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midsummer

And won thy love doing thee injuries And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back And laid the love-juice on some true-love’s sight (And yet a place of high respect with me) And left sweet Pyramus translated there And never did desire to see thee more And (which is more than all these boasts can be) And now they never meet in grove or green And then end life when I end loyalty And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin And never, since the middle summer’s spring And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be And grows to something…

of errors

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So like the other As could not be Before the always wind-obeying deep His wished light I labored of a love to see. My soul should sue as advocate for thee. I to the world Unseen, inquisitive, confounds So doubtfully. Not feel his meaning: What ruins are In me that can be found— This sure uncertainty, the offered fallacy. Look sweet. Speak fair. Become disloyalty. Labor you to wander in an unknown field In sap-consuming winter’s drizzled snow Where time’s deformèd hand Have written strange defeatures In my face, the ground of my defeatures. I hazarded the loss of whom…

cymbeline

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Whom best I love I cross. I swerve. I stand on fire. Meal and bran, contempt and grace. To commix With winds that sailors rail at, in simple and low things To prince it much. Flow, flow, you heavenly blessings: Royalty unlearned, honor untaught; our fangled world, His radiant roof; the government of patience As chaste as unsunned snow——The same dead thing alive. Whom we reckon ourselves to be, so we do. Fear no more… I’ll drink the words. As many inches As you have oceans. Fear no more, the dream’s here still. Firing it only here, even when I…

two gentle

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Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness And on a love-book pray for my success Till I have found each letter in the letter Whereon this month I have been hammering. Repair me with thy presence. Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands. Not being tried and tutored in the world And partly seeing you are beautified How could he see his way to seek out you? Hope is a lover’s staff, walk hence with that. I cannot leave to love, and yet I do. I am impatient of my tarriance. Didst thou but know the inly touch of love…

two noble

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Weak as we are, and almost breathless swim In this deep water. But touch the ground For us no longer time than a dove’s Motion when the head’s plucked off, O, my petition was Set down in ice, which by hot grief uncandied Melts into drops; so sorrow, wanting form, Is pressed with deeper matter. O woe, You cannot read it there; there through my tears, Like wrinkled pebbles in a glass stream. Pray you, say nothing, pray you, Who cannot feel nor see the rain, being in it. Let the event, that never-erring arbitrator, tell us What we know…

the wordes moote be cosyn to the dede

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Now have I toold you shortly in a clause, Th’estaat, th’array, the nombre, and eek the cause Why that assembled was this compaignye In Southwerk, at this gentil hostelrye That highte the Tabard, faste by the Belle. But now is tyme to yow for to telle How that we baren us that ilke nyght, Whan we were in that hostelrie alyght; And after wol I telle of our viage And all the remenaunt of oure pilgrimage. But first I pray yow, of youre curteisye, That ye n’arette it nat my vileynye, Thogh that I pleynly speke in this mateere, To…

language rules

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“…Furthermore, all correspondence referring to the matter was subject to rigid “language rules,” and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as “extermination,” “liquidation,” or “killing” occur. The prescribed code names for killing were “final solution,” “evacuation” (Aussiedlung), and “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung); deportation—unless it involved Jews directed to Theresienstadt, the “old people’s ghetto” for privileged Jews, in which case it was called “change of residence”—received the names of “resettlement” (Umsiedlung) and “labor in the East” (Arbeitseinsatz im Osten), the point of these latter names being that Jews were indeed…

grant a mercy death

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“… None of the various ‘language rules,’ carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for “murder” was replaced by the phrase “to grant a mercy death.” Eichmann, asked by the police examiner if the directive to avoid “unnecessary hardships” was not a bit ironic, in view of the fact that the destination of these people was certain death anyhow, did not even understand the question, so firmly was it still anchored in his mind that the unforgivable sin…

geflügelte worte

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“Before Eichmann entered the Party and the S.S., he had proved that he was a joiner, and May 8, 1945, the official date of Germany’s defeat, was significant for him mainly because it then dawned upon him that thenceforward he would have to live without being a member of something or other. “I sensed I would have to live a leaderless and difficult individual life, I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and commands would any longer be issued to me, no pertinent ordinances would be there to consult—in brief, a life never known before lay before me.”…

writing

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I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing a history of the present. –Discipline and Punish +++ We write in water. –All is True (4.2.46)  

the violence of singularity

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LITTLEWIT: …Well, go thy ways, John Littlewit, Proctor John Littlewit—one o’ the pretty wits o’ Paul’s, the Little Wit of London, so thou art called, and something beside. When a quirk or a quiblin does scape thee, and thou dost not watch, and apprehend it, and bring it afore the constable of conceit—there now, I speak quib too—let ’em carry thee out ‘o the Archdeacon’s court into his kitchen, and make a Jack of thee, instead of a John. There I am again, la! LITTLEWIT: … But give me the man can start up a Justice of Wit out of…

an index

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Like as the sun in a diameter Fires and inflame the objects removed far And heateth kindly, shining lat’rally, So beauty sweetly quickens when tis nigh, But being separated and removed, Burns where it cherished, murders where it loved. Therefore even as an index to a book, So to his mind was young Leander’s look. Hero and Leander, 607-614

end / And, as the long divorce of steel falls on me … fall away / Like water from ye

