Impermanence
By Alex Dimitrov
The first ending. And knowing it would end
I wanted another. Lover, summer,
pen with which to write it all down.
The first disappointment. Which is not
remembered but lives in the body.
And how familiar it became. To take
the same walk home or lean over ledges,
to say my own name when meeting someone.
Again and again for the last time:
the taste of salt in the afternoon.
Flowers for no one—alive and sold on the street.
What did I think was promised in being?
The way a stranger can finish you off.
Once only. And never the same
after that. After knowledge.
How people are being detained
and shot with our money.
All of which cannot prepare us for death
of which I am a student
and which is this country’s business:
the permanence of others.
Even our cruelty toward one another.
Will end. And I know
that looking at the night sky
is me looking at the past. At light
that’s long escaped and travels alone
but won’t always.
Longing a peculiar and peculiarly human emotion—this wanting what’s distant, what we don’t have, or what we’ve lost. This winter I did a deep dive into the filmography of Wong Kar-Wai. His movies are full of longing and saturated colors--any of them could be a study in yearning for a lost time. It was a brutal Boston winter, I missed concerts and coffee shops and friends, and watching his movies was satisfying in the way that pressing on a bruise is satisfying. Chungking Express was the first of his movies I fell in love with when I was in college. It is a diptych--two narratives about two unnamed Hong Kong policemen with broken hearts--and in contrast to the main love stories of ache and missed connections, this flashback is stunningly intimate.
The next one I watched was In the Mood for Love, which is about two neighbors who realize their spouses are having an affair and who develop an unconsummated intimacy over food and writing pulp fiction together. The film is full of frames within frames, tight spaces, slow shots, and meaningful gazes. It’s beautiful. Here are some stills I love:
Wong Kar-Wai makes a visual language for what’s unspoken between the two characters. There’s such a chemistry between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, and I loved stumbling on these polaroids from behind-the-scenes and this cut scene of them dancing to the song from Pulp Fiction:
In her essay “The Color of Distance,” Rebecca Solnit writes about the color blue and its connection to the idea of longing:
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.
When I first saw Michael Stipe’s tribute cover of David Bowie’s “Man Who Sold the World,” Bowie had just died and I was still grieving the loss of a job that felt like a loss of identity. I was searching for “form and land” and the song is about meeting and failing to recognize a past self. I love it when a song played at the right moment can provide the solid ground, the compass point that you need. His rendition gave a sound to the longing ache I felt.
I still miss David Bowie.
Like Last Year’s Snow
Words and Images by Oded Wagenstein
(I’ve excerpted some of my favorite pieces of Wagenstein’s photo essay from Human Affairs Magazine, to which you should totally subscribe. I highly recommend looking at the entire photo essay).
In the remote village of Yar-Sale in Northern Siberia live a group of elderly women. They were once part of a nomadic community of reindeer herders from the Nenets ethnic group. But now, in their old age, they spend most of their days in seclusion, away from nature and their community. While men are usually encouraged to remain within the migrating community and maintain their social roles, the women often face the struggles of old age alone.
It took a flight, a 60-hour train ride from Moscow, and a seven-hour bone-breaking drive along a frozen river for me to meet them. I immersed myself in their closed community, and for days, over many cups of tea, they shared their stories, lullabies, and longings with me.
Longing for nature, gone parents and friends.
One Art
By Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Ok. You’ve all read this pristine poem before. But what I’m really sharing is an NYT interactive close reading of the poem that will make you love it all over again. It’s definitely beyond the technology of Substack, so you have to go experience it yourself by clicking the link.
Did you read it? Good. Now you can read this next poem with a full appreciation for what its doing.
Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop
By John Murillo
Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again.
Lose a good woman on a bad day. Find a better woman,
then lose five friends chasing her. Learn to lose as if
your life depended on it. Learn that your life depends on it.
Learn it like karate, like riding a bike. Learn it, master it.
Lose money, lose time, lose your natural mind.
Get left behind, then learn to leave others. Lose and
lose again. Measure a father’s coffin against a cousin’s
crashing T-cells. Kiss your sister through prison glass.
Know why your woman’s not answering her phone.
Lose sleep. Lose religion. Lose your wallet in El Segundo.
Open your window. Listen: the last slow notes
of a Donny Hathaway song. A child crying. Listen:
a drunk man is cussing out the moon. He sounds like
your dead uncle, who, before he left, lost a leg
to sugar. Shame. Learn what’s given can be taken;
what can be taken, will. This you can bet on without
losing. Sure as nightfall and an empty bed. Lose
and lose again. Lose until it’s second nature. Losing
farther, losing faster. Lean out your open window, listen:
the child is laughing now. No, it’s the drunk man again
in the street, losing his voice, suffering each invisible star.
from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020)
And if you like that poem, go read Devin Kelly’s brilliant essay on it--every Sunday his newsletter introduces me to a poem and his analysis never fails to bring a surprising amount of heart to my quiet hour of morning tea.
