animani4

animani4






or the real deal:

Information desk made from recycled books

information desk3

http://www.recyclart.org/2010/09/library-information-desk/information-desk3/

War is in the Blood of Some Men: Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay composed Lays of Ancient Rome, a series of very popular ballads about heroic episodes in Roman history. The most famous of them, Horatius, concerns the heroism of Horatius Cocles. It contains the oft-quoted lines:


Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?" 

Saturday Verse: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts (1937)


The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Walt Whitman O living always-

O living always

O living always, always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and
look at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.


Walt WHITMAN (1819-1892)

by Walt Whitman

Whispers of heavenly death

in LEAVES OF GRASS


Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.

I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.

Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.

Whispers of Heavenly Death

Whispers of heavenly death murmur'd I hear,
Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,
Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft and low,
Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing,
(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?)

I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,
Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
With at times a half-dimm'd sadden'd far-off star,
Appearing and disappearing.

(Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth;
On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,
Some soul is passing over.)

Walt WHITMAN ( 1819-1892)

Gubbinal by Wallace STEVENS

Gubbinal by Wallace STEVENS



that strange flower, the sun,
is just what you say.
have it your way.

the world is ugly,
and the people are sad.

that tuft of jungle feathers,
that animal eye,
is just what you say.

that savage of fire,
that seed,
have it your way.

the world is ugly,
and the people are sad.


by Wallace STEVENS

HARMONIUM (1923)

Wallace STEVENS

The Reader by Wallace Stevens

The Reader

All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.

It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crounched in the moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."

The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.

by Wallace STEVENS

HARMONIUM
Wallace STEVENS

The snow man by Wallace STEVENS (1879-1955)

The snow man by Wallace STEVENS (1879-1955)

The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

HARMONIUM (1923)
Wallace STEVENS

Wallace Stevens - In the Carolinas

  In the Carolinas

 The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.
 Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.
 Already the new-born children interpret love
 In the voices of mothers.

 Timeless mothers,
 How is it that your aspic nipples
 For once vent honey?

 The pine-tree sweetens my body
 The white iris beautifies me.

 [(from Harmonium, 1923, 1931)
 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1982]
 Copyright (c) 1923, 1931, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1942, 1943, 1944,
 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954 Wallace Stevens

Birds Bring Babies?

STORKS

When Madness Is in the Wings By MICHELLE NICOLE LEE

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October 25, 2009
MODERN LOVE
When Madness Is in the Wings
By MICHELLE NICOLE LEE


THERE are two kinds of madness: the kind that strikes suddenly, like a startled bird, and the kind that stalks silently for years, circling round and round until you are fully gathered in its dark wings. Mine was the latter.

All my life I have been afraid of losing my mind. I don’t know why — there is no legacy of mental illness in my family — but at a young age I decided that reality was a wild horse on which the best you could hope for was a tenuous grip.

For a military kid who moved every few years, this was not far from the truth. The world could, and often did, shift swiftly and resolutely. As I grew older, though, I came to know my illness as largely subdued, if still capable of sudden squalls: those episodes in college, for instance, when I locked myself in my dorm room for weeks at a time, surviving on industrial-size bags of cereal swiped from the dining hall. If anyone knocked, I’d indicate that I was not alone. And I wasn’t. I would awake to find gravity clinging to me like wet cloth to stone.

When clinical depression was diagnosed in my senior year, it was a relief. The phantom had been given form, something I could rail against and, finally, accept. It was Prozac that brokered the truce. With it, I believed I had put my fear behind me.

Then I met Margaret, the woman whose brief presence in my life ultimately would allow me to rescue myself, though I never would have thought so at the time.

It was my first week in graduate school. She stood on the steps of the Yale School of Drama, leaves in her hair, bellowing lines based on a passage from Medea: “What feeble night bird of misfortune is this at my door? Is this that great adventurer — the famous lord of the seas and delight of women, the heir of rich Corinth — this crying drunkard beating down the dark doorstep? Yet you’ve not had enough. You’ve come to drink the last bitter drops. I’ll pour them for you.”

The scene was electric, and I, stricken. What had wrung this rapturous outpouring from this woman, and why did no one else seem to take note of her feral presence?

BRIEFLY I wondered if she was an apparition (there was something surreal about her wide eyes and hawkish face), but then she smiled and caught my gaze and I knew. She was one of them. Here but not here. With us but not. Afflicted by, and in communion with, a force both fierce and unseen — a force that both chastened and exalted her.

If you have vertigo, you avoid bridges. If you fear madness, as I do, you avoid the Faraway Nearby — that which is at once distant and perilously close, a term I had taken from the title of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting.

That day was the first of many on which I simply lowered my gaze and walked around her. Yet not only was Margaret a difficult person to ignore, she was positively viral. Her loud, vibrato voice was mesmerizing; it flung Shakespearean and Greek verse about like nursery rhymes. Her rangy physique and erect carriage added nobility to even the shabbiest ensemble. She gave off a sour-milk odor that lingered long after she’d moved on. To inoculate myself, I developed a kind of hysterical blindness. I simply stopped seeing her.

Avoiding Margaret, however, was not the same as avoiding madness. During my second year at the drama school, the yawning darkness began to swallow me once again, and when the term ended I officially withdrew.

A kind professor arranged for a transfer to a different program, thinking a change of location might help. Yet I felt paralyzed. Unable to move forward or back, I spent most of the summer in a stupor. Then one day I heard a voice call my name from across the street.

