And his shadow on the border of the pond, was watching for a few moments, then he stooped and groped on the ground. Then again there was a burst of sound, and a burst of brilliant light, the moon had exploded on the water, and was flying asunder in flakes of white and dangerous fire. Rapidly, like white birds, the fires all broken rose across the pond, fleeing in clamorous confusion, battling with the flock of dark waves that were forcing their way in. The furthest waves of light, fleeing out, seemed to be clamouring against the shore for escape, the waves of darkness came in heavily, running under towards the centre. But at the centre, the heart of all, was still a vivid, incandescent quivering of a white moon not quite destroyed, a white body of fire writhing and striving and not even now broken open, not yet violated. It seemed to be drawing itself together with strange, violent pangs, in blind effort. It was getting stronger, it was re-asserting itself, the inviolable moon. And the rays were hastening in in thin lines of light, to return to the strengthened moon, that shook upon the water in triumphant reassumption.

Birkin stood and watched, motionless, till the pond was almost calm, the moon was almost serene. Then, satisfied of so much, he looked for more stones. She felt his invisible tenacity. And in a moment again, the broken lights scattered in explosion over her face, dazzling her; and then, almost immediately, came the second shot. The moon leapt up white and burst through the air. Darts of bright light shot asunder, darkness swept over the centre. There was no moon, only a battlefield of broken lights and shadows, running close together. Shadows, dark and heavy, struck again and again across the place where the heart of the moon had been, obliterating it altogether. The white fragments pulsed up and down, and could not find where to go, apart and brilliant on the water like the petals of a rose that a wind has blown far and wide.

Yet again, they were flickering their way to the centre, finding the path blindly, enviously. And again, all was still, as Birkin and Ursula watched. The waters were loud on the shore. He saw the moon regathering itself insidiously, saw the heart of the rose intertwining vigorously and blindly, calling back the scattered fragments, winning home the fragments, in a pulse and in effort of return.

And he was not satisfied. Like a madness, he must go on. He got large stones, and threw them, one after the other, at the white-burning centre of the moon, till there was nothing but a rocking of hollow noise, and a pond surged up, no moon any more, only a few broken flakes tangled and glittering broadcast in the darkness, without aim or meaning, a darkened confusion, like a black and white kaleidoscope tossed at random. The hollow night was rocking and crashing with noise, and from the sluice came sharp, regular flashes of sound. Flakes of light appeared here and there, glittering tormented among the shadows, far off, in strange places; among the dripping shadow of the willow on the island. Birkin stood and listened and was satisfied.

Ursula was dazed, her mind was all gone. She felt she had fallen to the ground and was spilled out, like water on the earth. Motionless and spent she remained in the gloom. Though even now she was aware, unseeing, that in the darkness was a little tumult of ebbing flakes of light, a cluster dancing secretly in a round, twining and coming steadily together. They were gathering a heart again, they were coming once more into being. Gradually the fragments caught together re-united, heaving, rocking, dancing, falling back as in panic, but working their way home again persistently, making semblance of fleeing away when they had advanced, but always flickering nearer, a little closer to the mark, the cluster growing mysteriously larger and brighter, as gleam after gleam fell in with the whole, until a ragged rose, a distorted, frayed moon was shaking upon the waters again, re-asserted, renewed, trying to recover from its convulsion, to get over the disfigurement and the agitation, to be whole and composed, at peace.

- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love - pp. 246-8

David Markson's list of rejections for Wittgenstein's Mistress. (via withhiddennoise.net)

Sometimes it seems to me that even my physical sensibilities have coagulated and stiffened within me like resin. In contrast to years gone by, when I observed the world with wide-open, astonished eyes, and walked along every street alert, like a young man on a parapet, I can now push through the liveliest crowd with total indifference and rub against hot female bodies without the slightest emotion, even though the girls may try to seduce me with the bareness of their knees and their oiled, intricately coiffed hair. Through half-open eyes I see with satisfaction that once again a gust of the cosmic gale has blown the crowd into the air, all the way up to the treetops, sucked the human bodies into a huge whirlpool, twisted their lips open in terror, mingled the children's rosy cheeks with the hairy chests of the men, entwined the clenched fists with strips of women's dresses, thrown snow-white thighs on the top, like foam, with hats and fragments of heads tangled in hair-like seaweed peeping from below. And I see that this weird snarl, this gigantic stew concocted out of the human crowd, flows along the street, down the gutter, and seeps into space with a loud gurgle, like water into a sewer.

[...]

