from 1001 Sentences
/ / / 301-310 / / /
Anyone who can impress you that every word is useless is a very good writer.
The mouth that mimes these words is not archived behind that veil: a song rises
from the same abundance to which it returns.
When reading I half-close my eyes so the sentences seem to be touching one another.
If boredom is really an emotion then it is able to be repressed and misplaced indefinitely, as it operates, everywhere—the sun bored with earthly parasites, bees bored with the endless hustle of a hive—for what, beneath the sun, can not be acknowledged as a symptom of divine boredom?
So pleasing to see the light on the lion’s mane: the mind, too, has clothed itself in surface. Thoughts that end as words are dead as soon as they are uttered. This poem can now be reduced to writing. Many stories seem to indicate that the past is an angel writing down details in order to grow bored by them, to transcend them in order to forget itself.
At the exact instant my biological father died I felt an acute sensation of boredom.
The words are just coming out of my mouth.
/ / / 311-320 / / /
To accept my ideas is not the same as refusing the world.
An animal may perpetually explain itself but in doing so it also limits itself from being the explanation of something else (an early spring, its preconditions, another lion).
Explanation: one more path to freedom.
An animal butchered in proximity to a sleeper may initiate a series of visions dominated by the idea of sacrifice. Or else in a dream you hear a lion roaring but wake to find that it is in fact a crowd outside your door shouting your name.
A process of writing is useful insofar as it doesn’t settle itself as the gospel of process/sacrifice.
An assumption of success is what unites this poem and I.
Buried memories resurface themselves to the night of unknowing that this poem could be—the ground is full of these images and the entrance to the surface is narrow (Bergson’s door). The memory-images transported to the surface begin to breathe as they are selected: these are those who correspond most sweetly to the materials.
The cross-eyed lion is sleeping.
/ / / 321-330 / / /
A sentence never ends well.
It is said that all sentences are possibly one sentence open at every point to consensual review. My hope is that this one sentence is radiant, even as it is material. I also hope to go to Europe once more. As I carry myself (the first steps are technical and ecstatic) through these thousand and one miles of night I am joined by a whippoorwill, a nightingale, a chicken and a one-eyed fawn.
The reader, who floats above and outside the world of the poem, sees a flicker within this unknowing and leans forward to examine it more closely, perhaps hoping to introduce her or himself to the Angel of Recognition. If, in this act, the reader falls and therefore enters the night of the poem, we can then call this falling communication, the taking off of the top of Emily’s head.
Note how the poetic imposes itself over the durations in which the words themselves appear to be indecisive.
When we talk, It sings: this is often fate.
Evolution by rapture, rupture as song.
/ / / 331-340 / / /
Aesthetic demands pale before those of distribution, reciprocation, legitimacy; i.e., our aesthetics color the political world.
Rather than a defacing, graffiti is in fact a kind of blurb, a description of the structure’s aura (Mona Lisa’s Duchamp).
One may allow one’s sentences to facilitate formulative conditions for feeling as they now facilitate the solution of formulated emotions. A sentence may consider the thin, arching swan neck of the orchid as well as the productions of the swan theater.
An assertion of absolute repetition assumes the immutability of the subject and/or object at hand (call this comfort).
The invention of one entity also invents the corresponding entity that is able to resist it.
I watch myself mimic myself.
Gentle baboons float in the world’s clear morning, in song, and I am overwhelmed by the waters by which words perish.
Affectation, theology, devotion.
Behold my humility.
/ / / 341-350 / / /
One of the trends of my contemporaries is to regard a constructed poetic consciousness as an escape hatch into otherness, as though process could replace identity: identity, like a child, is never finally raised to completion: it is, like a child, eventually quite simply abandoned.
A lyrical image is not an expression of the obvious nor is it an emblem of the unknown; it is, rather, a tentative formulation of an ultimate reality.
I am climbing a tree I hope will deliver some words to me.
Lyrical images pass through my body, externalize themselves as poetic instances: disruptions of digestion, circulation, breath and sex become manifest in specific lyrical complexes. I am looking forward to taking my baby home (!) I am beating my wings against the walls (!) I am using my hands (!) I am technically doing manual work (!) I am folding her little raven wing (!).
Poems do not solve my problems; rather, poems prop them up at the level of poetry.
If the Angel of the Boundary is shaking us it is only so we may wake ourselves up without opening our eyes.
There are other sheep that are not of this fold. We must use techniques such as meditation, fasting, prayer, ceremonial magic, interrogation, vision quest, and even martyrdom.
Will they carry us home?
/ / / 351-360 / / /
Did you translate the flame?
I remember, she says, pouring gasoline over my little dog’s grave because we were afraid of the dark. The Angel of Thought, from whose terrible wounds seep many fields, animals and cities, is speaking—“I have,” she says in her angelic climb, “always desired to seize the very syllables that birthed me . . .”
If a lion has ever started a fire I have never witnessed it.
Understanding occurs an acre at a time.
An angel, inside infinities, is an absolute either contained, surpassed or ripened; an angel is sculpted by a finger whose multitudinous dominion is spread through its touch—like a message, or an illness, or a geranium’s green light—through its own sentience.
All my mulling over the angel’s embodiment (an artist’s path to his or her mountainous doubt) is inching near.
All that the luminous reveals is somehow not as encandled as that which it makes us doubt.
Psyche is a species that has evolved a bestiary of shadows.
The Angel of Thought was birthed beneath the bottomless lake each of these animals (sink or swim) is finally led to.