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Quotes

• A Labor

  When I speak of a labor, then, I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work. The labor of gratitude is the middle term in the passage of a gift. It is wholly different from the “obligation” we feel when we accept something we don’t really want. (An obligation may be discharged by an act of will.) A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. But we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as an equal. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift. Giving a return gift is the final act in the labor of gratitude, and it is also, therefore, the true acceptance of the original gift. The shoemaker finally gives away some shoes. The twelfth step in AA gives away what was received; the man who wanted to teach so as to “pass it on to the younger men” gives away what he received. In each case there is an interim period during which the person labors to become sufficiently empowered to hold and to give the gift.

  –Lewis Hyde, The Gift

• Chaucer

  There is a love for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word “cunt” five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.

  –Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

• Festal/ferial, fattening/dietetic

  One or two final comments on the distinction between the ferial and the festal cuisine. First, the excellence and exquisiteness of the dishes is in no way involved. It is not that festal cooking is best and ferial second-best. Some of the most discerning palates in history have pronounced a good boeuf Bourguignon or tripe Niçoise the full equal of any steak in the world. Many, many of the dishes that now rest secure in the haute cuisine are simply worthy specimens of ferial cooking at its best.

  Even more important, however, the distinction must never be thought of as depending on the “richness” or fattening qualities of the foods involved—as if the festal ones were full of calories and the ferial ones dietetic. The calorie approach is the work of the devil. He has persuaded otherwise sane men that festal eating should not alternate with ferial eating at all, but with dieting—an activity which, while it uses food, hopes that it can keep food from having anything significant to do with us. The modern diet victim sees his life at the table not as a delightful alternation between pearls of great price and dishes of lesser cost, but as a grim sentence which condemns him to pay for every fattening repast (even the sleaziest) with a meal of carrot sticks and celery. Not that there is anything wrong with raw vegetables, or with eating less if you want to—but to allow such considerations to become the rule of man’s eating is simply the death of dining.

  In fact, of course, the insane distinction of fattening/dietetic cannot be squared with the rational one of festal/ferial. The first fastens its attention, not on food, but on little invisible spooks called calories; only the second honestly addresses the real matter at hand. Consequently, the dieter has no way of distinguishing good food from bad. Take éclairs, for example. The world is full of them, mostly awful. Any true eater, ferial or festal, will be able to give you an accurate judgment as to which of them are worth meeting and which should be avoided. The dieter, however, has lost all criteria for judgment. That éclairs are fattening is his sole piece of information. If he is in a mood to diet, he will pass up the best éclair in the world without even a backward look; and if he is in a mood to eat, he will devour a corner-bakery, cardboard-and-corn-starch monstrosity as if it were something out of Brillat-Savarin. He is a man who, for all practical purposes, has lost his taste. He will choose tough steak in the presence of elegant stew, and canned stringed beans when he might have dined on mashed parsnips drenched in butter. All because he has fabricated a set of distinctions which has nothing to do with the subject.

  –Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

• Matchsticks

  Confucius is famous for his aphorisms; Oscar Wilde — infamous for his whip-smart quips. But they were working in the realm of that unit: the quote. I’m not working in that unit. It’s a matter of scale and venue. To be quotable (or diceable, or modular, or granular) was not my goal. It’s hard to be upset about it, but it was not my goal. A good line is a good line.

  A good line well placed is an experience. That was the goal: an experience, a larger unit, enough space to move, to hold propulsions, to let the intentionally unsaid things shimmer in the highly charged spaces between the lines. I crafted poems — units made out of lines placed in a specific order — and the poems have disappeared. My loveseats have been broken into chairs, into matchsticks.

  So how do we respect an original work while we aggregate around it? I was speaking with a friend the other night, and she said her favorite line of mine was “I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his sweater for the longest time.” But that’s not the line. I wrote the word jacket, not sweater. A very different connotation — and connotation is important in poetry — because jacket can be considered as a thicker skin (among other things) in a way that sweater cannot. She was being sloppy, but still — words matter or they don’t. If they matter, don’t change them. If they don’t, then why bother praising the line?

  Each modification dilutes. Each distortion cheapens the work, cripples it, erases it. Whether it’s done in sloppiness, or out of a desire to claim and internalize the work, or with intentional malice, it still amounts to a falsification. We have to be careful, when we build around an existing work, that we don’t ruin it.

  –Richard Siken, quoted in The Poet Laureate of Fan Fiction

• Obsessive

  The mind we were in was obsessive, perseverant. It swam with superstition and half-remembered facts pertaining to how many spiders we ate a year and the rate at which dentists killed themselves. One hemisphere had never been to college, the other hemisphere had attended one of those institutions that is only ever referred to as a bubble, though not beautiful. At times it disintegrated into lists of diseases. But worth remembering: the mind had been, in its childhood, a place of play.

  –Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This