9/11/99

Behind every spate of messiness lies an undone task. You can tell- because after you've done it you *feel* like organizing.

6/20/99

Dribs and Drabs

1. The fading of ESP similar to the earlier fading of the aura. ESP depends on empathy. Premonitions have their base in the instinct to protect, not aggress against.

2. The hero doesn't really like groups. So s/he rises above them.

*

Quotations are apologies

3. Poverty offers a few
consolations, Seneca reminds
us. Such politics as this
doesn't easily lend itself to
the cause of liberalism, but
that would be a superficial
reading of stoicism. Poverty
forces an economics of use,
while luxury eventually must
resort to a metaphysics of use.
Poverty provokes a situational
or contextual access to
metaphysics.

4. Quotation (on the other
hand?) offers immediate,
while admittedly limited, access
to the sensation of discovery.

*

Premonitions at first appear
in dribs and drabs.They are\
like clues. A clue is like a
legend to an unknown or alien
environment. Premonitions
deepen curiosity, they
incite research.

5. Can "essay"- try to tell-
or report- as in, report
a conversation.

6. Presentiment-
something you notice but
cannot necessarilty comment
on- it has, as yet,
an known significance;
i.e. information you cannot categorize.

7. Going backward-changing
or revising things, as a kind of time
travel.

8. Letters to, or thoughts
toward.

9. An inner dialoge is
going on (Fairbairn: an
originary breakup of the
self as a self-protective
i.e. defensive maneuver.)
Only if I speak up (within)
to my inner monologue can
I answer it.

10. Even the tendency to write on
scraps of paper is an
attempt to evade the
given economy or system of
classification.

9/17/99

Toni: "History only remembers
those who change it."

9/23 Check find file for
poetry into film competition.

9/26 "Time" singing again and again
like a Greek chorus, different
each time, prolonged a little like
a raga.

Jimmy's movie suggestions

6th Sense
The Fallen
Virtuosity

10/2/99

From the standpoint of true
happiness all of the usual
props for enjoyment stand out
as superfluous.

An idea for a sentence
or an idea for a new
category of sentences.

Observe yourself in your
round of lesser events.
You move, again and
again, from place to
place. Look at it as if
you don't know how you
got there. Now, what
does this mean.

10/4/99

"You know much better than
me what is customary in
this land."

The failed poems streak
like falling stars across
the sea of understanding.
This is why a poem must
wear a mask. The poem that
announces itself
risks nol being
heard because somehow
it speaks out of turn.

It's hard to get people
to read what you write.
Keep writing anyway.

10/22/99

I'm less interested in
writing that makes me think
than in writing that
lets me think.

So much around and, even within me,
makes me think: news,
advertising, information. Yet other things,
let me think: music, the sea, poetry.

10/26/99

Toni's "bookstore spirit."

10/29/99

"I will be better readers."
Rod Smith
"In Memory of My Theories"