fighting redemption
I saw a dog once
grab a raven by the wing as it dipped low, dipped into jaws that grabbed it and
with one decisive jerk snapped its neck.
The bird had dipped with the vanity of its kind -to scavenge a piece of
shiny metal, to take that bright scrap aloft for itself.
So today I write my 36th comparative literature paper since arriving at Brown. It is about the nature of communicability. It is about how a word can be both physiological and social. It is about the necessity of acting with words.
Which is ironic because all the act has gone out of my speech-act. Sound and fury signify nothing. How long can you tread water before you get furious at the ocean. Which is really just cowardice: easier to hate the sea than the self.
Maybe it’s a hazard of the trade: there’s only so much you can read about violence structural and otherwise before you feel the need to act against it but then you wake up and you’re still at Brown where if anyone talks about horror at all it is with the bright eyes of intrigue: will they pay more attention to me if I play for a while in the garden of earthly terrors? Fuck action if the scars don’t coordinate. Fuck it if you have to give up your sophisticated nonintervention.
And damn my cowardice: I want to be like that dog - I want to get this between my teeth and break its neck, daring the smooth scavengers to seek another shiny morsel in the grit and dead grass.
So today I write my 36th comparative literature paper since arriving at Brown. It is about the nature of communicability. It is about how a word can be both physiological and social. It is about the necessity of acting with words.
Which is ironic because all the act has gone out of my speech-act. Sound and fury signify nothing. How long can you tread water before you get furious at the ocean. Which is really just cowardice: easier to hate the sea than the self.
Maybe it’s a hazard of the trade: there’s only so much you can read about violence structural and otherwise before you feel the need to act against it but then you wake up and you’re still at Brown where if anyone talks about horror at all it is with the bright eyes of intrigue: will they pay more attention to me if I play for a while in the garden of earthly terrors? Fuck action if the scars don’t coordinate. Fuck it if you have to give up your sophisticated nonintervention.
And damn my cowardice: I want to be like that dog - I want to get this between my teeth and break its neck, daring the smooth scavengers to seek another shiny morsel in the grit and dead grass.