Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Reading List: End Of The Year
- My Life A Fragment
- Roshnai
- A Bend In The River
- The Death of Virgil
- Mythologies: Roland Barthes
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
This Week
- War & War: Fin
- 2 Stories : Conte Francais
- SS2D1
- St. Augustine: Fin
- First two Assignments on Descartes
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
This Week
- L'Etranger Finish
- Muslim History 100pgs
- SS2D1: Police Scene, coronation buildup
- On The Trinity
Monday, October 10, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Wednesday To Do List
- Ind. MiddleClasses: 100 pages
- L'Etranger 60pgs
- Starbucks 5:30-onwards: 1000words
Monday, October 3, 2011
Destroyer: Painter In Your Pocket
And I'm reminded
Of the time that I was blinded
By the sun
It was a welcome change
From the sight of you hanging
Like a willow
Off the arm of yet another visionary
Prophetess East Van. punk
I didn't stand a chance
I couldn't stand at all
You looked ok with the others
You looked great on your own
It was 2002 and you couldn't be bothered
To say hello or goodbye
Or stand the test of time
You did, I just tried to
Separate an ocean from these tears we cried
Where did you get that line?
Where did you get that look?
Where did you get that penchant for destruction in the way you talk?
Where did you get that ride?
Where did you get that rocket?
Where did you get that painter in your pocket?
Hey, there's Christine
And there's where she could've been
The summer season was cheap
Birds of prey stick together
And hey so do we, go
I didn't stand a chance
I couldn't stand at all
You looked ok with the others
You looked great by yourself
It was 2002 and you needed reminding to stay alive
And so did I, but at least I tried to
Fall upon that sword and never look back
Where did you get that line?
Where did you get that look?
Where did you get that penchant for destruction in the way you talk?
Where did you get that ride?
Where did you get that rocket?
Where did you get that painter in your pocket?
I didn't stand a chance
I didn't stand at all
You looked ok with the others
This Week
- L'etranger reread finish
- Indian Middle Classes Finish
- On The Trinity: pg.no.150
- SSD2: police scene and fly past and concluding speech
- Sat. Sunday: Metaphysics I Homeworks
Sunday, September 25, 2011
This Week
- Indian Middle Classes 300 pgs
- A Void : 150 pgs
- SS2D1: 5000 words+
- French Grammar Book : Finish
- L'Etranger: 50 pgs
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
This Week
- Hindu Social Reform
- L'Etranger
- SS2D1: Electric Shock Therapy, Justice Play, Fly Past
- French Grammar: Chapter 15, 16, 17
- St. Augustine
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Novels To Read
- La Chute
- Marguerite Duras Novel in French
- The Ambassadors
- Ali Poor Ka Eli
- Death Of Virgil
- The Emigrants - W. G. Sebald
- Shadow-Boxing Woman
- A Sentimental Education, Madame Bovary
- Melancholy Of Resistance
- Book Of Memories - Xmas Time or maybe in one long stretch on thanksgiving
Monday, August 15, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
End Of The Year Goals
- Metaphysics I Class
- SSD2 and SSD1 and SSD3 and SSD4
- La Chute
- French Grammar Heminway
- Persian Grammar Revision
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Sunday, June 26, 2011
This Week
- Beautiful Days
- SSD2: Mughal Episode, Ayat Episode, Noor Jahan Episode
- L'etranger: 120pgs
- On Trinity : pg.200
- French C7,8,9
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
The Book Of Job - Opening
Sunday, June 5, 2011
This Week
- On The Trinity : pg.50
- French Chapter 7
- SSD2 : Mughal Episode, and Noor Jahan Episode
- The Book OF Job
Saturday, June 4, 2011
On the Trinity - Opening
Book 8 Outline1. In the Divine Trinity, paradoxically, three persons are not greater than one. (I.I)
DFW
"This is art – concerned less with explanation than transfiguration, less with escape than the modality of perspective, the dark presence of our century’s history, like the enframing libretto, succeeds at just that – enframing – by transcending frame to become the wild theme’s emblem. What is more [illegible]: the book deserves the care and patience it demands.”"
DFW's notes in his copy of Lost In The Funhouse
Friday, June 3, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
L'étranger - pg. 40
Les lampes de la rue se sont alors allumées brusquement et elles ont fait pâlir les premieres etoiles qui montaient dans la nuit.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
epiphany 04162011
The great thing about writing is that a lot of writing changes on the second look although at the time of writing it looks like shit but the train of thought has a weird way of illumining itself on the second read and if it happens then that means you are in business and that the material is rewrite-worthy.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Dandelion Wine - Opening
It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
For Walter I. Bradbury
neither uncle nor cousin
but most decidedly
editor and friend.
AVON BOOKS, INC.
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
Introduction copyright 1975 by Ray Bradbury
Copyright 1946, 1947, 1950, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1957 by Ray Bradbury
Interior design by Kellan Peck
First Avon Books Printing: February 1999
Printed in the U.S.A
Saturday, April 23, 2011
epiphany 04161906
the greatest thing about writing is that when you think you are demoralized, fucked and left alone for no good on your broken raft in a sea of shit - that's the moment when the sun rises and fortune smiles at you. everything turns into pure gold and a way forward comes and carries you over to the magical shores ...
