The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging:
A Mid-Summer Night’s Masque


Emily Dickenson: “Publication/-is the Auction
Of the mind of Man-“

Anne Sexton: “Language has nothing to do with
rational thought. I think that’s why I get
so horribly furious and disturbed with rational
thought.
Language is the opposite of the way a machine works.
Language is poetry, maybe? But not all language is
poetry. Nor is all poetry language….Who, me? Sailing
around like crazy in LANGUAGE whatever it is and
then brought up short by reality (what is it, really?)…”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “359. Could a machine think?- Could
it be in pain?-Well, is the human body to be called
such a machine? It surely comes as close as possible
to being such a machine.
360. But a machine cannot think!- Is that an empirical
statement? No. We only say of a human being and what
is like one that it thinks. We also say it of dolls
and no doubt of spirits too.”

Laura Riding: “How we happen to be both human,
of the material of the machine…
The one original substance is one.
Two is two’s destruction.
But love is the single word wherein
The double murder of the machine
Is denied
In one suicide…”

Charlotte Salomon: “You’d do better to get
absorbed in the book you’re thinking
of writing.”

Walter Benjamin: “Because he is unable to
hold a vision he forces the machinist and
the decorative artist into his service.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The chair is thinking
to itself…WHERE? In one of its parts? Or
outside its body; in the air around it?

Phillip K. Dick: “’There are eleven paraworlds.’”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: “Discard every memory. Of./
Even before they could. Surge themselves.
Forgotten so, easily,/not even as associations.”

Franz Kafka: “To avoid an error in the use of words:
What is to be deliberately destroyed must first have
been quite soundly conserved; what crumbles, crumbles,
but cannot be destroyed.”

Robert Smithson: “Cracked, broken, shattered; the
walls threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation,
corrosion, decomposition, disintegration, rock
creep, debris slides, mid flow, avalanche were everywhere
in evidence.”

Liubov Popova: “We are breaking with the past
because we do not believe it anymore, because
its hypotheses are unacceptable…”

Phillip K. Dick: “But something..has replaced it.
Perhaps an alternate paraworld…”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Might it not actually happen
that a dreamer, as it were emerging from the dream,
said in his sleep, ‘I am dreaming’?”

Sappho: “The moon and the Pleides/are set.
It is midnight/and time spins away. I lie in my bed alone.”

Emily Dickenson: “The words the happy say/
Are paltry melody/But those the silent feel/
Are beautiful-“

Sappho: “Someone honored me, giving me
the secret of their craft.”

Charlotte Salomon: “For a long time I was covered
by the earth. And I woke up among corpses. And when
I miraculously came home again, and when I then-
I had partially lost my memory.”

Walter Benjamin: "Warmth is ebbing from things.
The objects of daily use gently but insistently
repel us."

Anne Sexton: “Well, nevermind. I think language
is beautiful. I even think insanity is beautiful
(surely the root of language), except that it
is painful.”

Laura Riding: “Will beauty, can beauty
allay the deficiency?/(Never quite. Never quite).”

Franz Kafka: “You have harnessed yourself
ridiculously for this world.”

Theesa Hak Kyung Cha: “If words are to
be uttered, they would be from behind
the partition. Unaccountable is distance,
time to transport from this very minute.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “You learned the ‘concept’
“pain” when you learned language.”

Robert Smithson: “The deeper the artist
sinks into the time stream the more
it becomes “oblivion”…

Anne Sexton: “But then I found this girl
(very crazy of course) [like me I guess]
who talked language. What a relief!”

Emily Dickenson: “Her face was a bed of hair,
Like flowers in a plot-
Her hand was whiter than the sperm
That feeds the sacred light.”

Sappho: “Don’t try to bend a crazed heart.”

Walter Benjamin: "The work is a death
mask of its conception."

Franz Kafka: “Intercourse with human beings
seduces one to self contemplation.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “And what do I point to
by the inner activity of listening? To the sound
that comes to my ears, and to the silence when I
hear ‘nothing’?”

Emily Dickenson: “Whoever disenchants
A single human soul/By failure of irreverence/
Is guilty of the whole.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: “Unlike birth, unlike
death, “this” redeemed through own memory
and presumes a separate conclusion.

Franz Kafka: “From a real antagonist, boundless
courage flows into you.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “We do not say that “possibly” a dog
talks to itself. Is that because we are so minutely
acquainted with its soul?”

Laura Riding: "The dogs still bark,
And something is not clear.
From ignorance dogs barked always.
How to enlighten them?
They do but bark...
Shall we seem to disappear
Until dogs stop barking?
There is no other way to explain."

Anne Sexton: “I feel, sometimes, sorry about
my poetry…not so far as the ‘literary world” is
concerned… but as far as the people in Wellesley
and the surrounding towns are concerned. It shocks
them and I can understand why…
You see, inside is the
place poems come from…”

Sappho : “The black sleep of night closes my eyes.”