Under the Sign Read Online Free PDF Page A

and in trajectories of subversive resistance, identities, genders, where actual uncomfortable, risky cultural shifts are found. Radical forms produced by historical necessity; not spurious avant-garde “moves.”
    Is soul found, formed , at the juncture of mind-heart? Marilynne Robinson ( When I Was a Child I Read Books ): “Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word ‘soul,’ and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit.”
    Greek word for soul: psyche . Blame Freud’s analytic for the loss of soul ? Blame prerogatives of white secular liberalism?
    26.
    Day breaks into petulance: later, gestures become slights, insults. I read about hospice care and the dying surrounded by family , a sign of a life well lived, of fidelities and loyalties.
    Rob Fitterman flies out to California for a day or so, to see our friend Stacy Doris in her last months. Thinking about someone is not the same as being with someone.
    A friend dismayed at not getting to her mother’s side in time; my own sorrow at not being near for my mother, for my sister, my aunt, my cousins, dying. Sister, moaning on the bed, in Washington; in New York, informed she is now dying, I am unable to act, to get up and go: turned to stone. If I don’t move will time stop? A collision between what should happen against what is happening. The Closed.
    To arrive the next, the following day into her already death; the train moving through or into her not being alive ; the singular loneliness of grief as a measure of what the beloved will not now know.
    When I asked Leslie Scalapino’s husband, Tom White, about her being “ready” to die, he said she had no interest in it, was not resigned to it, thought “no poet should die,” because they, we, have too much work to do! Onward!
    Emily Dickinson’s letter:
    Ah! dainty—dainty Death! Ah! democratic Death! Grasping the proudest zinnia from my purple garden,—then deep to his bosom calling the serf’s child!
    Emerson asked: Are they my poor? I might ask: Are they my dead? Many ones.
    War.
    27.
    The notion that, among creatures, humans have no natural capacity, are bare, and so were forced to make tools: “a matter of instruments.” The instrument or tool: Mind itself, not something external to it. Is Mind language? Meanwhile, Mind continues to invent instruments to replace itself, speed itself, take over parts of itself: our machines, ourselves . In the Times an article on the end of forgetting: indelible traces or tracks on the Cloud that cannot be erased.
    Task: garden.
    Temporal-spatial limbo
    sifting through the dawn
    awning drawn up
    embarking
    toward the opening in the circle
    this would be
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â a ritual harmony of the singular
    tracing steps
    the pond beyond
    glossed
    sails   the meticulous dress
    Â                       as she departs
    Â                          her circumstances.
    Not to belittle the cause. We remain alert
    despite oppressive
    march
    drone
    on into another war in another climate
    to—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â the killing machine
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â embracing the desiring machine—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â shadow        over
    corpse.
    28.
    Irritant of lost time: immaterial repetition.
    Setting down the track and then following, in the belief it will come out somewhere; the coming out dependent on the setting down. These narrative fictions constrain multiplicity
    Â Â Â Â Â Â skips and gaps and snags, frictions and reroutings, repetitions and returns.
    Thought experiment: imagine what a person might want to read in one hundred years.
    Not about the new clarity of an evening light unless that light illumines something. Memory