Friday, April 22, 2011
A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook
Primroses; salutations; the miry skullof a half-eaten ram; viscous wounds in earthopening. What seraphs are afoot.Gold seraph to gold worm in the pierced slime:greetings. Advent of power-in-grace. The powerof flies distracts the working of our souls.Earth's abundance. The God-ejected Wordresorts to flesh, procures carrion, satisfiesits white hunger. Salvation's travestya deathless metaphor: the stale headsauced in original blood; the little feastfoaming with cries of rapture and despair.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The Distant Fury Of Battle
Grass resurrects to mask, to strangle,Words glossed on stone, lopped stone-angel;But the dead maintain their ground --That there's no getting round --Who in places vitally rest,Named, anonymous; who testAlike the endurance of yewsLaurels, moonshine, stone, all tissues;With whom, under license and duress,There are pacts made, if not peace.Union with the stone-wearing deadClaims the born leader, the preparedLeader, the devourers and all lean men.Some, finally, learn to begin.Some keep to the arrangement of love(Or similar trust) under whose auspices moveMost subjects, toward the profits of thisCombine of doves and witnesses.Some, dug out of hot-beds, are brought bare,Not past conceiving but past care.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
It's still early ...
from The Monogram
[...]That I no longer have anything else
In the four walls, the ceiling, the floor
To shout for you and my own echo hitting me
To smell of your scent and people to get angry
Because the untested and foreign
People can’t stand and it’s early, do you hear me
It’s still early in this world my love
To speak of you and me.[...]
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
At Swim-Two-Birds - pg. 136
Maybe he is drunk, suggested the Good Fairy, I don't believe in wasting my sympathy on sots, do you?
Monday, April 11, 2011
At Swim-Two-Birds - pg. 128
The stuff that I go in for, said Casey roughly, is the real stuff. Oh, none of the fancy stuff for me.
Monday, April 4, 2011
At Swim-Two-Birds - Opening
CHAPTER 1HAVING placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.
'Εξισταται γαρ παντ απ αλληλων διχα
Copyright 1951, 1966 by Brian Nolan
Introduction copyright 1988 by William H. Gass
First Dalkey Archive edition, 1998
Second printing, 2001
Third printing, 2005
Fourth printing, 2008
All rights reserved
Partially funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Printed on the permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
A Month Of Sundays - Opening
1
Forgive me my denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American. I write these pages at some point in the time of Richard Nixon's unravelling. Though the yielding is mine, the temptation belongs to others: my keepers have set before me a sheaf of blank sheets -- a month's worth, in their estimation. Sullying them is to be my sole therapy.my tongue is the pen of a ready writer
This principle of soul, universally and individually, is the principle of ambiguity.
-- PSALM 45
This principle of soul, universally and individually, is the principle of ambiguity.
-- PAUL TILLICH
Sale of the book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
A Fawcett Columbine Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright 1974, 1975 by John Updike
This edition is published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincide3ntal.
An excerpt from this book originally appeared in Playboy magazine.
Manufactured in the United States of America
A Fawcett Columbine Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright 1974, 1975 by John Updike
This edition is published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincide3ntal.
An excerpt from this book originally appeared in Playboy magazine.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Monday, March 21, 2011
Oblivion: Mr. Squishy
Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhoos catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium's picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satellite TV's channel changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider's 220 regular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley's home number on Speed Dial so that it would take only one moment of the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just one finger to push just one gray button to invite her for one cocktail or even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and open his heart to her before quailing and deferring the call one more night and waddling into the bathroom and/or then the cream-and-tan bedroom to lay out the next day's crisp shirt and tie and say his nightly dekate and then masturbate himself to sleep once more.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Home-thoughts, from the Sea
Monday, March 14, 2011
The Cantos: V
Topaz I manage, and three sorts of blue;
but on the barb of time.
The fire? always, and the vision always,
Ear dull, perhaps, with the vision, flitting
And fading at will. Weaving with points of gold,
Gold-yellow, saffron... The roman shoe, Aurunculeia'a
barb of time: Perhaps an allusion to Giordano Bruno's motto vincit instans ("the instant triumphs"), of which Bruno says that the creative instant or inspiration is a barb of light which pierces the mind to give one a totally new perception beyond all mere logic chopping. This links up with Pound's notions regarding the "luminous detail" -- Companion
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Distant Star - Closing
A taxi pulled up beside us. Look after yourself, my friend, he said, and off he went.
Distant Star - pg. 130
This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters/ Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Epiphany #45
Last night buying a used copy of Rimbaud's poetry in French and showing The Crows to someone all while not awake ... talking to fmjtf.
Friday, February 25, 2011
L'étranger - Ouverture
I
Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile :: <<>> Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier.COLLECTIONS FOLIO
Éditions Gallimard, 1957
Monday, February 21, 2011
Jeremiah 5:6
"Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of
the evenings shall spoil them, and a leopard shall watch over the
cities."
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Inferno - Canto I
As when Divine Love set those beautiful
Lights into motion at creation's dawn,
And the time of day and season combined to fill
My heart with hope of that beast with festive skin --
But not so much that the next sight wasn't fearful:
A lion came at me, his head high as he ran,
Roaring with hunger so the air appeared to tremble.
Then, a grim she-wolf -- whose leanness seemed to compress
All the world's cravings, that had made miserable
Such multitudes; she put such heaviness
Into my spirit, I lost hope of the crest.
Like someone eager to win, who tested by loss
Surrenders to gloom and weeps, so did that beast
Make me feel, as harrying toward me at a lope
She forced me back toward where the sun is lost.
Israel Potter - pg. 31
Continuing in the service of the king's gardener at Kew, until a season came when the work of the garden required a less number of laborers; Israel, with several others, was discharged; and the day after, engaged himself for a few months to a farmer in the neighborhood where he had been last employed. But hardly a week had gone by, when the old story of his being a rebel, or a runaway prisoner, or a Yankee! or a spy, began to be revived with added malignity. Like bloodhounds, the soldiers were once more on the track. The houses where he harbored were many times searched; but thanks to the fidelity of a few earnest well-wishers, and to his own unsleeping vigilance and activity, the hunted fox still continued to elude apprehension. To such extremities of harassment, however, did this incessant pursuit subject him, that in a fit of despair he was about to surrender himself, and submit to his fate, when Providence seasonably interposed in his favor.