For a few last moments I strain to catch the distant street sounds: the drunken singing from the near-by tobacco shop, the shuffle of feet, the rumble of trains arriving at the station, the repeated, stubborn hammering against the rails of the nightshift men working just around the corner—and I feel a terrible disenchantment mounting within me. I push myself firmly away from the window, as though breaking a rope which has been holding me there, go up to my desk with a feeling that again I have managed to lose valuable time, pull my long-abandoned papers out of the drawer. And since today the world has not yet blown away, I take out fresh paper, arrange it neatly on the desk, and closing my eyes try to find within me a tender feeling for the workmen hammering the rails, for the passers-by on the street below and the newly installed windows, and even for my wife who is washing dishes in the kitchen alcove; and with a tremendous intellectual effort I attempt to grasp the true significance of events, things and people I have seen. For I intend to write a great, immortal epic, worthy of this unchanging, difficult world chiselled out of stone.

- Tadeusz Borowski, "The World of Stone," This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - pp. 178-80

Nature, the things of our intercourse and use, are provisional and perishable; but they are, as long as we are here, our property and our friendship, co-knowers of our distress and gladness, as they have already been the familiars of our forbears. So it is important not only not to run down and degrade all that is here, but just because of its provisionalness, which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in a most fervent sense. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again "invisibly". We are the bees of the invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'Invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. (Since different elements in the cosmos are only different vibration-exponents, we prepare for ourselves in this way not only intensities of a spiritual nature but also, who knows, new bodies, metals, nebulae and constellations.) And this activity is curiously supported and urged on by the ever more rapid fading away of so much of the visible that will no longer be replaced. Even for our grandparents a "house", a "well", a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers . . . Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things. On us rests the responsibility not alone of preserving their memory (that would be little and unreliable), but their human and laral value. ("Laral" in the sense of the household gods.) The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here,—in us alone can be consummated this intimate and lasting conversion of the visible into an invisible no longer dependent upon being visible and tangible, as our own destiny continually grows at the same time MORE PRESENT AND INVISIBLE in us. The elegies set up this norm of existence: they assure, they celebrate this consciousness.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letter to Witold von Hulewicz, November 13, 1925," Letters, 1910-1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herder (New York: W. W Norton & Company, 1948), pp. 374-5.

Tonight, I discovered that both volumes of the Bannard Greene & Herder translations of Rilke's letters are available freely at the Internet Archive - so awesome.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has given us a definition of European culture which resonates, in a sinister way, with the naming of the new epoch. “Culture,” he says, “can be interpreted as an intention to remove the otherness of Nature, which, alien and previous, surprises and strikes the immediate identity which is the same of the human self.” As an intention which converts the otherness of nature into the sameness of humanity, Levinas’s culture sounds alarmingly like Calgary, eating its way steadily toward the Rockies, converting foothills into dismal suburbs of itself. It is against such reduction to the Same that poetry works, introducing otherness, or wilderness, into consciousness without insisting that it be turned wholly into knowledge, into what we know, what we own. Within poetic attention, we might say, what we behold is always “alien and previous,” whether it’s an exceptional fossil or an “ordinary” rock or chickadee. In poetry there is no “been there, done that”; everything is wilderness. The arrival of the Anthropocene would be an acknowledgement that the intention of culture, as Levinas sees it, has been all too richly realized, that there is little hope for an other that remains other, for wilderness that remains wild.

- Don McKay, "Ediacaran and Anthropocene: poetry as a reader of deep time"

Mapping the descent

I left poetry for history in my youth. A terrible turning. I've no excuse. I could have pressed harder. Put the point down upon my paper with more exalted purpose. Perhaps, then, a poem would have written its indented way onto the next page. No, that's inexact. I tried as hard as any archer to have an aim, overhear a calling. I remember the effort, the resolve to be high-minded, the sober choice of models; I remember reading only what would do my genius good, the straining for greatness; and I remember watching every word I wrote unravel like a poorly knitted sleeve. My rhymes clanged predictably, my meters were military, my metaphors fled the mind like frightened mice, assonance set good sense to sleep, and though my alliteration was lively, its lilt always arrived when there was actually nothing to fear, peppering pages which had planned on being bland with a sudden seasoning, mumbling when the night was supposed to be clear.