I do not know how Margaret knew my name. I froze as though caught in the stare of the Gorgon. She smiled and admired my newly shorn head (I did not have the energy to care for it so had simply unburdened myself).

“Beautiful,” she said. “I wore mine just like it when I was at the drama school.”

That she had been a student at Yale some 15 years earlier was only one of the many parallels in our lives that unnerved me. Like me, she was a black woman. Like me, she fancied herself a writer and director. Like me, she had abruptly left the program.

But by fall I had gotten myself sufficiently together to re-enroll, and I soon commenced work on a documentary project that led me back to Margaret. I didn’t know what it would be. I just knew I wanted to hear her story. And over the course of a month, I conducted several interviews with her. She not only was willing to share her story but also seemed grateful for the opportunity, though at times her participation struck me less as an act of generosity than an exorcism.

Once I got over my formidable apprehension, I found Margaret to be warm and engaging, full of hard-won insights. She was surprisingly lucid, and though I had initially committed myself to simply listening to rather than believing or disbelieving her narrative, I quickly found myself moved by her candor, and convinced of it. She spilled forth the way only someone who has been chewing her memories for years can.

She told me of her father, who preached his first sermon the day she was born, baptized her in a muddy Georgia creek and ran off her suitor with a shotgun. She told me of a mother who liked to chop wood and make pallets, who picked pecans by day and worked at the cleaners at night.

These conversations were not all catharsis for Margaret. I had stirred the pot and her disquiet was increasingly obvious. One afternoon I found her waiting for me outside my classroom door, frighteningly agitated. She thrust a few sheets of folded paper at me, asked for a few dollars and left.

Opening the pages, I was overcome with dread. The scribbled letter was a release granting me permission to use the interview transcripts as I wished, provided I published the attached statement in any program distributed.

The statement began, “Never in the history of the world has God sent Satan in person, Death and her Two Sisters in person, the Devil in Person, the Snake in Person and St. Joan in Person after one individual” and bled into an account of her experience with what she called her “tactile demons.” It ended with both a plea and a command not to judge her without first walking a mile in her shoes.

I was flooded with grief, remorse and a grim new appreciation for the resilience of my quarry. I had not helped her and could not. She had not helped me and could not. Mental illness was beyond all reckoning, and no amount of digging could expose and extricate its roots. The next time I saw Margaret, I thanked her and said I had everything I needed. Then I put away her letter and tapes and did not open them again for 10 years.

In the time that interceded, she remained my touchstone, always in my thoughts, as I experienced the usual outrages, triumphs and diversions. I married and promptly divorced. I crisscrossed the continent for school and work, with stays in New Jersey, California, Costa Rica, Missouri and Washington State. The only constant in my unruly, if not altogether unrewarding life, was the depression.

Then two years ago, when I was living in Palo Alto, I began to suspect I was being watched. Suspicion quickly escalated to conviction, and before long I was lost.

Describing psychosis is a bit like recounting a dream. There is very little one can say to capture its horror or its brilliance. There were many dimensions to my psychosis, the most prevalent being a severe strain of paranoia fueled by profound guilt and self-reproach. No longer was my world peopled by friends, colleagues, relatives or even strangers. Instead, all had become jurors or witnesses for the prosecution, and I was to be held to account for every real or imagined offense.

I created elaborate lists of past transgressions and suitable acts of contrition. I left bouquets of flowers on doorsteps. I placed Post-it notes inscribed with “I Love You” on car windows. I raked the leaves of unsuspecting neighbors. I bought meals for the homeless. I gave away precious possessions and illegally entered homes so that I might sweep away imaginary cobwebs.

IT was not enough.

One day I decided to purchase two dozen red balloons from the corner grocer and distribute them randomly to passers-by. Most recipients were delighted. A few were wary. One was viscerally alarmed. It was an expression I recognized. It was the look I first gave Margaret all those years ago.

In that instant, something in me was jarred. I knew my old fear had come to pass. I had become one of them: the Faraway Nearby. And I saw just how close I had been all along, how narrow that passage is for so many of us. I wanted to shout, “I know what you’re thinking, lady, but there but for the grace of God. ...”

I wish I could say I immediately checked myself into the hospital, but it would be another two months before I accepted treatment, and even then I did so with reluctance. Still, something had awakened in me, a life-altering awareness of who I was and how deeply I had fallen. I had walked a mile in Margaret’s shoes, exactly as she’d told me to, and I did not judge her but felt I knew her, just as I felt I finally knew myself.

We hear of family and loved ones intervening to help at such times of personal crisis, and mine certainly tried. But in the place I was, that kind of love could not reach me. My awakening — my salvation, at the time — relied instead upon the bond I shared with a brilliant and disturbed stranger I’d met more than a decade earlier and thousands of miles away, a fellow sufferer who in our brief time together had managed to stir me more than those with whom I’d spent a lifetime.

I only wish Margaret could know the gift she gave me.


Michelle Nicole Lee is a writer in St. Louis.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times 

When Madness Is in the Wings

By MICHELLE NICOLE LEE

There are two kinds of madness: the kind that strikes suddenly, like a startled bird, and the kind that stalks silently for years, circling round and round until you are fully gathered in its dark wings. Mine was the latter.

Modern Love Essay: http://bit.ly/4ts7t9

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