A Rabit Hole on Love Letters
Don’t you just wish you lived in an era when we still wrote love letters? Here are a few wonderful ones:
From Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, written a year before her death while awaiting surgery to amputate a gangrenous leg.
Mexico,
1953My dear Mr. Diego,
I’m writing this letter from a hospital room before I am admitted into the operating theatre. They want me to hurry, but I am determined to finish writing first, as I don’t want to leave anything unfinished. Especially now that I know what they are up to. They want to hurt my pride by cutting a leg off. When they told me it would be necessary to amputate, the news didn’t affect me the way everybody expected. No, I was already a maimed woman when I lost you, again, for the umpteenth time maybe, and still I survived.
I am not afraid of pain and you know it. It is almost inherent to my being, although I confess that I suffered, and a great deal, when you cheated on me, every time you did it, not just with my sister but with so many other women. How did they let themselves be fooled by you? You believe I was furious about Cristina, but today I confess that it wasn’t because of her. It was because of me and you. First of all because of me, since I’ve never been able to understand what you looked and look for, what they give you that I couldn’t. Let’s not fool ourselves, Diego, I gave you everything that is humanly possible to offer and we both know that. But still, how the hell do you manage to seduce so many women when you’re such an ugly son of a bitch?
The reason why I’m writing is not to accuse you of anything more than we’ve already accused each other of in this and however many more bloody lives. It’s because I’m having a leg cut off (damned thing, it got what it wanted in the end). I told you I’ve counted myself as incomplete for a long time, but why the fuck does everybody else need to know about it too? Now my fragmentation will be obvious for everyone to see, for you to see… That’s why I’m telling you before you hear it on the grapevine. Forgive my not going to your house to say this in person, but given the circumstances and my condition, I’m not allowed to leave the room, not even to use the bathroom. It’s not my intention to make you or anyone else feel pity, and I don’t want you to feel guilty. I’m writing to let you know I’m releasing you, I’m amputating you. Be happy and never seek me again. I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want you to hear from me. If there is anything I’d enjoy before I die, it’d be not having to see your fucking horrible bastard face wandering around my garden.
That is all, I can now go to be chopped up in peace.
Good bye from somebody who is crazy and vehemently in love with you,
Your Frida
From Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Wolfe:
Milan [posted in Trieste]
Thursday, January 21, 1926I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it …
Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.
V.
For more between Virginia and Vita, I highly recommend the Vita & Virginia bot on Twitter:
From Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz:
Here is another, from Georgia after she moved to New Mexico to pursue her painting and left Stieglitz in New York:
There is much life in me — when it was always checked in moving toward you — I realized it would die if it could not move toward something ... I chose coming away because here at least I feel good — and it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside — and very still — Maybe you will not love me for it — but for me it seems to be the best thing I can do for you — I hope this letter carries no hurt to you — It is the last thing I want to do in the world.
Today it rains --
For more from O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, read My Faraway One--I’ve been stalking it for years in hopes of stumbling on it in a bookstore.
Emily Dickinson to Susan Huntington Gilbert:
June 11, 1852
I have but one thought, Susie, this afternoon of June, and that of you, and I have one prayer, only; dear Susie, that is for you. That you and I in hand as we e’en do in heart, might ramble away as children, among the woods and fields, and forget these many years, and these sorrowing cares, and each become a child again — I would it were so, Susie, and when I look around me and find myself alone, I sigh for you again; little sigh, and vain sigh, which will not bring you home.
I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away — I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie — Friends are too dear to sunder, Oh they are far too few, and how soon they will go away where you and I cannot find them, dont let us forget these things, for their remembrance now will save us many an anguish when it is too late to love them! Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language — I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, till that dear Susie comes. Three weeks — they cant last always, for surely they must go with their little brothers and sisters to their long home in the west!
I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for till now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.
Dear Susie, I have tried hard to think what you would love, of something I might send you — I at last saw my little Violets, they begged me to let them go, so here they are — and with them as Instructor, a bit of knightly grass, who also begged the favor to accompany them — they are but small, Susie, and I fear not fragrant now, but they will speak to you of warm hearts at home, and of the something faithful which “never slumbers nor sleeps” — Keep them ‘neath your pillow, Susie, they will make you dream of blue-skies, and home, and the “blessed contrie”! You and I will have an hour with “Edward” and “Ellen Middleton”, sometime when you get home — we must find out if some things contained therein are true, and if they are, what you and me are coming to!
Now, farewell, Susie, and Vinnie sends her love, and mother her’s, and I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Dont let them see, will you Susie?
Emilie —
Why cant I be the delegate to the great Whig Convention? — dont I know all about Daniel Webster, and the Tariff, and the Law? Then, Susie I could see you, during a pause in the session — but I dont like this country at all, and I shant stay here any longer! “Delenda est” America, Massachusetts and all!
open me carefully