2008 :: Issue 3/Fall :: Philosophical Notebooks

Monster

And this is what the monster said—

Your strangeness flies in and out of me.

An inside-out hero.

To cross to the other.

Let the monster.

Part sphinx, part centaur, part chimera.

For the love of things that can’t be explained away.

Did Spinoza hear what Arcimboldo saw?

The sphinx knew Oedipus was the monster.

The exile knows—we are all monsters in time.

Diasporic ethics: If there is someone to blame, everyone is to blame; if everyone is to blame, no one is to blame; if no one is to blame, each one must be vigilant for everyone.

Awakened from unquestioning.

Is it that the body has not caught up with the mind or that the mind has not caught up with the body?

Having traveled ten thousand journeys to be born, the body is always arriving.

Skirting the border of the possible and the impossible.

The terrible ecstasy of the monster’s hunger for language.

Our commemorators, our harbingers, our monsters.

Roars, hisses, clicks, buzzes, croaks, chirps, hoots, gibbers…