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 635

England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas.  What did it mean?  For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast?  Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

- E. M. Forster, Howards End - pp. 162-3

On their way thither they too looked up at the Wilcoxes' flat.  Evie was in the balcony, "staring most rudely," according to Mrs. Munt.  Oh yes, it was a nuisance, there was no doubt of it.  Helen was proof against a passing encounter but--Margaret began to lose confidence.  Might it reawake the dying nerve if the family were living close against her eyes?  And Frieda Mosebach was stopping with them for another fortnight, and Frieda was sharp, abominably sharp, and quite capable of remarking, "You love one of the young gentlemen opposite, yes?"  The remark would be untrue, but of the kind which, if stated often enough, may become true; just as the remark, "England and Germany are bound to fight," renders war a little more likely each time that it is made, and is therefore made the more readily by the gutter press of either nation.  Have the private emotions also their gutter press?  Margaret thought so, and feared that good Aunt Juley and Frieda were typical specimens of it.  They might, by continual chatter, lead Helen into a repetition of the desires of June.  Into a repetition--they could not do more; they could not lead her into lasting love.  They were--she saw it clearly--Journalism; her father, with all his defects and wrong-headedness, had been Literature, and had he lived, he would have persuaded his daughter rightly.

- E. M. Forster, Howards End - pp. 58-9

We begin with a desire to describe, to render, to capture even a bit of the world. We wish to stand in the way of time. We wish to gain a little information about things. We wish to understand the make-up and the connection of events. But first we must make things stand still. We must lift things from their world of things and find a place for them in the realm of thought. We must represent. I take my example from an extraordinary and beautiful book by Danilo Kiš.

Late in the morning on summer days, my mother would come into the room softly, carrying that tray of hers. The tray was beginning to lose its nickelized glaze. Along the edges where its level surface bent upward slightly to form a raised rim, traces of its former splendor were still present in flaky patches of nickel that looked like tin foil pressed out under the fingernails. The narrow, flat rim ended in an oval trough that bent downward and was banged in and misshapen. Tiny decorative protuberances—a whole chain of little metallic grapes—had been impressed on the upper edge of the rim. Anyone holding the tray (usually my mother) was bound to feel at least three or four of these semicylindrical protuberances, like Braille letters, under the flesh of the thumb. Right there, around those grapes, ringlike layers of grease had collected, barely visible, like shadows cast by little cupolas. These small rings, the color of dirt under fingernails, were remnants of coffee grounds, cod-liver oil, honey, sherbet. Thin crescents on the smooth, shiny surface of the tray showed where glasses had just been removed.¹

This tray is not handed to us on a tray, all its elements in order coexistent, communal, clean of commentary. Rather the tray is broken apart and strung out, the glaze preceding its surface, the flaky patches on the raised rim as much in front of its frieze of metal grapes as the soup is in advance of the fish. Our reading runs in loops of understanding as we gather a phrase together and then carry it on through the sentence like a package under our arm. The complexity, character, the length, the chronology of every quality's occurrence is carefully regulated by the writer. It is true that in "real life," as we continue so foolishly to call it, our experience of the tray would have many serial characteristics. We turn the tray over in our hands, for instance: first front, then back. We look here, then there. We try this, then that. Taste the sherbet; run our finger along the tray's rim; look through the curtains, through the window's haze at the lawn escaping toward the trees. How ideal language is for that. Meet Gertrude. Meet Ophelia. Meet Maud. Put on the left shoe, drop the right. But the tray is not entirely present, even in this recital of bits and pieces. I remember there was a maker's mark on the back of the real one, crudely indented, as if stepped on. The boy for whom honey and cod-liver oil are being brought cares only for its bearing surface, where a teaspoon might rest along with the jars. We have all the tray we need, for it is a tray we hold in our heads, and not in our hands. We think not only to the nickelized tray, but through the details of its development. The odd sound of the word 'nickelized' stands in for the nickelization itself. We watch a thought in the process of composing itself. No "real-life" tray does that. It does so, furthermore, largely in terms of visual details. The tray is touched but once. It is not a thing we're thinking, with its molecules and secret laws, but a perception, a perception remembered.²
_______________________________________________________________________
¹Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975). The book opens with this passage. The translation is by William J. Hannaher.
²The recursive character of reading is almost impossible to represent. The first sentence of our specimen "reads" something like this: Late in the morning, late in the morning on summer days, my mother, late in the morning on summer days, would come into the room softly, late in the morning on summer days, my mother would be carrying that tray of hers, late in the morning on summer days, when my mother would come into the room, softly, with that tray.

^{- William H. Gass, "Representation and the War for Reality," Habitations of the Word: Essays - pp. 80-1}

another piece from this semester that i think i might expand on

Pericope Adulterae

a piece that i finished several weeks ago

Johnnie-B

having a brainwave

for a new story. hopefully i can finish it in some form tonight and post it up here.