2009 :: Issue 4/Spring :: Poem Fragments
II. (De)Compositions
A. Re-memberings
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I have too many mothers to be one self. If I kissed every mother good night, I would never get to bed. |
There are so many strangers in me whom I’ve never even met. Writing is my way of introducing them to each other. |
You are what you remember; in other words, you are what you forget. |
I write to misremember myself. |
Blow winds blow— shake the leaves off memory’s trees. (Mindblown memories— drifting clouds crossing an un- remembering unforgetting sky.) |
Memory both the armor and the sword of the self. And if I relax my defenses? Lay my weapons down? |
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Does the self feed on memories or memories on the self? Identity as self- cannibalism. |
If you seek me in my memories, you will not find me. Nor will you find me in my forgettings. Since I am a dis- semination, how can you find me in recollection? |
Autobio a contradiction No living thing lives in itself. |
To remember is to change what one remembers. Far from reconstructing the self, the memoir constructs selves that have never existed before. |
All memory an amalgam of past and future, retrospection and prospection, remembering and imagining and probably more imagining than remembering. |
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The memoir of everything I can’t remember |
The memoir of everything I don’t want to remember |
The memoir of what only others remember |
The memoir of events that have marked my body, escaped my mind |
The memoir of events that have been marked by my body |
The memoir of everything that can’t be said |
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The memoir of forgotten avatars and incarnations |
The memoir of lost time |
The memoir of lost places |
The memoir of sleep, of dreams, of dreamless nights |
The memoir of stories I have heard |
The memoir of the invisible |
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The memoir of everything I do not own |
The memoir of red |
The memoir of traveled and untraveled odysseys to real and imaginary Ithacas |
The memoir of wounds |
The memoir of all the others |
The memoir of true and false unbeliefs |
Bibliography
|
Anonymous. The Arabian Nights. |
Barry, Lynda. One Hundred Demons! |
Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. |
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. |
Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. |
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. |
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Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. |
Freud, Sigmund. Repression. |
Homer. The Odyssey. |
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. |
Loftus, Elizabeth. Eyewitness Testimony. |
Pema Chödrön. The Wisdom of No Escape. |
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Pessoa, Fernando. Fernando Pessoa & Co. |
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. |
Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian. |
Shōnagon, Sei. The Pillow Book. |
Vālmiki. Ramayana. |
B. Sequences and Series (Series and Ensorcellments)
· The event ripens in the space between.
· Whereas the story seals and conceals the gaps, the series reveals and multiplies the openings between events. These gaps are the greatest gifts I have been given; now I pass them on to you.
· Between this thought and the next conception, between this feeling and the following quickening, between this act and the next contraction, between thinking and feeling, between feeling and acting—an opening always presents itself. The anxious mind is, however, always trying to close these gaps, lest they widen into solitude’s terrific unknowing.
·· After the ending, before the beginning, something else is possible.
·· Constrained by time and language to commence and to conclude, the series nonetheless gestures ceaselessly to the illimitable real, the actual series with its beginning and end being just the visible tip of reality’s endless beginningless virtuality.
··· Let us not confuse the one-after-the-other order of language with the all-at-once order of reality. (To the one-after-the-other mind, the order of the all-at-once world looks awfully like chaos.)
···· The world without sense is not a senseless world.
···· There is the active consciousness that busily makes sense, and the receptive consciousness that gracefully accepts the world’s unaccountable gifts. Of the two, it is the embracing consciousness that is both more sensitive and more sensible.
····· Sometimes the only reasonable thing to do is to let reason go.
····· Reason and rationality diverge more often than we think. In their divergence, the series unfolds.
······ While rationality insists on making sense, reason respects its limits, letting reality—intractably manifold—overflow it.
······ Whereas rationality drains the event of its very eventfulness, reason tries not to block any of the event’s exits.
······ Reason the pacific mind’s answer to disgruntled rationality’s aggression.
······ Only reason can protect us from rationality’s excesses.
···· The because of the mind rarely coincides with the because of reality.
···· Though the mind cannot think the immense sense beyond its sense, sometimes it can feel it. (Bliss.)
··· The paradoxical aim of the series—to present the impossible image of the event’s all-at-once in language’s one-after-the-other.
···· Poets have always known—the series is the form corresponding to the affect of surprise.
···· Only outside story can what comes next come truly as a surprise.
···· What is discontinuity but reality’s spontaneity?
·· Just as the finitude of the body gestures to the infinity of the cosmos, the finitude of the series evokes the vastness of consciousness—and of the infinite unconsciousness in which it turns.
Bibliography
Calasso, Roberto. Ka.
Cantor, Georg. Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers.
