"A Tired Old Flip-Flop" - thinking about poems

I --- A tired old flip-flop

This a line from a poem that @beginningtoend posted yesterday:

And here is the flip-flop this morning, in Rabat, and perhaps it is identical, through space and time, with the one he saw in Florida: only an ocean away.

His poem touched me deeply, but I don't think because of the drifting into old-age, more a writer's inactivity over the last weeks: the drifting from text to text. I thought of The Tower, W B Yeats, but really I don't think in any profound way, just in the way of endless circular reading, one more reference, here to old-age, and not actually writing.

And there they sit, the critiques, waiting to judge.

II

One moves between reading and re-reading

This is a line by George Oppen that a first came across in an article in Flashpoint Magazine. I don't know exactly why, but I keep going back to it. Perhaps what I like about this article, apart from the wonderful line, is its style; not so much its content, but the poetic flow of thoughts through a piece of prose. And I'm in a hurry now, so I move on.

Yesterday evening I was searching and searching for something new to read, a frustrating and unfruitful time. The only thing I found was a line from Thomas Bernhard in an old notebook, but I slept without satisfaction.

I woke this morning with the same feeling, but quickly found a book: The Loser, Thomas Bernhard. I've always been drawn to quotes of his that show up sometimes on Twitter and Tumblr, but I've never read one of his books. I was feeling negative, there was a rant coming on, something about quality. This book hit the spot. Or at least the first few pages did, and then I went down to the sea with my son, to play with garbage, and take photographs for this post.

III

I am absolutely not a piano virtuoso, I said to myself, I am not an interpreter, I am not a reproducing artist. No artist at all. The depravity of my idea had appealed to me immediately. The whole time on my way to the teacher’s I kept on saying these three words: Absolutely no artist! Absolutely no artist! Absolutely no artist! If I hadn’t met Glenn Gould, I probably wouldn’t have given up the piano and I would have become a piano virtuoso... (Thomas Bernhard, 2013)

"2013? I'd always imagined he was dead."

From this longer quote, I want to cut out a smaller piece, and hope it doesn't bleed:

Absolutely no artist! If I hadn’t met Glenn Gould, I probably wouldn’t have given up...

IV

Now, I've no idea where the book will go, but I'm going to rejoice in this quote anyway.

Three weeks ago I chanced on a post

https://steemit.com/mental/@titanius/my-depression-is-not-the-illness ( @titanius writes two follow up posts as well).

@girlbeforemirror then added a comment: about core beliefs underlying depression. I'm not sure if this is exactly what she meant, but I tied this in to frustrated creativity. Again, the quote:

Absolutely no artist! If I hadn’t met Glenn Gould, I probably wouldn’t have given up...

This is the downside of Youtube, and Kindle, and MTV. There is so much polished talent that it is all too easy just to give up and consume, to over-consume: indigestion, over-weight, heart disease, liverish, all from not giving vent to our creativity.

Write. Check. Post.

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Thank you for reading @richardjuckes. (The photos are my own).

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