On influence

Influence is an infection, which provokes a creative reaction by the immune system.

Unredressed

An unredressed injustice never dies.

New poems

+15

Easier

It is easier to love the tree than to love every leaf on it.

Unlawful (Harkaway>

Just because something is done according to the law does not mean that it is lawful. Law is made in the image of an ideal. One can make a law that does not reflect that image, and that law may be a law without being lawful.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

Forgotten (Orlean)

I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten but that we are all doomed to being forgotten; that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts nothing matters. Everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody.

Susan Orlean

By definition

I reject any paradigm that defines people by their institutional role.

Convince me (Porchia)

Convince me, but without convictions.  Convictions no longer convince me.

Antonio Porchia

Memory

Words are made of memory.  Even the shortest word—even "I"—is inconceivable without memory.

Now?

Is consciousness in the now
or is now in the consciousness?

Cheese flautas

Attention!

Words are attention.

Pursuant to pursuit

We pursue community for continuity.

The posture

What better way to express doubt
than in the posture of certainty?

New poems

+15

On time

Time is the wind
made when what moves moves.

The refusal (Zapruder)

He [Whitman] "shall not let it"—that is, the lures of the world, the intoxication—distract him from his loafing, the refusal to be tempted out of idleness, from which all his great poetry emerges.

This refusal can be difficult to sustain, because of external and internal pressures.  Yet it is only through preserving somewhere, within oneself, a refusal to be "useful" in the ways the world expects, to be "functional" or "productive" or "responsible," that one prepares to be a poet.

Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

Not quite

The innate is not inevitable.

Ambition to say (Nietzsche)

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book—what everyone else does not say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything

Everything is a set containing more than every thing.