View all notes
This personage (Black Finnegan by name, an old Irish criminal who was crushed, annihilated almost, by respectability) [...]
lol
And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The first bridge on Constitución. At my feet
the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths.
Steam hisses up and up into the night
which becomes, at a stroke, the Night of the Last Judgment.
From the unseen horizon,
and from the very center of my being,
an infinite voice pronounced these things—
things, not words. This is my feeble translation,
time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word:
“Stars, bread, libraries of East and West,
playing cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars,
a human body to walk with on the earth,
fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death,
shadows for forgetting, mirrors which endlessly multiply,
falls in music, gentlest of all time's shapes,
borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and mornings,
a bronze weight, a copy of Grettir Saga,
algebra and fire, the charge at Junin in your blood,
days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle,
love, and the imminence of love, and intolerable remembering,
dreams like buried treasure, generous luck,
and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy—
all this was given to you and, with it,
the ancient nourishment of heroes—
treachery, defeat, humiliation.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain
the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman's eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.”
the whole poem
Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.
A word on the title: I am not oblivious of the fact that it is an example of the monster the logicians call contradictio in adjecto, for to say that a refutation of time is new (or old, for that matter) is to attribute to it a temporal predicate, thus restoring at once the very notion the subject strives to destroy. Still and all I shall let it stand, so that its ever-so- slight mockery give proof that I do not overrate the importance of this play on words. And then, too, our language is so thoroughly saturated and animated with the notion of time that quite possibly not a single sentence in all these pages fails to require or invoke it.
lol
I have here accumulated citations from the apologists of idealism, I have been prodigal with passages from their canon, I have been reiterative and explicit, I have censured Schopenhauer (not without ingratitude), all so that my reader may gradually penetrate this unstable world of the mind: a world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective; a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of the Principia; an indefatigable labyrinth, a chaos, a dream. It was to this almost perfect disintegration that David Hume was led.
why is this kind of writing so funny to me
“I stood looking at this simple scene. I thought, out loud most probably: ‘It's the same as it was thirty years ago. . . .’ I thought back to that date: a recent enough time in other countries, but already a remote one in this fast-changing part of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for it a small, close affection, a bird-size affection; but most probably there was no other sound in this vertiginous silence than the equally timeless sound of the crickets. The facile thought I am in eighteen hundred and . . . ceased being a set of approximate words and deepened into a reality. I felt dead, I felt myself an abstract perceiver of the world; I felt an indefinite fear imbued with science, the clearest metaphysics. I did not believe I had gone upstream on the presumed Waters of Time. No. Rather, I suspected I was in possession of the reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I succeed in defining this piece of imagination.
There is a line of Verlaine I shall not recall again,
There is a nearby street forbidden to my step,
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time,
There is a door I have shut until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I have them before me)
There are some I shall never reopen.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year:
Death reduces me incessantly.
the whole poem
In the final years of the twelfth century, from twilight of dawn to twilight of dusk, a leopard looked upon some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who were always different, a thick wall and, perhaps, a stone trough filled with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that what he craved was love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of rending and the odor of a deer on the wind; and yet something within the animal choked him and something rebelled, and God spoke to him in a dream: You live and will die in this prison, so that a man I know may look at you a certain number of times and not forget you and put your figure and your symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have furnished a word to the poem. In the dream, God enlightened the rough beast, so that the leopard understood God's reasons and accepted his destiny; and yet, when he awoke, he felt merely an obscure resignation, a gallant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is overly complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.
:(
It was at the foot of the penultimate tower that the poet (who had seemed remote from the wonders that were a marvel to all) recited the brief composition that today we link indissolubly to his name and that, as the most elegant historians repeat, presented him with immortality and death. The text has been lost; there are those who believe that it consisted of a line of verse; others, of a single word. What is certain, and incredible, is that all the enormous palace was, in its most minute details, there in the poem, with each illustrious porcelain and each design on each porcelain and the penumbrae and the light of each dawn and twilight, and each unfortunate or happy instant in the glorious dynasties of mortals, of gods and of dragons that had inhabited it from the unfathomable past. Everyone was silent, but the Emperor exclaimed: You have robbed me of my palace! And the executioner's iron sword cut the poet down.
[...] The first, that if the end purpose of the poem was surprise, its life would be measured not by centuries but by days and hours and even perhaps by minutes. The second, that a renowned poet is less an inventor than he is a discoverer. In praise of ibn-Sharaf of Berja it has been said and repeated that only he could imagine that the stars at dawn fall slowly, like leaves falling from a tree; if such an attribution were true, it would be evidence that the image is worthless. An image one man alone can compose is an image that touches no man. There are an infinite number of things on earth; any one of them can be equated to any other. To equate stars to leaves is no less arbitrary than to equate them with fishes or birds. [...]