The wish that comes true.

“I write of the wish that comes true—for some reason, a terrifying concept.”

JAMES CAIN

True (2)

Samuel Beckett was often accused of being a pessimist, a charge he denied. In fact, he argued, those who are labelled pessimists are the true optimists—were it not for their belief that the world, however awful, could be improved, they would never bother raising the issues. Optimists, he further argued, are the true pessimists in that they’re so convinced the situation is beyond repair, all they can do is pretend there’s nothing wrong with it.

SHALOM AUSLANDER, Foreskin’s Lament

True

Man is a ‘make-believe’ animal—he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

WILLIAM HAZLITT, Notes of a Journey through France and Italy, 1826

Photo: ChicoVegas 033 originally uploaded by danimaniacs at flickr

Firsts

Everybody loves the first glimpse of naked love

Everybody’s story is the most thrilling in the world

Everybody tells their best friend their tale of the raw behind

First time they discovered an open heart with their pants down.

ALLEN GINSBERG, on the back cover of WADS: True Homosexual Experiences from S.T.H. Writers, Vol. 6, Edited by Boyd McDonald ; San Francisco : Gay Sunshine Press, 1985.

Sacrifice

Fiction/Imagination is an unveiling of what we didn’t know we knew.

Distance is light, as long as you keep in mind that there are no limits. We are distance.*

It is true that all poetry stripped of another life in another time is threatened by a
quick dissolution in the present. True that poetry carries its own future and is al-
ways being reborn. . . . But it is as true that no poet can put off for later, in
some other place, the here and the now. In our time of storms it is a matter of the existence, the vital energy of poetry. . . . To give life to words, to give
them back the water of life, can only be by way of bringing back the sense
of living. And all search for sense is a search for the essence which confounds
itself with our questioning of the intimate and the universal, that interrogation
which makes poetry possible and indispensable, that questioning which has
as consequence that the search for sense is also a search for freedom.

MAHMOUD DARWISH

Breyten Breytenbach, Mandela’s Smile: Notes of South Africa’s failed revolution

*Edmond Jabès

Kiss me.

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction—don’t believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

‘Only the impossible is worth the effort.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I read it somewhere.’
‘How long do you think it will be before a human being writes a poem again?’
‘It will be millions of years, and it will be a love-poem.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know it because it will happen when someone finds that the stretch of the body-beloved is the landmass of the world.’

JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods

No one kindles, ignites and holds forth the flame of utmost love and passion as Jeanette Winterson. It swells and swoons and bursts and breaks and bears all. And it’s messy and it will never die. A gem awaits on every page. Buy the book.

‘Is that a true story?’ I said.

‘Stories are always true,’ said Handsome. ‘It’s the facts that mislead.’

JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods

My Christ is a liberator.*

He who would lead a Christlike life is he
who is perfectly and absolutely himself.
—OSCAR WILDE

Your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is. . . . your educators can be only your liberators.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

My only response to you (as well as myself) is yes, “a resounding, joyous, glorious, staggeringly beautiful, yes.”

*not to mention, “très beau”.