A thin week on the notebook front with two classes in progress and writing/design work right and left. Our personal economy seems to be resurrecting slowly, in fits and starts, which in turn puts my muse into a sulk. “You never have time for me.” “But baby, you’re never off my mind…” Etc.
From A. R. Ammons (Collected Poems 1951-1971):
nothing useful is of lasting value:
dry wind only is still talking among the oldest stones.—”Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness”
The one thing we learn from history is that we do not learn
—”Essay on Poetics”
Art is the conscious preparation for the unconscious event
—”Essay on Poetics”
There aren’t / just problems of the mind, the mind’s problematic
—”Extremes and Moderations”
Saying doesn’t do any good but it doesn’t
hurt: aligns the psychic forces with the natural—”Extremes and Moderations”
*
I can only half believe
the brain’s a piece of thinking
meat—although one day
I glimpsed a glovedness in my hand—
a dead-meat moment—mortality,
the incipient insensible: flesh,
bone, blood, lymph, the electric
subtext of an unfinished
experiment in consciousness—
like this little machine made of words