Normally I don’t really go in for Proust.  Too many words.  But my mom sent me this passage, from The Guermantes Way, and I thought it was amazing enough that I wanted to share it with you; and so I’m going to type the entire paragraph.  Which is, like, a million pages long.  But never mind.  I am going to do it as a kind of spiritual exercise.  You’ll see.

Alas, this phantom was just what I did see when, entering the drawing room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there, reading.  I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of work which she will lay aside if anyone comes in, she had abandoned herself to a train of thoughts which she had never allowed to be visible by me.  Of myself — thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own absence, — there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and traveling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again.  The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph.  We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it.  How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind; how, since every casual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become dulled and changed, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible.  But if, in place of our eye, it should be a purely material object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we shall see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, will be, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid stumbling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk, or the ground frozen over.  So is it when some casual sport of chance prevents our intelligent and pious affection from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arising first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and shew us, in place of the loved friend who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our affection has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily that affection has clothed with a dear and cheating likeness.  And, as a sick man who for long has not looked at his own reflexion, and has kept his memory of the face that he never sees refreshed from the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the midst of an arid waste of cheek, of the slping red structure of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt, I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always at the same place in the past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping memories, suddenly in our drawing room which formed part of a new world, that of time, that in which dwell the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished at once, I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know.
-pp 814-815, Moncrieff translation

Mom did not know I was taking this picture

This is a photo of John Wieners, poet, died March first 2002.  Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

It’d be a little be a little after the fact, now, to write anything about who he was, or why he was important, or why he was important to me.  Poet Tom Raworth has a nice memorial page posted here.

But I came across this photo on my hard drive — I no longer know where I got it, so apologies to everybody about that — and I wanted to post my favorite of his poems here.  I have no idea where or if this was ever published; I copied it from an exhibit called “Early Morning Exercises” by Francesco Clemente, at Beaubourg, on (it says here) 4 November 1994.  And I have never recovered from its effect on me, and never wish to.

Refrain
My pillow a rock of stone
My bed a bench of board
These the treasure trove I hoard
Against the rolling morn

My symphony a choir of birds
Family the passing cars
And for friends the stars
And for company words.