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81 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1982
I don't understand the body either, that caltrop, nor the bloody logic of days, nor the faces that stare me down in this village in which I live, nor what are a house, a concept, what legs are, what is coming and going, toward where and what, Ehud, what these old women are, the howls of childhood, these spent men, what do the fools think of themselves, the children, what is thinking, what is clarity, the sonorous, what is sound, a trill, a cry, a howl, what's a wing uhn?People who talk of the 'mad' in lit crit and leave it at that are about as useful to me as the people who talk of the 'prose'. The what, pray tell? The mood swings? The sensitivity to certain textures? The brain that's been telling me to kill myself since I was eleven years old? If you can talk succinctly and specifically about the various ideologies of the Bolsheviks and their resulting splinter parties, you can Wiki the current definition of schizophrenia and spare me your mysticisms spewed from the same level that bred the hypothesis of the wandering womb. If you're going to use your crazy aunt as an excuse, newsflash: I am crazy. Your defensive posturing shows the limit of your biologically guaranteed empathy all too clearly, and if you're going to take your remarkable stable biochemistry for granted that ineptly, you don't in any way deserve it.
Dross, yes, the attempt to compose a speech without knowing anything of its beginning nor its end, nor why the necessity for this speech, why the necessity to try to situate oneself, which amounts to attempting to remain clutching a rope over the abyss and without even knowing how it is that one wound up there, nor whether one ought now to move to the right rather than the left, around the fog, bellow a roar, or above it? water? voices? ships? I am reconstituting sophisticated evenings, politics, duties, a sociology of future, a being here, they ask me, kindred with the world, and acting, and authors, citations, foaming verbosity, the ear hearing itself foremost but responding to the people with elegance propriety care as though in fact it had listened to people, theatre, all theatreIt doesn't surprise me with Hilst that poetry and playwright came before prose. I don't care about the facts of her institutionalized father. This author and her creative fount are dead and gone. It's her critics that are so hung up on ideological quarantine that insist on fucking with my reasons to be. You'd think intentional fallacy would have taught them a thing or two, but alas. Fear of the different's only good when it's been put to work.