Now I am a freight, so I harbor tricks. They prate
and clatter as I pretend to listen. The water is green
and deep and the chunks of fat all float.
I squat behind the headboard in waiting:
I want every clod who’ll make this heart, a heart.
The empty room is now noxious and sour. So I’ll die,
be gloriously dead with The published,
have my meaning stolen and my face carved upward into the gut of a clock.
— G E Costello
It’s good to be neuter.
I want to have meaningless legs.
There are things unbearable.
One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.
The ocean reminds me
of your green room.
There are things unbearable.
Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.
My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling.
Earth bears no such plant.
Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.
I tempt you.
I blush.
There are things unbearable.
Legs, alas.
Legs die.
Rocking themselves down,
crazy slow,
some ballet term for it —-
fragment of foil, little
spin, little drunk, little do, little oh, alas.
Nietzsche introduced two forms of expression into philosophy: aphorism and poetry. They imply a new conception of philosophy, a new image of the thinker and of thought. Nietzsche replaced the ideal of knowledge, the discovery of the truth, with interpretation and evaluation. Interpretation establishes the “meaning” of a phenomenon, which is always fragmentary and incomplete; evaluation determines the hierarchical “value” of the meanings and totalizes the fragments without diminishing, or eliminating their plurality. Indeed, aphorism is both the art of interpreting and what must be interpreted; poetry, both the art of evaluating and what way must be evaluated. The interpreter is the physiologist or doctor, the one who sees phenomena as symptoms and speaks through aphorisms. The evaluator is the artist who considers and creates “perspectives” and speaks through poetry. The philosopher of the future is both artist and doctor - in one word, legislator.
This image of the philosopher is also the oldest, the most ancient one. It is that of the pre-Socratic thinker, “physiologist” and artist, interpreter and evaluator of the world. How are we to understand this closeness between the future and the past? The philosopher of the future is an explorer of ancient worlds, of peaks and caves, who creates only inasmuch as he recalls something that has been essentially forgotten. That something, according to Nietzsche, is the unity of life and thought. It is a complex unity: one step for life, one step for thought. Modes of life inspire ways of thinking; modes of thinking create ways of living. Life activates thought, and thought in turn affirms life. Of this pre-Socratic unity we no longer even have the slightest idea. We now have only instances where thought bridles and mutilates life, making it sensible, and where life takes revenge and drives thought mad, losing itself along the way. Now we only have a choice between mediocre lives and mad thinkers, and thoughts too mad for the living: Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hölderlin. But the fine unity in which madness would cease to be such is yet to be rediscovered - a unity that turns an anecdote of life into an aphorism of thought, and an evaluation of thought into a new perspective on life.
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Sad, idle, I think of my dead mother,
her mouth chewing rice, her tongue removing fish bones.
The Red Cloth drapes the mirror frame:
Men of one country must love one another.
Your greed has become dangerous.
No,
it was dangerous even before that.
It is concise and defeating
and looms over your yard like an oak.
All that you want turns to water and
the rain is getting too dense
to elude.
I covet, I covet, I covet.
You beg to entreat, but you’re getting too wet,
too long in the eyetooth,
and far away from this world.
G E Costello
Thoughts, go your way home.
Embrace,
depths of the soul and the sea.
In my view,
it is
stupid
to be
always serene.
My cabin is the worst
of all cabins -
All night above me
Thuds a smithy of feet.
All night,
stirring the ceiling’s calm,
dancers stampede
to a moaning motif:
“Marquita,
Marquita,
Marquita my darling,
why won’t you,
Marquita,
why won’t you love me …”
But why
Should marquita love me?!
I have
no francs to spare.
And Marquita
(at the slightest wink!)
for a hundred francs
she’d be brought to your room.
The sum’s not large -
just live for show -
No,
you highbrow,
ruffling your matted hair,
you would thrust upon her
a sewing machine,
in stitches
scribbling
the silk of verse.
Proletarians
arrive at communism
from below -
by the low way of mines,
sickles,
and pitchforks -
But I,
from poetry’s skies,
plunge into communism,
because
without it
I feel no love.
Whether
I’m self-exiled
or sent to mamma -
the steel of words corrodes,
the brass of the brass tarnishes.
Why,
beneath foreign rains,
must I soak,
rot,
and rust?
Here I recline,
having gone oversea,
in my idleness
barely moving
my machine parts.
I myself
feel like a Soviet
factory,
manufacturing happiness.
I object
to being torn up,
like a flower of the fields,
after a long day’s work.
I want
the Gosplan to sweat
in debate,
assignning me
goals a year ahead.
I want
a commissar
with a decree
to lean over the thought of the age.
I want
the heart to earn
its love wage
at a specialist’s rate.
I want
the factory committee
to lock
My lips
when the work is done.
I want
the pen to be on a par
with the bayonet;
and Stalin
to deliver his Politbureau
reports
about verse in the making
as he would about pig iron
and the smelting of steel.
“That’s how it is,
the way it goes …
We’ve attained
the topmost level,
climbing from the workers’ bunks:
in the Union
of Republics
the understanding of verse
now tops
the prewar norm …”
You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked-
out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth.
You love how she only wears her glasses with you, how thick
and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you she wants to see.
You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her
scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut.
How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her
to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud,
you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love. Any expert, observing
human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all.
But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must
become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her.
You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you
want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed, from the eyes down.
You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you, you will know
everything about love. If she’s leaving you now, you already know it.
