Oct 29, 2011



Oct 27, 2011

SPENT

by Rae Armantrout

Suffer as in allow.

List as in want.

Listless as in transcending
desire, or not rising
to greet it.

To list
is to lean,
dangerously,
to one side.

Have you forgotten?

Spent
as in exhausted.

Oct 18, 2011

Oct 17, 2011

I do not possess any understanding of this world

by Herta Müller

I have said this before: I do not possess a superior understanding of the world. In fact, I do not possess any understanding of this world, let alone a superior one. I do not understand the world. I do not understand. That is why I write, because I do not understand. As for the price, it was not worth anything. A person's suffering, life itself, is the most precious thing there is. Nothing justifies the degradation of another, nothing justifies someone wanting to look at a zoo, to stand in front of a cage and think "I am more sensitive and have an extraordinary mind and I watch the common people to see how they behave." I haven't a clue. I belong among those in the cage, I am not standing outside the bars watching. I don't even understand what I have done. When I was in Romania, if I started every night to think about what had happened during the day, I couldn't get my head round it. I couldn't even afford to think within a wider time span. The exact, tiny things which kept accumulating were enough for me. I couldn't think, I had to cope, and this absorbed everything I could come up with in my head. I think literature too is a way of searching. What is this existence of ours? We are all a mystery, even in our own body: we do not know how long we will live, which body organs will fail us, when our mind will go. So this is enough. That is why it was so tragic, because alongside all these existential problems, which automatically concern us all, the dictatorship introduced the political surveillance that you had to fight against. I didn't understand a thing. That's why I keep trying to ask myself: what happened back then? All I have understood is that freedom is important.

Oct 14, 2011