The Maltese Falcon

The black bird... What is this a metaphor for? Obviously the novel invokes the trope of the holy quest. But it also seems to intentionally invert that trope. Why is Sam Spade repeatedly described as "the blond Satan"?

I don't yet have satisfactory answers for these questions. Maybe there are none.

Imbroglios

The tenuous knots, Gordian convolutions, leave me tied up in a strand of Ariadne's thread. I have the scissors in my hand, but do not know where to cut.

I dislike Phillip Roth, but he perhaps is right in this case

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home and tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.

And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you."

This is also a part of my dream and a part of that thing to which I cannot dream

“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart) I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) I want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”

~ E.E. Cummings

To be is to see

I want to see the world with an eye that analyzes from a place of introspection and regards the grotesque and the monstrous as yet another aspect of self--am I not a part of this? I am not above it. I must refrain from judging it as less than I. I will not succumb to nihilism without a fight to retain my humanity--including that which I revile or find disgusting.

“Anybody can learn to think, or believe, or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel... the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”
~ E.E. Cummings

This might be a metaphor for something...

In my dream we were running through the library of Babel. There was a hidden text you said I needed to see. We looped through mazes of secret passages and Escheresque stairways to find it. It was dusty and crumbling with age. I was afraid to touch it. I couldn’t read it. It was in a language that I couldn’t understand. You tried to explain it to me, tried to help me see. You needed my understanding, my expertise with semiotics. But it wasn’t working. I needed to see it with your eyes. I could only read it through your eyes. My interpretation was nothing without your sense.

"Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love.
Be young forever, seasons of the earth."
~ Czeslaw Milosz

Incomplete

"You stick your probe in further, but you're still not pleased" with surgical knives to cut into flesh, you make these holes in me. I wish I knew what it was you hoped you'd see.

In my mind's eye I see nets and fish and Circe and Scylla...

Then I strove to raise my hands as I lay dying upon the sword, but to earth they fell. And that dog-faced one turned her back upon me, and had not the heart to draw down my eyelids with her fingers nor to close my mouth. So surely is there nought more terrible and shameless than a woman who imagines such evil in her heart, even as she too planned a foul deed, fashioning death for her wedded lord.

Odyssey, Book XI

Perception and Being

When the artist goes so far as to discard resemblances, to rule out any similitude between image and reality other than a fortuitous one, meaning is set free by the disintegration of representation and begins to exert a negative influence. Meaning is the product of the forces of destruction. It flashes out across dissemblances, lacunae, approximations, deliberate indeterminations. Invisible, it blinds because it dissolves the figures in its inimitable presence.

Such also are the meanings that haunt our world.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Because

You can never have too much Rilke (and I can never get enough).

“You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart, and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right to the answer.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Everything...

Everything, well most everything, that I write here is fiction. Or a kind of fiction. Or poetry. Unless I'm quoting someone else, what I write here consists of fragments for story ideas or poems that will be published elsewhere in, hopefully, a better state than they appear here. As I said in this post, this blog functions as a part of my process. I write here in order to work out specific problems or to explore language experiments. Again, this is not my journal or diary, though certainly all writing is biography to some degree, the "I" or "she" is not necessarily "me" nor should it be read that way. Of course there are exceptions, but those are rare and even in those cases I'm playing more with an idea or a feeling than trying to report something about my life.

Of course Nietzsche would say that the "I" is the supreme fiction.

Carpe Diem

The Emperor of Ice-Cream
by Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The Bait

THE BAIT.
by John Donne

COME live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.

There will the river whisp'ring run
Warm'd by thy eyes, more than the sun;
And there th' enamour'd fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

If thou, to be so seen, be'st loth,
By sun or moon, thou dark'nest both,
And if myself have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset,
With strangling snare, or windowy net.

Let coarse bold hands from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks out-wrest;
Or curious traitors, sleeve-silk flies,
Bewitch poor fishes' wand'ring eyes.

For thee, thou need'st no such deceit,
For thou thyself art thine own bait:
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas! is wiser far than I.

This one I wrote for you

The Perfect Desire
 

Also for TW

There is a Want
Words
read
at the tip of my tongue

feeding
The Perfect. Desire

Consumes me. Tho I must extinguish
This fantasy dream machine

Want won't abide extinction.
Want (don't want)
cannot extinguish.
This tongue speaks,
reads perfection in desire.

Does it desire
extinction?
Perfection?
Want
To read
this tongue
to speak, to extinguish...

I beg you, extinguish
this desire
to speak
your tongue
thrills to extinction.
Want
Perfect.

Words.

The Perfect.
Please extinguish
This Want.
This desire.
Extinction:
your
tongue. Perfect
Extinction

Extinguish
Desire
Want

This tongue to extinguish
The Perfect Desire
to speak,
to read these words on my tongue.

Procrastination

Today I decided to procrastinate by writing a Sestina using this tool.

Try it. It's fun!

Here's mine:

A Mantis in the Looking Glass

Foolish girl thought she owned words

perforce to create a world.

Beyond her vision always a veil

muffling the sound. White noise rebounding

absent language, yet echoing

in her ear “A Universe Profound.”

A tyrant dreams “A Universe Profound”

his Knowledge, a colony of Words.

Recoiling Billowing Echoing!

Yet, even without language, a world

vast, silent, and concrete. Rebounding

against her vision, against the veil.

A small green body; a veil.

Leaf green eyes, wings, glittering, profound.

Triangular head, silently swiveling, rebounding,

hunting without words.

This tree its entire world.

Clasping prey in tiny arms, silently echoing

its small image of a world. Echoing

behind my vision, this futile veil.

Mystifying and demystifying a world

even without language, profound

even without words

cycling death and life. Rebounding

against articulation, this vision in words

builds an incomplete world

silently lying behind the veil.

Their lives are rebounding.

Their silence echoing.

Their materiality still profound.

How sacred is this world

if it is not rebounding?

What limits the profound

silence rendered meaningless? Echoing

tyrannical world

only human words

construct meaningless echoing.

Rebounding words become the veil,

a world less profound, meaning lost, words.

Vocabularly words

Umbraphile or shadow walker: one who is addicted to the glory of total solar eclipses.

Noctcaeladors: those with a strong interest in, and psychological attachment to the night sky.

The Real and the Hyperreal

In that moment, with shocking clarity, I understood. The unreality, the surreality, the absurdity, coalesce into the hyperreal.

It's all in Naruda

"Everything you need to know, everything, is in Naruda!" You smiled at my declaration, but your eyes seemed to disagree. My blasphemy made you uneasy. We would dance around it, ignore it, and pretend, for a time, with varying degrees of success, that it didn't matter. One day you would merely shake your head and rue the day you loved me with such intensity. 

"I Died for Beauty"

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth - the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

 

~ Emily Dickinson