I feel like some of you think I’m this sad ole crone which—don’t get me wrong—I am, but I’m also sometimes joyful (pictured above this morning) just for being alive and more often than not I strangely find myself content as a disfigured blooming sunflower in a sea of such sunflowers.
Anyway, I love Fall as much as the next witchy weirdo, but friends, it is still summer and we ought to love and celebrate every season. Late Summer is a time of preservation, and mellowing out our excitements, our outrageous audacities, settling into the warmth the sun gave us and finding the sacred within the transient, for Fall will soon begin and shove that beautiful shimmering transience into our faces and oh how delicious and thrilling it shall be.
One question…
before I let you swim in the paper sea below: Like two of my most favouritest Substackers Simon Haisell and Jessie Lethaby, I’d love to do some slow reads with y’all starting with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea. I’ll likely start mid-Fall as my schedule will clear up a bit then. Is this something you would be interested in?
On that note, I’ve also now turned on paid subscriptions for Beautiful Losers.
Between you and me, though, I’m not going to be pushing upgrades much, and most of my writing here will continue to remain free and accessible to everyone. I may or may not paywall the archive. I don’t know, I got no fucking clue what I’ll do.
What paid subscriptions primarily help with, I think, is that well, on a platform like Substack they get the work taken more seriously, and they also provide a direct way for folks to support writers monetarily. For Beautiful Losers, specifically, they also help me pay my illustrator Mariam Chagelishvili.
Of course, support need not be monetary. Sharing, discussing, dare I say gushing over writers’ creativity is equally supportive and welcome. And if in the future anything’s behind a paywall that you can’t afford, feel free to DM me and I’ll comp you no questions asked.
Alright, on with it then.
also an excellent time to reinvigorate your new self intentions and perhaps set some new ones or manifest other things entirely. I find that reading, for me, is one way to engage in deeper conversation with myself. Like meditation and yoga, it allows me to both look inward and outwards at once, and even downwards and upwards. So today, I thought, on a whim, to share with you a short reading list with my favorite excerpts for late-summer to help you both welcome and bid farewell to this season. So go with God and find what ye will. Read more. Read everything. Read the world. Read the backs of cereal boxes. Read yourself.
Fanny Howe, Gone
SOME EXCERPTS:
At the transverberation
your heart is pierced
with such a piercing
you leave the sphere of doubt
Take heart
Lose heart!
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On the day I prayed
no one answered me
On the day I called
you didn’t answer me
All the days I prayed
but there was a dial tone only
On the day you called
I was away
No self-pity
A week was made of six whole days
Seven was outside of them
A name a number an actual mean
Our souls need freedom
Otherwise price and kill
Or kiss and sell
Depend on it
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There is something between them
It climbs colorlike
The shades of pain
Describing their skins
Like a map’s edge of ocean
It laps from her to him
They do feel that third person!
Lal Dĕd, I, Lalla, trans. Ranjit Hoskote
SOME EXCERPTS
Love-mad, I, Lalla, started out,spent days and nights on the trail.
Circling back, I found the teacher in my own house.
What brilliant luck, I said, and hugged him.
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Drifter, on your feet, get moving!
You still have time, go look for the Friend.
Make yourself wings, take wing and fly.
You still have time, go look for the Friend.
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Now I see a flowing stream,
now a flood that’s drowned all bridges,
now I see a bush flaming with flowers,
now a skeleton of twigs.
Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office
IN ARABIC
A language of loss? I have some business in Arabic.
Love letters: a calligraphy pitiless in Arabic.
At an exhibit of miniatures, what Kashmiri hairs!
Each paisley inked into a golden tress in Arabic.
This much fuss about a language I don't know? So one day
perfume from a dress may let you digress in Arabic.
A "Guide for the Perplexed" was written–believe me–
by Cordoba's Jew–Maimonides–in Arabic.
Majnoon, by stopped caravans, rips his collars, cries "Laila!"
Pain translated is O! much more–not less–in Arabic.
Writes Shammas: Memory, no longer confused, now is a homeland–
his two languages a Hebrew caress in Arabic.
When Lorca died, they left the balconies open and saw:
On the sea his qasidas stitched seamless in Arabic.
Ah, bisexual Heaven: wide-eyed houris and immortal youths!
To your each desire the say Yes! O Yes! in Arabic.
For that excess of sibilance, the last Apocalypse,
so pressing those three forms of S in Arabic.
I too, O Amichai, saw everything, just like you did–
In Death. In Hebrew. And (please let me stress) in Arabic.
They ask me to tell them what Shahid means: Listen, listen:
It means "The Beloved" in Persian, "witness" in Arabic.
Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. Columba Hart
O dear love, do not be remiss in virtue, no matter what the suffering! You busy yourself unduly with many things, and so many of them are not suited to you. You waste too much time with your energy, throwing yourself headlong into the things that cross your path. I could not persuade you to observe moderation in this. When you want to do something, you always plunge into it as if you could pay heed to nothing else.
Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights
NIGHT MIRROR
Li-Young, don’t feel lonely
when you look up
into great night and find
yourself the far face peering
hugely out from between
a star and a star. All that space
the nighthawk plunges through,
homing, all that distance beyond embrace,
what is it but your own infinity.
And don’t be afraid
when, eyes closed, you look inside you
and find night is both
the silence tolling after stars
and the final word
that founds all beginning, find night
abyss and shuttle,
a finished cloth
frayed by the years, then gathered
in the songs and games
mothers teach their children.
Look again
and find yourself changed
and changing, now the bewildered honey
fallen into your own hands,
now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.
Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.
And time? Time is the salty wake
of your stunned entrance upon
no name.
Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine
from THE CLOCK WATCHER
Now that it has all come to an end, so that even the police are ‘making enquiries’, I am trying to keep myself occupied for a little by writing out a story that no one will ever believe. Or no one just yet. Possibly some new Einstein will come to my rescue, sooner or later; and prove by theory what I have learned by experience. That sort of theory is thought up about every second year nowadays, though none of the theories make much difference to ordinary people’s lives.
Perhaps I never was quite an ordinary person, after all. Perhaps I ceased being ordinary when I married Ursula. Certainly they all said so; said I hadn’t thought what it implied, even that I had gone a bit round the bend during the last part of the war. But, when it comes to the point, not many people bother very much about who a man marries; though it can still be different when it is the case of a girl. And of course I had no parents by then.
Will anyone ever read this but me? Well, yes, perhaps they may. So I had better mention what happened to my parents, and remember to put in a word or two about other things like that. My father fell from the top of one of his buildings when I was four years old. Of course it was a dreadful thing to happen, but I was never what is called close to my father, or so it has seemed to me since, and my mother would not let me even go to the funeral, said it would be too morbid an experience for a young child, and left me locked in the bedroom when the procession left the house. Not that you could really call it a procession, I imagine. Especially as it was simply teeming with rain. But possibly I exaggerate that aspect of it as children are apt to do. My mother died during the war I was engaged in fighting. There was nothing unusual about her death. Every second person seems to die as she did, I regret to say.
Amparo Dávila, The Houseguest, trans. Audrey Harris & Matthew Gleeson
The house was very large, with a garden in the middle and the rooms laid out around it. Between the rooms and the garden there were corridors that protected the rooms from the harshness of the frequent rains and wind. Caring for such a large house and its garden — my morning activity each day — was hard work. But I loved my garden. The passageways were covered with climbing plants that flowered almost all year round. I remember how much I enjoyed sitting in one of those corridors during the afternoon, sewing the children’s clothes amid the perfume of the honeysuckle and the bougainvillea.
In the garden I grew chrysanthemums, pansies, Alpine violets, begonias, and heliotropes. While I watered the plants, the children entertained themselves looking for caterpillars among the leaves. Sometimes they would spend hours, silent and very intent, trying to catch the drops of water that leaked from the old garden hose.
I couldn’t keep myself from glancing now and then toward the corner room. Although he spent all day sleeping, I couldn’t be sure. There were times when, as I was cooking in the afternoon, I suddenly saw his shadow cast upon the wood stove. I would feel him behind me . . . I’d throw down whatever I was holding and run from the kitchen screaming like a madwoman. He would go back to his room, as if nothing had happened.
Silvina Ocampo, Thus Were Their Faces, trans. Daniel Balderston
from THE HOUSE MADE OF SUGAR
SUPERSTITIONS kept Cristina from living. A coin with a blurry face, a spot of ink, the moon seen through two panes of glass, the initials of her name carved by chance on the trunk of a cedar: all these would make her mad with fear. The day we met she was wearing a green dress; she kept wearing it until it fell apart, since she said it brought her good luck and that as soon as she wore another, a blue one that fit her better, we would no longer see each other. I tried to combat these absurd manias. I made her see that she had a broken mirror in her room, yet she insisted on keeping it, no matter how I insisted that it was better to throw broken mirrors into water on a moonlit night to get rid of bad luck. She was never afraid if the lamps in the house went out all of a sudden; despite the fact that it was definitely an omen of death, she would light any number of candles without thinking twice. She always left her hat on the bed, a mistake nobody else made.
Christa Wolf, Cassandra, trans. Jan van Heurck
I wanted to become a priestess. I wanted the gift of prophecy, come what may.We swiftly varied our mistaken judgments to avoid seeing the sinister reality behind the glorious façade. One example enraged me when I was still capable of feeling enraged: all the Trojans had cheered just as I did when the SECOND SHIP set sail, yet later they insisted that this ship was the beginning of our downfall. How could they have forgotten so quickly what they had learned at the knees of their mothers and nurses just as I did: the chain of events ruinous to our city stretched back to remotest antiquity. Destruction, rebuilding, and destruction again, under the sovereignty of a shifting succession of kings, most of them luckless. So what made people hope, what made us all hope that this particular king, my father Priam specifically, would break the chain of misfortune; that he would be the one to restore the Golden Age? Why are we carried away by the very wishes that are grounded in error? The thing they resented most about me later on was my refusal to give in to their disastrous wishful thinking.
Antonio Porchia, Voices, trans. W. S. Merwin
SOME EXCERPTS
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For a thousand years I have been asking myself, “What will I do now?” And still I need not answer.
Nothing is not only nothing. It is also our prison.
When I come upon some idea that is not of this world, I feel as though this world had grown wider.
My heaviness comes from the heights.
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I love for the sake of what I loved, and what I loved I would not go back to loving.
When I believe that the stone is stone and the cloud cloud, I am in a state of unconsciousness.
The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are.
Sometimes I think that everything I see does not exist. Because everything I see is what I saw. And everything that I saw does not exist.
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We become aware of the void as we fill it.
God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man.
When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.
Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.
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In my silence only my voice is missing.
Human suffering, while it is asleep, is shapeless. If it is wakened it takes the form of the waker.
My truths do not last long in me. Not as long as those that are not mine.
A child shows his toy, a man hides his.
Some things become so completely our own that we forget them.
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Everything is a little bit of darkness, even the light.
Yes I am preoccupied with myself. But I have forgotten what that means.
I do not agree with you. But if you do not agree with yourself either, then I agree with you.
Some things, in order to show me their lack of existence, became mine.
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