Model City

What is the purpose of globes? A large thing falsely small.
The globe with colorful countries pasted on it;
the globe containing, adrift in plastic snow,
a city where the atmosphere is liquid, denser than air.
Yes, this is how we, outside of cities, feel;
our noses smudge against the lens of glass,
our hovering breaths behold the skyline whole
and fiercely we believe that it is real,
unlike the sere, street-level town in which
to represent a large expanse of grass
someone has taken pains to depict each blade, and filled a useless field.

Other People

In the afternoons we slink out over the city,
pure clear squares of grey leading around corners
to wrought-iron and wood, constructs that claim
other people live here too.

Other people in the park, by the boulangerie,
down the hill, other people tut-tut-tutting along
the square with the glass pyramid that nobody understands
but everybody sort-of likes.

We pass other people’s gardens with ivy overflowing,
other people’s lights illuminating their swan-laced curtains,
other people’s beat up desk discarded on the sidewalk that hey,
we could use.

We come home when it’s too dark and too cold.
Across the way, the neighbors sit down for dinner, just as we do.
Do they look happier than us? We wave at them,
we watch them moving about like mimes;
to us they’re more than strangers.

two-worldedness

This is an essay that is mentioned in the back of Vendela Vida's novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I just finished and recommend highly. Vida credits this essay with provoking the novel by making her wonder, "What kind of person feels that her past has nothing to do with her present?"

These questions about where the self resides temporally may be interesting to anyone who chooses the lyric mode of expression over the narrative (as well as to any philosphers skulking in our midst.)

‘Against Narrative’


Times Literary Supplement October 15 2004


Galen Strawson




“Self is a perpetually rewritten story”, according to the psychologist Jerry Bruner: we are all constantly engaged in “self-making narrative” and “in the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives”. Oliver Sacks concurs: each of us “constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ [and] “this narrative is us, our identities”. A vast chorus of assent rises from the humanities—from literary studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political theory, religious studies, echoed back by psychotherapy, medicine, law, marketing, design…: human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.


I’ll call this the Psychological Narrativity thesis. It is a straightforwardly empirical thesis about the way ordinary human beings experience their lives—this is how we are, it says, this is our nature—and it’s often coupled with a normative thesis, which I’ll call the Ethical Narrativity thesis, according to which a richly Narrative outlook on one’s life is essential to living well, to true or full personhood.


Two theses, four possible positions. One may, first, think the empirical psychological thesis true and the ethical one false: one may think that we are indeed deeply Narrative in our thinking and that it’s not a good thing. Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s novel La nausée, holds this view. It is also attributed to the Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius.


Second, one may think the empirical thesis false and the ethical one true. One may grant that we’re not all naturally Narrative in our thinking while holding that we should be, and need to be, in order to live a good life. There are versions of this view in Plutarch and a host of present-day writings.


Third, one may think both theses true: all normal human beings are naturally Narrative and Narrativity is crucial to a good life. This is the dominant view in the academy, followed by the second view. It leaves plenty of room for the idea that many of us would profit from being more Narrative than we are, and the idea that we can get our “self-narratives” wrong in one way or another.


Finally, one may think both theses are false. This is my view. I think the current dominance of the third view is regrettable. It’s not true that there is only one way in which human beings experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative. I think the second and third views hinder human self-understanding, close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and can be highly destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts.


To take this further, one needs to distinguish between one’s sense of oneself as a human being considered as a whole and one’s sense of oneself as an inner mental entity or “self” of some sort—I’ll call this one’s “self-experience”. When Henry James says of one of his early books, in a letter written in 1915, “I think of...the masterpiece in question...as the work of quite another person than myself...a rich...relation, say, who...suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship”, he has no doubt that he is the same human being as the author of that book, but he doesn’t feel he is the same self or person as the author of that book. One of the most important ways in which people tend to think of themselves (wholly independently of religious belief) is as things whose persistence conditions are not obviously or automatically the same as the persistence conditions of a human being considered as a whole. Petrarch, Proust, Derek Parfit and thousands of others have given this idea vivid expression. I’m going to take its viability for granted and set up another distinction—between “Episodic” and “Diachronic” self-experience—in terms of it.


The basic form of Diachronic self-experience [D] is that one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future—something that has relatively long-term diachronic continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life. I take it that many people are naturally Diachronic, and that many who are Diachronic are also Narrative.


If one is Episodic [E], by contrast, one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. Episodics are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms (the Episodic/Diachronic distinction is not the same as the Narrative/non-Narrative distinction, but there are marked correlations between them).

This is just the first 1/6th of the article. Find the rest here. It gets thicker and better.

Points of Light

The ever-present calculation, am I going to die today?
to which is added, for the first time in years, the smell of skunk.
I thought they were extinct already in these parts, or nearly.
The inundating wave of gratefulness.

For us, the skyline cast like jewels along the river.
The audience stands in the aisles of the local bus
as it wends its way though West New York, the last bus of the night,
what luck, for us and only for us.

