DON DELILLO
This picture was an anonymous work that almost anybody on earth could have made, but as it happened, a Georgia slave had produced it. The work's owners, the Stone family of Camden County, had found the work in the attic of the family's old mansion. It was drawn with ink on a large white linen bedsheet and consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand outlines. A draftsman using the right tools would have made thousands of concentric squares with the outlines just four or five millimeters apart. But, as I've said, the drawing, except for the central square, had been accomplished freehand: Each unintended imperfection in an outline had been scrupulously reproduced in the next, and since each square was larger, each imperfection grew larger too, until at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast chaotic wanderings.
To my way of thinking, this secret project of the nameless slave, whether man or woman we'll never know, implicated all of us. There it was, all mapped out: the way of our greatness. Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church's grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments--implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make.
- from The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson.
The future was a casino, and everyone was gambling, and everyone expected to win.
- from Fury, chapter 1, by Salman
Rushdie.
The real trouble with walking a long ways is that you usually have to walk back.
- from Warlock, chapter 35, by Jim Harrison.
Jesus is dying slowly, life ebbing from him, ebbing, when suddenly the heavens overhead open wide and God appears in the same attire he wore in the boat, and His words resound throughout the earth, This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Jesus realized then that he had been tricked, as the lamb led to sacrifice is tricked, and that his life had been planned for death from the very beginning. Remembering the river of blood and suffering that would flow from his side and flood the globe, he called out to the open sky, where God could be seen smiling, Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.
- from The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose
Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero.
Like a record in sports, made only to be broken, a poetics is articulated
in order to be transcended.
- from The New Sentence by poet and essayiist Ron Silliman.
Theory is an impossible project which will never succeed. It will never
succeed simply because the primary data and formal laws necessary to its
success will always be spied or picked out from within the contextual
circumstances of which they are supposedly independent. The objective facts
and rules of calculation that are to ground interpretation and render it
principled are themselves interpretive products; they are, therefore,
always and already contaminated by the interested judgements they claim to
transcend...Theory cannot guide practice because its rules and procedures
are no more than generalizations from practice's history (and from a small
piece of that history), and theory cannot reform practice because, rather
than neutralizing interest, it begins and ends in interest and raises the
imperatives of interest--of some local, particular, partisan project--to
the status of universals.
- from Doing What Comes Naturally by critic and scholar Stanley Fish.
As to the origins of bowed instruments, it is said that the wife of Shiva,
the goddess Parvati, felt such great pity for the fate that awaited man at
the end of his terrestrial adventure that she decided to give him something
that would protect him from demons and help him to find on earth, whenever
he wished, the world of the gods. But Shiva, jealous of these attentions,
destroyed her gift in one blow. Its fragments fell into the seas and
forests, gave life to conchs and tortoises, pressed themselves into the
trunks of trees, and even descended into the loins of women. Only the bow
fell intact to earth, but it was used for many generations as a weapon.
Many divine ages had to pass before man constructed the first lute, using
the shell of a turtle. Nevertheless, it was still strummed with the
fingers. Only as the most fearsome era drew near did man discover how his
bow could be used to vibrate strings, and thereby imitate the eternal sound
that began the world--a sigh emanating from the billowing clothes of Shiva,
the dancing god, the god who rules the universe and maintains its order.
--from Canone Inverso, a novel by Paolo
Maurensig, translated by Jenny McPhee.
Omar, Tu Fu, and I were on the pier
At Tenth Street drinking vodka and warm beer
And writing verses, turn and turn about,
And floating them downriver with a cheer.
--"Rubaiyat" by Hayden Carruth, from the book Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: poems 1991-1995.
"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His
own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other
players (i.e., everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker
in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who
won't tell you the rules, and who SMILES ALL THE TIME."
--from Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry
Pratchett, pg. 4 (Berkley: New York, 1990).
"There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can't do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you."
--from "The Fourth Notebook" of The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Franz Kafka, edited by Max Brod and translated by Ernst Kaiser & Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge MA: Exact Change, 1991), p. 54.
"Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream. Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous."
--from "The Immortal," in Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings by Jorge Luis
Borges, translated by James E. Irby.
There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself.
-Mao II
Responses? Mail them to: jj@jjwylie.com