Reset Forty-One, Day Twenty-Five

Saturday barely remembered, but a few vivid images of pictures I saw and sounds I heard, some sought out, some randomly encountered. I'm sure I slept for a while and ate something, and slipped into worrisome reality from time to time, but always returned to the vague world of imagination. I'm pretty sure reality has gotten awful, but fantasy is thriving, when I can find it, and reality gets kicked aside. Reality would be better if I could write down what I imagine, but the imagined dissolves when I think about it. It seems it used to make its way into words sometimes, but these days it rejects the contact with the mundane. Metaphor, simile, analogy crumble at its touch, as it disintegrates at theirs. There is no interface.

I ought to have learned music. Words are both too solid and too ephemeral. Maybe I could learn to use only their sounds, as Gertrude Stein did, letting meaning fall where it may, or not. No ideas but in things, Williams said. But what if ideas are not what you want? What if ideas are only the residue things leave behind when they pass from reality to illusion? No things but in sensation, no sensation but in desire. But for me the interface is gone, and I'm on the other side of where it was, which I think is where I want to be, where desire is inexplicable. Deliberately courting the place where, Yvor Winters said, madness lies. Mad at last, mad at last. It's about time.


( Sunday Verse )