Gerald Stern Quotes

I am going to carry my bed into New York City tonight complete with dangling sheets and ripped blankets; I am going to push it across three dark highways or coast along under 600,000 faint stars.

lucky life isn't one long string of horrors.

I think it's in Malone Dies that Beckett's creature is in a kind of prison or hospital. As I recall, he is visited twice a day, slop brought in and slop taken out. He has a stub of a pencil, a bit of paper. And he asks questions, ten, sven, I don't remember, "Why am I here?" "What day is it?" The last one, no. 10 maybe, says "Number your answers." This is not just desperation and clinging to something called 'reason'--by his fingertips--that is humanity, shit-smeared, hopeless, and mad humanity--in the face of all denial. Our work is about that. My work.

I remember Galileo describing the mind as a piece of paper blown around by the wind, and I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree, or jumping into the backseat of a car, and for years I watched paper leap through my cities; but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck, dancing back and forth like a thin leaf, or a frightened string, for only two seconds living on the white concrete before he got away, his life shortened by all that terror, his head jerking, his yellow teeth ground down to dust. It was the speed of the squirrel and his lowness to the ground, his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing, that showed me the difference between him and paper. Paper will do in theory, when there is time to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows; but for this life I need a squirrel, his clawed feet spread, his whole soul quivering, the loud noise shaking him from head to tail. O philosophical mind, O mind of paper, I need a squirrel finishing his wild dash across the highway, rushing up his green ungoverned hillside.

Philipose’s lines, “Lucky you can judge yourself in this water,” and later, “Lucky you can be purified over and over,” are lines from the 1977 poem “Lucky Life” by the late poet (and my Iowa teacher and friend) Gerald Stern. The degree “MRVR” after the wart doctor’s name is based on an anecdote in Evolution of Modern Medicine in Kerala by K. Rajasekharan Nair (TBS Publishers’ Distributors, 2001). The line that references “the round world and its imagined corners” is after John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 7.

When in doubt, do the right thing

Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows.

Galaxy Love" There’s too little time left to measure the space between us for that was long ago—that time—so just lie under the dark blue quilt and put the fat pillows with the blue slips on the great windowsill so we can look over them and down to the small figures hurrying by in total silence and think of the heat up here and the cold down there while I turn the light off with the right hand and gather you in close with the wrong.