#stanleykunitz — Public Fediverse posts

Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self

From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 150:

In other words, if it is sometimes hard to discard the past because the pain of this past haunts our present, it can also be hard to give up a past that has been particularly rewarding; it can be hard to surrender what has brought a great deal of satisfaction. Yet if we are to give fresh editions of ourselves a chance, we must find a way of doing so. Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self. This amounts to a lifetime of mourning. There will always be regrets and misgivings. We tend to get nostalgic about parts of our past that made us happy. And we tend to grieve the loss of certain opportunities: we lament having made this choice rather than that, of having taken this turn rather than that. But most of all, we mourn those aspects of ourselves that we are forced to renounce because they have become redundant. Sometimes our mourning is so intense that we cannot bring it to a timely conclusion but instead form melancholy attachments to dimensions of ourselves that are largely obsolete.

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
[....]
Though I lack the art to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

- The Layers, by Stanley Kunitz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UHEIqbbr1o

The wayward temporality of psychic life

From Lynne Segal’s Out of Time, pg 4:

As we age, changing year on year, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been, creating a type of temporal vertigo and rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age. ‘All ages and no age’ is an expression once used by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott to describe the wayward temporality of psychic life, writing of his sense of the multiple ages he could detect in those patients once arriving to lie on the couch at his clinic in Hampstead in London. Thus the older we are the more we encounter the world through complex layerings of identity, attempting to negotiate the shifting present while grappling with the disconcerting images of the old thrust so intrusively upon us. ‘Live not on the litter’, the North American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote in one of his beautiful poems penned in his seventies.

From Lynne Segal’s Out of Time, pg 279:

This is why living in the present is best seen as also living within or staying in some sense connected to our pasts, remaining true to their trampled hopes, whatever the current terrain. It returns me again to the thought that there can be beauty in the tragic, at least when loss arrives without malice, brutality, or personal fallibility, whatever the suffering.

Midway upon the journey of our life
  I found myself within a forest dark,
  For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
  What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
  Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
  But of the good to treat, which there I found,
  Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

- Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I

From Richard Brock’s Four Quartets – T S Eliot and Spirituality pg 89:

Overcoming these destructive experiences was then and is now, in essence, what spirituality is all about. It sets us on a path from which we may have strayed and leads us out of the dark wood to a garden where we can find ourselves free among shafts of sunlight.

From Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure pg 187:

To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures.

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
[....]
Though I lack the art to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

- Stanley Kunitz, The Layers

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

- T.S. Eliot

#ageing #eliot #Halberstam #LynneSegal #queerTemporality #StanleyKunitz #time

In the recurring dream
my mother stands
in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
she is wearing an owl's face
and makes barking noises.