Sunday, November 9, 2014
a (very) rare political post
Though H. P. Lovecraft was personally very conservative, racist, even a eugenist --- he would, believablly, have joined the Tea Party, if he were alive today --- still, the words will say what they say. In 1920, he wrote the best description I've yet seen of the 2014 election (and of the general mood and direction of America in the 21st Century).
From "Nyarlathotep":
". . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .
"I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown."
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
these beings that are but fragments from absence
Rilke at Muzot, summer, 1926
My translation of three poems from Rilke's French are in the current issue of jmww
Monday, October 27, 2014
Monday, September 8, 2014
Saturday, August 30, 2014
through the wall of this wound
photograph by erin
Red Photograph Inside a Gladiolus Blossom
The woman makes this image.
This is the garden inside the garden
and then again inside.
Erosblood glows
unfurling
through the wall of this wound
that opens the air like a sex.
Her looking strokes
breathe
the petals to further opening and opening
and un-
fold
membrane contour texture
different wet reds
shine.
All this from dirt and sun and water
dust the flower has healed
sepal
ovule
anthers laden dark
nudge of a cell upward
any touch would soft to bursting
and scatter sperm
inside the four chambers of the stone.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
a shard from which I drank
[ always to be among words ]
Always to be among words, whether one wants to or not,
always to be alive, full of words about life,
as if words were alive, as if life were a-word.
But it's otherwise, believe me.
Between a word and a thing
you only encounter yourself,
lying by each as if next to someone ill,
never able to get to either,
tasting a sound and a body,
tasting out both.
It tastes of death.
Yet death and life, whether both exist,
who knows,
since so many of the dead are distant, though in me
there are so many dead,
the dead having also taken me
along with them.
a friend, a girl who once knew me,
a shard from which I drank to you....
--Ingeborg Bachmann
(my revision of Peter Filkins's translation)
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