Day 48: John Ashbery, Ray Bradbury, Matthew Zapruder
Ive been being lazy and dictating these into my phone. Its actually more work than writing.
John Ashbury - Commercial Break
Take care of values. The rest is shopping,
raiding the islands
for what little coral they possess.
Tell me . . . You opted for the shrimp cocktail.
I have no more
sand in my shoes. The witch squints at the fire.
I love the opening line, and then the poem gets progressively more unfocused, especially with that last sentence, placed weirdly on the same line.
Perhaps the witch is speaking, rambling, maybe she's senile.
It reminds me a lot of Joy William's writing, with the Florida Keys theme of enviornmental destruction, the funny pessimism and parataxical bafflement.
I'll be repeating that opening line to whoever will listen.
The Long Rain by Ray Bradbury
I like the atmosphere of this story. It reminds me of all the rainstorms I've been caught in, and the utter relief of a warm dry room.
It is perhaps the classic story of a doomed voyage of explorers who perish one by one in a alien world.
The world of this story is Venus where it never stops raining and the rain has turned all plant life to Shades of white. The rain also causes plants to grow extremely quickly and then weather and die. I feel like the world of Death Stranding has been inspired by the story. There is also a giant centipede, 1 mile high and 1 mile long that shoots out bolts of lightning and destroys a tree with every step. That bit is pretty crazy.
At the end when he steps into the sun dome, it is an amazing feeling. The sun dome room reminded me of Olafur Eliasson's Artificial Sun installation.
This is a really evocative and entertaining story. I really felt I lived in this world. As to why it was written, I can only guess. Let's do some research..
Oh, just For entertainment's sake. That's even better.
Matthew Zapruder - Negative Capability.
John Keats famously coined the term negative capability while praising Shakespeare, defining it as when a writer is capable of "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
The phrase interested me when I heard about it in a Great Courses lecture. The lecturer used it to describe a writer's ability to inhabit many different World views and character, motivations and ways of life, which is why Shakespeare's plays are so complex. Keats also wrote somewhere of negative capabilities opposite: the egocentric sublime. this is where all characters might as well be the writer's own ego. any a writer who's sense of self is such a cosmos that he can't meaningfully inhabit other brains.
Zapruder touches on the Shakespeare's character thing, but also gives several other examples:
- Poems that constantly contradict or change their minds: .
poetry makes its meaning through a series of verisimilitudes. Each moment in the poem seems at the moment completely real or true, regardless of what has come before or after. This is what negative capability means in poetry, to be in the state where you can accept a succession of things, especially if they contradict each other, in order to allow within yourself and experience that you will not have elsewhere in life.
Poems that are not "about" something, but explore a moment of awareness. He uses Keats's poem "to autumn" as an example.
Poems that are about an ineffable feeling. As an example, he uses Ashbury's "as you came from the holy land". I like what he says at the end here:
haven't we all had those moments of deep inexplicable feeling, of sadness or melancholy or joy that we can't quite place? maybe we don't often share those moments because in order to, we would huff to try to say why we feel they are important, which would mean distilling them down in a way that does not feel accurate to the entirety of the process of understanding.
I feel like I have a better handle on this concept now, though I do feel that it would be clearer if it was called ambiguity and not negative capability. Then again, if it used a meaningful word, it would not be interesting. That's theory for you.