Thursday, November 15, 2012

If He Stands Still He Is Dancing














TO SEE IF SOMETHING COMES NEXT

Jack Gilbert

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No-: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still he is dancing.



5 comments:

  1. Damn.

    A quick check of wikipedia seems to indicate that in general, Van Hollen is not as corrupt as these guys: Erskine Bowles, Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Eric Holder, Barack Obama.

    It looks like that Grand Bargain is going to suck at least as much as we feared it would.
    ~

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  2. BTW, I love The Round House which won the National Book Award last night.

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  3. I think I've seen it here, Earthgirl either bought it or someone loaned it to her. I remember reading her early work, not sure why I didn't keep up, I liked it. I'm finishing up a Kraznahorkai, starting up another attempt at James (all have failed before), have Frances' novel after that, then I'll try the Ehrlich. Even if Earthgirl didn't have it, I work somewhere I can get my hands on books.

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  4. Jeff, Your photo of the water glass with the underlying text is marvelous. Are you going to do more in the Liquid Lenses series?

    Have you read about Levi Bryant's onto-cartography? Because the picture resonated with me as an onto-cartograph.

    "I’m pitching onto-cartography as a new sort of critical theory that explores the way in which space-time paths emerge from interactions among entities as well as signifying components. The idea is that entities and signs exercise what I call “gravity”, creating vectors or paths along which other entities must move. For example, major professional journals, conferences, and academic institutions previously exercised a gravity on thought and theory, limiting what could be heard and articulated by virtue of having to pass through these institutions to be transmitted elsewhere. With the rise of the internet and para-academia the structure of gravity has changed and it’s now possible for voices and thoughts to get a hearing that couldn’t before be readily heard. The key point is that space-time is not a fixed given, but rather is a heterogeneous multiplicity arising out of entities (what I now call “machines“) and signs that is constantly shifting and changing in the structure of its paths and attendant gravity. The practice of onto-cartography consists in mapping these assemblages and gravitational path so as to intervene in them and change them. I’ve referred to this practice as “terraism“." Larval Subjects blog July 7, 2012

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