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the rest

notes and views

There are pieces of this and pieces of that, but none of it fits together. And yet, very strangely, at the limit of all this chaos, everything begins to fuse again. A pulverized apple and a pulverized orange are finally the same thing, aren’t they? You can’t tell the difference between a good dress and a bad dress if they’re both turn to shreds, can you? At a certain point, things disintegrate into muck, or dust, or scraps, and what you have is something new, some particle or agglomeration of matter that cannot be identified. It is a clump, a mote, a fragment of the world that as no place: a cipher of it-ness.

Paul Auster

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

(...)

(...)

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

"If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles"

Mark Strand, The Monument

As they duel
TULLIUS Because victory (attacking) – is a melodrama, and defeat (attacking again) - is a melodrama (retreating under counter-attack from Publius). Retreat is a melodrama, and so is suicide. Time, Publius, is a great teacher of style... (attacking)
PUBLIUS So then, what (defending) is not melodrama?
TULLIUS For example... (attacking) fencing. (stepping back) This moving back and forth on stage. Like a pendulum. Anything that does not heighten the tone... is art. Anything that does not imitate life but just goes tick-tock ... anything that is monotonous... anything that does not crow like a rooster ... The more monotonous a things is, the closer it is to truth.
PUBLIUS (throwing down his sword)Touché! But in this way you could go on and on until the end of the world.
TULLIUS (continuing to slash at the air with his sword) And during. And after. And after the after and the after and the after... Until the first blood is drawn. Or the second blood is drawn. Until – the last – drop – of -blood...That–iswhy–people -fight- Uff...
Iosif Brodskij, Marbles