aphorism cc

Our animals needn't learn from us.

Fragment XI

chopstick split beef on wooden plates

Fragment X

(lifted the footprint from the earth)

Fragment IX

joints... of wood, rinds, sawdust, fibers...

Fragment VIII

...fronds, toadstools..., sweat, lumps of salt...

Fragment VII

So much depends upon our knots

Fragment VI

Methinks my grasp was the hallucination.

Fragment V

All [things] are transient; pain, hate, virtue...

Lexicography 1

echo-system (n) [ek-o-sis-tem, 1987] The infrastructure arising from phenomena and their environment, without availability of symmetric information, whereby one can observe the environment by means of the phenomena, a trope of Insistentialism.
["Within the echo-system, one learns via one's Narcissism..." (Wattman 1987)]

From "An Essay on the Ostracist" (1)

The pottery shards found in an abandoned well were dubbed by the archaeologists and the popular press "the ostraka" after the Greek, or "the fragments" by others. Given the constitution of the shards, their cross-section, the tinge of the shards suggesting the presence of copper, they are believed to come from the heartland of the forgotten tribes of the island. Certain indentations in the clay have lead many to believe that the tribe had access to early-bronze-age implements, absent among the stone-age peoples that succeeded. Burial sites containing atlatls, however, reveal a resistance to bows and arrows, perhaps explaining the extinction of the culture.

Fragment IV

...erasure-blade fell on the flesh.

Fragment III

Wet knives stuck in the wood.

Fragment II

Mistook her hair in(?) wisps of smoky...

Fragment I

...shucked [a] fresh oyster...by myself...

aphorism liii

Loathe all your neighbors as yourself.

Observations on Doubles (6)

Plutarch noted well n the days of the Greeks and Romans that they live by parallel lives, most famously Cicero and Demosthenes, given in plot line and no more, though separated by centuries, the hour of the glories of Apollodorus and Pseudo-Appolodorus, the grammarian and the librarian respectively, who preceded that familiar Renaissance trope of the twins alike in many respects (too many respects) but different in their souls' moments of delight, cleverly cleft at the womb, those happy two of numerous mishaps in which but one is hapless left for the sake of those polyps known as doubles who do the same job just as well and justly, too, just as Marx judged they would, and the one envies the other, the two having made division of labor and themselves.

Observations on Commensuration (5)

The analytic use of standards and measures, first into midnights, onwards to mid-days, later into first-order diminution and then into second degrees of diminution, renders the wide world canonical ("Long live the sound of the cannon!"), whereby the one-by-one world leads the procession, looking like some Jesuit or some odd denomination of anti-nominalists - Benedict's orders come to mind, speechless, speechless, speechless - surely one of them realizes that the angelus belongs to the people, not to the peal of the bell, the reel on the bell, the brazen-sky bell that rings because the plowshares drop and not the other way around.

Biography III

She explained her affinity for exile as that of the separation between the heart and the mind. She claimed to have found the concept in Ovid's "Tristia", but historians, myself included, have yet to find her meaning. When she had been forced out of Portugal, she detoured to Constanta, in modern day Romania, planning to die in the vicinity of Ovid's final resting place. In the well-known story, she planned to enter the bathtub for forty-seven hours, the same length of time her mother had spent in labor. Her note reads: "I shall leave myself as I have entered it: unclean, unknown, and unwanted" (Wattman 178). Luckily for posterity, the Utilities Authority had called a general strike the week before, stripping the town of running water for a pay rise.

Biography II

In her transition from her works such as "As Observacaoes" (The Observations) to her sonnets, the typical criticism to have emerged since Wattman ascribes the shift to her maturity. Of course, she herself would deny this several times in the interviews and manuscripts that arose after the heyday of Wattman's school of Insistentialism had petered out. But even years before that, lines from her verse play "Taxonomies" exhibit her disdain for the very notion of maturity, claiming: "Maturity results from matters-at-hand, bureaucracy, / And all of the prejudice the rear guard maintains" (Taxonomies III, i, 97-8). Her mind, like her poetry but unlike her prose, wrote en plein air, imposing her memory on the nature around her. In fact, all three of her own personal copies of Wordsworth's "Preludes" (one each for 1799, 1805, and 1850) are ferociously annotated. All the references to what she called "infancy, insouciance and incest" are covered in inkblots.