I do not know how I come to my emotions.
Between moments of nuzzling his bundled hija’s face
a man is unreeling ropes of words I climb to laughter although
I am sure I do not speak the language of this complicated joke.

could use some help

is not the title of the poem but i've been slicing and dicing and smushing together bits on this one. Any advice is welcome, especially for the troubling last stanza.

Relocating to Colder Climates

The urgency of August has disappeared.
Gone are the towns of dust and spit and dung––
I’ve been sent looking under some other rock.

Here is where the city lines draw a mazed procession,
the mind rambles among cobbled edifices;
containers we’ve made to store books and chairs,
scribbled papers, and the little crooked cupboard of the heart.

The contrabass beyond this door and then another
plays a pebbled path bubbled, swerving.
The pin-pointed part of the self remains elusive.
It’s best to cling to things that can be molded by hand,
tugging on strings to fill this space with life-rumblings.

When it got very bad/they leapt into each other's eyes/and shut them firmly

From Adam Zagajewski’s Introduction to The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert:

"Every great poet lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world of history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a dense layer of dreams, imagination, fantasms. . .

These two territories conduct complex negotiations, the result of which are poems. Poets strive for the first world, the real one, conscientiously trying to reach it, to reach the place where the minds of many people meet, but their efforts are hindered by the second world, just as the dreams and hallucinations of certain sick people prevent them from understanding and experiencing events in their waking hours. Except that in great poets these hindrances are rather a symptom of mental health, since the world is by nature dual, and poets pay tribute with their own duality to the true structure of reality, which is composed of day and night, sober intelligence and fleeting fantasies, desire and gratification.

There is no poetry without this duality, though the second, substitute world is different for each outstanding creative artist."

When I read this yesterday it seemed to be speaking to Elizabeth's poem, which derives its power (for me) from its surrealism. The actions unfolding are dignified as signs (because the context is a poem, because of the underlying repetitive structure of the words and sounds) yet the meaning of these signs is baffling. The poem insinuates with its matter-of-fact tone that we should be able to figure out its meaning, but remains elusive, giving the eerie sensation that it is the reader that is strange and out of place; the world of the poem is solid; the two worlds that Zagajewski describes are inverted.

PS: Have any of you read Herbert's poems? This book is blowing me away . . .

Name Day

We’ve broken all the windows in the attic
again with our singing games. The seventy-six
doves found the seeds we left for them,
and now they are all sleeping in the middle
of the day, their heads tucked under their wings.
We found the orchard full of plums and now
we’re all sleeping in the middle of the day,
with our heads tucked under our wings.

Yesterday a great wind or a ghost or god sent the wheelbarrows
all rolling downhill towards the dark water.

A man showed up, saying he could read
the furrows their stiff legs had dragged through the earth,
saying they spell his name, his story,
that it now belongs to us.

We baked the delicate bread in his honor,
the braided wedding bread with rosewater,
because he is the only one who can
tell us how divine came to be
a verb, and what language water
speaks beneath the earth.

Because, you see, we have no precedent
for celebrations of this kind.

a Metaphor for our lifves [sic] as they stand

It felt like we had been driving forever through a forest of trees of which we couldn’t see the tops. It was becoming dark when, suddenly on our right, we saw lights. Yes, they were feeble, but I clutched your arm in excitement. They were the first glow we’d seen in miles and miles.

The road writhed a little and you read, spelled out on an arrow, surrounded by old fashioned chaser lights, “You Are Here.”

“That’s not what it says,” I objected. “The sign says Are You Here.”

The windshield was sparkling clear because of the rain. We pulled into the parking lot. The glass bulbs which made up the sign looked delicate.

There was an old Shell pump of indistinguishable color beside a narrow building made of wood. It had a sharply pitched roofline, shutters, dormers. The front steps were steep.

“I would like my stories to be made of real places, real events—these are the things from which I’d like to make narratives, find meaning,” I said.

“Lets go inside,” you said, getting out of the car.

Another, smaller, wooden sign said, The Inn Between.

Return To Form

Following the curvature of the earth, an orange circuitboard of light

as we circle the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Airport for reasons dark to me: once, twice, thrice.

Some of these networks congeal as streets, others coagulate into towns.

Bad neighborhoods, court districts, voting precincts are impossible to identify, looking down.

Twinklings hint of other systems, here arrayed in time: redlight, greenlight, traffic surges,

store hours, schedules, seasons, ways of moving, the clear as day but invisible causes of hidden wants, urges.

What I've come here for is the homes, those shells we each sculpt around our own life

to shut out the cold and to protect against the bone-grey trees, stunted balconies, satellites, sights

which root above, wrought iron and water tower, in sky-plots long ago

staked out for nobler purpose by our hearts.

bumper sticker

"Metaphors be with you."

I saw this on a bumper sticker in California this week, and it made me giggle. I want one.