Author Archives: d.perry

Night Palace
by Joanne Kyger

The best thing about the past
                                                is that it’s over
                              When you die
                you wake up
        from the dream
                                            that’s your life
Then you grow up
                              and get to be post-human
              in a past that keeps happening
    ahead of you

‘The poet John Keats once wrote to a friend of his named Bailey:

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affection and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.”

The Chinese poet George Wu, who died in the Last Sino-Japanese War…understood this when he recorded: “Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.” Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: “Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

You see, in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh in the weave of the human universe. And only the poet can expand this universe, finding shortcuts to new realities the way the Hawking drive tunnels under the barriers of Einsteinian space/ time.

To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.

To be a true poet is to become God.’

– Dan Simmons, Hyperion

Excerpts from https://www.e-flux.com/journal/151/652979/on-the-recurrence-of-neoreactionaries/

‘Overproduction and overdevelopment don’t mean only an excess of products, but also an excess of prosthetic organs that the soul cannot hold.

…

The Greek word for scapegoat is pharmākos, closely related to pharmakon, which means both “poison” and “remedy.” The scapegoat is the remedy to the community that also poisons the community. Girard recognized this paradox: “The victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him—but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed.”’

Believe in the Future
by Shi Zhi

When cobwebs relentlessly clog my stove
When its dying smoke sighs for poverty
I will stubbornly dig out the disappointing ash
And write with beautiful snowflakes: Believe in the Future
 
When my overripe grapes melt into late autumn dew
When my fresh flower lies in another’s arms
I will stubbornly write on the bleak earth
With a dry frozen vine: Believe in the Future

I point to the waves billowing in the distance
I want to be the sea that holds the sun in its palm
Take hold of the beautiful warm pen of the dawn
And write with a child-like hand: Believe in the Future
 
The reason why I believe so resolutely in the future is:
I believe in the eyes of the people of the future
Their eyelashes that can brush away the ash of history
Their pupils that can see through the texts of time

It doesn’t matter whether people shed contrite tears
For our rotten flesh, or our hesitancy, or the bitterness of our failure
Whether they view us with sneers or deep-felt sympathy
Or scornful smiles or pungent satire
 
I firmly believe that people will judge our spines
And our endless explorations, losses, failures and successes
With an enthusiastic, objective and fair evaluation
Yes, I await their judgement anxiously

Friends, please let us believe in the future
Believe in our unbending striving
Believe in our youth that can conquer death
Believe in the Future: believe in Life.

Beijing, 1968

https://www.zgnfys.com/m/a/nfwx-30418.shtml