from "On the Road to What We're Tempted to Call Heaven" by Bernadette Mayer

I'm not being bitten
by heaven or by hell by god
but by the no-god's rain on the world
that my friends the moths hate
& so they stay away
old poets
so few & far between
leave so soon as visitors
without waiting for either the rain
or most of the fun
I go up to my room
if I have one
assuming the feel or sound of the rain
could be heaven
as if there was one
but I'd rather wonder how come
no such perfection
or knowledge of everything
from the beginning of the day
or the beginning of history
or the histories of everyone
beginning to end
or no end could be

DFW

"What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage" 222

"The encaged and suicidal" 224

"Dealers, sirens of the other, second cage" 224

"Joelle's been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B." 227

"Set free the encaged rapacious thing inside" 229

"The difference between suicide and homicide consisting [...] in where you think you discern the cage's door" 230

"The blind god of all doorless cages" 231

"[Cocaine] had been not just her encaging god, but her lover" 235

"A foreign academic with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis" 229

Mother-death-cosmology 230

Entropy: fans - 233 "everything falls off the wall sooner or later" 235

"Putting ? after THE END" 235

"Entertainment is blind" 237

"These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that" 239 (Wittgenstein)

"The Prize" 239

Iona 273

Morris Code 275

Individual v. Group 82-83

Without a thought 27, 44

- from index to Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I'm stunned at the sudden loss of this fiercely intelligent and laceratingly funny writer.

from "The School of the Dead" by Helene Cixous

Writing is this complex activity, "this learning to die," that is, not to kill, knowing there is death, not denying it and not proclaiming it...Our crime isn't what we think, it isn't the crime in the newspapers, it's always a bit less and a bit more. In life, as soon as I say my, as soon as I say my daughter, my brother, I am verging on a form of murder, as soon as I forget to unceasingly recognize the other's difference. You may come to know your son, your sister, your daughter well after thirty, forty, or fifty years of life, and yet during those thirty or forty years you haven't known this person who was so close. You kept him or her in the realm of the dead. And the other way around. Then the one who dies kills and the one who doesn't die when the other dies kills as well. Surviving is not what we think...

Field

What was it now? History was a black glass. Time was a black glass. The island was curved, the hand was curved, the middle wasn’t there anymore.