Israel Potter - pg. 29
Unauthorized and abhorrent thoughts will sometimes invade the best human heart. Seeing the monarch unguarded before him; remembering that the war was imputed more to the self-will of the King than to the willingness of parliament or the nation; and calling to mind all his own sufferings growing out of that war, with all the calamities of his country; dim impulses, such as those to which the regicide Ravaillac yielded, would shoot balefully across the soul of the exile. But thrusting Satan behind him, Israel vanquished all such temptations. Nor did these ever more disturb him, after his one chance conversation with the monarch.
Israel Potter - pg. 10
Chapter 3ISRAEL GOES TO THE WARS; AND REACHING BUNKER HILL IN TIME TO BE OF SERVICE THERE, SOON AFTER IS FORCED TO EXTEND HIS TRAVELS ACROSS THE SEA INTO THE ENEMY'S LAND
LEFT TO idle lamentations, Israel might now have planted deep furrows in his brow. But stifling his pain, he chose rather to plough, than be ploughed. Farming weans man from his sorrows. That tranquil meditations. There, too, in mother earth, you may plant and reap; not, as in other things, plant and see the planting torn up by the roots. But if wandering in the wilderness; and wandering upon the waters; if felling trees; and hunting, and shipwreck; and fighting with whales, and all his other strange adventures, had not as yet cured poor Israel of his now hopeless passion; events were at hand for ever to drown it.
Inferno - Opening
... when I came to stop
Below a hill that marked one end of the valley
That had pierced my heart with terror, I looked up
Toward the crest and saw its shoulders already
Mantled in rays of that bright planet that shows
The road to everyone, whatever our journey.
CANTO IMidway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard -- so tangled and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I'll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunderFor Frank Bidart
Copyright 1994 by Farrar, Straus and Grioux
English translation copyright 1994 by Robert Pinsky
Italian text copyright 1991 Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano
Illustrations 1994 by Michael Mazur
Foreword copyright 1994 by John Freccero
Notes copyright 1994 by Nicole Pinsky
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada by Harper Collins Canada Ltd
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 1994
This Week
- French C19
- Persian Lesson 100
- Descartes: Exercise 2 in Latex
- SS: D2
- Cantos: X
- Inferno: Canto XX
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Distant Star - Opening
II saw Carlos Wieder for the first time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when Salvador Allende was President of Chile.At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto Ruiz-Tagle and occasionally attended Juan Stein's poetry workshop in Concepcion, the so-called capital of the South.
"What star falls unseen?"
WILLIAM FAULKNER
For Victoria Avalos and Lautaro Bolaño
Copyright 1996 by Roberto Bolaño and Editorial Anagrama
Translation copyright 2004 by Chris Andrews
Published by arrangement with the Harvill Press, Random House UK, London.
This edition has been translated with the financial assistance of the Spanish Direccion General del Libro y Bibliotecas, Ministerio de Cultura.
Originally published by Edditorial Anagrama as Estrella distante in 1996
Manufactured in the United States of America.
New Directions books are printed on acid-free paper.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP993) in 2004.
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
باد ما را خود خواھد برد
در شب کوچک من افسوس
باد با برگ درختان میعادی دارد
در شب کوچک من دلھرہ ویر انیست
گوش کن
وزش ظلمت را میشنوی؟
من غربیانہ بہ این خوشبختی می
نگرم
من بہ نو میدی خود معتادم
گوش کن
و زش ظلمت را میثنوی
در شب اکنون چیزیمی گزرد
ماہ سر خست و مشوش
و بر این بام کہ ھر لحظہ در او بیم فرو ریختن است
ابر ھا ھمچون امبوہ عزاداران
لحظہ باریدن را گویی منتظرند
لحظہ ای
و پس از آن ہیچ
پشت این
پنجرہ شب دارد می لرزد
و زمین دارد
باز میمانداز چرخش
پشت این پنجرہ یک نامعلوم
نگران من و توست
ای سراپایت سبز
دستاھیت را چون خاطرہ ای سوزان در دستان عاشق من بگزار
و لبانت را چون حسی گرم از ہستی
بہ نوازش ھائی لبھای عاشق من بپسار
باد ما را خود خواھد برد
باد ما را خود خواھد برد
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
طویل مدتی منصوبی
- فارسی کا ایک ناول
- البرٹ کامیو کا ناول فرانسیسی مین
- چار افسانی
- MIT کا کورس : بعد اطبیعاتی اور منطق اوْل
Five Bells
| Time that is moved by little fidget wheels Is not my time, the flood that does not flow. Between the double and the single bell Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells From the dark warship riding there below, I have lived many lives, and this one life Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells. Deep and dissolving verticals of light Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water. Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth, Gone even from the meaning of a name; Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips And hits and cries against the ports of space, Beating their sides to make its fury heard. Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face In agonies of speech on speechless panes? Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name! But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells, Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time. Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life, There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait - Nothing except the memory of some bones Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud; And unimportant things you might have done, Or once I thought you did; but you forgot, And all have now forgotten - looks and words And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off, Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales Of Irish kings and English perfidy, And dirtier perfidy of publicans Groaning to God from Darlinghurst. Five bells. Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark, So dark you bore no body, had no face, But a sheer voice that rattled out of air (As now you'd cry if I could break the glass), A voice that spoke beside me in the bush, Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind, Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man, And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found. But all I heard was words that didn't join So Milton became melons, melons girls, And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night, And in each tree an Ear was bending down, Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass, When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought, The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky, Knifing the dark with deathly photographs. There's not so many with so poor a purse Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that, Five miles in darkness on a country track, But when you do, that's what you think. Five bells. In Melbourne, your appetite had gone, Your angers too; they had been leeched away By the soft archery of summer rains And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind, And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage, The sodden ectasies of rectitude. I thought of what you'd written in faint ink, Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind With other things you left, all without use, All without meaning now, except a sign That someone had been living who now was dead: "At Labassa. Room 6 x 8 On top of the tower; because of this, very dark And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed Into this room - 500 books all shapes And colours, dealt across the floor And over sills and on the laps of chairs; Guns, photoes of many differant things And differant curioes that I obtained..." In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper, We argued about blowing up the world, But you were living backward, so each night You crept a moment closer to the breast, And they were living, all of them, those frames And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth, And most your father, the old man gone blind, With fingers always round a fiddle's neck, That graveyard mason whose fair monuments And tablets cut with dreams of piety Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment At cargoes they had never thought to bear, These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone. Where have you gone? The tide is over you, The turn of midnight water's over you, As Time is over you, and mystery, And memory, the flood that does not flow. You have no suburb, like those easier dead In private berths of dissolution laid - The tide goes over, the waves ride over you And let their shadows down like shining hair, But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed; And you are only part of an Idea. I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, And the short agony, the longer dream, The Nothing that was neither long nor short; But I was bound, and could not go that way, But I was blind, and could not feel your hand. If I could find an answer, could only find Your meaning, or could say why you were here Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice? I looked out my window in the dark At waves with diamond quills and combs of light That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze, And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each, And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells, Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out. Five bells. |
Monday, February 7, 2011
Israel Potter - Opening
TOHis HighnessTHEBunker-Hill MonumentBIOGRAPHY, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue -- one given and received in entire disinterestedness -- since neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, nor the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.
