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

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