if I were stranded on a desert island with any one of my three current top contenders for “Single Food I Would Take to a Desert Island if I Could Only Take One Food”:
1. Nutella
2. Peanut M&M’s
3. Sweet Southern Heat Barbecue potato chips
(as one of the comments under the video said)
Graham Greene is quoted often as saying that “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.” He writes this not as instruction but as description, of himself lying in a hospital bed as a young man listening to parents whose ten-year-old son had just died of complications from a broken leg. “I watched and listened. There was something which one day I might need: the woman speaking, uttering the banalities she must have remembered from some woman’s magazine, a genuine grief that could communicate only in clichés.”
Greene’s image echoes Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale “The Snow Queen,” in which the central conflict centers around a pair of siblings and a splinter of ice: the splinter of ice has gotten into the eye of the brother, leaving his vision (and heart) frozen. He is unable to see warmth anywhere in the world, or to give it; he lives in cruelty. The story follows the sister’s quest into the Snow Queen’s frozen realm, to win back her brother’s capacity to love.
I recently heard Christian Wiman recite this poem, by the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst. It feels to me like another take on the argument about art and coldness. I find myself identifying with both sides, so I feel accused and accusing at once. (Mostly, though, I’m on the “she’s” side. Except I want to defend elm leaves.) Wiman recited it like it was slam poetry, skipping the the title (“These Poems, She Said”) and starting right off with the first line, nearly yelling:
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said….
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.
It is hard when the inside of your head looks like this.
(Also, I love this movie. Partly because the inside of my head looks like that a lot.)
which ran “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Hooray McSweeney’s… in particular Scott Blaszak, for this set of letters from artists in response to Apple’s game Draw Something.
