Posts tagged as:

passion

The Being We Become

September 3, 2009

in Process,Words

My brain finds connections I can’t completely explain between the Shu Ting poem I posted last week and this passage by bell hooks:

“I did not wait for desegregation, for college, for creative-writing classes, for grown-ups to show me the way. I found my vocation. It called to me and I was determined to answer the call. I began to write in my girlhood. And I am writing still, moving swiftly into midlife with a body of words I have made into books beside me. No passion in my life has been as constant, as true as this love. No passion has been as demanding. When words call, to answer, to satisfy the urge, I must come again and again to a solitary place — a place where I am utterly alone. In that moment of grace when the words come, when I surrender to their ecstatic power, there is no witness. Only I see, feel, and know how my mind and spirit are carried away. Only I know how the writing process alchemically alters me, leaving me transformed. Other writers tell of how it works within them. Written words change us all and make us more than we could ever be without them. Still the being we become in the midst of the very act of writing is only ever intimately present to the one who writes.”

– from the preface to “remembered rapture”

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Mixed Feelings About Savaging

April 25, 2009

in Audience,Thinking,Words

From Mark Ford’s review of William Logan’s new book “Our Savage Art”:

Certainly his own critical persona owes much to this model; in his introduction to this book he figures himself as a version of Diogenes, the austere ancient Greek philosopher who lived in a tub and despised all people and possessions. “A critic who does his job,” Logan observes, “must be a good hater if he’s to be a good lover, because if he likes everything he reads he likes nothing well enough.”

Yes — but if he ‘hates’ nearly everything he reads or encounters, which seems like the case with Logan (I have not read him) and was certainly the case with Diogenes, does his opinion tell us anything about the work reviewed? Or just about the distance of the reviewer from human experience?

Or, is the belittling expression of disgust more excusable if it is articulate and sometimes witty, rather than merely frothing?

Or, does it simply arouse the same lesser passions as gossip and social intrigue?

Or, is passion passion, regardless of its sub-type nuance?

I have always felt a nostalgic longing for the sort of passionate art audiences that rioted at the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”…

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