created 2025-03-20, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025poetryexperimentalfiction
rel: Silence - John Cage
Why I’m reading
First poetry-ish book ofy2025. I was wanting something different and this has been hanging around my reading space, pulling to be read.
Before the others are up, dawn, she walks to the lake, listening to Bach, the first clavichord exercise, which she plans to have played at her funeral someday, has had this plan since she first heard the music, and thinking of it she weeps lightly.
Once they had a conversation, extending over many months, in broken bits, about mushrooms.
I knew scarcely anyone, so stood in an inner room, near a table draped in a lace cloth and heavy with cakes. If I were Joseph Conrad, I could not help thinking, I would be mastering this room in case I might one day write about it.
Once Goethe called colour “a degree of darkness.”
If I were an early person I’d look for the limits of human wisdom by going to sacred oak trees or the local blind man with lips on fire.
she had the fantasy of a different type of novel and although gradually realizing all novelists share this fantasy, she persisted in it, without knowing what it would be except true and obvious while it was happening. Now I’m writing, she would be able to say.
For sublime is punctured by egoism, by the rapt, hard, small beak of my self demanding to be me. My self finding words for that. If I can find the words I can make it real, she thought and that was when she sat down to be a writer.
Note
There’s mention of Pythagoras. It seems to be traced to Aristotle’s Principles of Pythagoreans
The so-called Pythagoreans … assumed the elements of numbers to be the elements of everything, and the whole universe to be a proportion or number.
The elements of number, according to them, are the Even and the Odd. Of these the former is limited and the latter unlimited; Unity consists of both (since it is both odd and even); number is derived from Unity; and numbers, as we have said, compose the whole sensible universe. Others of this same school hold that there are ten principles, which they enunciate in a series of corresponding pairs:
(1.) Limit and the Unlimited; (2.) Odd and Even; (3.) Unity and Plurality; (4.) Right and Left; (5.) Male and Female; (6.) Rest and Motion; (7.) Straight and Crooked; (8.) Light and Darkness; (9.) Good and Evil; (10.) Square and Oblong.
how do you sustain morale during a long project? reality was a mirage interrupting me
Lecture on the History of Skywriting
At first I only wrote for myself, nothing else existed. In the uncounted millennia before the big band, when I was a riot of atmospheres and inexplicable nongravitational intensities before the creation of galaxies or cherry trees or rational thought, before the creation of creation, I kept a few notes. I can’t call it a diary because “day” as such did not yet exist but it had the same solipsistic purpose - to prevent the moments of my own life from being “allowed to waste like a tap left running” as Virginia Woolf put it.
Tuesday I became clouds. ..clouds do more than draw your eye upwards. They invent your imagination.
If you bring a concept or category up close enough to the human mind to be very very attractive and then whisk it away so it stays out of reach, it becomes erotic. Flirting is not in my nature but who would be bothered doing science if it weren’t erotic.
John Cage “Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices”
Memoir writing for me was a process that entailed long periods of silent reflection during which I tried to keep my mind motionless and my eyes downcast. Here is my favorite thing to look at with eyes downcast:
rel:Survey of ShadowsForest shade, lake shade, poplar shade, highway shade, backyard shade, café shade, down behind the high school shade, cow shade, carport shade, blowing shade, dappled shade, shade darkened by rain above, shade under ships, shade along banks of snow, shade beneath the one tree in a bright place, shade by the ice-cream truck, shade in the new car salesroom, shade in halls of the palace as all the electric lights turn on, shade in a stairwell, shade in tea barrels, shade in books, shade of clouds running over a distant landscape, shade on bales in the barn, shade in the pantry, shade in the icehouse (the smell of shade), shade under runner blades, shade along branches, shade at night (a difficult research), shade on rungs of a ladder, shade on pats of butter sculpted to look like scallop shells, shade to holler from, shade in the chill of bamboo, shade at the core of an apple, confessional shade, shade of hair salons, shade in a joke, shade in the town hall, shade descending from legendary ancient hills, shade under the jaws of a dog with a bird in its mouth trotting along to the master’s voice, shade at the back of the choir, shade in pleats, shade clinging to arrows in the quiver, shade in scars.
One of the names the ancient Greeks gave death was Ploutos, which means Wealth. They celebrated him on tombstones with a sort of nihilist glee,
We are all debts owed to Death.
In ancient times there were tribes who rode into battle shooting volleys of curses before them. Little papers attached to arrows such as those now fluttering down across my windows in a white storm.
What to say of the entirety. The entirety should be smaller. Small enough to say something about.