Clementine von Radics
Montana (excerpt from the first 5 lines)
c. 2012*
*Author bio:Clementine von Radics is a 21 year-old writer living in Portland, Oregon. She read Anais Nin’s diaries at 19, started keeping a journal, and the bad habit grew from there. Her first chapbook, “Where Are You”, will be available April 1st.
One of my rare literary quotations or lines that I post from ‘unpublished’ or ‘unsourced’ writers. Sometimes, greatness is found in fresh, innovative, relatable words that resonate from the inside of my bibliophilic tendency to conflate classic works with superior poetic significance. It inspires me yet infuriates me, how I wish I had so eloquently conveyed my own tangled depth of emotions in so few brilliant words. It’s a love tinged with envy; a love for some feeling that I have shared yet never myself felt brave enough to internalize. To me, the greatest writers are not those just labeled as such; they are those who speak the language of human intimacy, of the universal intricacies we all feel alienated by, but somehow relieve the fear that we are never alone. Even if alienated physically, there is an emotional depth that penetrates all walks of life, in its dirtiest, most shameful, most vulnerable moments we all share, but are not brave enough or insightful enough (yet) to convey the wisdom of the plight of the human condition to which no living, thinking, wisdom-seeking being could every deny the power of.
I urge you to read some of the absolutely raw, and almost unparalleled vision of a contemporary female writer that has instilled in me, reading her works tonight, a new sense of urgency and meaning in my own journey of prose/poetry/automatic writing without fear of exposing wounds, new or healed, in honor of the greatest writers and literary idols like Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, countless more courages and brilliant women, among the echelons of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Yeats and Blake; not in order just to pay homage to their groundbreaking, astonishing works, or the books I feel may have saved my life, but in compiling my own in hopes of touching another inspiring writer to persevere. Let us strive to let go of the judgement, the fear of the wounds, the internal torment we have all withstood, survived, and enable ourselves to create something more beautiful than our own destruction. Not for ourselves, but for those who may read it, whenever and if ever they do.
I want to write. I am a pedantic, reading obsessed, quote-infatuated 28 year old art history grad student and I don’t know how to muster the courage to post my own writing here. The best of the best, my favorite words, my Lolita tattoo, my Hippocrates tattoo, they all shame me. I bow down to their unquestionable genius, and I hope by amalgamating new, aspiring, brilliant writers, poets, lyricists galore will help guide me through this shroud of insecurity and empower me with sharing my own battle scars, my own wars inside and out, my own shortcomings, my failures, my broken hearts, my depression, and my struggles to find meaning in this meaningless void of existence will somehow gain an inkling of respect, enjoyment, help, solace, or empathy in one other human being i can touch. Please forgive this outlandish tangent. I have been over thinking and I want to rewire this tendency into something positive, and laudable. Even creditable.
Why, what is there in the world that we should care for
that’s not our lives,
the only gift the Lord never offers us: a second time.
—Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way” (Du côté de chez Swann, Vol.1/7)
Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu, also known under title Remembrance of Things Past
1913
(via ms-sparkle)
Notes
18
Posted
1 week ago
