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I do not like to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy- I too crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love's executioner.

Irvin Yolam from
Love's Executioner & other tales of physchotherapy

 

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I. The southwest reaches of Alaska stretch
also across my shin
territory formed by similar pressures
and, like the rest of it, subject
to similar catastrophe.

Giant pinpricks on my hands flare like indicator lights:
when full on, like emergency distress
it signals, Leave Behind Now
these americanisms and midwestern anticlimatic

self awareness

but neither marks me like the central
latitude hot and contested
which would be just another unremarkable coordinate
but being untouched is more obvious than the scars

Elizabeth Van Buren, Untitled

 

 

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I live in the past.
I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught up in it.
Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments.
Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living in it.

Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

 

 

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Parting freezes the image, roots the heart
Once Spring was a tulip standing alone,
Summer is a forest of roses and green.

No one will see again what I have seen.
And I possess you now from whom I part:

We only keep what we lose.

May Sarton from O Saisons! O Chateaux!

 

 

 

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When I speak of life & love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing.

At any age we grow by the enlargening of consciousness, by learning a new language, or new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe.

Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise the retraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.

If love includes passion, it is more explosive and dangerous and forces us to go deeper.

Great art does the same thing. . . Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo": Here there is nothing that does not see you. You must change your life."

-May Sarton, The Journal of Solitude

 

 

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Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Adrienne Rich,
The Fact of a Doorframe

 

 

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It is argued that we carry place with us, and in some sense this is true.

I cannot catch hold of the peculiar magic of thos [childhood] places. No effort of will can restore to me that perception, that view of the horizon not yet tainted by futurity- it runs through me sometimes, but I cannot summon it. And yet everything I would say about place depends on it, and everything I search for in myself involves some deep fantasy of its restoration. My best, truest- I cannot define my terms- self is vitally connected to a few square miles of land.

Nell Noddings, Starting At Home

 

 

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As an artist he held the proud notion that every image came out of his own spontaneous chemistry, not from any synthetic formula.
-Anais Nin, Journals

 

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The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by a man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaniously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the eart, the more real and truthful they become.

Milan Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being

 

 

 

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The fall of the breifcase was so affecting that they began to kiss in glorious bewitchment

Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

 

 

 

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When I want to cheer myself up, I head for Ferdousi Street where Mr. Ferdousi sells persian carpets.

Mr. Ferdousi, who has passed all his life in familiar intercourse of art and beauty, looks upon the surrounding reality as if it were a B-film in a cheap, unswept cinema.

It is all a question of taste, he tells me: The most important thing is to have taste. The world would look far different if a few more people had a drop more in taste.

In all horrors, (for he does call them horrors), like lying, treachery, and theft, he distinguishes a common denominator- such things are done by people with no taste.

He believes that the nation will survive everything and that beauty is indestructable.

Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs.

 

 

 

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What you have experienced,
no power on earth can take from you.

Victor Frankl

 

 

 

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Isn't it true that everyone is a bit of an artist? Isn't it true that mankind creates art not only on paper or on canvas, but also in every moment of the everyday life-

when a young girl pins a flower in her hair, when in the course of conversation a little joke escapes your lips, when we melt with emotion at the beauty of twilights light and shadow, what is all this if not the practicing of art?

Why then this odd and idiotic division into "artists" and the rest of mankind?

-Wiltold Gombrovich, Ferdydurke

 

 

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I can feel how large, how essential this moment is as it's happening; that is what I have come to love about being an adult, to the extend that I can claim that title: that one knows more about how good things are, how much they matter, as they're happening, that knowledge isn't neccessarily retrospective anymore.

When I was younger, I missed so much, failing to be fully present, only recognizing the quality of particular moments and gifts after the fact. Perhaps that's the one thing that being "grown up" is: to realize in the present the magnitude or grace of what we're being offered.

Mark Doty, Heaven's Cost

 

 

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I let my hands know him for the last time, that the body was moving away from me, sinking into itself. Perhaps that is the one thing the soul is: our outward attention, the energy and force in us that leaps out of the self, almost literally, into the life of the world.

The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the bodies earth and water into gesture and connection, into love.

Without spirit, the body closes back into itself like an old piece of furniture, an armoire whose ancient wood is still fragrant, whose whirled grains and steady sleep refer back to the living tree.

Mark Doty, Heaven's Cost

 

 

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And he's still there, like a watermark in everything I do,
in the paper somewhere, visible if you hold it up to the light.

Zadie Smith

 

 

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