Looks like what drives me crazy
✧ Langston Hughes, “Evil”
Don’t have no effect on you—
But I’m gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.
Fragmentary, No. 26
Lecturing in Japan
Stephen Hawking was asked
not to mention that the universehad a beginning
(and so likely an end)
because it would affectthe stockmarket.
Speculation aside,
we all need a prehistory.According to Freud,
we do nothing but repeat it.
Beginnings are specialbecause most of them are fake.
The new person you become
with that first sip of winewas already there.
✧ Anne Carson, “i wish i were two dogs then i could play with me”
Fragmentary, No. 23
poets are useless,
. . .
are not only ‘non-utilitarian’,
we are ‘pathetic’:this is the new heresy;
but if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgement
✧ H.D., The Walls Do Not Fall
on what words conceal?
Fragmentary, No. 1
The phenomenologist from Paris hates mosquitoes
and carries a small electronic device
that lures the female mosquito to her death
by simulating the amorous cry of the male. Then,
to block the whining sound, he has pink earplugs.
As he sits in conversation
with the phenomenologist from Sussex
a mosquito is observed to enter.
The Englishman leaps to his feet,
calling, “Let us use the mosquito machine!”
and smashes the insect to the wall
with the device. It is the first sign
of wide ontological differences
that will open in the Anglo-French dialectic
here.
♦ Anne Carson, from “What Do We Have Here?”
in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, (1995)
