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January
2007
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Copyright © 2006 "Giving well is the best revenge."
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Cave paintings are to this civilization as the Internet (form and content) is to whatever is coming next.
All is fictions.
How even more childish would our behavior be if we were not finally and absolutely humbled by understanding nothing of death.
As the first French improved the walls of caves, we now improve the ether.
No science, no theology has dealt, except in the most superficial way, with the fact of the existence of diamonds.
The wave rises, curls, froths, rejoins the water it never left.
No matter what you think or wish, you do not choose your audience.
In Peru did you
The Last Days of America
Brim-full cisterns are of little use.
The Dissonant
Music of the Spheres
On reading Cormac McCarthy: It's easy to tell the storyteller from the stroy, but neither from the place where they both happen.
The tainted germ.
No wonder the old are tired. They work 24/7 at not living.
Hormone-free at last, old men harp harmlessly on harmony, or dis it. No difference.
Praise from other ants should be neither sought, accepted, denied, nor demeaned.
To nurture or not to nurture: That is the question.
My guess is that none of it counts in any way that can be talked about.
The cynical want to take away your teething ring once and for all. Some gullible offer assurances that with proper behavior the teething ring is your forever. Other fullible want only to figure out how it's made and then make better ones.
The center is here. The center is elsewhere.
The only thing the fathers fear is the judgment of children.
The doors are unlocked. Always.
China doesn’t need much. One thing that would help is less fucking and more sucking.
In your search for clues don't forget this one: There's one way to be born but a thousand ways to die.
Academic composers : the 20th century = salon painters : the 19th century.
Art is metaphysical travelogues.
Science tries to outwit nature. Philosophy tries to outwait it. I, to wait it out.
Balance. Balance.
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We so want there to be an abyss.
It is neither healthful nor helpful to remind the mind too often of its spuriousness.
"I can easily imagine the world without me. I cannot imagine me without the world." For the grand prize, explain what is wrong with those two sentence.
The only people more dangerous than those who think they have found the answer are those who think likewise but pretend the don't.
The percentage of writers who can write is roughly the same as the percentage of humans who can compose symphonies.
The Three States of Human Denial
A society that rears its children in the superficial knows, seeks, and rewards only superficial excellence.
We are surrounded by, immersed in, reminders of mystery. If you can't see them, then worship in your religion of choice, as long as you let your neighbor do the same without interference.
What really irks the Arabs about the Jews is that the Jews did religion, first, bigger, and better.
One of these days our curiosity is going to get us in real trouble.
It's hard to say which has greater toxic potention in excess: religion, art, or science.
All believers are reductionists. They range from the simple (primitives) to the simplistic (Scientists, religious adherents) to the complex (artists).
Skeins and scrim, vapors and veils,
As I become more transparent, putti visit nights to check my substantiality.
The only correct response to "Why?" is "What not?".
As in science, so in art: Eventually you've explored the surface. At that point you go below, or above, or you ossify.
A meretricious, cancerous selffulness that eats a whole being and leaves something behind or nothing. Such is genius.
Name on large-scale on-going change humans have made in either social behavior or structre that they were not force to make by circumstance.
There are ten thousand kinds of fucking. Our barbarous animalism, our vaunted, flaunted materialism makes us think there’s only one and it’s cock-cunt.
Semele is not a good role model.
On a lounging bench in some grove, subropical I think, some thing, sheet-wrapped, writhes, its distress that of birth or death, though at this distance I can't tell whether the dirty wrappings are swaddling or shroud. Finish the story yourself sometime.
They’re horny too, the "gods". Frightened, desperate, jaded.
Beware the wounded Irish psyche given occasion and opportunity to vent. Only the sturdies of worlds can survive such an onslaught.
Are we, to some, objects of arousal?
Cormac McCarthy, from the race besotted on words and gifted in words almost beyond telling, comes to the place (West Texas) and race (cowboys) of fewest words. He comes and can't leave, can't understand it, can't tell it to his satisfaction, can't let it go so (like Vivaldi) he keeps telling--brilliantly--the same story over and over.
McCarthy's is a nice world to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
At the end the 20th century finally produced a great comic novelist, one whose comedies of manners are almost a match for those of his fellow Irishman at the end of the 19th century. One difference: Wilde was trying to be funny. McCarthy isn't.
On McCarthy's prose: Affects? Yes. Fraught? Yes. So is the stonework of Chartres that makes possible such windows.
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"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." --Oscar Wilde.
Magellan's Log Copyright ©
2006 Texas Chapbook Press
www.texaschapbookpress.com