One True Sentence

‘All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’

So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. ~Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Moveable Feast’

you can only know them

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are and these are things that you can’t come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know them if you are them. ~W.Somerset Maugham, ‘The Razor’s Edge’

I Want a Girl Who Reads

The first time I heard poet Mark Grist perform the poem I Want a Girl Who Reads, I proceeded to watch it several times in succession. Not only did I instantly connect to the poem itself and the sentiment behind it, but I was entranced by the way he performed it. I say “perform” and not “recite” because it’s the performance that really brings it home for me.

It’s a poem but he’s not just saying words, he’s telling a story. and how he tells that story is key: the way he lingers on some words and speeds past others, how the  awkwardness is conveyed at the beginning but then morphs into adoring smiles and respectful passion that we can feel as well as hear and see, the shifting gaze as well as the hand movements that emphasize his points. It makes me feel proud to be a girl who reads, validated. and just a bit naughty…

 

My Heart’s in the Highlands

The recent talk of Burns Night celebrations has me missing Scotland. Before I visited, I dreamed of this poem someday becoming true, and now that it has…I feel like I found a part of myself there but left a different part behind.

 

by Robert Burns

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer –
A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North
The birth place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.

Farewell to the mountains high cover’d with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forrests and wild-hanging woods;
Farwell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;
My heart’s in the Highlands, whereever I go

Pieces Can Stand Alone

When I was trying to come up with a name for this blog, I wanted something that roughly meant ‘to get lost in the details’. That’s when a particular song lyric jumped into my brain:

Man goes beyond his own decision, gets caught up in the mechanism~ The Scarlet Tide by Elvis Costello

There it was! The perfect tagline for what I had in mind.

This kind of thing happens to me often, a certain lyric, verse or quote will grab my attention for seemingly no reason. I always scramble to write it down. it screams out to me, regardless of the context or bigger body of work that it came from; it can stand alone on it’s own.

Sometimes I just like the sound of it, the way it feels in my mouth when I speak it aloud. It is an added bonus if these pieces come to mean something, when they’re able to make a statement or small story separate from the bigger body of work. I really grow to respect a verse, or even a single word, that can do that to me.

The taste of her breath I’ll never get over, the noises that she made kept me awake~ Won’t Go Home Without You by Maroon 5

Sensual. Able to create a clear vision without going into too much detail.

 

tread softly because you tread on my dreams~ The Wind Among The Reeds by W.B.Yeats

This verse spoke to me from the moment that I first encountered it (I heard it in the movie, Equilibrium, which caused me to look up the entire poem and who wrote it). At first it resonated with me as a plea to please not be too harsh in relation to things I had plucked up enough courage to share online. Over time though it has become a reminder to me to try to extend that courtesy to others.

 

I find these slices of feeling in books:

Adventure is no more than discomfort and annoyance recollected in the safety of reminiscence ~The Journeyer by Gary Jennings

 

When the day shall come that we do part, if my last words are not “I love you” you’ll ken it was because I didna have time ~The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon

 

From movies:

I lead a small life, valuable, but small. Sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around? ~You’ve Got Mail

 

I was dreaming about God. He was playing Tennis. Perhaps that’s where God is all the time and that’s why you can’t see him when you’re awake. Perhaps he’s our dream, and we’re his ~Empire Of The Sun

 

And from television:

Jack is here because he has to do something. He can’t be told what that is. He’s got to find it himself. Sometimes you can just hop in the back of someone’s cab and tell them what they’re supposed to do. Other times, you have to let him look out at the ocean for awhile ~Lost

 

They all speak to me in their own ways. So while I too often get caught up in the mechanism and over think things, luckily I am also able to take small snippets of wisdom for what they are, without needing to plug them into something bigger and grander.

These little compact stories are able to teach me helpful things about myself, enhancing my life in ways that the deeper things can not. There is nothing to work through, there is nothing to move past, or on, from. I can just let them gracefully sink in.

…now if only I could commit to writing all of them down in one place, instead of on envelopes, magazine covers, my skin. and on rare occasions, even actual notebooks.

Don’t you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It’s something you can’t analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You’re looking at a picture on the wall. That’s all. But it makes you feel alive to the world. It tells you, yes, you’re here. And yes, you have a range of being that’s deeper and sweeter than you knew ~Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis