Thank you for these words of encouragement, they’re writing.  It was exactly what I needed to hear.

Right now you’re like a sulking cherry tree that hasn’t bloomed for years but then inexplicably erupts with pink flowers in mid-autumn. You’re like a child prodigy who lost her mojo for a while and then suddenly recovers it when her old mentor comes back into her life after a long absence. You’re like a dormant volcano that without any warning spurts out a round of seemingly prophetic smoke signals on the eve of a great victory for the whole world.

Having a fan in your face turns anyone into a paperback romance.

9 March 1944

Dearest Tess

Here is a little note to wish you every happiness on your birthday. Your mother will give you the present I have for you. It is some painting material and I want you to take great care of it & paint very carefully, because these colours and brushes are not made as toys but are the kind which real artists use, and when a thing is the best of its kind, even if it is only a little thing like a paint brush, it should be treated like a Sacred Animal. Always remember it is not the size or price of things that is valuable but the quality.

You have been a great happiness to your mother and me for five years. It is very sad that I see so little of you. I pray that before you are six ¹ we shall be together at home once more

Ever your loving
Papa

¹ It was her sixth birthday.

(From The Letters of Evelyn Waugh)

Later he would write, “My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.”  A charming brilliance, he had.

(except really I was just pissed because the bartender was acting like I was just gazing at him for my own goddamn pleasure, except I got news: no one’s throwing him any goddamn parades)

(maybe they were, who cares)

(via weekendpartyupdate, ole)

Recall Lolita; ol’ Humbert Hum spends his afternoons milking the venom from his fangs in a fey little leather bound diary.  He assumes the Big Dove too witless to make any attempt at deciphering these ruinous revelations, the stuff which fills the exhausted silence she neurotically mistakes for love.  And yet, Lo!  The Fat Haze has it in her.  A Bad Accident soon follows.  Hum, feckless greedy tick that he is, was not writing on Doane Paper.

“College ruled” paper should be left for the animals.  Wild minds need structure or else they’re all over the page.  Must each letter be a mile high, visible to every wandering eye vying for a peek at your engine?  That’s always infuriated me.  My mother prefers gridded paper, but because I am a dumbell, my eyes cannot stay on a linear path.  Chad Doane has brilliantly solved this.  Every three horizontal lines on the grid are a slightly bolder blue.  It’s a beautiful thing.

No one’s throwing themselves in front of a speeding car for me, my friends.  They can’t read a goddamn thing I write.

It’s also great for drawing and mapping out plans to better your future which you will never execute, but will frequently pause amongst the ruins to admire the order and ease they had so elegantly promised on paper.

(I’m only allowed Nabokov in small doses.)

My mother found this on her window shield a few years ago randomly.  I have kept it for years.  At first I was astonished by how many of those needs seemed superfluous, even luxurious.  Don’t allow yourself to live without, in both what you demand for yourself and what you give to others.  With each day that’s passed since first holding this in my hands, I have understood better in small, nearly imperceptible ways how deeply impoverished we so often allow ourselves to become.

This is the only time I will ever use this concept in the affirmative, because it could be the only instance in which it applies: you deserve every single one of these.  You do.  Perhaps rationally you might agree; now the trick is to massage it so deeply into your psyche that you do not just agree, but believe.

The only way to answer this is by saying to the universe, “I’m right on top of that, Rose.”

(click to enlarge)

The poet was different from everyone else.  He had a gift.  His purpose, compulsion even, was to embody this gift.  He could see in ways that others could not, and then take the blind by their hands and lead them nearer to knowing the sublime.  The sublime of course would be a poet’s natural habitat, but an isolated one.  There was no one who might sense the world in the way they would.  If love was experiencing beauty in sync with another, when you’re born a poet, it’s understood to be something you’ll never know.  You will always be the scribe or the witness or the translator.

At least, this is how the Romantics thought of it.

But the curse of being human is need, right?  Some people are at peace with what they must take, but others aren’t.  Keats was not.  This makes sense when you think about the poet as a medium, something divine.  Divinity exists above the frankness of biology.  Was ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ Fanny Brawn or was she the burden of language?

I don’t know, but who does.

The point is, negative capability is something to be willfully not understood.  Does everybody have thoughts that form first in language?  Just some of us?  If a poet’s purpose is to articulate mimesis through lyric, does he exist when he’s got nothing to say?