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+++ BUCKINGHAM: …You few that loved meAnd dare be bold to weep for Buckingham,His noble friends and fellows, whom to leaveIs only bitter to him, only dying:Go with me like good angels to my endAnd, as the long divorce of steel falls on me, Make of your prayers one sweet sacrificeAnd lift my soul to heaven. … Heaven has an end in all. Yet, you that hear me,This from a  dying man receive as certain:Where you are liberal of your loves and counsels,Be sure you be not loose; for those you make friendsAnd give your hearts to, when they once perceiveThe…

again

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+++ FAUSTUS: Was this the face that launched a thousand shipsAnd burnt the topless towers of Ilium?Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.[They kiss]Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.[They kiss again]Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips… –Dr Faustus A-text, 5.1 +++ ROMEO: If I profane with my unworthiest handThis holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready standTo smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. JULIET: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,Which mannerly devotion shows in this;For saints…

his deadly imprisonment was the other

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+++ ANTHONY: This is very true, cousin, indeed, and well objected too. But then you must consider that he is not in danger of death by reason of the prison into which he is put peradventure but for a little brawl, but his danger of death is by the other imprisonment, by which he is prisoner in the great prison of this whole earth, in which prison all the princes of the world be prisoners as well as he. If a man condemned to death were put up in a large prison, and while his execution were respited he were,…

forgetting ourselves

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Socrates: Oh Phaedrus, if I don’t know my Phaedrus I must be forgetting who I am myself—and neither is the case. Phaedrus 228a. +++ Phaedrus: … Don’t make me say what you said: “Socrates, if I don’t know my Socrates, I must be forgetting who I am myself.” Phaedrus 336c +++ … Socrates: I do believe you will, so long as you are who you are. Phaedrus: Speak on, then, in full confidence. Phaedrus 243e +++ Socrates: When someone utters the word “iron” or “silver,” don’t we all think of the same thing? Phaedrus: Certainly. Socrates: But what happens when…

if I am outside myself (II)

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From Montaigne’s On Practice:  Lo here what I daily prove. Let me be under a roofe, in a good chamber, warme-clad, and well at ease, in some tempestuous and stormy night. I am exceedingly perplexed and much grieved for such as are abroad and have no shelter: But let me be in the storme my selfe, I doe not so much as desire to be else-where: Only to be continually pent up in a chamber seemed intolerable to me. (Florio) +++Here is what I experience every day: if I am warmly sheltered in a nice room during a stormy and tempestuous night, I…

if I am myself outside

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From Montaigne’s On Practice:  Lo here what I daily prove. Let me be under a roofe, in a good chamber, warme-clad, and well at ease, in some tempestuous and stormy night. I am exceedingly perplexed and much grieved for such as are abroad and have no shelter: But let me be in the storme my selfe, I doe not so much as desire to be else-where: Only to be continually pent up in a chamber seemed intolerable to me. (Florio) +++Here is what I experience every day: if I am warmly sheltered in a nice room during a stormy and tempestuous night, I…

correct correction

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+++ O Lord! I dread: and that I did not dread I me repent; and evermore desire Thee Thee to dread. I open here, and spread My fault to thee… O Lord! As I have thee both pray’d, and pray, (Although I Thee be no alteration. But that we men, like as ourselves, we say, Measuring thy justice by our mutation) Chastise me not, O Lord! In thy furor, Nor me correct in wrathful castigation For that thy arrows of fear, of terror, Of sword, of sickness, of famine, and of fire, Stick deep in me: I, lo! From mine…

From Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art. Hofstadter translation

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The artwork lets us know what shoes are in truth. Art a circle; circles in this circle. Artworks shipped like coal from the Ruhr, Hölderlin’s hymns packed in soldier’s knapsacks during the First World War. Beethoven’s quartets lie in storerooms like potatoes in a cellar. The far-spreading, ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. A thingly thing-being, the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. A workly work-being, the silent call of the fallow desolation of the wintry field. The certainty of bread. The menace of death. We hesitate to call God a hankering after the irrational,…