the world a letter

Eduardo asks for notebook pages, so here, I've taken one from a few months ago. Easier (though grimmer, too) than organizing the thoughts I have about the Blaser essay from Poker 5. That'll come eventually, anyway.

Yeesh, here comes the paste. Forgive me that not only it is not Adagia, but that it is mundane:


my grandfather was a well-, widely-loved man and if his spirit ever wants to visit earth, there are many places he would be welcome.


smudge of mud.


the sound of grief choking on itself


lacunated/laocoon


you can’t control everything, and you can’t expect people to be different than they are.


This depth all breakers.


The place of great stillness
keeps moving
hungry for it
I run


In light of this, one way of describing qigong seems to me that we know everything but don’t have enough energy to realize it. Qigong attempts to know you not with reason and logic (Socrates) but with energy.


Verfrumdung—making the familiar unfamiliar in order to shock the audience into taking control of their perceptions.


Titus Andronicus, A Closet Drama


I’ve never heard it mentioned that one of the mechanisms (the kernel of magic, where opposites are harmonized) of the Kore myth is that she, unable to resist her hunger, is the goddess of bearing-forth and plenty.


The human body is a cage capable of taking whatever shape (possibility) wants.

she looks into the mirror to see how she feels


titles: Let it Go; Red Cedar; Eastern Juniper; “The Rigid Pallor of an Apoplexy That Fixes its Own Distortions” (from Moby-Dick)


I ask for quiet
like a man asks for quiet
listening for the making
of the tracks he sees at his feet


I was given myself to worship the world through

in that man maketh, he is as a piece of tin foil upon the great sea


to channel means you write down what happened, and what happened is that you wrote down.

the motion of breath is the motion of tide, not surf—breath’s soul is, that is, tidal, not surflike.

I find first books the most serious, often. Then again, I’m the guy whose favorite movie for several years was Batman Returns. I cried each time I watched it—the holocaust imagery, and the deft portrayal if the gaudy idiocy fascists play out as drama on the world—just right. So maybe I have a weakness for what others see as weakness, the tendency to earnest dramatization of internal, socially-written, states, which could maybe be said to be a trait—self-importance—first books generally share.

That is, the mechanics of poetry aren’t so mechanical.