This Week
- Second Draft
- French: C6-9
- Persian: Lessons80-95
- Tale of Genji: pg. 300
- Descartes Paper: First Draft
Monday, January 31, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 225
Take Benjamin Franklin, steel-engraved, down from the wall. The Porteno pettifogger gazes, frowning, at the inventor of the lightning rod. Manuel Belgrano opens his eyes. This, my friends, is the first democrat of these new worlds. The model that we must imitate. Forty years from now, our countries may have men like him. If and when, naturally, the great country of the north continues to produce men like Franklin. If it does, we may enjoy in the future of the freedom for which we are not prepared today. By some misfortune, it may so happen that North America will not produce more men of the stamp of the inventor of the lightning rod and that in our countries the lightning bolt of anarchy will strike down our best men. It may so happen that they will invent the Big Prod up there and that down here we'll all die of the croup, carbuncle, and tick, like the cattle in our fields. We must take care not to fall into the hands of master-butchers.
I The Supreme - pg. 207
Above all, senor dean, if we do not observe the formalities of an elementary urbanity. Is the bathroom door a proper place to enrue that all our disagreements will come out in the wash? We are in accord on that point, doctor. Let us proceed to the salon d'a-grement.
I The Supreme - pg. 197
I believe that at one time the pen must also have possessed a third function: reproducing the phonic space of writing, the sound-text of the visual images; which could have been the spoken time of those words without forms, of those forms without words, that allowed El Supremo to conjoin three texts in a fourth intemporal dimension turning around the axis of an undifferentiated point between the origin and the extinction of the writing; that thin shadow between tomorrow and death.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Destroyer : New Ways Of Living
Maybe I should have loved you. I was a desert in love with extremes. (La la la) I wore skins. I didn't care who survived. (La la la) Treacherous fop, don't be embarrassed It's you and your kind:
Maybe I should have sworn
Not to be born
Of this wretched glove too soon,
But a dragon needs room
A dragon needs room
A dragon needs room
To run, run, run, run...
You married well, a gentlewoman of means who
Kept the word "Destroyer" embroidered on her jeans, too
The band foretold trends from Spring of '85.
They're calling it "The New Decay"...
Hey, so am I.
For looking good at your table on the terrace
That you call home. I'm sold
Paris, London, Rome's too old for you
And your kind
Explosions want to see what they can find:
New ways of living...
The New Ways of Living
Monday, January 24, 2011
This Week
- The Idiot - 350 pgs
- Descartes FIN: Paper
- Short Story First Draft
- Persian Lesson 80
- French First Chapter
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Ghazal - pg. 266
کوئےجاناں چمن سے بہتر ہے اس کا کتا ہرن سے بہتر ہے
گل قبا پر ہو جامے سے باہر کب ترے پیرہن سے بہتر ہے
گور میں بھاگ اہلِ دنیا سے خلوت اِس انجمن سے بہتر ہے
چمن دہر کا ہے ہر گل خوب نسترن، یاسمن سے بہتر ہے
ہنسنے والا نہیں ہے رونے پر ہم کو غربت وطن سے بہتر ہے
ترک دنیا سمجھ جواں مردی نفرت اس پیرِ زن سے بہتر ہے
بازو اس کا مکاں، شکم اس کا دھکدکی نورتن سے بہتر ہے
نہیں کھلتا کسی طرح سے پھر عیب پوشی کفن سے بہتر ہے
سیب ہے یہ تو پھر بہی ہے وہ غبغب اے دل زقن سے بہتر ہے
مانگئے کیا خدا سے چشمئہ خضر کیا صنم کے دہن سے بہتر ہے
دشمنِ جاں اجل کو جان آتش
دوستی گورکن سے بہتر ہے ۔
Correspondence - Opening
1Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann, poem and dedication in a book of Matisse paintings, Vienna 24(?) June 1948'In Egypt'For IngeborgThou shalt say to the strange woman's eye: be the water!Thou shalt seek in the stranger's eye those whom thou knowest to be in the water.Thou shalt call them from the water: Ruth! Noemi! Miriam!Thou shalt adorn them when thou liest with the stranger.Thou shalt adorn them with the cloud-hair of the stranger.Thou shalt say to Ruth, to Miriam and Noemi:Behold, I sleep next to her!Thou shalt adorn the stranger next to thee most beautifully of allThou shalt adorn her with the pain over Ruth, over Miriam and Noemi.Thous shalt say to the stranger:
Behold, I slept next to these!Vienna, 23 May 1948To the meticulous one,22 years after her birthday,From the unmeticulous one
Thursday, January 20, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 196
The figure of the typical Brazilian macaque stands out against the whiteness of the wall. I study it from my window. Unknown animal: lion in front, ant behind, pudenda inverted. Leopard, more pard than leo. Illusory human form. Its most amazing particularity, however, lies in the fact that when the sun strikes it, it casts the shadow of a human being and not that of its bestial figure.
