About to sleep

Couldn't sleep and I checked the blog to find all these new scheduled posts.

They're kind of creeping me out. The Everlasting Whims & Everlasting Loss is of course a quote from Only Revolutions. Page 180, Sam's side. I actually prefer, having read and reread the book several times, Sam's writing. I feel like Danielewski wrote him first, but who knows. I'll have to try reading it in reverse order, see if it makes a difference. I just love some of his phrases moments.
"

Because I am too soon.
Because without You, I am only revolutions
Of ruin.

I'm the prophecy prophecies pass.
Why need dies at last.
How oceans dry. Islands drown.
And skies of salt crash to the ground.
I turn the powerful. Defy the weak.
Only Grass grows down abandoned streets.

 "
The August 14th post is [an]other quote(s) from The Fifty Year Sword, also by Mark Z Danielewski. I didn't read the rest. I'm sorry. My eyes just float over the words.


I think I'm getting worse again.

It was a sunny day, but it doesn't feel like summer. It hasn't ever felt like summer. A spring, followed by a premature fall into something morose and grey. Old cobbled streets, coated in dust. Never seen. I stayed in my room all day. Remember that dissertation I started way too early, or at least tried to? Well I actually need to work on it this year. Reasons burn need sometimes. I just feel hollow. Like an empty jug, with no handle, no clay, nothing, unsculpted.

Lost sensations still have my fingertips tingling. My throat aches. I don't know if I can continue. I don't know why I want to. Or if I want to.

The Fifty Year Sword, Page 62

                                           "and she
felt bleak,
                "as if a thousand
                                            "vengeances
upon vengeances were dicing her
suddenly
                "into hail.

Okay a new one. I recognised the quote immediately, although it didn't much matter since I actually remember when I scheduled this post to begin with. It's the opening of Danielewski's novella The Fifty Year Sword.

The word 'ghost' comes from the Old Norse geisa to rage, Gothic usgaisjan to terrify (hence we get 'ghast'); outside Germanic the derivatives seem to point to a primary sense ‘to wound, tear, pull to pieces’. It's thought to have pre-Germanic origins but the sources are hazy; the word's haunted by the phantom of some other past, but we don't know the origin. We never do.

It's interesting that the sense 'pull to pieces' comes up. I think of the German der absoluten Zerrissenheit, a phrase Danielewski/Johnny left untranslated in House of Leaves. I also remember the torn up text of the Esau and Jacob chapter, and that old Hebrew word vayitrozzu which comes from the amazing root rzz meaning "to tear apart, to shatter". Finally I remember Sappho, all her destroyed papyrus manuscripts, left littered in rubbish heaps with IOUs and store records, waiting in the dark to be read again, reread in its ghastly half-rotten visage and its fragments, all of which becomes some kind of uncanny beauty that I still can't place my finger on.

Oh, I remember one more thing. A poem I read once, about a ghost in a house , by the sea if I remember. Lingering for days with a friend. More than a friend. More than days. It was a long long time ago. I don't remember any of the words. But I remember having read it, I remember remembering it, and something of that ghost and her house remains or lies dormant or reappears before me now, and I know she never really left me, and she was with me, in every moment, every glance and inhalation, every season, she was always there behind my eyes, on the tip of my tongue, always alone yet never gone.