S̶e̶a̶n̶ > Recent Status Updates

I don't normally post about my own writing here (I have a bare bones author page for that), but it's been a while since I've had new fiction published out in the world, so if you're interested, my story 'The Violence of Displaced Reference' appears today on ergot.press.

Memories from childhood: walls, detonations, screams. The air is a concentration camp for a tiny girl dancing on the edge of a knife. (from Pizarnik's diaries)

How could I tell the Detective that every poem is the inability of language to produce the presence in itself that, by simply being language, is all absence?

Suddenly it occurred to me: the most fearful of monsters is the well-known friend slightly altered.

Ivy's mouth is stained, her teeth red from some confection, as though she has savagely fed from a candy carcass.

Some day she'd have to decide between security and freedom. But when you had neither, they seemed like the same thing.

I thought: 'Is there anything as vile as a human being?'

It was not that the world through which I wandered became the source of a text I wrote in one form or another; it was that wandering became the text that unfolded as I wandered. Walking was/is the text, it is the writing of a being who could exist at the border of all that has been written in order to efface me.

I did not especially care about the truth of anything. All I wanted was to not be what I had been and to not be what I had become, which was nothing at all, but this meant I had to learn to live with not being at all. Learn to be someone other than myself so that I may come to be myself.

I have noticed that sometimes I frighten people; what they really fear is themselves. They think it is I who scare them, but it is the dwarf within them, the ape-faced manlike being who sticks up its head from the depth of their souls. They are afraid because they do not know that they have another being inside them. They are scared when anything rises to the surface, from their inside, out of some of the cesspools..

Humans, in their vapid stupidity, always associate the new with the great, cannot see beyond their own nose, and forget an event ten seconds after it has occurred. If this is progress, please let me die in my sleep this evening. If this is progress, let the world burn, I want no more of it.

If a man is silent, he is stoic, if a woman is silent, she is a bitch, a childish word I abhor. Why is this? Why is a silent woman feared? Why does the world continue to move in opposite directions, pulling itself apart by greed, by ignorance, by the small tail between men's legs?

This may not be a novel, but it's taking forever for me to read it.

It is an aspect of probability that many improbable things will happen.

Written with the imagination of a drunken savage.
Said Voltaire of Hamlet.

No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness, Seneca says Aristotle said.

All poets are mad, Robert Burton corroborated.

The height of absurdity in serving up pure nonsense, or in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words, previously seen only in madhouses, was reached in Hegel.
Said Schopenhauer.

On the first floor, which was more a suggestion of a life than the actual lives we lived, several bookshelves lined the walls, filled with garbage books, a wall of commonality reserved for guests who never browsed.

The field dips in pollen-flecked waves, my legs carrying me forward, my feet uncontrolled farm equipment destroying the soil as I walk, my childhood erupting in cakewarm black piles. In the clearing, along the edge of gold, sudden horror as the field drops away into black fathomless water. The water stretches as far as I can see, an eternal sheet of black glass.

There was a large rock near. She hurled her head at the stone, so that she broke her skull and was dead.
Says the earliest version of Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Before the Normans brought despair, the Anglo-Saxon word was wanhope.

Anyone feel like trying to convince me to keep reading this? All the histrionic verbiage on the front and back cover make me want to throw it at the wall.

A writer, like a solitary carpenter bee, will hoard scraps from the manifold and then proceed to gnaw obsessively, constructing a long gallery, nesting her very existence within her food. The eater vanishes. The characters in the long gallery emerge.

Those creatures and worlds that we know only in sleep and dream and mythology—of yesterday and today—the magical technology—are emerging as usual reality in the new dimension of living and dying. And when the unreal has been accepted and made real, new realities will present themselves, forces which become gentlenesses, gentlenesses which become forces.

Evening. On the virginal mountain there is a glow like the blooming of heavenly hyacinth in a dark, dark field. My own warmth goes out of me with the light. I am as cold as the shadows, I am chill denial, chaos again, the unnamed thing.

Realizing that, of necessity, an ill person is unsexed, I try to wring a cold mental harmony out of life, but, instead I find myself sucked inward, my intellect smothered as by a voluptuous and nauseating rhythm. What I most long for is to be able not to desire anything, for I think of all life as gradually and eternally becoming nothing.

I realize now that deep down in everyone is an instinct of being, unaffected by the values which consciousness imposes. This being is impersonal, undefined, a mere gesture which asserts life and takes no account of obligation or consequence. I want to be saved from myself, from the terrible self from which all my secondary life proceeds, the self which goes with closed eyes toward its own end.

The love of those among whom one has been reared is usually not love at all. One can die inwardly without any of them being aware of it.

I feel sometimes as if Death were holding me softly in a feathered palm, feeding me with the white blood of sorrow. And I think of a lost bird flying toward a gray horizon it will never reach, above the broken mirrors of marshes and the gray fur of reeds, endless!

The heat was the visible expression of a terrible silence, a silence in which the cracked voices of the old women were as irrelevant as the discordant notes of far-off birds. A stasis of life had created a vortex of intensity, a stillness into which life poured itself with the vividness of death.