dream

standing with a psychologist and introducing her to a friend who is a mute, can only make sounds that are unintelligible (generally he seems slightly deranged and/or autistic but a good friend) eventually after a whole conversation about him she hands me a paper which to my sinking horror reveals that my friend does not exist, that I had imagined him the whole time - it gets worse: the friend who doesn't exist is not the dumb mute I was telling her about but the one who I thought I had been this whole time! suddenly I realize that I am really the dumb mute and the other me vanishes, I am left struggling to speak but only able to force out a few incomprehensible sounds as though my mouth were sown shut or I had no mouth...

Conversation with a Foreigner

- What do you studying?
- Philosophy.
- What’s that?
- Philosophy? Oh. Um... well, it’s...the history of ideas, the way people think...
- So you know what I thinking now?
- No, not exactly that... it’s like... how people have thought about things: why are we here, what’s our purpose, do we have a purpose, what is reality, what can we know, questions like that.
- Oh. Like where we come from.
- Yeah, kind of...
- So, you will work in hospital?
- What? No... um, I guess I could write books...
- Like the ones you reading?
- (laughing) Yeah, exactly like those ones.
- (smiling though unconvinced) That's good.

of mallarme

"Unfortunately I arrived at this point through a horrible sensitivity, and it is time that I wrap it in an external indifference, which will replace my lost strength..."

Sensitivity continually endangered - nerves registering the subtlest of vibrations , every jolt of injustice, each pang of pain, swathed in robes of indifference to blunt the blade of existence

The Protozoan (e.g. amoeba) constantly remakes its boundaries as its pseudopodia surround and incorporate food. The protozoan form of consumption is an eternal process of recreating its own borders in such a way that its desired object gets included within itself. It simply redraws the edges of itself around the reality it wants to assimilate. Almost like a child's crayon gone astray.

When prayers become
Mute blades
That sing against stone
Fatal forgeries of a throat
Engulfed by hands
The thousand knives of breathing….

Chart the breathless
Rhythm of the body in anguish
Nerves shuddering in the windless void.
Indifference grating and
Dis inte grating.
Music organized in no agreement,
Music of taste and touch,
Tactile intensities,
Language rubbing up against the body’s
Estranged tongue

Rusted moans
Of soul-twisted metal,
Heated contortions that birth
New deformities:
Tumorous multiplication.
...

mandelstam

My pen has become insubordinate: it has splintered and squirted its black blood out in all directions

I am not afraid of incoherence or gaps.
I shear the paper with long scissors.
I paste on ribbons as a fringe.
A manuscript is always a storm, worn to rags, torn by beaks.
It is the first draft of a sonata.
Scribbling is better than writing.
I do not fear seams or the yellowness of the glue.
I am a tailor, I am an idler.
I draw Marat in his stockings.
I draw martins.

It is terrifying to think that our life is a tale without a plot or hero, made up out of desolation and glass, out of the feverish babble of constant digressions...
Destroy your manuscript, but save whatever you have inscribed in the margin out of boredom, out of helplessness, and, as it were, in a dream.
Sometimes a lowered lid sees more than an eye, and the tiers of wrinkles on a human face peer like a gathering of old blind men.

O to bring back the bashfulness of seeing fingers
They who are going to die can love and see
Sound can be pouring through their fingers