"The Burning Ship" by Campbell McGrath

No room for regret or self-doubt in art,
doubt but not self-doubt. The ship hauls anchor,
the kerosene lantern flickers and goes out,
voices in the pitch black swell with anger

as shipmates mistake each other for enemies.
The lantern spills, the pilot drops a lit cigar.
Tragedy ensues and engenders more tragedy.
If only the moon could see, if only the stars

had been granted the power of speech.
But the blind remain blind, the voiceless mute.
The burning ship threads its way between reefs
in the darkness. Doubt but not self-doubt.

R*U*S*K*I*N

R*U*S*K*I*N

Event Poster - Martin Kippenberger

Maurice Blanchot by Jean-Luc Nancy

The Infinite Conversation: This title - one of the most striking of all his works - we could take as an emblem of Maurice Blanchot's thinking. Not so much thinking, really, as a stance or gesture: a confidence. Above all, Blanchot has confidence in the possibility of the conversation. What is undertaken in the conversation (with another, with oneself, with the very pursuit of conversation) is the ever-renewed relationship of speech to the infinity of meaning that shapes its truth.

Writing (literature) names this relationship. It does not transcribe a testimony, it does not invent a fiction, it does not deliver a message: it traces the infinite journey of meaning as it absents itself. This absenting is not negative; it shapes the chance and challenge of meaning itself. "To write" means continuously to approach the limit of speech, the limit that speech alone designates, whose designation makes us (speakers) unlimited.

Blanchot was able in this way to recognize the event of modernity: the evaporation of worlds-beyond and, with them, of any secure division between "literature" and experience or truth. He reopens in writing the task of giving a voice to the part of the self that remains silent.

To give such a voice is "to keep watch over absent meaning." Attentive, careful, affectionate vigilance. It wants to take care of these reserves of absence through which truth is given: the experience within us of the infinite outside us.

This experience is possible and necessary when sacred scriptures with their hermeneutics of existence are shut. Literature - or writing - begins with the closing of those books. But literature does not constitute a profane theology. It challenges any theology as well as any atheism: any establishment of a Meaning. "Absence" here is nothing but a movement: an absenting. It's the constant passage to the infinity of all speech. "The prodigious absent, absent from me and from everything, absent also for me" that Thomas the Obscure speaks of is not a being or an authority but the continuous shift of myself outside myself, by means of which there comes, although always pending, the "pure feeling of his existence."

This existence is not life as unmediated fondness for, and perpetuation of, self, nor is it its death. But the "dying" of which Blanchot speaks - and which is not at all to be confused with the cessation of living, but which on the contrary is the living or "sur-viving" named by Derrida so close to Blanchot - shapes the movement of the incessant approach to absenting as true meaning, annulling in it any trace of nihilism.

That is the movement that by being written can "give to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something."



Written on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Blanchot. Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg and author, most recently, of Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandell.

Garbage men

Two guys, garbage men, grew tired of the language that they had been taught, and invented a new language. This in itself is unremarkable, and happens frequently. But this language, modeled on the trash compactor, was a compact language, fitting neatly into the spaces of words and letters in the old language. It was a model of efficiency, although it had to be spoken and written along with the old language, being dependent on the spacings. That was it's only flaw, really, if you believe doubling is a flaw. They couldn't think of a catchy name, and it never caught on.

from "Love Poems" by Rod Smith

If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.
—Wittgenstein



Listen to the lion. Like
an owl in the
heaped instant
oil-death craft, my love
my driftwood my
Susquehana deckhand
disturbance, so sad, printed
into everything taken.
That enormous bandaged
boundary behind
the open muffling
Is to be filled rain
envisioned, tall
fear rim peopled &
transmuting different
bunk in us "surrounding
a little bird-buddha"
in an ad for an ad for
Listen to the lion. Biological
crank turned by burned
sausage into the vacuum
of affirmation where my
oft inner floated mesquite
self's Ismene suddness
is known spirals sleep and
clear. No roads can show
the middle eye something
other objects shot into
the sky. When giving.
No tactile surface
is stone moist to the
toned raking Paris
you wish. The sun
has several names, like
Sherman, Tazmo, Bonk,
& Harmine-- it's risen
raves retake Atlanta
from nothing's lost
laundry room key &
we, clean in those
clothes have regone
there, we've done
a hell of a job.
thank you. We've
done exactly what
was expected of
us. & we
are not dead. 6
tabs re-side baste
& coax ton's opera-knuckle
brisket. Pal 1
is the cloned guy, &
loosely they have
or will have nice
copulated currency, as
if a tusk warranted Suzuki,
as if, portly
a re-stained tore heart's
made timing looked
back in tears over this
strange be.

from "Canto I" by Ezra Pound

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wreteched men there.

les choses

"The Not Tale (Funeral)" by Caroline Bergvall.

The great labour of appearance
Served the making of the pyre.
But how
Nor how
How also
How they
Shal nat be toold
Shall not be told.
Nor how the gods
Nor how the beestes and the birds
Nor how the ground agast
Nor how the fire
First with straw
And then with drye
And then with grene
And then with gold
And then
Now how a site is laid like this.
Nor what
Nor how
Nor how
Nor what she spak nor what was her desir
Nor what jewels
When the fire
Nor how some threw their
And some their
And their
And cups full of wine and milk
And blood
Into the fyr
Into the fire.
Nor how three times
And three times with
And three times how.
And how that
Nor how
Nor how
Nor how
Nor who
I cannot tell
Nor can I say
But shortly to the point I turn
And make of my tale an ende.



from Shorter Chaucer Tales.

grammantical

"Betwixt" by Mel Nichols.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you get to know your small dog. Your reddish-orange dog.

Dare you go? Need you say this? Ought we go through with this?
How do you know that God didn’t make us evolve?
Nanotubes are created rapidly by squirting a carbon source.

I have a huge collection of frogs, right down to a frog toilet seat in my garden.


a metallic whisper please visit the mirror tortured in the potential space and one heck of a wondertickled verbena smoky sea wrack of excellence and tiger's eye








(look here you! http://thebeginningofbeauty.blogspot.com/)

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