Fanny Howe

A few lines and passages from Radical Love:

All people seek great difficulty, no doubt about that; they seek and even create the situation which will be insurmountably problematic. It would be a strange person who did not know that suffering is a way to stay alive.

The night before she dreamed she had won the Nobel Prize for Despair.

From the beginning he held the tragic position that the only revolution was the eternal revolution – an inexhaustible struggle for something already lost.

Weak desires protect you from disappointment. But nothing keeps you safer than being a visible ruin.

Some people use the word affliction when they mean infliction. They think that making other people suffer is painful to them because someone else made them suffer first. Libby never blamed her life on her father interfering with her but she wished she was not the drunk that her mother was. She experienced her addictions not as afflictions but as weeds that grow in certain gardens wild. No matter how you tugged and pulled, you couldn’t ever get them all out of the ground.

His work was his obscurity. You can actually work in opposition to fame.

I was an existentialist, then I noticed how words could make things happy again. Many of the most lost people used the loveliest language in order to laugh.

The dialectic of the 20th century (determinism versus choice) is as old as the hills. But today I realized that a choice can be wrong. I used to think otherwise. Now I see that choices are so difficult because people know that they can make the wrong ones. But I think that if a choice is made against you to reject you, your work or your love for instance – it can’t be wrong. It can’t be wrong because it would always come to that, anyway. Sooner or later, you would be rejected by that party. And you would suffer throughout the whole process. So in a way what happens to you is pre-determined, but what you do is a choice.

What is sad to discover is that events in this world are both pre-determined and whipped up at the moment they are occurring. People are bewildered by this paradox unless they can grasp the difference between time and timing. It is like the way they write out their calendar, make predictions and watch events unfold according to plan… and then it all goes wrong and a choice becomes necessary.

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A few passages from The Needle’s Eye by Fanny Howe:

The almond tree with its white blossoms teaches him that fruition is a sign of completion, the moment of failure to which everything aspires. The trees have fulfilled their cycle, turn white, click off, and die.

*

The binder for liquid bole is animal-skin glue. Almost honey. Without glue binder, bole won’t stick to the icon board. And then there is the gold leaf, or flake, like a dry fleck of pollen, to gild the wood. Everything is stuck together when the gold has come.

The flowers buzz when the vibration of the bees stimulates their pistons and their molecules swell and their petals hum like cellos. Rocks are alive too, the firstborn of the natural world, somber without will.

There is no freedom from this universe we were born into, because it is our vague source of sensation, our soul, the container of our guilt.

Skins liquefy in heat. And when a bald baby swallow dies on your palm, you feel warmth pouring over your skin, a kind of burning fountain that scalds you like pepper spray.

Do you think this is a sign of the spirit ripping its energy into you to carry to the other side? I do. There are no actual objects over there, no materials but unformed steaming clouds, colors that harmonize musically, no gravity exists but elasticity composed of invisible mesh images.

Who will meet me on the other side, I ask you, to prove the error of what I say? Will it be someone who never loved me?

*

Did you know that Puritans believed a baby was only conceived during an orgasm? The Puritans had to spend a lot of time on making this happen, on sex, because without more children, there would be no settlement, no city.

*

Still, hope was like a throng of singers that circled the world both here and there having died and echoed over and over. What is a song but a call from the other side?


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A novel-in-verse (or almost) by one of the writers associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. And indeed, there's something poetic about this, but it is also a novel of suspense in the same time (as what we read is actually the notebook of the main character, who transcribes dialogues and digresses about various thing - she especially reports her "visions" of the Virgin Mary) - a mixture that, I think, one could hardly pull off with mainstream success now, long after the heydays of "postmodernism" (or the idea of it) -- but this was published in 1979. Too lazy right now to write more about this, but it is definitely an enjoyable AND innovative book (did I forgot to mention the "illustrations" that seem at first random, but prove to be part-and-parcel of the book?).… (more)