Monster Fugue

[MONSTER]

And this is what the monster said—

Your strangeness flies in and out of me.

An inside-out hero.

To cross to the other.

Let the monster.

Part sphinx, part centaur, part chimera.

For the love of things that can’t be explained away.

Did Spinoza hear what Arcimboldo saw?

The sphinx knew Oedipus was the monster.

The exile knows—we are all monsters in time.

Diasporic ethics: If there is someone to blame, everyone is to blame; if everyone is to blame, no one is to blame; if no one is to blame, each one must be vigilant for everyone.

Awakened from unquestioning.

Is it that the body has not caught up with the mind or that the mind has not caught up with the body?

Having traveled ten thousand journeys to be born, the body is always arriving.

Skirting the border of the possible and the impossible.

The terrible ecstasy of the monster’s hunger for language.

Our commemorators, our harbingers, our monsters.

Roars, hisses, clicks, buzzes, croaks, chirps, hoots, gibbers . . .

[SUSPENSE]

And the bridge bridged bravely on.

Falling.  No becauses.

Today is the the.

Amor fati—the longest-shortest path from birth to death.

Perverse prose: language diverted from itself.

Eyes opened wide by a sudden suspension of belief.

Winged by slowness love arrived.

What counts as an event depends on the counter.  (Then there are those who’ve stopped counting.)

Home only becomes home in the leaving. 

To be surprised by nothing—to be at home in the event—is to be surprised by everything.

[TIME]

How many eternities in the shattering of time?

What is time about?, asked the sleepy children.

Time too arises and passes away.

Around time’s corner the event awaits us.

He looked.  The world looked back.  Time stopped.

Now and now again, the moment comes, the opposite of time.

Time cannot make anything happen, only the event can.

In time everything touches.

Nothing moves like nothing in notime.

The hero resists synchronization.

The present is an endless tunneling.

There are many times in time.

Those who believe the measurable is more real than the immeasurable seek to abolish the immeasurable with their fine instruments.  And the immeasurable becomes the refuge of secret worlds waiting for the sleep of number.

The philosophy of clocklessness.

Not all difference makes a difference.

There is only one prophecy: Convergence turns to divergence, divergence to convergence.

Only mortality can know eternity.

[PHOTOGRAPHY]

All photography is autophotography.

The camera also hears, the photograph sounds.

Then he stopped taking photographs and the photographs started taking him.

The whole universe shifts every time a camera clicks.

A glassy essence in love with reflection.

Stilled to ecstasy.

Being is just a snapshot of becoming.

Arrested by the feeling of flowing.

The photograph nobody remembers taking.

The revealing blindness of desire’s obscure camera.

[POLYPHONY]

Is and is not neither is nor is not.

To listen outside words.

Polylicious.

—Phil Yin, meet Sophie Yang.
—Pleasure to sweet you.

Because words lean toward being, I lean away from words toward the becoming world.

The sea of paradox, Odysseus’ true home.

One only has nostalgia for what one is not. 

This one thinks with words, this one with pictures, but this one thinks outside words or pictures.  (But is this still thinking?)

The celestial reversatility of black-in-white thinking.

Is truth the shadow of doubt or doubt of truth?

Just as certain kinds of thinking are only made possible by transgression, other kinds are made impossible by it.  Mere transgression, however, is not yet thinking.

The hungry ones doubted God into existence.

The lines of thought can—at best—only approximate the body’s curves.

Islands of nouns scattered in a swirling sea of verbs.  Above—a twinkling sky of prepositions blesses wordless seafarers.

When Lao Tzu kissed Aristotle, paradox woke up from the nightmare of noncontradiction.  Somewhere a volcano erupted.

The opposite of nostalgia.

In the pure land where thinking is neither for nor against, the non-thinking in thinking rises, flowers.

And if we assembled the unwilling subjects of the empire of language?

A tongue of water speaks a fluid world.

Gestures from the unutterable.

Some things can only be seen in silence.