I The Supreme - pg. 195
Not enough. Not red enough. Not as red as real blood. Perhaps it suffices to simulate it beneath the marginal sun of Brazil, to the west of Africa. The incendiary sun of Asuncion is another matter. Continually beating straight down, splitting stone. The glare bares, betrays, bleaches out the treasures of this card-board carnival. Blurs the dancing girls, the capoeiras. The white hand against the black lacquer of the carriage clutching the ibis of the hat. Royal-heron. Bird-of-Paradise. Alchemical buttons. Colored sequins. Wear more if you like. Pile on as much as you please. To me it will be mere theater. To me the imperial envoy is just another messenger boy. An empty-headed suitor come to seek my hand. But I don't give my hand away to anyone.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The Shampoo
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
– Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
(shigekuni.wordpress.com posted originally)
This Week
Monday, January 17, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 194
There comes forth from the souvenir-pen another reception that I shall offer the envoy from Brazil, fifteen years later. I can allow myself the luxury of mixing up the facts without confusing them. I thus save myself time, paper, ink, and the trouble of searching through almanacs, calendars, dusting shelf lists. I don't write history. I make it. I can remake it as I please, adjusting, stressing, enriching its meaning and truth. In the history written by publicans and pharisees, they invest their lies at compound interest. Dates to them are sacred. Particularly if they are erroneous. To those rodents, error consists precisely of gnawing holes in documented truth. They turn into rivals of moths and rats. As for this perpetual-circular, the order of the facts does not alter the product of the factors.
I The Supreme - pg. 193
A plain chicken done up in fancy dress. A monocular chicken. Any creature of the animal kingdom except a man to be trusted. No, doctor, this was the setting for another performance. The thing is that in Paraguay time is so hard-pressed that it slows way down, mixing up facts, shuffling things about, misplacing them. Fortune is born here every morning and by noon it's already an old lady, according to an old saying that's new and true all over again each day.
I The Supreme - pg. 193
[(In the margin): The catfish of Takuary had turned into a prickly bone. The fish is born of a thorn. The monkey of a coconut. Man of the monkey. The shadow of Christopher Columbus's egg wheels round and round above the Land of Fire. The shadow is not more difficult than the egg. The shadow flees before itself. Everything eventually gets to where it's going. Merely to be on the way is already to be arriving. ]
The Idiot - Opening
TOWARDS THE END of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o' clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full stream. It was so damp and foggy that dawn could barely break; ten paces to right or left of the line it was hard to make out anything at all through the carriage windows.
FIRST VINTAGE CLASSICS EDITION, JULY 2003
Copyright 2001 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Classics and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
The Man-Moth
The Man-moth
Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.
Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
I The Supreme - pg. 190
On this mission Belgrano represented candor, good faith, loftiness of character. Vicente Anastasio Echevarria cleverness, knowledge of the ways of men and things, easy and persuasive eloquence. I saw in this jackanapes only a varicose, viperine tongue; I heard in him only the tumult of his outlandish ideas peeking out of his reptilian eyes. Belgrano, on the other hand, was a man of much greater worth than the description of him by the Tacit Brigadier. A transparent soul, that of this man unacquainted with evil, peeping out through the pupils of his clear blue eyes. A man of peace condemned to be different from what he was in the depths of his being.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 186
... wait patiently because they will reign here again. They are the Old Ones because they are wise. You must not ask questions, the Voice-of-Before says to you. You must not ask questions because there is no answer. Do not try to get to the bottom of things. You will not find the truth that you betrayed. You have lost yourself after having caused the failure of the very Revolution that you sought to make. Do not try to purge your soul of lies. All this prattle is futile. Many other things you have not thought of will go up in smoke. Your power has no power over them. You are not you but others ... (the following folio is missing...)
I The Supreme - pg. 178
(4) What about Senora Pureza? Has she already arrived there? Have you offered her asylum, cordial hospitality, as I ordered you to do in my previous dispatch? Treat her with all the respect that so eminent a lady deserves, for the country owes her many services that I alone have any knowledge of. You need not play high and mighty with her or launch into those lofty diatribes of yours which in your stupidity you fondly believe enhance your authority. Authority that is not yours, but merely conferred upon you as a deputy of the Supreme Power.
I The Supreme - pg. 174
Inform the parish priest of Encarnacion of my sovereign will and decree:He is to declare where the soul of the late Jose Custodio Arroyo ended up. If he find him in hell, he is to leave him there. Should this prove impossible to verify, he is to proceed immediately to give the corpse sacred internment, after a funeral with the body lying in state. Without charge. Pass the dossier on to the vicar general. Order is also hereby given to transport the priest of Encarnacion to the penal colony of Tevego.
