Under the Sign Read Free Page A

permeable edge between inward meditation and outward connectivity; in a sense about that , pulse and elastic flicker of the subject-object dyad that defines acts of being, reading, listening. These are acts of delicacy and attention, to allow for an opening, to let something unknown in, let it combine with what is already there. How else do we change? How else love?
    5.
    Many ones . Snow on ground accumulates. Shootings in Tucson; shootings in Newtown. How events invade without filter, without choice. The far is always already near.
    Thinking that there are too many; one feels simultaneously remote and overwhelmed by a crowd inside solitary confinement. This sense may be both tendentious and obvious. Not interiority but welter of accessibility and exposure, the incessant streaming that makes the urban, by contrast, seem gentle, particular, slow.
    On the computer, revisions are lost. To save the changes is to erase them.
    Writing as temporal trace of a singular presence, different from film or photography; closer, perhaps, to music. Listening to music and reading enable a kind of time travel. At stake: the possibility of a particular form of reciprocity, intimacy. Something about actual touch; touch in relation to presence. How the virtual confounds this.
    6.
    The psyche jumps—old toy, doll or clown—brought into fantastic focus and then cast aside into the dump; internal drama played out against diffuse rituals. The question of intensities unmet by reality and so of excess. Shaky autonomy of being a self, capable at times of dividing into proximate agitated figures, provenance of fiction and dream.
    Making a painting, a poem; making or being in love; reading: these open time from the prison of the clock.
    Lisa Robertson, in “Time in the Codex”:
    The substitution of personae for self, of a series for an origin, of a rhythm for a state: Here is love’s tension, love’s politics. Here is form. The reader loves without knowing. I read for the book, simply because the book is there to be read. Sometimes my fidelity is for materiality.
    I face something delicate and fragile that could span a great distance and then it closes. One time cancels the other, exercises its authority upon the other. I am suspended between form and perception, inflected with an outside temporality. Attention becomes impersonal.
    7.
    In our current climate, concept trumps percept: a requisite underlying or anchoring idea seems to guide what we value in art and poetics.
    Task: not to lift what is into what is not .
    The imagination is the grace of what could be . Transcendence is the grace of what is not . I learn a new word: apophasis : unsaying, saying-away: the unsayable.
    Plotinus to Celan to Beckett.
    Wittgenstein: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
    8.
    Empirical knowledge refutes mythos.
    Wallace Stevens (“The American Sublime”):
    But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
    The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?
    Desolation of the real—landscape, weather— empty and vacant without symbol, ritual: Blood and Body. Stevens negotiates this obdurate deficit throughout; this is his bravery in the face of the ascendancy of rational empiricism; a consummate understanding of a perhaps infinite, restless permutation (the possible ) that swerves beyond mere logic. Frank O’Hara (“Personism”): “Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.”
    The sound of wind and a constant nodding as if everything were in agreement with everything else, yes yes yes : the world is not a dichotomous monster being pursued by techno-giants with unspeakable skills, but instead is a dilation opening into fluid arrays, permissions, and potentials. This chorus seems insufficient in the face of technological negation, as we turn