September 15, 2019

T.S. Eliot said that humankind cannot bear very much reality.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.

There are very few days when I am not writing. This is true in the most quotidian sense — email, text messages — and professionally, because the word “editor” is in my job title.

I sometimes do either morning pages or nightly ones. I write a newsletter weekly and have done for nearly seven years. I have returned to a shared journal — long hand! — with my best friend; “returned to” because we had one in high school.

If you are what you repeatedly do then you would think the phrase “I am a writer” would feel true by now.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

What does it mean to be useful?

There are two questions I have been asking myself everyday; that is one of them.

What is your question for the coming season? What else should we be asking?

Attribution:

Today I found a dead cat wrapped up in a dish towel, delicately disposed on the sidewalk. Who does the body belong to? You asked where your grave was. I didn’t know where to look. T.S. Eliot said that humankind cannot bear very much reality. I write to you from a place after hope. Racism isn’t condemned to geography, but it is cemented into the sidewalks. My neighbor planted a yard sign that says: In this house, we are still outraged. The poet Roger Reeves says we are not separate from the perpetuation of violence. He calls it civilized outrage. He calls it trafficking the spectacle.

— from lorca by mónica teresa ortiz

—

On nightly pages, ongoing thanks to RAH.

—

Thank you for signing up to receive The Main Event. Hello to everyone who invited me into their inboxes on the strength of Dan Hon’s referral. Hello to everyone who came to this another way. Most times I’ll send missives that go to paid subscribers only; sometimes I’ll send two a week.