Notes for the Imagination 4
Noah DeLissovoy

The division of its labor that the writing mind obsessively impresses upon itself (poetry/ story/ theory etc.) does a violence to it. Imagination doesn't divide inherently into these separate functions. Can we claim a sense for poetry that outstrips the limits of the artistic ?

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Or: could there be knowing in writing that wouldn't erase the particular in knowing it, by accomodating and essentializing it? That would instead respond to the world, and include it in the work, as intrusive, in favor of a fluid and dialectical validity.

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Not give up on understanding in writing. Particulars compel, in their particularity, a negotiation with them that brings us into relation: that's getting to a knowledge.

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True tales are told toward the center of the web of social relations. They depend upon an involvement in that metabolism. (If you want to get in, go outside. Shut the door firmly. There the grass has covered your bones and you mumble your answers to the proper geology.)

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Imagining something doesn't mean we get to see it. Who will support you, in your picturing? Meaning is a real architecture to get out of. Don't expect assistance from the denizens. They aren't hearing that. Among the buttresses . . .

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No one knows a thing. Things instead seem to own us. That relationship is our vocation. An attachment, that dooms, to be challenged.

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Vulgar anti-instrumentalism. As if being of use were something to be embarrassed about. As if there were a being-in-language that wasn't brought to bear on some materials, towards some end. Living itself is using being. The self is outside.

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Thinking is difficult. It hasn't been done before, if to think is to think what doesn't exist yet. That would be a "creative writing."

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Can I look up out of words at you? They are a trap, a nest of a trap that we fell into as a result of an escape. They are our way out, our exit into being bound by them. (Saying isn't freedom, but a confinement that makes possible.)

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Stuff doesn't only exist by means of or through language. But what the material is capable of depends very much on it. What senses are accomplished.

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So much work for so few words. Though they eat up event. So many instances are their responsibility. Can they comprehend that?

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Poetry is news of language; but already that language belongs to somebody. So it's news of how something is being used. It needs to be critiqued, not only for what it does wrong, but for what it does right as well.

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What makes poetry convincing: to sustain an argument would be to admit its dependency on us. What's true doesn't want that kind of logicity. Instead it would exist between the human.

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We look down into prose. Through the concentric rings, a world disappears. Story as a way to get to absence.

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Who gives permission to paragraphs? What kind of a license? Can I register this intention with the Board of . . . ? I look through the mirror at the official technology. It's computing me. The machinery loves (hurting).

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Mind reels after attack. Realization is effect of the wound. Knowing isn't healing; it's the pain of healing. Let's examine the throbbing patient.

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Somebody stumbles in thinking and knocks into the real a little bit. It was an accident. Person doesn't deserve it. Knowing is stolen from things. Put it back where you found it, please.

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One day I discovered a language that discerned me more or less correctly. Nice to meet you. But it had already occupied me and uttered those words. That was a redemption, but not mine.