He wondered if there was a word for returning, after long absence, to a familiar place and feeling it shrunk, as if the physical world had given way to a mental reality that transformed the streets to neural pathways– there were so many things that could not be said, he felt, but what was worse were the things that could be said but would be left unsaid– and yet, why need to say anything at all?

The trouble with words is that we inhabit them like houses, like cities. We have learned to desire words to lay over the world around us, like sketches of a reality that stands there unnoticed. We can live in this reality, but we have become tame creatures. Some academics scoff at 'socially constructed' realities, as if the reality of a man's mind were not as solid to him as a house, as fundamental as his clothing. Like a house a man may build his inner scaffold for himself; but the vast majority let other men build their dwellings for them, perhaps as much from indolence as from ignorance of the laws of construction.

His identity, he knew, was like a film: though it seemed a constant flow, it was in truth a series of distinct objects advancing frame by frame. So we are to our past and future selves like slides seen in a row,from the outside appearing to constitute a whole.

He felt that even in their intimacy they resembled two strangers who passed in a hallway, adopting momentary faces each to meet the other. He was at the age of just learning that what is feigned is not entirely unreal; that to act on a feigned intention is still to act.

If there is a God, we better hope he has no sense of irony.

"But I've known you forever", she gasped, perhaps believing it; in our play we had forgotten the weight games take on when they become a last resort, and we clung on desperately to this performance though we had no audience.

She held up her hand as if interrupting a sentence I had not, in fact, begun.

We peeled out of the lot in her Nova. It occurred to me that somewhere she must have learned to drive, felt the anticipation of the first moments sweating at the wheel; that she had not emerged as a person merely by my sight of her, but had scores of secrets and memories I would never know about, or perhaps never believe if I were told. She had parents; someone had set her on the first bus to kindergarten, someone held watch over her in feverish nights. The world seemed then impossibly obscure, though the pavement burnt at my bare feet, and the orange sun drilled the sky, as if it were a giant house with many doors, behind which mysterious noises invoke thoughts of private dramas, festivals, natural disasters, bare chasms filled with ethereal light: all locked and forever inaccessible.

She was watching me; her voice peeled thoughts from me like a reluctant blanket, thrusting me into the bare winter of actual day.

Was wir Wahrheit nennen ist nur ein Versuch, des schwarz verengten Ichs endlich loszuwerden.


Nicht ein Gleichnis des unauslöschbaren menschlichen Ehrgeiz ist der Ikarus, der doch nur den einen Fehler machte: gering zu bleiben im Gesicht des Großen. Wie Ikarus sind die, die ihr kleines Anstreben und geringstes Traum nicht ertragen können, die auch nur die Sonne annähern, um ein wenig Wärme zu kriegen. Wie anders sind doch diejenige, die sich zur Sonne umschaffen verlangen, die bloß die Ozean werden, in der die vielen Ikaren verschwinden wie tauchende Schwärme.

An der Vielfältigkeit, der schaffenden Neuheit menschlichen Daseins, war er nicht mehr imstande zu glauben.

Wortein, wortaus ein Neues sich verschwand. Sprachlandschaften blühten, verdarben im bleichen Sprachtag. Ein jegliches Paradies ist klein– so groß geworden kommen wir nie dahin.


Was bist du mir? Ein Mörder des Altgewordenen, des erstickenden Hoffnungsverlust in mir? Sonst nichts. Nichts anderes verlang ich vom Menschen, als mir ein neues Glauben schaffen, egal wie klein.

Einmal eine echte Tragödie zu erleben, ist das schönste, was man je hoffen kann. Wir erleben so viele falsche Katastrophen, so viele nicht vollgebrachten Weltenden, dass wir im echten Fall nicht wüßten, ob es echt war. Im Internet, im Kino sind wir tausendmal gestorben, am Ende verlassen wir aber die Illusion ohne Wunde.

Des Lebens einziger Beleg ist Blut, Zerschlagung.

Dass könnte nur der sagen, wer kein echtes Leid ertrug.

Das unbeschädigte Leben bringt sich nicht zum erklären. Nur erst, was sich als Mangel und Schmerz erkennt, kennt Wörter.

Wo es finster ist findet Geheimes Ursprung. Das Wort ist ein Licht, das alles fesselt, erklärend. Es kann sich im Licht nichts bewegen, nichts glauben.

Sie bohrten durch die Nacht, Unzerstörbares suchend. Erst im dunkeln, wo es nur Ungeschaffenes herumgreift, ist Ewigkeit zu finden, da kein Wort der Ungeteilten ihre Grenze aufklärt.


Es geht immer darum, eine Zuflucht zu finden, oder auch eine selbst zu schaffen.


Ich wäre gern Terroristin geworden. Oder Hüre. Nur das, was die Sinnlichkeit zu ehren versteht.

Die Gelegenheiten menschlichen Lebens sind zahllos zerstreut, wie Faden die die Katze auf dem Boden schlägt oder auch ein Spiegel, der sich selbst durchschaut, und endlos wieder zum Vordergrund sich bringt, sich nur. Wir schauen überall und überall sehen wir nur uns. Wie sonst– der kleine Mensch sieht klein, er will die Welt auf ewig vermindern.


Da sind wir, ungebraucht im blinden Tag. Verzagen kommt, weil wir nicht mehr nötig sind. Die Freiheit, im Leben zu machen was man will, ist das tödlichste Gift. Einem größeren nötig zu sein: nicht zweifeln zu müssen.

Beauty is not an image of things
as they purely assume: it is tormented,
the glass that devastates the widow's arms
In a hideous fire, drawn to void reunions,
the mirrored sliver that is flung at an angle
wrong towards earth, scavenging
the thick unwanted growth
of false staccatos and rotten symmetry
in strict cannibalism:

the real made more than real,
perception's edge,
A vision of all these ruined things arising
In an onslaught of peace
That uproots temples old as wires
Torn from a heart.

