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View Harah's older paintings and drawings
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from Peter Schjeldahl
from Marguerite Duras
from Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy
This sort of reevaluation can happen when events disrupt your life’s habitual ways and means. You may be taken not only out of yourself–the boon of successful work in every art form, when you’re in the mood for it–but out of your time, relocated to a particular past that seems to dispel, in a flash of undeniable reality, everything that you thought you knew. It’s not like going back to anything. It’s like finding yourself anticipated as an incidental upshot of fully realized, unchanging truths. The impression passes quickly, but it leaves a mark that’s indistinguishable from a wound. Here’s a prediction of our experience when we are again free to wander museums: Everything in them will be other than what we remember. The objects won’t have altered, but we will have, in some ratio of good and ill. The casualties of the coronavirus will accompany us spectrally. Until, inevitably, we begin to forget, for awhile we will have been reminded of our oneness throughout the world and across time with all the living and the dead. The works await us as expressions of individuals and entire cultures that have been–and vividly remain–light-years ahead of what passes for our understanding.
(“Out of Time,” New Yorker, April 13, 2020)
“We shouldn’t intervene, we shouldn’t get involved in the problems another person has with reading. We shouldn’t be upset with the children who don’t read, we shouldn’t lose patience. It’s about discovering the continent of reading. No one should encourage or incite a person to go see what’s there. There’s already far too much information in the world about culture. We must set off on our own for the continent. Discover it on our own. Bring about the birth on our own. Take Baudelaire, for example, we must be the first to discover the splendor of his writing. And we are the first. And if we are not the first, we will never be a reader of Baudelaire. All the world’s masterpieces should have been found by children in public landfills and read secretly unbeknownst to their parents and teachers.”
“Me and Other Writings” p.71
“When we attribute our interpretations of our experiences to the situation rather than to our own way of seeing the situation, we shove our own meaning-making out of view. It’s a form of self-delusion.”
Steven C. Hayes, A Liberated Mind, p. 183
In the middle of a three day visit to you, we sat in the dark quiet having recounted the story of a long ago trip undertaken separately in youth, you know, with the intelligence of willful children.
The light at/through the window was very specific. The time elapsed was accounted for in our quiet and in our feeling. Restraint arose.
I mean what I mean is you went to Barcelona without a cent somehow.
I went from Eugene to New Orleans as a young blonde person, hitch-hiking.
We both 1) survived and 2) are telling each other the stories we’d ourselves forgotten.
And they now exist in the other’s head to be brought later to the ceremony.
We’d forgotten them because of the attempt to live and become expectations.
In the darkening yard, days later, after I’ve left you, I have both bees and monarch butterflies back from a brink.
“The tightest, most self-involved knot is connected to strings that go everywhere.” p.273
“The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of a pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.” p. 297
“What are the commandments?”
“One is that I am the only zoo animal currently living who has the key to my own cage. I can open it and go outside.” p.303
re: Emily Dickinson “People assume that the shutting-up made her smaller. But locking yourself up can be a way to shrink the castle down to your size, and to expand your body toward the wider limits of the walls, until you are rooted at the foundation, see sideways out the glass, and do your highest thinking when the smoke leaves the chimney. And still, through the window, you can send out sweets. Emily did not show her face to the children, only the hands and arms that set down the poems. What if she wanted simply to reveal, and not to be exposed? What counts as hiding and what as devoted contemplation?” p. 305
1/
Others do a version, a
trompe l’oeil of affection, not
showing the crack,
in a narrative of love and climate menace.
In writing a book on the mind as organ, one can
begin to regard the mind with dispassion as lacking
authority so that the thoughts that
populate a rant pointed at you begin to float.
I do not have to believe thoughts,
neither is there only reason
to think with. Once toy soldiers of mind
are on my counterpane I become the bed
that cares as a matter of course.
My painty fingers ask: what is the name of that color? The one that instigates this shirt? Is it a green, a light green, a sea foam, a blue-green plus white, whiter? A kind of wish?
And with this shirt I thee recall. Because I wore it on our streetcar ride. I beg to remember that you must have looked around for that color as you (protective) looked for where I was following.
Now it is washed and hanging in the sun, later because the visit is gone, the sea of it, the ether of it, the summer in a Nordic country.
(I check the vodka level in the glass. I wasn’t sure I wanted to travel this far with my self this evening.)
The color calms but induces flutter. The shirt had my body in it as you looked upon.
(How long does it take for vodka to evaporate? A drunk worries how much is lost. I’m so embarrassed. The fern leans out over the walkway.)
In the square foot of ground immediately before me now, in the present, scene of my remembering, is a beginning oak tree, cilantro, alyssum, clover, oregano, and teeny white flowers attached to what I thought were weeds. So happy about my gardening philosophy which is to notice when the taskmaster-weed-killer shouts in my head and then I go lay down. Many a plant has been saved. I bend down to them and look. They all arrive by disparate but precise stems. I’ve never seen them before and they are right in front of me.
I am so glad of paintings today which are the color of the shirt. How could you possibly think that was not lovely for all time? How could you recede?
I’ve butterflies in my yard, a kind of paint. Love is, in the end, an attention, math attention, language attention, love attention. Please come talk to me.
