Music is only sweet against silence. Without it, it's
only another kind of noise. Space, too, is only per-
ceptible in relative silence. Thus is named "the desert"
--by what we discover there, by leaving (some of)
our noise behind. But silence is not a product to be
exploited or carried home. --Perhaps one can only
obtain a loosening of the noise-compulsion, if
that...

Philosophy is the building of a road. Out here, you
wander, you are grateful for one when you come
to it, but you can have no illusions about roads
belonging in this place or emanating from it
somehow. Exile, tsimtsum. For, of course, we came
from a forest or savannah or anyway a place with
trees, shade, & water. (=Talk) There is something
uniquely terrible about a dense throng of cacti.
The Old Ones.

A poem is a butterfly. A butterfly, that can live for
a thousand years.

  This wall visible from the moon, who will know
  i made my part of it any better than the rest?

  Late afternoons sometimes i suspect its purpose
  isn't even to be visible from the moon.

11 26 90

Translated "Raps Clack Calcspar" for the International
Palindromists' Club: "Los golpes chasquean la piedra
caliza."

'And the sun goes down in waves of ether
in such a way that I can't tell
if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is within me again.' --Akhmatova
(tr. Jane Kenyon)

Being forced to listen to sagittarians [ES-P] is like
watching paint dry. It's not possible for me to do more
than sample their words now & then to see if they're
still fumbling around on the same subject--& yes, they
are. If they were carpenters like they are thinkers, they'd
hit their thumbs more than the nail. It makes me want to
snatch it away from them... (Books written for this reason.)

...suffering is a koan i must answer with my life (joy),
but i keep wanting intellectual solutions. Nixon financed
his first political campaign with poker money he won
in the war.

'...human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which
we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we
long to move the stars.' --Madame Bovary, xii

'Metaphorical language is the result of the disproportion
between man's short life and the immense and long-term
tasks he sets himself. Because of this, he needs to look at
things as sharply as an eagle and to convey his vision in
flashes which can be immediately apprehended. This is
just what poetry is.' --I Remember, Boris Pasternak

Lawrence Durrell died; i burn a stick of frankincense &
myrrh in his honor. Later i fix some onion soup in the
kitchen only to discover, in the living room where the
two smells blend, a typically Durrellian irony.

A language with only a future tense. (via Enigmatic Mermaid)
Or not.