"—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

Several Posts and an Etymology

Have you ever mistaken a dream for reality? Because maybe that question's a tired trope but maybe out of dissociation, whether depersonalisation or derealisation or anxiety my memories so often have a completely detached quality indistinguishable at times from the conchoidally fragmented shards of my dreams, but then at times my present also has that detached quality, in fact it all does, my sight seems to recede far behind my retinas, everything is distant and muted, dull echoes of the world spiralling about my skull. And then I get a grip. As if a grip were to be held (haldan), as if there was anything solid to hold onto in the first place - as if that first place existed.
Although I still catch myself heading towards the door for a meeting with a friend I had scheduled until I realised that it was never scheduled, that that friend no longer is around.

But that's not what I came on to write about. More scheduled posts, quite a few. So I didn't recognise those words at first, but a quick google told me that they come from the novel As I Lay Dying. Pretty apt name. Pretty good book as well. The picture was a recent post, I just forgot to tag it, so it blends in with the other old ones. I uploaded it from a scan of of Leaves for someone looking for it in a forum.

I don't know that there's much more to say on the posts. All in all pretty disturbing. I definitely had something about myself in mind when I wrote them - the 'Irrealis' and 'trees' posts that is - and it's not hard to tell what it was. Makes me think of ripples. I think George Eliot remarked on the way every motion of every life will have wider influences; which of course wasn't only her idea (Chaos Theory etc. etc.). But I'm not so sure how much lingers. Did you know that the word 'linger' comes from the Sanskrit dīrghá; to the same root apparently as the Greek ἐν-δελεχής, meaning 'perpetual'? Some people also think it comes via the Gothic tulgus ('firm, persistent'), Old Saxon tulgo ('very'); all of which might connect to the Latin indulgēre ('to indulge'(originally to be 'long-suffering towards'(maybe))). All's very prolix, I'm sorry.


Words linger. I think that much is clear. And I knew that then as I know that now. And even with all that, I know that there is nothing perpetual in lingering.

Is[n't] it t[rue? "It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components--snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is."

There is no ripple but the blink of a phosphene

five mirages grace closing horizons

even as the sun vanishes and the ocean grows black,
sightless
they are there

I'll scatter the seeds of so many trees.

] | Irrealis

Beyond remains, I am remaining.

Don't let me keep you awake. Rest assured that I've known many cavernous nights and this one shall chill me as much as those gone.

I can't sleep tonight. Or at least, I can't will myself into the bed. I don't know why.

 Eros Turannos 

 

 

She fears him, and will always ask

   What fated her to choose him;

She meets in his engaging mask                  

   All reasons to refuse him;

But what she meets and what she fears

Are less than are the downward years,

Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs

   Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity

   That once had power to sound him,

And Love, that will not let him be

   The Judas that she found him,

Her pride assuages her almost,

As if it were alone the cost.—

He sees that he will not be lost,

   And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees

   Envelops and allures him;

Tradition, touching all he sees

   Beguiles and reassures him;

And all her doubts of what he says

Are dimmed with what she knows of days— 

Till even prejudice delays 

   And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates

   The reign of her confusion;

The pounding wave reverberates

   The dirge of her illusion;

And home, where passion lived and died,

Becomes a place where she can hide, 

While all the town and harbor side

   Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

   The story as it should be,—

As if the story of a

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,—

As if we guessed what hers have been, 

   Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they

   That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

   Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea 

   Where down the blind are driven.

 

 

- Edwin Arlington Robinson

Not even valid

Denial has at least two meanings. The first is a refusal to acknowledge or accept a concept. This is what is meant by being 'in denial'. Secondly, it can be a refusal to accept - though there may be acknowledgement - of something which is offered. While the second implies choice, the ability to turn down a proposal, the implied authority of one's decision; the first dwells on a lack of choice. We deny something that insists, and in denying we do not banish it, merely ignore it. Yet it is still there.

Through Nightmare

Never be disenchanted of
That place you sometimes dream yourself into,
Lying at large remove beyond all dream,
Or those you find there, though but seldom
In their company seated -

The untameable, the live, the gentle.
Have you not known them? Whom? They carry
Time looped so river-wise about their
There's no way in by history's road
To name or number them.

In your sleepy eyes I read the journey
Of which disjointedly you tell; which stirs
My loving admiration, that you should travel
Through nightmare to a lost and moated land,
Who are timorous by nature.

- Robert Graves

Another day, another scheduled post. At least I didn't throw in any Greek.

So, I recognised this - another passage from of leaves, although it's actually quoting Robert Jean Campbell, M.D., Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, 9^th edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) p. 951. That's not the citation given in the text, but I went off and actually found a copy that didn't have brackets slicing through it. They're meant to represent ash littering (marring) the pages. Notice how "patient" is severed into "pati", reminding us of the word's root to the Latin. As Danielewski later writes in the book:

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.” 

I'll drink to that. Or not, seeing as I don't drink any more. Not a good idea with the new combination of meds. Probably just not a good idea for me in general.

Guess it sure seemed like it at the time.

Hm.

“The knight was wrath to see his stroke beguyld,
  And smote againe with more outrageous might;
  But backe againe the sparckling steele recoyld,
  And left not any marke, where it did light;
  As if in Adamant rocke it had bene pight.
  The beast impatient of his smarting wound,
  And of so fierce and forcible despight,
  Thought with his wings to stye aboue the ground;
But his late wounded wing vnseruiceable found.”

That's from Spenser's Faerie Queene, I was reading it last winter. Irony is that I didn't have the patience to read up to the actual end of it (though it was incompletely written, funny that). I suppose I didn't have the patience to get to the end of a lot of things.

["These words coincide-" [] ] [--------------ash?

Robert Jean Cam[ ]ell sums up t[ ]e psych[ ]dynamicsof suic[   ]s as fol[ ]ws:

... sui[  ] or a suicide atte[ ]t is seen most freque[ ]ly to be an agg[ ]sive attack directed against a loved one or against society in ge[  ]al; in others, it may be a mis[   ]ded bid for attention or may be conceived of as a means of ef[  ]ting reunion with the id[]al love-object or m[]ther. That suicide [    ]n one sense a means of relea[]e for aggressive impulses is sup[    ]ed by the change of wartime suicide rates. In Wo[  ] War II, for example, rates among the participating nations fell, [

]times by as much as 30%; but in ne[    ]l countries, the rates remained the same.

In involutional depressions and in the depr[   ]ed type of manic[]depressive psychosis, the following dynamic elements are of[  ]n clearly operative: the d[   ]essed patient loses the object that he depends upon for narcissistic s[  ]lies; in an atte[  ]t to force the object's return, he regre[  ]es to the oral stage and inc[  ]porates (swallows up) the object, t[]us regressively identi[  ]ing with the object: the sadism originally directed against the desert[   ] object is ta[]en up by the patient's sup[  ]go and is directed against the incorporated object, w[   ]h now lodges wit[  ]n the ego; suicide oc[   ]s, not so much as an attempt on the ego's part to esc[ ]pe the inexorable demands of the superego, but rather as a[ ] enraged attack on the in[   ]orated object in retaliation [ ]or its having dese[   ]d the pati[   ] in the first place.

Quantum im]mort[ality ] | "Thine eye darts forth the fire that burneth me, | And were I not immortal, life were done | Between this heavenly and earthly sun"

The way ice lacerates my guts
at your [g]lance
and then melts and burns
leaves me charred
like an uncut diamond.

Though, you cut me quite easily.