # 11:38 PM

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