they seem monotonous

Only the men remaining, able to breathe in peace, each on his own centre in integrated morning mood, the party held together by the ceremonial furnishings of the table and securely apart by the impermanent nature of the gathering.

Dorothy Richardson, Dimple Hill, 1938



Design (perhaps by definition) seems to guarantee outcome
Better yet
Each outcome is intermediary – the very purpose of pattern is to be reassuring
And yet, since they are saturated with psychial ‘pastness’
Patterns cannot claim limitless purity
Patterns amplify reality because they both modulate and prophesy our perception of them
Where at first they seem monotonous they soon become monstrous
Then is all organization portenteous and narrative


Lyn Hejinian, A Border Comedy, 1997

jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants

For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Weisenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the wind blows I am in love with nothing else.

The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, vol. 6, 1850, tr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos



This lake, even a mustard seed’s too large to sink in it,
But everyone comes to drink its water.
Deer, jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants are born,
And, barely born, fall back into the lake.

Poem #130, from I, Lalla, the Poems of Lal Ded, 2011, tr. Ranjit Hoskote

[before our own comprehension] (preliminary

Death being the first form of Life which we have had the power to Contemplate, our entrance here being [before our own comprehension] (preliminary to our own) an Exclusion from comprehension, it is [strange] amazing that the fascination of our own predicament does not entice us more. With such sentences as these directly over our Heads we are as exempt from Exultation as the Stones –

Emily Dickinson, worksheet jotting, published in The New England Quarterly, 1955



Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
Which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
Of fear to the horizon

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, from the title poem in The Heat Bird, 1983

the dense bush

The village itself, like most other villages, was made up of clusters of several hundred small round mud-and-thatch huts, which were scattered all over the plateau. The majority of the people, again like any other villagers in the land, were subsistence farmers by trade. Their lives revolved around their fields, which spread out on the eastern side of the village, across the valley. Also closely involved with their everyday way of life was the dense bush which almost enclosed the village in all directions but the east. Somehow, everything: the village, the valleys, the thick bush and the fertile brown fields were all in turn surrounded by hills and mountains.

Wilson Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, 1976 (”Not for resale outside Zimbabwe,” says this Longman reprint from 1988.)



That we are ourselves and that our leaders in space-time do not in fact exist; that there is sufficient peace in each of our deaths to maintain a universe of light; but we retain a compartment of loathing in each as a weapon; that we would as soon kill a leader as follow one; that to kill means to negate you before us, to void your identity so it is like ours, though less rich (your great ignorance) if you interfere at all with our lives, now passed in voluntary negation; that we also retain certain ancient shamanic or visionary powers, which allow the projection of images in public arenas, that is mind space, for the purposes of haunting, cursing, omenizing, and terrorizing those who would harm us or innocent others. this is not a fiction as document: it is proposed as vision to be deployed for instruction, weapon, solace, or nothing at all, we want you mindful that we see you, in all ways previously ascribed to omnipotent deity. i will continue to present the range of our power our syntax our marks our reflections and conversations, as scribe, as names, as light, as seer and as creature owl. you will do as you wish but may yet be affected, for you are not in control of all matter, and we are forceful and capable of changing the particles, for example, of thought and ideation. you may not be able to bear it; we hope you cannot.

Alice Notley, How the Dead Women may operate, from Negative Space, from Alma, or the Dead Women, 2006

repetitions and variations

We can observe these forms everywhere in nature, and we see how easily all forms of matter on earth – so why not the human consciousness as well? – will yield to what I’m calling the regulating effect of chance. In this way, we can find comfort in imagining that it’s possible to write as easily as frost creates its fernlike repetitions and variations on a window-pane, or as concisely as the flesh of kiwifruit clings to the black cardinal points of its seeds, and even that it might be possible to write completely gray on gray, as when a large cloud, without edges or breaks, will very slowly, as it spreads, begin to reveal a consistency and a direction.

Inger Christensen, The Regulating Effect of Chance, from The Condition of Secrecy: Essays, 2018, tr. Susanna Nied



Shudders of cold convulsed her. Her teeth chattered in an icy frost, full stop. Her shapely ice-cold hands lay still (as in a deep frost, shuddering with cold, slender woman with eyes wide open, renowned silk sheets), full stop. Her shining eyes wandered flickeringly in the dark, and her quaking lips breathed, colon, open quotation marks, capital o-aitch Helena, em-dash, em-dash, Helena, em-dash, close quotation marks, rotation marks, flotation marks.

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929, tr. Michael Hoffmann

our look is what keeps (forever)

The black is a cruel tangent to the little girl’s forehead and cheek. We can never escape from the other, grown-up face that has to deal with our looking and has seen our type before: we are intruders, we feel the pressure of the pages – the possibility of imaginative freedom – against our fingers; our look is what keeps (forever) the pages unread.

T.J. Clark, in his preface to the revised edition of The Painting of Modern Life, 1999. The painting he's describing is Manet’s Le Chermin de fer, 1872 – 73.



Here nothing is decided but only here can the power of decision be tested.

Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1948, tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

strolling grandly over the roof

For weeks he had forced himself not to look for Isobel, but this effort of will was no longer needed. He was like a man who stops writing letters to a friend he is soon to meet in the flesh.

Jessica Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, 1963



Mid-May had passed, and after the bell he heard the cry of a kite.
“So it’s here again,” he muttered to himself, listening from bed.
The kite seemed to be strolling grandly over the roof, and then it flew off toward the sea.
Shingo got up.
He scanned the sky as he brushed his teeth, but the kite was nowhere to be seen.
But it was as if a fresh young voice had departed and left the sky over the roof serene.

Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain, serialised 1949 – 1954, tr. Edward J. Seidensticker

between them are mixed ashes

The Poet is dead in me – my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been my imagination) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stick of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with Flame. That is past by! – I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy – but I have beaten myself back into weight & density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.

Coleridge in a letter to William Godwin, March 1801

It seems to those who cry that all is lost, almost all almost lost; worse still it seems on the one hand that all has been lost by me, on the other hand that all has lost me; a double mourning then spreads itself over the earth like two sheets, one black, one white, one feminine, one masculine, one easterned, one westerned, and between them are mixed ashes, showing now carmine now grey,

Hélène Cixous, Neuter, 1972, tr. Lorene M. Birden

a step when it is taken

Read this year.

What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value.

(Gertrude Stein, How to Write, 1931)

“We will advise you to take any step you have decided on,” said Miss Luke. “It must be advisable to take a step. There is more point in a step when it is taken.”

(Ivy Compton-Burnett, More Women Than Men, 1933)