Thomas Bernhard
Whatever you write it's always a catastrophe. That's the depressing thing about the fate of a writer . . . All you deliver is a bad, ridiculous copy of what you had imagined . . . It's especially hard in the German language, because that language is wooden, clumsy, disgusting. A terrible language that kills anything light and wonderful. The only thing one can do is sublimate that language with a rhythm to give it musicality.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 171
So that I too, according to the diagnostic powers of this agnostic savage, have soul-eggs that are all broken. All he sees is emptiness amid the bones. But emptiness is still something; everything depends on what a person makes of it. No? Yes. The pamphleteering fetuses of the chivosis are twisting the wet rag of my body underground. They're drinking maize beer. They keep on twisting me, their pockets bulging with calumnies. They drink more beer. They throw me into the fire. My body smolders in the tremors of being-dead-continually. But they won't put an end to me. I'm water that boils outside the pot, a schoolgirl will say of me. Being dead and remining on my feet is my forte, and even though for me it's all a return trip, it's always adios and onward, and I never come back, right? Right! Do trees grow downward? Do birds fly backward? Does a word that's spoken get wet? Can all of you hear what I don't say, see clearly in the dark? What is said is said. If you only listen to the half of it, you'd understand the double. I feel like a fresh-laid egg.
I The Supreme - pg. 169
Here in my bedroom, the muffled tick-tock of the watches, among them the one Belgrano presented to Cavanas at Takuary. The faint flutter of moths in the books. The stealthy minute hand of the wood borer in the timbers. Every so often the weary sounds of the cathedral bell, marking not hours but centuries. How long a time I haven't slept! Everything is repeated, in the image of what has been and will be. The infinitely great and the infinitely small. Absolutely true that there is nothing new under the sun, and this very sun the repetition of innumerable suns that have existed and will exist. The ancients knew the sun was two thousand leagues distant and were surprised that it looked to be two hundred paces away. They knew the eye could not see the sun if the eye were not somehow a sin itself. More than necessary to know how not to fall sick, to make oneself invulnerable to everything. According to the Jesuit Montoya, the Indian chieftain Avaporu chewed the magic herb of the Yayeupa-Guasu he sneezed three times and became invisible. So that even if I were dead I wouldn't be, since I would be my repetition. Only the shell of my first soul would be broken or dead after having incubated the others.
I The Supreme - pg. 167
I'm tired of their clowning. I don't intend to answer them. Nothing enhances authority so much as silence. My patience has a very wide turning circle.
I The Supreme - pg. 165
From the people-multitude I picked the men who formed the skeleton organization of the army of the people. An even more invincible support than that of cannons and rifles in the defense of the Republic and the Revolution.
I The Supreme - pg. 161
The cardboard figures of the Junta became more and more unsteady. In the Yegros mansion, band, orchestra, elegant soirees, roistering, revelry, night after night.
I The Supreme - pg. 160
We cannot oblige our citizens to sleep in peace with a river on the rampage. You alone, as officers of the General Staff, named by the Governing Junta, paid by it in the country's money, are not the people. By acting in this fashion, you are, rather, the counterpeople. By your very profession as military officers, you ought to be the first to set an example of faithful performance of your duties; of respect for the dignity of the Junta; of decency and honor to citizens, protecting those who are most defenseless, ignorant, and humble, those who have been taught to welcome blows as though they were a blessing from God.
I The Supreme - pg. 152
The only thing I'm asking you is your permission to incubate in your incubus-cube. I don't want to be engraved in a woman's womb. I want to be born in a man's thought. Leave the rest to me.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 147
What deeply pains us and disturbs us in the venom of sedition and atheism that the books and the ideas of those libertine impostors that all of you are reading in secret are insinuating into your minds. The devil, my son, is prompting the pages of those decidal and regicidal books. Spitting on the Holy Books his execrable slaver of exotic doctrines. But, your paternity, the God that all of you have brought to our America, binding to his services the mitayo and yanacona gods of the Indians, is exotic too. Don't be a heretic, my son! No, reverend father. We simply want to know what is new, and not just keep parroting the Paternicas, the Summa, the maxims of Peter Lombard.
I The Supreme - pg. 137
'For the love of God,' I said, 'fourteen years after you should, by every natural law, be in your grave, how can you turn yourself into an object of ridicule for your enemies or an object of pity for your friends?'
I The Supreme - pg. 137
The two of you made the trees shake, the water in the river boil when you dived into it naked. Dona Juana's ardor made the white-hot heat of afternoon siestas last far into the night. She brought cool night dew to the boiling point. A fog with the taste of acid drifted across the land bathed in moonlight. It crept into my hermetically sealed house.
I The Supreme - pg. 131
An exhalation, a breath of its own. Those who know most, see most, are always blind. Those with the sweetest voices, the mute. Those with the keenest hearing, the deaf. Homer! O mere repeater of other blind men and deafmutes! Man's principal malady is his insatiable curiosity regarding things he cannot know.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 130
The pelican loves its offspring. If it comes back to the nest and finds that they have bitten by serpents, it tears its breast open with its beak. It washes them in its blood. It restores them to life. Is it not I who am the Supreme Pelican in Paraguay?
Monday, January 10, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 129
No, Mister William, here in this country even the most humble remains are precious to us. We're very poor, hence we can't give up even our pride. But, sir, to drink this is to snatch up Hades itself and drink it to someone's health, the younger of the Robertsons said in English with a hearty guffaw.
I The Supreme - pg. 121
What answer can you give me? There's no bone, you tell me. There must be something worse then; some weight that makes their heads fall down onto their chests. Look for it, find it, my good sir! With at least the same diligence with which you hunt for the rarest species of plants and insects.
I The Supreme - pg. 117
You don't know. Well then, listen. The first reason is that animals live amid nature, which knows neither pity nor compassion, the source of all ills. Secondly, they do not speak or write as men do; in particular, they do not pen calumnies the way you do. Thirdly, birds and all animal or animated species do their business at the very moment they feel the need to.
