New York I am your eyes and from afar like a satellite (hardening, turning) to get the best view so you can see yourselves as large as I see you. New York I am your arms and from this height will draw you close (softening, folding) and suffer too so we can get you back to you.

I go to die and you to live and which goes to the better lot...

ἀλλὰ γὰρ ἤδη ὥρα ἀπιέναι, ἐμοὶ μὲν ἀποθανουμένῳ, ὑμῖν δὲ βιωσομένοις: ὁπότεροι δὲ ἡμῶν ἔρχονται ἐπὶ ἄμεινον πρᾶγμα, ἄδηλον παντὶ πλὴν ἢ τῷ θεῷ.

Piet Mondrian, Trees in Blossom, 1912

how to get inside of this moment and disappear.

In astra pontus tollitur, caelum perit*

the sonorous sill, you child of aesthete, my concordant hands have failure lined to the wrists

...which makes it difficult to pick things up.

like Des Esseintes, who in the grips of a heavy object can retain all postur(ing), but when troubled with the slightest of things, such as a wineglass, trembles and betrays the illness within.

Have you visited this yet?
Spokenweb

*The sea rises to the stars, the sky vanishes.

Beware of spitting against the word*

"It eventually became some sort of habit, of including these pictures, I think they do tell their own story within the prose narrative and do establish a second level of discourse that is mute. It would be an ambition of mine to produce the kind of prose which has a degree of mutedness about it."
W.G. Sebald

I've been exploring the notion of how to get at silence within a work. One attempt tends to see through me, into the physical space of the poem itself. Another takes its time elucidating arrangements of words--they rest, awaiting their final placement. The phrases (musical or otherwise) are composites of intended and unknown explorations, forming silent fountains undiscoverd until later readings.

Other, more fervent phrases nourish fires and devour eyes that seek some criteria not yet installed, or some melancholy stalled in an act of silence. An aporia concerning solitude that one dare not brush, too soon, lest it relinquish its silent metaphor... silent grasp.

When one reaches the height(s), what is that sound of solitude?

I'm reminded, often, of the hush spaces in Camera Lucida. Barthes' quiet explorations of photographs; his attributing them to what he wishes.

(And, how lonely it is to gaze at a photograph. Nostalgia's trick.)

There is also this notion in Barthes of hebetude: in such a state of 'dullness of mind,' is there a consciousness attributed to silence? Or is it a blissful nothingness...

I remain fascinated by second levels of discourse and figuring how to fold that into my work, perhaps as Nietzsche suggests, "the tempo of these speeches is a tender adagio."

*Beware of spitting against the wind (Ecce Homo)

ἔρρωγα, πέπεικα λίθος*

“The fear is really unique: I do not know its rules. I only know its hand on my throat and that it is the most terrible I have ever experienced.”
Kafka to Milena

"I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so determined, it's almost a meeting, although when I try to raise my eyes to your face, what breaks into the flow of the letter...is fire and I see nothing but fire."
Kafka to Milena

resisting the heart, the body intercepts with physicality; skips itself a plenty--that hardened note of irregular rhythm; disregards necessary departure

*broken, having persuaded stone

prima nocta, quaque nocta supine

Listening to the Orphic radio. full impact, full understanding. companions and contradictions with Mondrian tree, Mozart, and martini.

Derrida: "Already in the Phaedrus, Plato says that the evil of writing is seen as coming from without.... already tying the episteme and the logos within the same possibility, the Phaedrus denounced writing as the intrusion of an artful technique, a forced entry of a totally original sort, an archetypal violence..."

If what is known can only be attributed to the knowing self from beyond the self, then it might seem "natural" that what comes from within to be pure artifice. Let us consider Huysmans, who claims that artifice is superior to nature. If through the act of writing we create artifice, that oscillation of violence in archetype is not unlike the very essence of nature... non? nature or artifice, or rather imitations of both.

or
in the end

the bitterness of writing. the felt of sky.

made clearer.

lonely house

what incredible range, this storm upon your face
and later, the ambient light touching the grayness of stove
pouring over a split egg        whiteness over injury
you tell me of your reluctance, that same lack of enthusiasm that surfaced three days ago, which you retracted
only to revise and fold again so willingly in front of my heart
      now over the heat, poking at egg whites with a fork

you fall apart, I say

some sparagmos tearing at your seams

and my insight is returned with insults and further injury “I detest eggs”
you surface,

despite having asked for them all along.