If an apple could finish Adam, they could knock me off with a grape

[sovay]

Yesterday I went to hear a semi-staged reading of a dystopian sci-fi musical satire. It was a great deal of fun. It was also a workshop: there were surveys to fill out and a talkback afterward. I have no idea if anything I said was valuable, but apparently the bit where I confessed to having a thing for "grandiosely geeky second-string villains" was entertaining. Bits of the score are still stuck in my head.

Today I sneezed and broke my life: I sorted a box of papers dating back to 2008 and then I had to cancel my plans for the evening. (Which always makes me feel like a complete fruit loop. Yes, I'm totally around, except for how I'm suddenly not.) I have been self-medicating with Margery Allingham, but Tiny Wittgenstein has parked himself on my shoulder and he is a persistent little neurosis. Also, I don't think we have the same taste in mysteries.

I think I am mostly annoyed. I've been sorting papers for the last few days; I hate it, but it hadn't been so draining or depressing as to render me incapable of human interaction. I can't tell if this one went too far back in time or whether it was a cumulative effect. I'm hoping it's short-lived. The only upside has been finding all the notes I took (and in some cases never did anything with), sharply-pencilled legal pages for the most part, which I have set aside in a stack of their own. Some of them turned into poems. Some of them, I have no idea.

Because for half a second a ghost
spoke out of the consoling, congratulating babble

Or they play still in the underworld

a slight and scholar-haired Orpheus
in a solid-striped sweater

He said, "Not all musicians know the way to the underworld."

is because when the chest is opened, it contains not only the physical heart of Davy Jones, but all the memories of his love for Calypso—letters, trinkets, tokens of affection buried and toxic; it is wonderfully metaphoric on different levels. The way it is impossible to forget a person with reminders of them all around. The way a heart may be carried like a locket. The way some things hurt too much to keep even their echoes close.

The Dybbuk at the Theater

He could never be found for curtain calls

Melitta
(Pythia) 4?

In the midrash not even the three angels of the [amulet] know, Lilith threw and turned Adam from the riverbanks of Eden, not her rib but her fingerprints (to structure him a template) anchor him human

As if you were a golem until we met

As if you were a golem until that day
I kissed your forehead and printed there
the characters of all our kind who return
to clay, red figures on the last black ground.

Semoy
Semanoy
Semangelof

What I love about English as a language to write in—although I miss features of other languages, particularly the juxtapositions and rhythms afforded by inflected languages—is the precision afforded by its wealth of vocabulary. I don't select for academe; I select for exactness.

Ranuccio Farnese

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, "Head of a Young Man Looking Down to the Left"
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, "A Centaur Carrying off a Fauness"
Giuseppi Varotti, "A Banquet Scene"

palissander
bleu mazarine

Come ghost out of the machine, Christopher,

the last of the boyish icons put to bed
with a glass of milk and an apple,
saintly safe.

and censorious Cato repeating
delenda est
until no one remembers the god
of the children we burned.

A book of water runs between your fingers,
a book of earth shapes page and spine as turned,
a book of fire, closing, falls to embers,
a book of air is the draw of breath:
its covers shut

I am the fire all your hearts burn in.

I'm going back to Dancers in Mourning (1937). At least I had a month.

Comments

[rose-lemberg.livejournal.com]

Reading these poem scraps is like unrolling memories backwards.

Because for half a second a ghost
spoke out of the consoling, congratulating babble
Love this. Was there a poem born of it, or is it still germinating?

I need to find a way to draw you a Tiny Wittgenstein as a shifty-eyed bucket of coffee.

*hugs*

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Tiny Radclyffe is going to snatch Tiny Wittgenstein away for a long, weltschmerzy coffee date! And then there can be another month of non-krep.

I say so, and I usually win. Unless it's my wife.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

I hope this feeling loses its hold on you.
I recognize so many pieces of this.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

I'm glad for the staged dystopian reading, but sorry for the renewed shoulder-parking of Tiny Wittgenstein.

I do relate to that sort of feeling, very much, even though mine doesn't, so far as I know, take the form of a sub-diminutive Austrian philosopher.* I hope you'll have another break from it very soon.

I wish I knew a way to propitiate him for you.

*I went to look him up, in order to make certain he was indeed of Austrian origin. I'm obscurely pleased to see the Irish-language wikipedia has a six paragraph seed (I think that sort of thing actually called something else in English, but I can't think what the word is, so I'm translating the Irish word directly.) of an article about him.

[selidor]

Ooof, yes. Old papers contain poisonous memes that sit and breed among their pages. I have a shelf full of ringbinders in another country that are "useful" notes. Except I will have to look through them, someday...On the upside, it is excellent that they have poemlet-fragments sitting to refind!


Come ghost out of the machine, Christopher,

the last of the boyish icons put to bed
with a glass of milk and an apple,
saintly safe.
The early fragments of your Turing ideas?

May the movie help put back together the pieces for the next month.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

*a slight and scholar-haired Orpheus/in a solid-striped sweater*

Lovely. Did anything more come of it?

I would like to make you a quite different Tiny to counteract Mr W; but until then, *hugs*.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

My shaman-therapist once looked off into the middle distance, grimaced, then grabbed my hand and said, "Oh sweetie. You have such a hard time being human, don't you?"

This comment has been brought to you by my Tummy, which demanded I tell it to you.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Gack! Throw a cloth over Tiny's cage.

I want a facsimile edition of your Zettel!

And think: this is an interlude. The springs of curiosity and delight I've seen in you will not run dry.

Nine

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You are traveling down this dark road, and you have a lantern, and there are fireflies in it, but their light isn't like the light of the fireflies we know; it's deep purple blue. It hardly illuminates--the best we can say is that it doesn't endarken.

You, though, are not tempted to look for a brighter sort of light because you are afraid (rightly) that it will blind you to your surroundings and you might stumble. And you want to see what's around, but right now the road is going through a desolate plain. You somewhat fear your eyes no longer are seeing truly, and then, too, you somewhat fear that they *are* seeing truly.

But you have those fireflies. I don't know how they came to congregate in your lantern, but they did--it must be that they believe in your journey? Or something.

So keep going: we want reports.

(This is not a metaphor or an allegory. This is just something I realized.)

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

Today I sneezed and broke my life

Oh dear. And it was going so well... is this a health attack, or just a Tiny Wittgenstein attack?

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

Every time I read your posts, I imagine entire worlds just beyond my customary reality. Things like "Tiny Wittgenstein has parked himself on my shoulder and he is a persistent little neurosis," along with the usual poetry of your life (which doesn't mean that life is not difficult).

You wrote, "I select for exactness." I read your work to remember how brilliantly that can be done.

[gwynnega]

These are amazing snippets. I'm sorry the paper-sorting was depressing--but I'm glad you had been feeling better. I hope you feel better again, soon.