Health + Youth

“At four that afternoon, after a day spent looking at the telephone and lighting cigarettes and putting the cigarettes out and getting glasses of water and looking at the telephone again, Maria dialed the number. A man answered, and said he would call back. When he did he asked who had referred her.

”‘You want an appointment with the doctor,’ he said.

“’When could he see me.’

”’The doctor will want to know how many weeks.’

“’How many weeks what?’

"There was a silence. ‘How advanced is the problem, Maria,’ the voice said finally.”
—Play It as It Lays

BLVR: I want to ask you about the idea of the “extreme or doomed commitment.” You have a line in The White Album where you say, “I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic,“ believing "that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments.”

JD: Right.

BLVR: I wonder if you consider marriage or motherhood, or even writing—

JD: I did consider marriage and motherhood extreme and doomed commitments. Not out of any experience of them as such, but it was simply the way I looked at things.

BLVR: And having experienced motherhood and marriage, do you still see them as extreme and doomed commitments?

JD: No, I don’t. I mean, not—I don’t. I see them as, well, certainly they were for me a kind of salvation.

BLVR: Salvation from what?

JD: From a loneliness, an aloneness.
—Joan Didion/Shelia Heti

“All of us know — we almost expect — that an artist will use up everyone he meets in the hope that the payoff in the public sphere will make up for casualties in the private. Even those of us without such gifts find it hard to serve two masters. Years ago, when I began writing, I noticed that the writing life and the happy (you could even say, the good) life lay in opposite directions. For the former I would have to take myself away from much that I cared about, and give myself over to the dark spaces in the world (and in the self) that I, like most of us, would rather look away from. Writing feeds on the tension — even the tragedy — that a happy life aspires to see beyond.”
—Pico Iyer, “Art of Darkness”

This: 

Look. It is only getting worse
from here on out. Thank God. Otherwise
the sun on this filthy river
could never be as boring or as poignant,
the sheep’s brain trembling on the fork
wouldn’t seem once stung
by the tang of grass, by the call
of some body distant and beloved to it
singing through the milk.

–Paisley Rekdal

You don’t love me
What’s to love anyway
You don’t love me
Would love be my saving grace?
You don’t love me

It’s delirium
It’s a childlike dream
then it fades away
It’s illusion
Would love put me in my place?
The illusion
The delirium
The delusion

I’m going nowhere
Now I’m going nowhere

You don’t love me
What’s to love anyway
You don’t love me
Would your love be my saving grace?
You don’t love me

Now I’m going nowhere
I’m going nowhere
I’m going nowhere
with my torn red heart
with my torn red heart
with my torn red heart
—Lanegan