"My aporia achieved
the glamorous anticipation of an answer" --Lyn Hejinian

"Quick cats'-paws on the generous stray-away" --Keats

To denounce Egotism with the ego is a little like the
War to End All Wars which is always being fought--
& for other reasons...

"Under the flowery oleanders pale" --Matthew Arnold
(quoted in Powys, Visions and Revisions)

Modern warfare is so destructive it ought to be called
something else....In the long-range cultural context [1991],
rather, it signifies that the United States has reached a
point in its decline where neither its productivity nor
the prestige of its ideals can anymore convince the world
of its preeminence. Only sheer tonnage of bombs is left.
So we can expect to see lots of "little wars", as the real
leaders of the new order emerge as precisely those nations
[who refuse] to squander their resources on senseless
militarization... [And pyrrhic indeed shall those victories
be:] The Superbowl can be won; wars, like a forest fire,
just end. The important thing [for you & me] is not to
feel powerless. What has ended, what has been taken
away, here, are a few illusions about where things were
headed--& that's good. As for the rest...terrible though it
is to live through, even vicariously, i think that the hollow-
ness of its justifications are far more obvious to the Allies
today (though its leaders are obliged not to snigger); &
it's whole feel is so anachronistic, that it must not be many
generations to come before the world's population will
know this only as one of the many luxuries the Twentieth
Century boasted, & which they can no longer afford.

"In the eighth century of our era the dilettante of the
Japanese court established the tea cult and the play of
'listening to incense'. ...the game was not merely to know
which was which, but to give each of them a beautiful
and allusive name, to recall by the title some strange
event of history or some passage of romance or legend."
--Pound

The horror, the horror.