Askesis
To
stay outside a system is
the
only way to know the system;
the
poem strives for the untouched
sophistication
of a 1992 Star
Trek
commemorative plate,
unspoiled
by use or usefulness.
Self
denial becomes self transcendence
if
we allow the fading meaning
to
befit, to be proper to. Even today
there
are people who train raptors, who
keep
words like jess and creance alive,
who
become austringers and learn of
bechins,
cadges, and the terror of the hallux.
We
each embrace with fanaticism what we learn
we
cannot live without, as my three-year-old
will
explain to anyone, to everyone that
velociraptors
do not die, they change
into
birds,
and so the hawk is a site
of
complication rather than exclusion,
caring
not at all for either
our
interest or our belief, not even
for
the imperializing nature of our reading.
Yet
there is no rupture with the past,
only
a radical rewriting, so we speak
loaded
with hope yet always in danger
of
it being too clearly understood.
So
we seek, not so much error as
deviation,
to carelessly stray from the path,
which
is the only way it widens.
Still,
we end up as stuff to be utilized,
exploited,
manipulated, processed,
all
with the greatest efficiency. We are
forgotten
just as we forgot the presence
of
the words we spoke, to listen to them
in
such a way that we let them tell us
their
saying. Perhaps mathematics
is
the truest discourse, the only
language
of pureness, but who the fuck
wants
to speak in the immaculate
monologue
of purity? Call it the Night
of
the Long Knives, the Röhm Purge,
or
Operation Hummingbird, it is hard
to
trust what a Nazi tells us. So choose
your
own adventure: We must allow
what
we dare not embrace; we must
allow,
but we dare not embrace.
[In response to Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, pp 117, 118, 131, 133, 135, and Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp xv, xvii]
The days of aesthetic knife fights
and
drunken pub nights arguing over poetry
are
over for us. Now, we are the indifferent middle
-aged
professors sporting growing foreheads
and
faster growing paunches, mortgages,
deadlines,
hardening livers. We have published
and
now we have realized we will still perish.
Now,
(now, now!) we dream of escaping
the
university salt mines, of writing mysteries
under
the noms de plume Pierre Frenchstone
and
Pomley Applegarth, creating fluffy plots
where
the distinguished Professor Emeritus
saves
the day by knowing the difference
between
Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets,
rescues
the beautiful young grad student
from
the new tenure tracker’s terrifying dangling
modifiers,
of selling millions so we can finally sell
out,
retire to the Mediterranean and cultivate
into
our daily conversation old-timey terms
like
noms de plume, Professor Emeritus, now-now,
and
perish,
perish,
perish.
