Tree
No. 26
Tired of the smug thoroughgoingness of the snit-besmirch’d critical apparatuses. Tired of the histrionics of the pure verb. I yank off my cohort and dash myself remedially against the one standing wall of the tycoon’s hut. Oh, the cow’d serenity of hysteria here in the loco imperium, here in the droopy West. Two mallards skim scum off the pond. A bullfrog thrums out its remorse and urgency, and suddenly shuts up. I think of the Irkutsk girl of the Lake Baikal region, coif’d in a black helmet of hair, looking like a samurai of the Edo period, skirmishing with the local postmaster. I think of the black lava fields of Pico, its hedge-row’d verdelhos growing succinctly green under the cloud-ring’d volcano. Schopenhauer says somewhere that ‘extravagance springs up out of a brutish limitation to the present moment’: the vagrancy of unbecoming, a way of refusing to get it right.
—Tempus tacendi . . .
—
Blanchot: “La littérature va vers elle-même, vers son essence qui est la disparition.”