Sonnet II

I've seen men fashioned from wire, snow, or clay,
And even straw cinched tight, or sheets of tin
That would wave some disintegration in
Like heaven condemned and burned by venomous day.
If men were men instead of messengers,
Who would fain carry but themselves and not
The aimless parcels no one ever sought
Who pour canals upon their passengers,
Then we should both become the greatness that
The firmament we bear possesses by the might
Of its forked lightning. Ever since begat,
Along with her lord Chaos, empress Night
Our parents' courses, swollen, flowing fat,
The lies of paths have well remained in sight.

aphorism li

The lessons of maturity foster hypocrisy.

Observations on Character (5)

I visited therapy as someone else.

Biography I

Of course, the Adjutant was hardly known in the party for his oratory. Rather dismissibly, but by no means meagerly, established his renown among the other members of the various Anarchist faction. The press knew him as the man who, “made advances upon [the Infanta] upon her acquittal from [the Filibuster Affair]” (Conard, 1889). The aristocracy lampooned him as, “that lascivious gamin” (Cleant, 1887). Most memorably, though, he boldly, or foolishly, proposed the unimaginable. Even before the Events of 1895, before the Aphoristic Leaflets and the October Bill, he unfathomably suggested that the national anthem be changed to “La Ravachole”!

Sonnet I

As we were gone to bed in heat, and lost
To care in deeply breathing in and on
Each other, as we left for nights that tossed
Our limbs, impassioned, quartered, racked, and drawn
A catastrophic drowse has rent me from
The sight of you, my beloved Heart!
Another stuns my grasp and stills the drum
That leaves me ravished, only with my part.
But would the Dreamer left me with the rite
So that I might beseech him for the time
To share a vision with my Love, delight
In life-long instants of unchained Sublime,
Until red-handed Dawn awakes me fast
From that which Fate dictates can never last.

aphorism xxx (On Acatalepsy)

I'm convinced that nobody's convinced anymore.

Fifth Fair

Taste you. There is such heat in you, hot, harsh, stark, dark as wine. In your hand! Heard you, darkling. Wind from the turret animates your boughs. Bothering your locks. There you are. Galvanize you; fever you. Embraced the shock from your sinews, oaken at a touch, thrush-passionate. Despaired, for the cold of your midnight, wearily and dessicated yearned for your labyrinth; Longed for your fair, pale, willow-pale, tattooed, supply and tenderly shattered pomegranates. Long for you, for your chest, holding firm only in its mutability. A regard! There! You are us.

Observations on Saturday (4)

I guess I could write about something I observed the other day, that unseasonal day, that still day, still as the day is still long, when I heard those two through the window talking about a work of mine, quite honestly too, because I certainly write about fish too often, but I can’t help it, for fish are so very interesting, though not everybody can enjoy them, Plato for instance, since fish have to see everything underwater through the piss and spawn and spit and tears of all the other animals, and I must remind myself to write less honestly.

aphorism x-xii, xx (The "Baroque" Aphorisms)

(Fugue)
Instruments sense purposelessly, interchangeably, and fallibly.
(Toccata)
Organs sense purposefully, uniquely, and infallibly.
[Tast (sic)]
Physical experiments must maximize systemic determination.
(Temptation)
Social experiments must maximize free choice.

Observations on Matthew (3)

As far as I’m concerned, the drive of a religion based on a character with father issues, despite the fact that the same religion won’t recognize it, thanks to that Idealist cadre (thanks to the men who would rather forget their manhood and the women who can’t help but remember their manhood) such a religion treats its prophets as one would treat artistry and dubitable patrimony that condemns its adherents to probity, cudgels them to the point of civilization, strongarms them into a vision of liberty which that same character empties out thereby becoming the past, thereby sowing the future.