I like this Kozar. I think I would be also astonished to watch him embrace a
complicated gourmet meal, bite by bite. I would worry that he not finish it
before it got cold. Small servings of each ingredient would probably be
best. This piece is definitely an intimate snorkel with the lang. Fast food
it is not. More!
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
>
> LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
>
> The truth is I only care about words, not every word (I don’t care for the
> Ìword word, if truth be told) snow isn’t a word I care for (I don’t care to
> be cold, and snow–I mean to say lyric snow–has become so commonplace) one
> less word now: and for the letter n there are others. A multitude. Nabob,
> an exotic word–not the least chance to use it, a sonorous word, but there’s
> an overabundance of sonorous words, we can discard it: what’s left? The
> fugitive image of any word, lacking an image leaves a concept (leaping
> inside us) it crumbles: in truth I care not at all for the word nothing,
> abstractions leave me limp with boredom, tepid tepid abstractions: I want
> to see and touch (above all touch); I want to sniff the spoor of the word
> buckwheat, my god, how many combinations: the words are mill-stones
> turning; whatever word a mill-vane broken into syllables; and on the shore
> the dying, what does it say. Marah, marah: is that what it says? I listen
> closely, nothing but interference; and I taste, I crush a stem of purslane
> against my palate, but it clarifies or tells me nothing now: here on the
> edge, manna, masquerade are the remaining words, backward, or forward to
> this place, at the edge: what, to what to speak with words: listen to me,
> the bread that I’ve put on the table parts, down to the center of its husk,
> brings forth ash (ants brought forth once more): and then, what. Things
> are obscured by so much thought, classification and description,
> description doesn’t bring the chameleon back to the chameleon, doesn’t
> bring back the mother, doesn’t bring anything back to us, let us yield,
> that the jacaranda of this life is passing, I am homet (the lizard):
> nothing. A green thing that lost its tail. The masquerade of her whose veil
> is dropped, see the face’s skull, the body’s bones, skin of golgotha peeled
> away now: the donnybrook I was once, now I hear myself and slide inwards:
> outside a lovely day. Euphrates. Much distance. A god of nickle or zinc
> can’t cope with peo- ple, nitrogen has been enough to keep me alive.
> Spurious, but alive. With some or another word but not with every word.
> The word Capulí tells me nothing, it has nothing to do with me; dying,
> let’s see, I can’t adjust to its destiny: nor, finally, to the
> dictionary–too vast. At the final moment any word will do; linen, for
> instance, at that moment: the ark on one’s shoulder, bread on the table,
> hand on head, and at the head’s point of transcendence, be it the word
> wheatfield that I hear, for instance, in the yellow crossing of axles: or
> be it bread, by omission. And might I see made whole all crumbled things.
>
>
>
>
>
> At 06:25 PM 1/5/2005, you wrote:
>> On 6/1/05 3:15 AM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>> It seems to me that inversions are mirror images of systems of order (which
>>> is I think what we mean by "sense") and as such make coherent and
>>> consistent "sense": what's been changed is the core metaphor, not the
>>> process by which it's elaborated or the pattern it forms.
>>
>>> What I take to be
>>> nonsense, and I'm very invested in this, is unstructuredness, which, given
>>> our human natures and the nature of the languages we've generated, may in
>>> fact be impossible to achieve, either as writer or reader; attempting to
>>> approach it nonetheless can serve to extend the boundaries of possibility
>>> at the same time that it marks them.
>>
>> Hi Mark
>>
>> Swiftly - Yes, there's a difference between parody and satire or what I
>> called "black humour" and nonsense. Which is not to say that the boundaries
>> between them are not murky. The former very often rely on inversion for
>> their various anarchies. They are not "revolutionary", in that they do not
>> challenge the existing order but in a strange way pay tribute to it; great
>> satirists (Swift, or even Terry Pratchett) are very often conservative.
>> Though there's Brecht: you could argue however that his parodies of homily
>> texts in the Manuel of Piety might be said to be equally tributes.
>>
>> Pure nonsense - some surrealist texts, say - baffles any attempt at "sense".
>> But complete structurelessness is, as you say, an impossibility, and I'm not
>> sure it's even a desirable impossibility - I find it very difficult to
>> imagine a poem that might give me aesthetic pleasure that had absolutely no
>> structure. I very often like the kind of stuff which loses all connectivity
>> except syntax, it does interesting things to my brain... And if it is to be
>> funny, or not simply affectless, there has to be some recognisable trace of
>> logic there, to permit the recognition of incongruities, to set up enough of
>> an expectation for it to be imploded. This process is a bit more complex,
>> anyway, than simple inversions, especially if seemingly random elements
>> suddenly intrude and derail it.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> A
>>
>>
>> Alison Croggon
>>
>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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