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allegiance:
n; The creative life is founded on the understanding that one’s allegiance
to this world is partial.
autumn:
n; 4. A day comes when every leaf realizes that what it thirsts
for is not to be found in trees.
commitment:
n; 2. The commitment we have made to the visual and our inability
to refuse any of its solicitations
results in a very real physical exhaustion as well as a moral listlessness.
The extent of our pathology eludes us
and barely audible is our complaint— I see too much.
complicity:
n; There is a point at which one becomes complicit with the sadistic impulses
of one’s jailer, or one’s
interrogator— this point is birth.
consolation:
n; 2. We are born with access to two doors. One of them is
suicide, the other is creativity. The fact
that sometimes the door of creativity opens onto a room where one finds only
the door to suicide is an architectural
peculiarity that is neither cruel nor significant.
divergence:
n; In my words you can hear the receding footsteps of the one you have come
to meet.
elaboration:
n; 2. A human life is a ceaseless elaboration of a most bitter
and unbearable truth. Every act, every
thought, every dream, is an evasion. Our personal history is nothing but a
desperate re-articulation of the
universal that we were born into. From the certainty that was an audience
to our inaugural wailing we derive
generalities and further generalities; we propose that what is is what might
be; ultimately we seek to erect a
dubious subjectivity— a lie that could not be more bold—
which we will accept as true. We can bear a truth
which is no truth at all— and this is our strength.
evolution:
n; 3. The fittest do not survive. 4. It
is one thing to evolve as a response to a stimulus, or an
environmental insult. It is quite another thing to evolve beyond the effects
of such a stimulus or insult.
To develop such a specific insensitivity to a previously demanding stimulus
is precisely how evolution leaps.
5. To be perfectly adapted to a contemptible situation is
not a form of progress.
goodness: n; When we refer to a person’s goodness
we are remarking on their relative success in obscuring
their inherent baseness.
home:
n; 4. I have found my home when I can participate in the
nightmare of humanity with a clear conscience.
incompatibility:
n; 2. It is often the case that a writer will get the title
right but will unfortunately have written
the wrong book.
intention:
n; 6. Our so-called good intentions are the most effective
means of keeping us from effecting good.
lie:
n; 3. A lie is how the truth seeks immortality.
martyr:
n; 5. Where a martyr ends a tyrant begins.
poet:
n; 60. The incommunicability of the earned privilege of poetic
experience is what the poet communicates.
61. What begins in the poet must never end there. 62.
The poet exists in the general and the particular legibly,
coherently. His journey back and forth is impossibly rapid, so much so it
seems as though he inhabits both
places simultaneously. Silence is the sound of his progress. Eventually his
language, worn smooth by so
much back and forth movement, rolls down the slightest incline and continues
towards an eternity that will
welcome it. 63. The poet who insists that no other writing
is possible, the poet who refuses to explore any other
literate possibility, is one who forgets that it is possible to masturbate
with the other hand.
opportunity to forget. 4. In punishing we inaugurate the
possibility that the punished might survive himself—
the horror of it.
that will survive it. 8. Sometimes a question is an involuntary
convulsion of our despair.
he would be destroyed.
talent:
n; 2. It is not the lack of talent that is blameworthy, but
rather the dedicated pursuit and exploitation of
one’s lack of talent— in the name of a career—
that is damnable. 3. Talent is not a pardon from hard work,
but its guarantee.
tragedy:
n; 5. A poet does not fall in love, a poet falls
completely through love— and it is for this reason that
such love can only be tragic. The poet who falls through love continues to
fall. A poet is always falling
through time, but in love, there is a witness. For the one left behind,
for the lover who remains, the hole
the poet created as he broke through love— nostalgia, that is the name
of this rupture— is the most they can
expect to love.
victory:
n; If it is impossible to defeat a world that is fanatical in its determination
to force all into its dark
and suffocating objectifications, is resisting such forces the only victory
that is possible, or is this belief in
one’s fortitude the very mark of one who has been broken and defeated?
write:
v; 9. What we do not write for those do exist, we write for
those who do not exist.
from Invigorations
(recent excerpts from A Personal
Dictionary)
© Mike Schertzer, 2008
