Emersonian Bible #4: Harrison, Knausgaard, Qiu
News, archive, quotes, and recommendations.
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
If things have seemed a bit off around here lately, it’s because I’ve been getting divorced. I can’t recommend it, unless you’re the type who enjoys being dragged behind vehicles, having your fingernails ripped out, listening to Journey, or undergoing other methods of extreme torture. The last several months has been an extended series of nasty metamorphoses – of starting over and starting over and starting over again.
These circumstances have presented problems for this publication. Much of my recent writing has served a therapeutic, and thus deeply personal, function; almost all of it has either obliquely or explicitly been reckoning with this major disruption to my life – including, as attentive readers may already have noticed, everything that has been published here.
But here’s the issue: that isn’t what I want this space to be. I’m bored with my personal turmoil as a subject. I am not Philip Roth or Karl Ove Knausgaard – I have no interest in further publicly airing out the minutiae of the last few months in writing, even in veiled form. And unlike, say, Saul Bellow or Elena Ferrante, I have no special insight into what has happened – only the very simple and obvious observation that getting divorced sucks shit. Which I’ve said already.
Hence why things have been mostly quiet here this year. I briefly considered indefinitely shuttering this site and focusing my energies elsewhere – not because I wanted to, necessarily, but because of my seeming inability to justify to myself what I’m doing here and why. What is this space, and who is it for? You’d think I’d be able to answer that question by now.
But I’ve put too much work into this project – and produced too much writing that I’m enormously proud of – to just let it die. I’m going to try to give it a chance to breathe again in the coming weeks. I just needed to first clear the obstruction that’s been blotting out my vision. Let this post be a small blast of dynamite, opening the way for something new.
Archive
Since the last Emersonian Bible, Smith’s Notes has published:
Picasso / Warhol: Whose Era?
An attempt to outline two different strains of thinking on art.Balcony Man (Song Series #2)
A song by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis.Should’ve Been Me (Song Series #3)
A song by Mitski.Terlingua Ghost Town: Poems
An original poetry chapbook about love, horror, and Leonard Cohen in South Texas.Ceci n’est pas un Proust
Notes on reading in time.
Daily Devotional
In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the “beingness” of life…. a dam doesn’t stop a river, it just controls the flow. Technically speaking, you can’t stop one at all.
…my definition of magic in the human personality, in fiction and in poetry, is the ultimate level of attentiveness. Nearly everyone goes through life with the same potential perceptions and baggage, whether it’s marriage, children, education, or unhappy childhoods, whatever; and when I say attentiveness I don’t mean just to reality, but to what’s exponentially possible in reality…. All this is true, but why are people incapable of ascribing to the natural world the kind of mystery that they think they are somehow deserving of but have never reached? This attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you’re going to be boring. As Rimbaud said, which I believed very much when I was nineteen and which now I’ve come back to, for our purposes as artists, everything we are taught is false—everything.
When you are not aware of yourself, you start to write things you have never thought about before. Your thoughts do not take the path they would normally have followed, and the thinking is different from your own. The language is in you, but it’s out of you, and it doesn’t belong to you. That’s what literature can do—when you throw something in, something else comes back.
If you have faith in your writing, it’s easy. It’s when you remove that faith that things become difficult—when you start to think, this is stupid, this is idiotic, this is worthless, and so on. That’s the real fight: to overcome those kinds of thoughts.
A human being has only so much in them, and yet you must learn through experience, until you finally reach the maddening conclusion that the world wrote you off a long time ago, or accept the prison sentence that your crime is your existence. And the world keeps turning as if nothing had happened.
Recommendations
The music of Jenny Hval
Between Knausgaard and Jenny Hval, something’s gone right in the state of Norway. I first discovered Hval’s otherworldly, ethereal art-pop through a 2019 collaboration with the (also highly underrated) Australian songwriter Laura Jean; recently, I’ve been diving deep into her work, with highly satisfying results. What music fan, I ask, could resist the alien transmission of “Jupiter,” the mesmerizing lullaby of “Spells,” or the hypnotic sweep of Lost Girls’ “Love, Lovers,” possibly my favorite Hval track?
Be good to each other.