I The Supreme - pg. 109
Decidedly, Tacitus-Brigadier, you give every appearance of being a veterinarian of the remount cavalry, a penpushing quartermaster clerk.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 108
(in the private notebook)Signing this armistice, so contrary to the aims of the annexionist invasion and the interests of Buenos Aires, was to prod a sore spot, the Tacitus of the Plata will say later on. Our sorest spot of all, Tacitus-Brigadier. You too will invade our country; and then you will begin quietly translating the Divine Comedy by invading Alighieri's Avernal circles.
I The Supreme - pg. 107
He baits the hook with an already fried catfish; he tosses the line into the Takuary; he waits, pole in one hand, the gold key of free exchange glittering in the other. The virtue of the key is that it is aperitive; that of the hook that it hooks things. The Paraguayan chiefs, mouths wide open, were hooked. The tobacconist-chief catches sight of the nutritive fortune amid the reflections.
I The Supreme - pg. 106
At the very top of the Orange Trees, observing the evolutions of the battle. And where did you come from?, they ask the completely naked peasant, half dead with fear. I ... the poor man murmurs covering his privates with his hands. I came ... I just came to have myself a peek at all this pantomonium!
I The Supreme - pg. 100
Whoever you are, insolent corrector of my pen, you are beginning to annoy me. You don't understand what I write. You don't understand that the law is symbolic. Twisted minds are unable to grasp this. They interpret the symbols literally. And so you make mistakes and fill my margins with your scoffing self-importance. At least read me correctly. There are clear/obscure symbols. I the Supreme play my passion cold-bloodedly ...
I The Supreme - pg. 97
For the moment God does not occupy my mind. The question that preoccupies it is ruling over chance. Putting my daedal digit on the die, the die in the dicebox. Getting the country out of its labyrinth.
I The Supreme - pg. 95
(Written in the margin. Unknown hand: By so doing, you were trying to imitate Descartes, who detested fresh eggs. He let them incubate beneath the ashes and drank down the emrbyonic substance. You wanted to do the same thing without being Descartes. You were not going to eat the Revolution every morning for breakfast with your mate. You turned this country into a lustral, expiatory egg that will hatch heaven only knows when, heaven only knows how, heaven only knows what. Embryo of what might have been the most prosperous country in the world. The best cock in all human legend.)
I The Supreme - pg. 88
To be nothing. To know nothing. Obscure sunflowers, their sorrow projects its shadow over the water. What do they know of cross-bones, of cross-words, of cross-bearing crusades. Volumes and volumes of ignorance and knowledge come out of their mouths in spirals of smoke.
I The Supreme - pg. 84
The power of those who govern, your uncle wisely assures me, is founded on ignorance, on the tameness and meekness of the people. Power has weakness as its foundation. This foundation is firm because its greatest security lies in the weakness of the people.
I The Supreme - pg. 71
The incommensurable fury of lust groans, cries out, insults, implores the barren divinities, in a fly's voice. Rage of exhaustion. It appears to fill the heavens and fits in the palm of one hand. The tremendous volcano does not pour forth a single drop of its burning lava. The sails of dreams lie limp, without the breath of a breeze to swell them. Enough!
I The Supreme - pg. 67
The writing mania appears to be the symptom of an uncontainable century. Outside of Paraguay, when has so much been written as in the days since the world has lain in perpetual convulsion? Not even the Romans in the period of their decadence. There is no more deadly merchandise than the books of there convulsionaries. There is no worse plague than the scribonic. Menders of lies and benders of truths. Lenders of their pens, the borrowed plumes of plebeian peacocks. When I think of this perverse fauna, I imagine a world in which men are born old. They shrink, they shrivel till they're small enough to put inside a bottle. They grow smaller still inside it, so that a person could eat ten Alexanders and twenty Caesars spread on a slice of bread or a chunk of manioc cake. My advantage is that I no longer need to eat and it matters not at all to me if I am eaten by those worms.
I The Supreme - pg. 65
Books have a destiny, though destiny has no book. Without the people from which they had been cut off by sign and story even the prophets would not have been able to write the Bible. The Greek people called Homer composed the Iliad. The Egyptians and the Chinese dictated their histories to scribes who dreamed of being the people, not copyists who sneezed the way you do on what you've written. A Homer-people creates a novel.
I The Supreme - pg. 61
The proximity of sleep files the angles smooth. The spirals sprawl out more. The resistance from left to right, weaker. Delirium, intimate friend of the nocturnal hand. The curves sway less. The sperm of the ink dries more slowly. The movements are divergent. The strokes droop more. They tend to distend.
I The Supreme - pg. 59
forget your memory. To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real. The unreal lies only in the bad use of the power of words in the bad use of writing. I don't understand, Sire ... Never mind. The pressure is enormous but you almost don't feel it you don't feel it eh what is it that you feel.
I The Supreme - pg. 57
When I dictate to you, the words have a meaning; when you write them, another. So that we speak two different languages. One feels more at home in the company of a familiar dog than in that of a man speaking a language unknown to us. False language is much less sociable than silence. Even my dog Sultan took the secret of what he said to the grave with him.
I The Supreme - pg. 56
Don't try to imitate them. Don't use improper words that are not my style, that are not steeped in my thought. I loathe relative talent that's begged and borrowed. What's more, your style is abominable. A labyrinthine alleyway paved with alliterations, anagrams, idiosyncratic idioms, barbarisms, parnamasias such as paroli/parulis, imbecilic anastrophes to dazzle imbecilic inverts who experience erections by virtue of the effect of the violent inversions of word order, such as: Beneath the foot of the tree I fall; or one more violent still: Having Revolution firmly planted in my head, the pike winks its conniving eyes at me from the Plaza.
I The Supreme - pg. 55
Give me your hand. Are you going to get up, Sire? Let me have your hand. A very great honor for this servant to have Your Excellency extend his hand to me. I'm not holding my hand out to you. I'm ordering you to hold yours our to me. It's not a reconciliation I'm proposing to you; simply a simulacrum of temporary identification.This is a lesson. The last one. It ought to have been the first one. Since I am unable to offer you a Last Supper with the flock of Judases who are my apostles, I offer you a late-first class.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Maximilien Robespierre
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country. ... The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.
