Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things-.
What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.
The man has a theory. The woman has hipbones. Here comes Death.
M: Is he smart I: She yes very smart sees right through me M: In my day we valued blindness rather more.
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.
He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
There is no person without a world.
You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.
A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.
You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.
Love is a good place to situate our distrust of fake women.
The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.
Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.
Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan.
Desire is no light thing.
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don’t think I can imitate it, but there’s a density to it that I think I’m always trying to push towards in English.