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens.
Lakoff and Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh.
Leary, Timothy. Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.
O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensées.
Perec, Georges. A Void.
Riemann, Bernhard. "On the Hypotheses Underlying Geometry."
Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.”
C. Dialogues with the Dead
Just as some live more than others, some die more than others.
—Arthur Rimbaud
The dead leave many things. Every generation must decide—which remnants shall we pick up?
—Claude Lévi-Strauss
I love eavesdropping on the conversations of the dead.
—William Butler Yeats
The hemlock didn’t stop Socrates from galliyapping on.
—Diogenes
The dead too have their odysseys.
—Padmasambhava
Some only find their voices after death.
—Kathleen Ferrier
Repetition never dies. (The dead repeat themselves in us.)
—Pythagoras
Some prefer to speak with the dead, others with the unborn.
—Marcel Proust
The dead decide many things for the living, just as the living decide many things for the dead.
—Eric Hobsbawm
In the dead’s great clamor, sometimes a voice rises above the rest.
—Arvo Pärt
Of what the dead keep silent I am most induced to speak. (It is the silences I hear loudest.)
—Paul Celan
I only write unfinished sentences. (What excites me most are the poems I never begin.)
—Friedrich Hölderlin
Like intimate lovers, the living and the dead finish each other’s sentences.
—Anne Carson
Those who speak for no one speak to me most. Perhaps this is why I am entranced by the discourses of the dead.
—W. G. Sebald
In death, as in life, some voices travel farther than others.
—Thomas Browne
The dead do not choose what they say, any more than the living do.
—Baruch Spinoza
The karma of language.
—James Joyce
The living and the dead are constantly crossing the boundary between them. (Like most boundaries, this one is imaginary.)
—Jacques Derrida
The dead never mean what they say. But neither do the living.
—Lewis Carroll
Whatever you say may be your last words. (Everything you say is your last words.)
—David Hume
What the dead say depend on who’s listening.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
How many tongueless dead riding on my voice?
—Helen Keller
Again and again I die to language, finding myself with nothing left to say.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Why do the living always force the dead to speak? Perhaps they’d prefer to rest in silence.
—Sigmund Freud
The living have always needed the dead more than the dead need the living.
—Novalis
No awkward silences in conversations with the dead.
—Heinrich Schliemann
Death turns all answers into questions.
—William James
Death is the mother of writing.
—Jean-François Champollion
I do not care to finish the dead’s unfinished business.
—Marquis de Sade
We are the dead’s unfinished business.
—William Faulkner
The dead don’t speak, unless they’re spoken to.
—Gilles Deleuze
Some conversations only become possible after all the interlocutors are dead.
—Tom Stoppard
The living own their discourse even less than the dead.
—Roland Barthes
Bibliography
Anonymous and Anonymous. Gilgamesh.
Anonymous and Polyonymous. The Gospel of Judas.
Anonymous and Heteronymous. Voynich Manuscript.
Barthes, Roland and Mrs. Barthes. Camera Lucida.
Beckett, Samuel and Charlie Kaufman. Krapp’s Last Tape.
Browne, Thomas and W.G. Sebald. Hydriotaphia or Urne-Buriall.
Celan, Paul and Theodor Adorno. Poems.
Chomsky, Noam and L.L. Zamenhof. Reflections on Language.
Deleuze and Guattari and Alfred Kinsey. A Thousand Plateaus.
Dickinson, Emily and Edward FitzGerald. Poems.
Geisel, Theodor and Jonathan Swift. Horton Hears a Who!
Kafka, Franz and Ovid. The Metamorphosis.
Lem, Stanislaw and Italo Calvino. Imaginary Magnitude.
McWhorter, John and Raymond Roussel. The Power of Babel.
Melville, Herman and Walt Whitman. Bartleby the Scrivener.
Padmasambhava and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Pinker, Steven and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Language Instinct.
Rhys, Jean and Charlotte Brönte. The Wide Sargasso Sea.
Rice, Anne and Vlad the Impaler. Interview with the Vampire.
Rilke, Rainer Maria and Lou Andreas-Salomé. Sonnets to Orpheus.
Sappho and Gertrude Stein. If Not Winter. Trans. Anne Carson.
Sebald, W.G and Roberto Calasso. The Rings of Saturn.
Shakespeare, William and Christopher Columbus. Hamlet.
Stevens, Wallace and Charles Ives. Harmonium.
Stoppard, Tom and Euripides. Travesties.
Whitehead, Alfred North and John Cage. Process and Reality.
Yeats, William Butler and Timothy Leary. A Vision.
Zinn, Howard and Malcolm X. A People’s History of the United States.