I The Supreme - pg. 51
You remove something from your bosom. Throw. Something bounces off the planisphere, between the constellations of the Altar odor of a musk cat. The unmistakable, immemorial odor of woman. Carnal smell of sex. Lustful, sensual, lubricious, libidinous, salacious, voluptuous, dishonest, shameless, lascivious, fornicatory. Its effluvia expand, fill the room. Penetrate the smallest interstices. Make the heaviest objects sway to and fro as on a tide. The furniture, the arms. Even the meteorite seems to float and bob in the terrible stench. It must be invading the entire city. I am paralyzed with nausea. Retching, on the point of vomiting. With a supreme effort, I contain myself. It is not merely that I smell this female odor, that I have suddenly remembered it. I see it. Fiercer than a phantom that attacks us in broad daylight, leaping back and forth, to the end of those first days, burned up, forgotten, in the brothels of the Lower Town. The smell is here now. Female-Samson, she has embraced the pillars of my temperate temple. She coils her thousands of arms round the wooden columns of my unimpregnable eremitorium-erectorium. Trying to topple it. She looks at me blindly, sniffs at me, invisible. Trying to topple me. Sultan enters.
Friday, January 7, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 49
Don't start measuring my trouser's fly with my theodolite. That apparatus served me to rebuild the City that in three centuries your ancestors left more choked with filth than Augeas' stables.
I The Supreme - pg. 48
She runs her hand over the meteor as she looks around out of the corner of her eye. A gentle caress of the jeopard-hawk of the cosmos. Chance-stone chained in a corner of the room giving off invisible light, a warning of minor hazards: this woman with the svelte body bare-ly trembling. She does not hide the clear intentions in the darkest corners of her mind.
I The Supreme - pg. 45
Follow the trail of the handwriting through the labyrinths of ... (torn).... the filigreed fleuron in the vergered-perjured paper, the flagellated letters, now mark the unreality of the inexistent. In the forest of differences in which we lie, I too must guard against being deluded by the delirium of similarities. People all reassure themselves with the thought that they are a single individual. Difficult to be the same man constantly. What is the same is not always the same. I am not always I. The only one who doesn't change is HE. He maintains himself in the invariable. He is there, in the state of superlunary beings. If I close my eyes, I still see him, infinitely repeated in the rings of the concave mirror. (I must look for my notes on this subject of almastronomy.) It is not merely a question of eyelids. Sometimes HE looks at me, and then my bed rises and drifts at the mercy of whirlwinds, and I, lying in it, seeing everything from very high up or very deep down, till everything disappears in the point, in the place of absence. Only HE remains, not losing an iota of his form, of his dimension, but rather, growing, increasing by himself.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
God's Little Mountain
God's Little Mountain
Below, the river scrambled like a goat
Dislodging stones. The mountain stamped its foot,
Shaking, as from a trance. And I was shut
With wads of sound into a sudden quiet.
I thought the thunder had unsettled heaven;
All was so still. And yet the sky was cloven
By flame that left the air cold and engraven.
I waited for the word that was not given,
Pent up into a region of pure force,
Made subject to the pressure of the stars;
I saw the angels lifted like pale straws;
I could not stand before those winnowing eyes
And fell, until I found the world again.
Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen;
For though the head frames words the tongue has none.
And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?
Blackwater Fort
As I had held Carlotta closethat night we watched some Xenophonembedded with the 5th Marinesin the old Sunni Trianglemake a half-assed attempt to untanglethe ghastly from the price of gasoline.There was a distant fanfaronin the Nashville sky, where the windhad now drawn itself up and pinnedon her breast a Texaco star."Why," Carlotta wondered, "the House of Tar?Might it have to do with the grossimports of crude oil Bush will come clean ononly when the Tigris comes clean?"
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 25
A thicker stroke. A thinner one. The mustaches of the t's longer or shorter, depending on how free the hand of the person who set them down. The little pigtail of the o, standing straight up or drooping. Not to mention the instep, the crooked legs of the letters. The columns. The fleurons. The finials. The curlicues. The campanulas capping the capitals. The morning-glory vines of the flourishes drawn in a single spiral with one stroke of the pen, which is what Your Excellency traces beneath his Supreme Nature, climbing the wall of the writing sometimes ... Enough of your scriptuary floriculture, you dimwit!
I The Supreme - pg. 23
You are to start tracking down the handwriting of the pasquinade in all the files. The dossiers of agreements, disagreements, counteragreements. International communication. Treaties. Remissory notes. Demissory letters. All the bills of Portugese-Brazilian traders, of Oriental merchants. The piles of paperwork concerning food excises, tithes, the salt tax. Fructuary assessments. State monopoly, commercial commissions, war duties. Import-export records. Customs permits for incoming-outgoing shipments. Complete correspondence of all functionaries, from the lowest rank to the highest. Messages in code from spies, informers, agents of the various intelligence branches. Invoices of arms smugglers. Everything. The least little scrap of paper with writing on it.
Monday, January 3, 2011
I The Supreme - pg. 10
She is never without her bezoar stone. She keeps it hidden underneath the niche of the Lord of Patience. More powerful than the image of the Bloodstained God. Talisman. Stair. Platform. Last step. The most resistant. It sustains her in the place of certainty. Place where there is no further need of any sort of help. Obsession has its foundation there. Faith is supported entirely by itself. What is faith if not belief in things that have no verisimilitude? Seeing through a glass darkly.The ruminant-stone has its own vigil light. Someday it will have its own niche. Perhaps, in time, its sanctuary.
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