Welcome to Litsy!

A bit pretentious, dense, overblown, & indulgent…but still sometimes beautiful, if you can manage to look past all that. At times, I managed; other times, I didn‘t. Regardless, I‘m glad I read this. I think it‘s important to push yourself to read differently every now & again. And this, with its interview and transcription format, was different.

Review cont‘d 👇🏻

“Will I suffice?

I ask myself every day if I will. Often, when the question becomes heavy, I take off into the blue sky and let it answer.”

“Sometimes it‘s enough for a creature to appear and disappear. To make contact and be released.”

“I think of how someone looks at you a certain way when they love you. They push your hair out of your eyes, off your cheek. They touch you because they can‘t not touch you. They run a finger along your cheek or on the inside of your wrist or trace the indentation at the base of your neck, along your collarbone. They are entirely unaware of how this affects you, but they cherish you so wholeheartedly the sweetness of it is profound…👇🏻

“The language of silence has as many parts of speech as any other language.”

I went on a bit of a book buying spree this morning. Angels, witches, and…apples? Guess which one cost me $40? 😱

Don‘t tell my husband, okay? 🙈

I've got a round-up of November's best books on my blog... well, some of them. I actually had to break it up into three parts this month because there were so many 5-star reads!
https://lindypratch.blogspot.com/2021/11/november-2021-best-books-round-up.html

6 women have conversations about art & how best to live. Before the first page of this contemplative, compassionate novel, its philosophical & experimental bent is revealed by the epigraphs, which are by Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous, Rilke & others. Later, Alan Watts is quoted on the distinction between belief & faith. I learned that the word angel comes from the word for messenger. Also, that angels eat Fruit Loops & whipped cream. #Canadian

The angel bows to Mary and announces her fate. And some of what‘s happening in the image continues to speak to me. The deep bow of respect. The acknowledgment of beauty of another human being, the strength and endurance. The potential. Acknowledging the light in another being. Bowing to that light.

Quote from tagged novel: “If you can get someone to remember a joyful moment, it humanizes them.”
I encountered the same thought in E Lily Yu‘s novel about refugees, On Fragile Waves.

A photograph can capture the secret of who a person is without ever revealing the secret. A photograph can hold the secrets a person has without telling them.

All of those artists painted angels, or found angels, and who‘s to say they didn‘t see or feel them? For me, it wasn‘t a question of belief in angels, but it was about a willingness to see what is there, and to witness the world with a deeper awareness. But also, to be open to the unseen world.

There is an ongoingness that I wish to convey. The traditional narrative arc is wonderful, but it is not the only mode in which to talk about how things occur, how life rolls out, how life comes at us & is so boring & delightful at once, so unpredictable & so obvious, so weird & so lovely & hidden & open.

The air and the atmosphere are a miracle. We don‘t have to look around for examples of the miraculous; we need merely to breathe in and out, or move our hands through the air, the wind.

I like reading diaries better than novels, and better than watching movies. Diaries are life, you see. And life can be rather dull. Rather ordinary. If I have learned one thing, it is that the ordinary is more closely aligned with bliss and to splendour than to what might be deemed spectacular.

Everything will be okay. This is what I tell myself, and I think about what a good, sweet word is “okay.”

(Art detail from a painting by Laurie MacFayden)

I know how to make myself appear completely ordinary so that I might observe others. What I observe is that not a single person on this earth is ordinary.

It is the questioning around the story that gives the story its dimension. But the story is there only as a kind of basic pretext.

I was going to be a poet. Instead, I became a librarian.
People want stories; they want books that have good endings, but they can‘t say what a good ending is. They want the plot to be exciting, not boring, and they want the next book to be like the last one they liked. The cover should be nice. The book should make sense and be easy but not too easy.

The way we come to a conversation matters. The openness, the trust. Is every conversation a type of annunciation? Each person is an angel giving the other person, who is also an angel, a message. In that moment we are each responsible for the other. If one of the people in the conversation were to faint or to cry, for example, it would be up to the other person to act.

Try this: write down the words of someone else with a fountain pen and you will see what I mean. Ink is more than you think it is; it‘s a kind of air that you breathe together in a small enclosed space.

Trees are angels. Their bark can be read like braille and I walk through the trees and feel each one, closing my eyes. The birch trees are soft and silky and peel and curl with black dark moments, and their spirit is kind and steely. Black poplars are dark and furrowed and are natural storytellers, and they know more than is possible for their age.

One is compelled to make art, to record the evidence of our time that is interesting to the artist alone. If anyone else later finds it of interest, then this is not the artist‘s business.

(Photo: detail of painting currently in progress on Laurie MacFayden‘s easel)

One searches for words and cannot find them. But the experience had the effect of combining senses, so it was like melted chocolate and the scent of rain and then deep cello sounds, all mixed together in a sensory experience.

I want to know what characters are thinking and how they attempt to speak what‘s in their soul, honestly and simply. Or, alternatively, how they circle around things, how they attempt to conceal, or how they fail to express what they mean to convey.

I was thinking about something so beautiful that I entered the silence of flowers.