Category Archives: Non-Fiction

Excerpt from Bluets – Maggie Nelson

90. Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. the tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this was a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it.

91. Blue-eye, archaic: “a blueness or dark circle around the eye, from weeping or other cause.”

92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping–its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)

93. “At first glance, it seems strange to think that an innocuous, inborn behavior such as crying could be dysfunctional or symptomatic,” writes one clinical psychologist. But, this psychologist insists, we must face the fact that some crying is simply “maladaptive, dysfunctional, or immature.”

94. — Well then, it is as you please. This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

95. But please don’t write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping.

Excerpt from “A Wild Perfection” – James Wright

A Letter from James Wright to Mary Oliver

Cupertino, California
July 10, 1965

Dear Miss Oliver:

I hardly expect that you will actually read this note, because the address on the envelope is incomplete. But I will go ahead and write it for my own sake. I have loved your poems for a long time, but until I found and read your book (Poems to a Brown Cricket, No Voyage an Other Poems), I hadn’t realized how much they had come to mean to me. It is an extraordinarily beautiful book that you’ve written, and it haunts me in some secretly desolated place in myself where I had not hoped to see anything green come alive ever again.

Am I correct in remembering that you once wrote to me? Or am I simply imagining things? I recall a dreadfully unhappy letter from you, which heartened me. At the time I was quite ill; and, before I could answer your letter, I lost it. I hope you will forgive me. I have lost so many things. So many.

Till the very end of this summer I will be staying with a couple of very old friends here in California. I don’t know why I tell you this. Of course, I am a liar. I know perfectly well why. If you should receive this note, and if you should find a moment, and if you should feel patience, I would be truly grateful to hear from you. I have been laboring heavily from time to time on a new book of my own. It has been pretty jagged and difficult going, and the example of your book has given me some of he encouragement which I sorely need.

Wherever you are, and whether or not you even read my words, thank you for writing your book.

Sincerely,

James Wright

A Shift of Western Sympathy in “The Great Gatsby” and Mehta’s “Fire”

                  For centuries, harmony has been the invisible wheel steering Eastern action and culture, which has prospered on the belief that good input will equal good output. Spiritual balance is maintained, for example, through external societal organization of class in the caste system. The socio-economic divisions separate people from the time of birth by wealth into distinct classes that they can not, at any point, transcend. India, for example, has maintained this caste system since ancient times. People followed the system to maintain social harmony. Only recently they eliminated the structural caste and welcomed the American ideal of “rags to riches,” evident in recurring themes of Bollywood films, suggesting that these boundaries can be crossed.

The film, Fire, directed by Deepa Mehta, in particular questions the Hindu’s boundary of duty. Without touching on the western ideal of “rags to riches,” the character strives for the western ideal of individual freedom that will allow her happiness, despite the unrest and disorder it causes the family. The protagonist, Radha, runs the household, takes care of the mother-in-law, works at the shop, and aids her husband in his practice of celibacy, for she is barren and any sexual relations for the sake of pleasure would be sinful. When Sita, her son’s new wife, who moves in with the family, challenges traditional duty, Radha comes to challenge her own purpose in life. She begins to challenge her husband and her work entirely. Sita and Radha find the love they need in each other, and the lesbian relationship forms in order to satisfy their needs. This whole social order is threatened by their intemperate actions, but their acts are portrayed as doing nothing wrong, that in the ending scene Radha survives the fire indicates that she is pure from any wrongdoing.

Traditional Eastern culture disapproves of the Western value of individual desire above communal desire, however Fire demonstrates a shift in Indian or Eastern mentality. They have adapted this way of thinking, eliminating the social structures that bind us and oppress us, to embrace individual liberation without regard to the community or even the family.

              The Great Gatsby similarly glorifies the aspirations of one to transcend caste boundaries, however, Gatsby’s desire is for power and not love.

That this movie is remade with current music and effects, indicates the social relevance it has today. The film resurfaces the question of whether one can truly surpass the social class they were born into. By influence of executive producer Jay-Z, the music plays a huge role in connecting the 1920s to modern day. The current music helps us associate that this story is most definitely a commentary on current American culture.

              Gatsby is one who dreams of becoming part of the elite caste, the “old money” society of propriety and status. However, close he gets to the “green light,” he will never be fully accepted into that culture. The Great Gatsby was commonly believed that  into social class.  India is a prime example for their social order of the caste system, which deeply impacted their culture. It was not until 

Whether we like to think this social ordering does not exist, it very well exists and cannot be fully eliminated as we naturally are creatures who function on the level of survival. We stick to those we trust, those who experience our same culture, who share our same values.

James Baldwin said (2)

“I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac.”