Pierre JORIS
A Certain Shabbiness, or: The Circus is Leaving Town for Good
It is not because the initials of the Lydia Zavatta circus — large golden letters, less baroquely adorned than one would have supposed, against a less-then-scarlet red cloth above the band-stand — immediately brought to mind a major American poet who has yet to receive his dues and is unlikely to do so in the present climate, it is not because of that that this thought came to me immediately upon entering the circus and after some fumbling around finding our seats — hard and narrow benches covered with faded, threadbare cloth of the same red. Or that the thought stayed with me throughout the show, growing more obvious or even banal with every dusty act, and then after we traipsed out into the lukewarm summer night, and drove back in a quiet if not overtly pensive mood and gazed at the ocean, itself oddly subdued under a lackadaisical moon, for a few minutes before going back to our rented summer cottage and its so-so mattresses, where said thought, still unsaid, remained with me throughout a night of slapstick dreams that must have been distant cousins, if more chaplinesque montages of the circus. And has now lasted into this gray day, this thought — if this bitter-sweet mingling of nostalgia and foreboding deserves to be called a thought rather than just the ring of shabby sadness that clings to all such occasions like the ring of gray soap flakes marks the water level of the drained bathtub. So that even now, having left the occasion behind me, the taste lingers and wants to be put down here, now, instead of the aubade that habitually opens day. The banality of it all so apparent — a simple analogy with all its inaccurateness, vagueness, with maybe only that bitter sweetness to make it stick, to make the link hold. It is this: that this provincial French circus, small, shabby, on the brink of bankruptcy, with only one clown, with only a few doves, half a dozen dusty dogs and four moth-eaten brown bears, struck me as a clear analogy for the situation of poetry today.
Reading Theory Today
I admit that I merely flicked
through Being and
Nothingness I have never regretted
the disengagement this encourages
for art, offering images,
a consolation rather than
a challenge, is an evasion
of responsibility, leaving that
up to criticism and its attendant
concept talk. He slipped on
a deep mistrust of banana heels
while she slipped into
something more confusing that
clung to her thoughts like
imaginary hypnotic inertia.
It is difficult he opined to
make contact with the real
world, and yet that is the
only chance we have. A theo-
rhetorical S.O.S. if ever there
was none. He tells of the
ineffable.
from: meditations on the 40 stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj
31. consideration (tadabbur)
is the other category
of understanding.
it signifies. try to
find the full meaning
of every word, Ayah,
explore behind those
words, metaphors & parables,
discover the textual
cohesion & underlying
unity, determine
the central ideas,
delve into lexical intricacies,
tanzil, & historical background,
undertake a comparative
study of different tafsir. Then
discover all
the implications for the relations
between man, God, fellow human
beings, own self, world;
derive laws & morals,
rules for state & economy,
principles for history &
philosophy, implications for
the current level of human knowledge.
We are not entirely separate
nor mutually exclusive
categories of understanding,
we overlap.