It is the mind's tornado:
Do not wait in the basement for calm to come.
Unskin from your heart fear's parasite that craves itself
Surviving, a cold unthinking
Nerve stripped bare in a palm.
It is not this–
this violence, this flowing germ:
It stems from this, its radiant spike unravels
The cool collections of furious night.

Beauty is the boy who will see death
Torn with life:
His last hologram blown, bent
To the shivering deep, resurrecting
like a gathering god
an unfilled sentence,
A refusal of the rule. He stands in the threshhold
of the fallen world
Swollen in death, like a drink poured in a glass
then frozen, a pure urge emerging
from the wreck of death–

This is the word that starts the world,
When the gone has cracked
And scratched its names into the soil–
The terrible oblivion of a scarred title,
A nude expectant hand
That traces the chasm of ruins
It took for the new world...

There is a darkness to the start of day
The hand eludes,

Before sun's head has beaten
Through the wall of world.

There god crawls,
there a funeral wit redraws a landscape.

Has it begun?
Has the ending and the blot of things begun?

Must every day then be created
From pure muteness?

Once anything sufficed
To fill these teacup abysses,

An aimless thread,
A tree that was the palace of a king;

Now only you suffice,
The sight of you, the shape of things

That bend to kiss you in the street;
Whose fatal love

Before dawn draws its penitence from earth
In an endless sermon, always

the same, soft tyranny of words
Winging over the trembling sky.

A solitary heartbeat must suffice, if the soul will have its miles
Of blistered yearning still to make, and an arid wind
That shakes dead thoughts from awkward trees. It occurs as scripted:
One knows the mountain as oneself, obtaining the pass
Of the lone ridge that yawns and gives to a final face its mere reality
Blown of shine. One has just begun to believe oneself
When a sun drops livid on a thread to melt these mysteries,
these dark peaks seen in darkened pools dissolving,
these irresolute truths that scatter in the brain.

Each thing's impermanence is disclosed to the wandering eye:
Infinities of things extinguishing, things that sublimate
The incessant zero of God, and burst. It must have once sufficed;
It must suffice. But here in the endless bliss of stones we falter
Unconsciously, these mute things loved by feet. We must carry their need,
These extinct desires, or bear an oblivious tongue through immediate space:
The soul in going bears desires minutely. It is audible, the heart of earth
And tendons of earth that strain beneath some vast unfeeling weight...

Perhaps we are born to carry this, as eternities the earth forgets,
to step too long, through some magnetism culling an anguished echo
of Pandora's thought, where the path ends sculpting earth
Making earthbound things of us, as refugees who, risen to arise,
Have climbed too quickly, seen the forest plunging to the floor,
The arduous path discarded like a string and disconsolately
Broken, our forgotten clue, as we hasten to assume the air.

At such altitudes the heart grows faint; we know each stretch of earth below
As a man who has risen and fallen, antagonized upwards
And died in vain. We have known these episodes, these atlantic
Places that linger like a loving hand and lift, to gather
The mountain's agony and agonies of air and stand finally
Sourceless, bereft, enveloped in the corona of the mind.
The highest is yet too high, though not enough; it shatters us
In swift minutia sweeping across a strand, mere exiles that gather
And are gone– this is a footprint of a father– this a wife–
This is the valley bent below us with rage, a soft thunder
Tilting the glass of daylight down, upon the gone, gone
Forest veiled in the hidden soul. The mind unmakes this
Ecstasy of peaks, this mesh of self and miracle: it is needed
To bring vision, if at all, to a simple sleep. But a foot that passes
Need not know dreaming, as if the landscape were a murdered god,
each height a childless angel one steps on climbing the soul.

At last there is no world but heaven, speared in the atlas air:
As a ground once traveled is forgotten, then dissolves
With the thought of it. We need not fear this leaving, it is clear.
But must the mind always measure its height, and time its progress?
What could bear the body in its treason of the mind? At last the mind,
in dreaming, dreams at rest in mind, like two deadly hooks conjoined.

So reason spreads its blanket in the new bald sun
Below a clear and miniscule past like an ant crushed by a child.
The mind wants universe and it will comb the mind outstepping
Still the skull to grasp at paradise, though slick, a slippery vision held
In an empty chalice on an empty globe. Unseen diameters
Hold Eden bare: this it is; the mind at radiance, when hope has slipped
And vision is the raw thing beating in the meat of day.

TRANSCRIPT OF A SILENT FILM

Perhaps all men are like Chaplin,
Bumbling and falling and seeing titles
Brace their existence, though no one speaks.
And we must wander wobbling streets
Meshed in obscure customs of
that we cannot extricate, a small ship
That hesitates to meet a foreign shore.
The sun is black; the walls are white,
A gracious lady awaits her stumbling fate
And as we are, it is unknown, if a small crowd
Has gathered here as if about a fire
To stir sense in these outtakes by their ridicule,
Or else some editor to cut the strands
At whim if it pleases– it need not be a tragedy,
When the last reel spins– a mere ornamented fin,
A jaunty tune, a tramp merging with the distance–
Some tears amidst applause, but mostly laughter–
that one man could stumble so, and redirect himself
Suffer the swings and the barrages as the fool,
Not a sanctified, cripple Christ but a solid man
Up and down the alleys of hard earth dignifying,
Unaware of bruises, that God has taken everything
From him, a wife, a family– the curtain pulls;
the organ grinder bows.

Master List of German Oddities

Dusch Das (for men)
McPaper
I'm Bag
Corny
"Long Branch Saloon"
The Oscar Wilde: Authentic Irish Bar
Wellness Flakes