Lesieli’s Reviews > The System of Dante's Hell > Status Update

Ughhh, 6. Heretics is heartbreaking and I freaking hate Peaches.

*Reading on Libby app so my page numbers are off.*

“How to be in this world. How to be here, not a shadow, but thick bone and meat. Real flesh under real sun. And real tears falling on black sweet earth.”

Some alarming things happen in this book where I’m like, “Whaaa? That is so bizarre without much context but why is this next sentence/paragraph stunning?” 🙃

“The mind is strange. Everything must make sense, must mean something some way. Whatever lie we fashion. Whatever sense we finally erect . . . no matter how far from what exists. Some link is made. Some blank gesture toward light.”

Page 74 and 75… TOO GOOD!

It’s quite difficult to connect to what he means in the midst of all his words so I’m taking the majority of them as they are. The life of Amiri Baraka’s mind is definitely what distinguishes him as a poet and many other things I have yet to learn about him as a writer.

“Awake at night for any substance of lost day. Already past. Each second the blue air turns. Each invisible leaf. Each snowed down street. An impossible distance of shadows. Wool cloak of years. Not time, not ever time. Not to myself, a young fat-lipped corpse.”

“All the other times I know form crusts under my tongue and hurt my speech. […] Even intimacy dulled by some hacking silent blade. The knife of the lie. Lying to one's self. You are uglier than that. You are more beautiful. You have more sense than to kill yourself this way. You are invisible in my mouth & talk through my head like radios.”

‘Nothing to interest me but myself. Disappeared, even the thin moan of ideas that once slipped through the pan of my head. […] I am myself. Insert the word disgust. A verb. Get rid of the "am." Break out. Kill it. Rip the thing to shreds. This thing, if you read it, will jam your face in my shit. Now say something intelligent!’

THIS. MAN.