This morning I read this poem. "A task" by Czelaw Milosz, chosen randomly from his collected poems. It reminded me of the post I made on reading this poem initially in 2017. It resonated again today amidst so much degraded public discourse. I will add to this repost the closing paragraph of the other poem… Continue reading A task: from Milosz to me
In April 2017 I wrote the following post in an experiment, a form of improvised association and regathering of the fragments of my mind. I will write some more of these kinds of posts soon. Please enjoy. Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche (originally posted 23 April 2017) After a morning during which I searched my ravaged… Continue reading Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
"Max" W.G. Sebald wrote some of the most mesmerising sui generis texts of 20th century literature. His Rings of Saturn is a collection of essays on silk, travel, depression, genocide and the prose marvel, Thomas Browne - a Borgesian list sewn together with deep meditation. This great work transformed my sense of possibility with writing,… Continue reading Sebald’s sentences
Today I am reposting this reflection on the true heritage of Ezra Pound, Cantos from a cage, which I originally posted in April 2018. I have borrowed from the local library, Daniel Swift The Bughouse: the poetry, politics and madness of Ezra Pound (2017) that tries "to make our peace, as best we can, with… Continue reading Cantos from a cage
Prophets are despised in their own country, and now and then I am tempted deeply by Cassandra's fate. So in appreciation of true prophets and great writers, who formed my understanding of the world as a young man, here are some brief testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "If one is forever cautious, can one remain a… Continue reading An interlude on Solzhenitsyn
In the 1980s or 1990s I wrote down on an index card, this observation from Robert Musil An essay is not the provisional or incidental expression of a conviction that might on a more favorable occasion be elevated to the status of truth or that might just as easily be recognized as error ... an… Continue reading The floating life within
Coincidentally - a word that tricks chance into being fate - I was reading this week Maria Popova's account of Wisława Szymborska's celebration of not knowing. Szymborska said, in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, that it is from the humility of not knowing that inspiration comes - in any profession, not merely writing: "Inspiration… Continue reading A postscript on Utopia
I have spent the morning renovating the Burning Archive. A new theme changes the look and will feature more posts on the landing page so that you can sample more of my writing. I have also added several pages that gather together the main categories of my writing. My poetry collections features links to the… Continue reading Renovating the Burning Archive
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable… Continue reading Cantos from a cage
A short post. The miracle of literature: how words crafted for another voice, at another time, pierce the carapace of habit, strike at deep wounds, and reveal a way of being. From my reading last night: The Task (Czeslaw Milosz) In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life Only if I brought… Continue reading A task: from Milosz to me
"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside… Continue reading On revenge
"I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world." Joseph Conrad, 1922, in correspondence with Bertrand Russell. A new biography of Joseph Conrad has come out. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in… Continue reading Conrad’s darkness
Adam Phillips: "Writing needn’t be a world domination project… but just the attempt to find enough people who are interested in what matters to you" This quotation comes from Adam Phillips' latest collection, In Writing. I sourced it from the review in The Guardian. How timely I should stumble on this remark - I have… Continue reading Adam Phillips, In Writing
"The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud." George Lichtenberg (1742-99), The Waste Books, #22, p 8 I collected from the local library The Notebooks of Robert Frost, which features… Continue reading Waste books and epigrams
After listening to an episode of the On Being podcast, titled Thinking and Friendship in Dark Times, I took up the invitation to remember the impact on my own thought of Hannah Arendt. The podcast featured a literary critic who used the mantle of Arendt's thought to criticise approaches to refugees, global capitalism and the… Continue reading Hannah Arendt and remembering thought
In reading Austerlitz last night, I stumbled on the passage in which the relayed memories of Austerlitz tell of his ambling into the strangely desolate town in which lie the ruins from which he has averted his attention for four decades. Here he finds the reason for his long avoidance of his personal and national… Continue reading The hope of none
After a morning during which I searched my ravaged memory for the concealed door to my troubles, I opened an old box which contained five old, forgotten notebooks of mine. Their black covers and red spines revealed nothing to me of when I last used them to gather observations, thoughts, fragments of lines, like a… Continue reading Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
I have spent the afternoon, as if in retreat from a world that does not welcome me, lying in bed and reading, much as I did as a teenage boy when I fled a family that tormented me into the world that I conjured from the novels of Trollope, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, a world which… Continue reading Sebald’s sentences
Nothing to say except the weak and fading Malones of my imagination - skeletons only, caricatures, ghosts in some uncontrolled machine - still I must say something.
For to judge aright, one should esteem men because they are generous, not because they have the power to be generous; and, in like manner, should admire those who know how to govern a kingdom, not those who, without knowing how, actually govern one. Niccolo Machiavelli, from the Dedication to The Discourses
