Courage Consists In Remaining

By Jack Joseph Smith

The line is as Nancy iss "Courage consists in remaining inside oneself, next to nature, which holds -no account of our disasters." By Jean-Luc Godard; from his ilm "Pierrot LeFous* * I quake when-I feel you breathing Leave me, ,leave me I quake when I hear you speaking Leave me, .leave me You rustle all the wind out of my heart When you wish me-to be gons- You makes a river-flow in teers-instead' of ideas When from you,.you: wish-me to be gone for myself I wert to your window sill Instead of the hopeful sheen of any -sumer.star- The -night-laid me blinded ‘against: black marble- Naked, ,I could ‘not hold my fist any higher-than;’ my eyes: While you; Pallenon your ‘little-bargaim basement. bed- in an immense-dreary’ shyness with nozhere=to go - but. power- held my-world so stil: that the warm breeze: suggested‘ only-e planet I might: very well ‘fall fram: For a moment,.<' I hated myself? for hating. you for. letting: our -presence-be seperately-alone-im one rocm But no :-Pates,no déstany;,no wish could ever: turn: = any possibility: imme = toward ‘the action.of your lonely bidding: My words were-ore place; my heart another: My--guts -had isunker}.my mind filled: with the unreal fog: that has-no feeling for what-a perso is: What I again-had to find was -time~ But yow:had none either~ With a mother-closely dying- by your side-omtonorrow's muraing shift And thus no-longer-could we-borrow from one another- _ What must be done-said to-create> So I lay down-beside-you for the futures like a frozen child waiting to be tested And blessed“you-for having no anger in your love: when the feeling in my blood had begun to rum. sinceree

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A long poem of intimate crisis framed by a Godard quotation, in which the speaker lies beside a lover whose mother is dying, navigating rejection, helplessness, and the slow return of sincere feeling against the backdrop of a shared room and a borrowed future.

The poem sustains its tension between cinematic philosophy and domestic pain, making courage a matter of staying present when everything in the relationship has gone still.

Claude

The Godard epigraph — 'courage consists in remaining inside oneself, next to nature, which holds no account of our disasters' — gives the poem its impossible assignment: to stay present in a room where love has gone cold and a mother is dying one shift away. The speaker quakes at breathing and speaking alike, stands naked at a window sill blinded by black marble, and yet the poem's courage is precisely its refusal to leave. 'I lay down beside you for the future / like a frozen child waiting to be tested' — the simile is devastating because it admits that remaining is not strength but exposure.

The poem turns the cinematic quotation into lived experience by refusing to be philosophical about it. Every abstract claim — fate, destiny, possibility — is immediately grounded in the body: sunken guts, unreal fog, a fist that cannot rise above the eyes. The final blessing of the lover 'for having no anger in your love' is not resolution but surrender.