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Beginning again. Ch. 1–2 for this week’s Short Course. Innocence, Experience, and then a Higher Innocence. Worth a shot—these SNRIs sure aren’t cutting it!

“The breaking-up of perception into ever more discrete units will lead to narrowed but at the same time more precise expression and therefore greater freedom in the interplay of words and to an infinite variety of combinations in that ‘mythical grammar’ that is the instrument of sub-creation.”

To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.”

“How far back it'd been happening to us. We come from prisoners of a long war that didn't stop even when it stopped. Was still being fought when my mom helped take over Alcatraz. I was part of the fight too. So were my grandchildren. But surviving wasn't enough.

“It was one thing to be grateful for the ancestors and another thing to know them on the page. I always felt like we didn't do good enough. That our family line was in some way weak. And yes weakened by the effects of history, colonization, historical trauma. But also not strong enough to pass down the traditions or language successfully because we lacked something. I hadn't considered everything that had happened.

“People always treat Loother like he's mad. He speaks what he feels directly, is that anger? Maybe he is mad. What's there to be so okay about all the time that everyone should feel so fucking okay and like everything is supposed to be nice? When you can get shot just dancing, something is the fuck wrong. Something is the fuck wrong with this world, Loother feels, at times, but he likes life too.”

Why’s it gotta be so goddamn hard being a fragment of light?

Maybe it’s that whole particle/wave thing.

from “Empty Warriors”

the men
escaped and taken, twice and three times absorbed in life and sharing,
absorbed in locating the mission and magic, the manner and
muscle, the answer and aims, walking the borders between
smiles and outrage.


[Feckin hell! My heart!]

And they will not know if they will be capable of the kind of love that survives surviving, that holds bullet shards in a body, doesn't let it poison the blood, the kind of love that chooses the harder way, the way that includes more and not less, the way away from selfishness. No one will know if anyone is capable of making this place more than its accumulated pain.”

“You are from a people who survived by making their surviving mean more than surviving, who did their best to stay together. But you will not know if the people ahead of you will be capable of the same.

“You will feel and talk about loss with them, feel and talk about loss, and feel and talk about loss, laughing all the way through the nights in the bars and outside the bars where you knew Indians were welcome.”

Fuck, that’s a sentence.

Dylan Thomas on words in poetry: “I knew that I had discovered the most important thing to me, that could be ever. There they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable.”

What makes a poem's language work is the work in the language, and what makes it last is the love for this language work. All good poems are love poems—not because they tell of love and lovers, but because they reveal the poet's love of language. Not about love, the poem IS love.…Shakespeare imagines that the only truly lasting love resides in the miracle of the poet's "black ink."

It is absolutely bonkers to me that it took psychedelics for Michael Pollan to understand why mystical writers like Emerson and Whitman are good. Bro: Imagine.

from “The Irish Cliffs of Moher”

This is not a landscape, full of somnambulations
Of poetry

And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,

A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.

Roses, rents, all things conspire
To crown your death with wreaths of living fire.
And the public mourners come: the politic tear
Is cast in the Forum. But, in another year,
We will mourn you, whose fossil courage fills
The limestone histories; brave; ignorant; amazed;
Dead in the rice paddies, dead on the nameless hills.

from “Ode to the American Dead in Asia”:

Wet in the windy counties of the dawn
The lone crow skirls his draggled passage home:
And God (whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze.
Like grace or confetti) blinks and he is gone,
And you are gone. Your scarecrow valor grows
And rusts like early lilac while the rose
Blooms in Dakota and the stock exchange
Flowers.…

…We still like gruesome stories, though. I have myself been guilty, when leading minibuses of students around Connemara, of stopping here at twilight to show them the twisty hawthorns and the gaunt roofless gables and try to make them experience a moment or two of the strangeness of Roundstone Bog, to hear its rumorous breezes while holding them quiet with the legend of the Halfway House.”

…Even today there is still enough ghastly talk about the Halfway House to frighten the benighted passer-by, but nobody now walks out so far in the dark, and in our cars we pass the place too quickly to see anything more uncanny than our own headlights reflected in the eyes of the sheep that rest on the dry road surface here.…

I am enthralled with the lore-telling.

“There might be old records from Galway Gaol or leases in archives of the Martin estate that could throw a glimmer of light on the faces of those who lived and died here. Or it may all be a dark absurdity, words put together to conjure up all the shudderings and black treachery of the bog and condense them into a tale.…

“My failure to achieve the school’s idea of manhood proved to me I was no man at all. For there was no other kind.”

On childhood bullying: “But I had no idea till I started talking out the Catholic stuff with Stevie—so deliciously lapsed himself—how very effectively Vinnie O'Connor had bashed my head the day he broke Austin Singer's spirit. We are creatures of the cruelties we witness.”

Even my scar-tissue said ouch.

“The stories that we tell ourselves are often the most untrue.”

“When we downsize intellect with rationality, our mind is like a dinghy tied to a dock. Humans need bigger vessels. Mystic vision needs whole-bodied speech, spectacle, prayer, and praise. The Big Divine would have us open wide to its presence and bow low with spiritual intelligence.”

By my amazing cohousing neighbor! The introduction alone is a steadfast companion; really excited for the following chapters!