May 2013
87 posts
3 tags
“Sometimes, for a moment, I thought I would be able to do something. Then that moment would pass and I would want to move and not be able to move.
In the country, one day, I had not been able to move. First I had dragged myself around the house and then from the porch to the yard, and then into the garage, when finally my brain spun like a fly. There I stood, over an oil slick. I offered...
3 tags
“People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a young woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old...
1 tag
“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
– David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (via stuff—n—things)
1 tag
“Some enter and never leave
others go crazy beyond paper
some know...”
– (via ahuntersheart)
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11 tags
“One.
Of the individual, only a number remains.
[…]
One.
War and war and war and war.
Death is a little door in the world.
Vis pacem.
The star systems pace in perception.
Process. Blind process.
When playing chess one studies the threshold of history.
Want figures thus the very heart.
Two.
The nature of systems is now becoming clear.
Approach the tide.
Shall oblivion...
5 tags
“A textbook of peace should terminate the soul.
[…]
Peace can never be.
To think is to honor a state of psychological failure.”
Srikanth Reddy, from “Voyager”
3 tags
“It was difficult to see the falsehood of language.
Stop.
Now begin.”
Srikanth Reddy, from “Voyager”
6 tags
“The philosopher must say is.
The world is legion.
The self is a suffering form.
Is is.
Waves rise and fall, but the sea remains.”
Srikanth Reddy, from “Voyager”
5 tags
“A world is a world is a world.
His sense of the line limits his career to the criticism of reason.”
Srikanth Reddy, from “Voyager”
10 tags
“Reason forces one to believe in secret.
To judge his problems in the world, a person has to quiet thinking.
Those who think minister to reason.
To wonder, perhaps, is to believe.
To believe? To recover lost feeling.
The dead do not cease in the grave.
The world is water falling on a stone.
Some serve the state.
Some grace.
He talks of the interminable minutiae of making.
Process...
2 tags
“He should thus remember he endeavors to speak for one human.”
Srikanth Reddy, from “Voyager”
4 tags
“The world is the world.
To deny it is to break with reason.
Nevertheless it would be reasonable to question the affair.
For the cancellation of everything known would not cancel the world.
The world should thus be considered.
The speaker studies the world to determine the extent of his own troubles.
He studies the night overhead.
He says therefore.
He says venerable art.
He traces...
5 tags
“Sleep is difficult—not the act,
the thing, the fact of being severed. Sleep rests like the lot beneath
the window with its latent touchy car alarms, though all night
it’s a curled animal without movement or sense. Hours accrue
without us in them even though we are, the way we’re in outer space
without knowing it and the earth seen from the moon lies down in the dark.
...
3 tags
“How it works: Sometimes there is a thought that becomes a dream (she is laying out a long sentence and then she is out on Fourteenth Street laying out a long piece of black curb) and the mind says, But wait, this isn’t true, you’re beginning to dream, and she wakes up to think about thinking and dreaming. Sometimes she has lain awake a long time and the stroke of sleep comes...
4 tags
“The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue to not help him.”
Lydia Davis, from “Liminal: The Little...
3 tags
“She thought about the opening and closing of her eyes: that the lids lifted to reveal a scene in all it’s depth and light and dark that had been there all along unseen by her, nothing to her since she did not see it, and then dropped again and made all that scene unseen again, and could anytime lift and show it and anytime close and hide it, though often, lying sleepless, her eyes...
1 tag
2 tags
“a
violence directed against the emergence of the Ego,
the Self, the Subject or...”
– Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, p. 62 (via comna)
2 tags
“fragments wall hiss depicted growl grass winds speak hoof beats rain din moon phases singing rise rise touch our eyes drawn over eyes rise cradled by her shadow she traces a circle inside a square inside a circle inside a square cave inside cave inside cave inside cave she climbs up climbs out into night”
...
4 tags
“this silence provides us roots and limbs. We live in it because we cannot build another, no other treehouse will be good enough. Nor will we be, cheered for a moment as silence lets other things whistle, then let down when we realize where we are. There is nothing we may hold onto after these years, just dust and even quieter things, things which do not need silence because they’ve...
2 tags
A thinks about grandmother, A thinks about Milena, A thinks about all these wrought iron shapes that mimic the static controlled growth of the plant constrained by wires. A thinks about grandfather, A thinks about Margaret, A thinks about Kafka. A thinks about the words that fall toward one another, the words that unwittingly erringly fall to the sides of the road. A thinks this road is inherently...
1 tag
“The reduction of life to survival is achieved by
gradual reduction to the...”
– Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, p. 46 (via comna)
4 tags
“How Long Has That Train Been Gone? (Professor Longhair)
The train’s vacancy left red steam along the hives of trees which sang jonquils and anisette like haloes rising negotiating vowels of wood.
Baby Won’t You Please Come Home? (Miles Davis)
Home is a stone snared within a stone and all its dark persuadings cleave their tongues to my condition—my head holds honeyed...
