Tithonus] Chronos] " These things I sigh for and lament, but nothing can be done."

"The long unmeasured pulse of time moves ever[y thing]."

Half a year looms past, revolves, an ending turn. There is a terror and eventually a fatigued comfort in the days causelessly passing faster and faster.

Like a jagged stone worn smooth by sand and wave.

["Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery."]

Many by way of horror come to crumble in this sand.

A few black rocks still jut half-drowned above the writhing ocean surface,

But for how long I can discern that they are there
I do not know,
in the dying light the ocean grows - the sound of it, the unformed shape

A kind of everything.

Sometimes there's a great ache. It goes from the back of my throat to a sting in the eyes like smoke from a small fire, and then down behind the ribs, misty now, like dewy fog in a rainforest. But I've outlived many deliquescent achings and even if my bones creak and my gut grows sore I find another tomorrow beating me back into silence, though not tranquillity.

How awful must it be to be mute. But even with a mouth not sewn shut I find my words receding to a haggard limp before they ever fall from the precipice of my tongue.

I don't know about any of those. Okay well the second one down is from Only Revolutions, page 58. I found an awesome website that lets you search the text, like an online index. Pretty helpful for pinning down half-recalled words.

I read an interview with Danielewski the other day:

"Yeah, and I think that’s where it moves beyond just writing into a more vocational way of living. It encourages a practice of being open, of listening, and most of all finding a way of being comfortable about being uncertain, because it’s impossible to tell at a certain moment. Now and then you get these little gems, but often things that suddenly are important aren’t recognized as being important until maybe even a couple of years later. Say you had a moment, and you were open to the vitality of the story that was being told, the word that was being conveyed, but you didn’t necessarily place it somewhere, and nonetheless, two rewrites later, suddenly this moment comes to life, and that’s how it happens."

I have no idea when I must've wrote 'Chaos Magic'. It seems too calm for it to have been done that late on. It seems too calm in general. In fact none of these are using brackets, so I guess they were done a bit earlier or later than the initial bulk of scheduled posts I had made.

Chaos magic

“It won’t work unless you can behold the stars as individual points.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s just it; you don’t need to. You aren’t supposed to. Forget the constellations. Stop looking at it like it’s a pattern. Like it’s a painting.”

“Then what is it?”

“What’s left. What’s more than what you took from it.”

...

“Okay now take the knife.”

“Why am I doing all the work?”

“Because it’s your spell.”

“What next?”

“Pick it up first.”

“Okay.”

“Hold it.”

“I am.”

“Hold it.”

...

“Point up. Straight up. Now let it tug you.”

“What?”

“Point it up again. Okay. Now imagine a thread is attached to the tip. It’s made of something white and blue and cold but glowing. Picture that. It goes straight to the sky. Can you feel it?”

“I think so...”

“There’s a wind, but not the kind we have. Do you feel that? Can you feel the thread swaying in it? Pulling at the blade? Follow the thread with the knife. Every inch. Don’t let the cord break.”

“Chord? Like music?”

“You’re not wrong.”

“If my mum sees us...”

“Stay concentrated. The wind.”

...

“It’s all around us but it doesn’t make a sound. It moves slowly.”

“Yeah.”

“It won’t always change direction.”

“I’m not sure I feel it.”

“Imagine your feet are in a bucket of ice. Like all the water’s frozen over around them.”

“How’s that supposed to help?”

“It won’t, aside from stopping you thinking so much. Or at least it was meant to.”

“You said you’d done this before.”

“Kind of.”

“What?”

...

“Where’s it guided you?”

“Lower.”

“Than the stars?”

“Yeah. Towards the tops of the trees.”

“They’re part of it too.”

“Part of what?”

“Part of the pattern that isn’t a pattern.”

“The constellations?”

“Yes. Or what the constellations aren’t. The trees are part of that. Do you see how they lean into it?”

“Into the wind?”

“Yes. And into the stars.”

   "—You’re allready too late.
            Because I’m anarchy. Axes
  and raids. Find me at morgues and
                     bloodspattered parades.”

My strange reflection, when will I see you again?

Bachelard's Introduction to The Poetics of Space. I can't figure out why these lines always felt so familiar.

"In any case, harmony in reading is inseperable from admiration. We can admire more or less, but a sincere impulse, a little impulse toward admiration, is always necessary if we are to receive the phenomenological benefit of a poetic image. The slightest critical consideration arrests this impulse by putting the mind in second position, destroying the primitivity of the imagination. In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer's ghost."

That last poem was another scheduled post. Well, I say 'poem', but I recognise the italics as a complete piece that I wrote during a lecture way back in October. I think I added the rest at the time I wrote the post around February.


There was a certain night a while ago where I got really really drunk, deliberately, or that sort of half-deliberateness that constitutes almost everything if you let it, until all becomes a habit. But there was a habit I wanted to give up that night. I think. Patchy memories. Which is actually a really good phrase, because it suggests that there's been holes in memory filled in or covered by foreign fabrics, whether repressions or invented memories. And we all know how quickly recollection of recollection takes the place of real memory. As if 'real memory' were a thing.

What I remember a very enveloping darkness, just a crack of light leaking onto the wall, or was it the floor, it wall all blurred, and the words, repeated, hoarse, over and over, my voice, "Just stop. Just stop. just please stop. stop. just stop. just stop


..................................................................................

Something keeps reopening my heart.
Stitches stretch and burst.

I consider an opening future.


Siphoned down institutional corridors,
cordoned into corners contaminated by
I
thought madness was sight,
the downward path the upward pass
but before I ever reach a peak
the track disintegrates -
slips
            from my grasp,
passes
            through my wrists.

 Secrete a mountain river
(babbling)
through a saline bag.


I choke it with my hands.
My several fingers dig
nails into
its throat.
Close it.

If it lives it will writhe. If not, I won't need to breathe at all.

Dusk in a place of darkling green

The sky cracks                                       A company of drops

as if cataracts shave                             curtain the horizons

stones to ice. Some                                still promising their

shimmering awakes                               aubades, morning

night’s withdrawing                              songs gone awry

reverberations                                        below diminishing

of storm clouds                                      flecks of sound.

shot off, like                                          ‘Shhhhhhhhhh

a table cloth                                            hhhhhhhhhhh

inexpertly deprived                                hhhhhhhhhhh’ –

of its surface.                                         Dimmening leaves offer.

Sappho Fragment 23(?), currently trying to find the Carson translation

And their feet move
rhythmically, as tender
feet of Cretan girls
danced once around an

altar of love, crushing
a circle in the soft
smooth flowering grass.

Sappho Fragment 36, trans. Anne Carson