6 tags
“I know so little of myself, even less of them, so I’m stunned when, in a dream, I taunt Nietzsche, on my knees, calling him “the little minister.”
He doesn’t want to play, holds his temples in his hands, like his head is a Faberge egg,
or a soul, not that I know anything of souls. On all fours, I can only cry out a long, ragged neigh, stomping and violently...
4 tags
“I’ve always known my true life would begin and end in a garden like this, my will not free,
my breath not Word, everything: bloom— but the bloom the wound of a pupil
overtaking the eye.”
Christopher Hennessy, from “Gethsemane”
2 tags
“the freight of grief I carry for them left to uncurl in the sun, like a dying
stem in my palm. I kneel among the tendrils: to study the stand
I will take to prove my guilt.”
Christopher Hennessy, from “Gethsemane”
1 tag
1 tag
A bends against and molds to certain shapes. A fitting of amorphous scale textured substance that holds onto itself and thinks itself held onto. It moves water-like as one body but fights the break. A break against though in slow motion becomes this bending and molding. If sped up many littling water droplets scattering. An architecture of a substance slowed down nearly to at rest though creates...
1 tag
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“Other mistakes you repeat, finding yourself in a familiar place, but worn out, like pigeons circling a roof, the flock growing bigger, then smaller.”
Kellam Ayres, from “Practice”
2 tags
mud flats
asfaltics:
somewhere somewhen.
mud. or muds, plural.
1 tag
mudscape
asfaltics:
somewhere somewhen.
On sober reflection 68 467 On soft mud 68 468
* ex Class 68, John Macdonald, A Naval, Military and Political Telegraphic Dictionary, Numerically Arranged on a Very Comprehensive Scale… (Whitehall, 1817) *
5 tags
“TAKE ME IN says Girl holding open the water on her palm and coating herself in dirt. TAKE ME IN says girl and then runs from dead tree point to dead tree point to dead tree point her pigtails ringlets curling bouncing slick and heavy on her Girl shoulders.
The World takes her in by wrapping its tangleweeds around her legs, tipping her up, and dripping the water from her.”
J.A....
4 tags
“The trick is to fold the paper and the message enough times to make it disappear and then to swallow it down and keep it in the belly until the body either bursts into flames or elevates into the Sky and is rendered rectified recognized reconstituted reformed reshaped re-upped recounted recast re-carved re-cut in the shape of something normal again.”
J.A. Tyler, from “[this...
5 tags
“Boy says to Land:
LEAD ME ON
And Land it says:
NO.
Boy stands.
ON.
NO.
ON.
NO.
Boy stands Boy goes Boy walks Boy runs Boy runs to nowhere Boy runs from dead tree to dead tree to dead tree, from point to point to point Boy eyes leading Boy to creamy white light bouncing off shiny objects. Boy goes from object to object. Boy goes from treasure to treasure. Boy picks up the World a...
5 tags
“River painted on the Mountain’s side, River going down River flowing River then stuck tar thick not dripping not dropping not moving River going solid Land going burned Land smoking Mountain opening up and spitting fire and spitting flames and one by one the People swallowed and Ocean a tar pit and Ocean a soft pillow of black brown red and Sky uncovered darknesses and Clouds of ashen...
3 tags
“Say it sad and plain: that this poem is a void.
That this well is as far as your voice has ever carried.”
Marcus Wicker, from “To You”
5 tags
“Farther east, the trees that pink first have. The poets wait for them, know in their ligaments the very day the trees will open their plural hearts again. All winter, the poets stay quiet in the rooms of their minds, preparing to let spring surprise them like an old lover on the platform of a far-off city. But I am muddied with noise and want.”
Kate Petersen, from “Red Roof...
5 tags
“He believes I’m spacier than I am, but I’ve always got at least a few fingers in the earth.
Though sometimes I have to hold on.
Snow like billions of silent electric punctuation marks.”
Rob Roensch, from “Dark Molly”
2 tags
“She looks out at the snow and the snow is the world is the inside of her mind.
The snow is not beautiful to her or to the world; it is happening.”
Rob Roensch, from “Dark Molly”
4 tags
“I wish for wings instead of hands—long gray dusty flaps, feathers trailing uselessly on the floor.
I would have to drink by dipping my face into a lake, a bowl, an oily puddle.
Not being able to touch another would make things easier.
And the flight.
Who wants these thick bones?
[…]
My ears turn into hands when I close my eyes as hard as I can.
There’s a bluebird in...
babilano:
Southern Wonders - There Is Rest For...
6 tags
“To see clear, resist the drag of images. Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind. Act in events; touch what you name. Abhor easy obverts of natural metaphor. Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.
Yet, I admit the event of the wood thrush: In a footnote Langer (her book rapids-clean like the spring-water aired over sleek...
6 tags
“I could go on this way until the end of the page, even though
what I have in mind isn’t the thing itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing
as a shelter for what is beneath it. There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over
a wave. You cannot put a tarp over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken
oil well miles under the ocean. There is no tarp for that raging...
