Sunday, November 30, 2008

Breaking the Necessary Silence

One of Bataille's impossibilities ( I would call them contradictions, but a contradiction is a fault of discourse--a limitation from which Bataille would have poetry break free: music, the slave of its instrument, will know freedom only in destroying the instrument that gives it voice.

Silence again.

... most of the day preparing submissions: poetry.

Why?

I've never been able to come up with an answer--a motive, that wasn't a cliche, an outright lie, a bit of rhetorical nonsense (I send my poems into the world as I send my children... rubbish. My poems are not my children. A metaphor with no meaning, no effect but to erase the question without addressing it).

"Then why do you write poems?"

That's a question I don't have to answer.

Or rather, the only answer... silence.

Bataille tells us that poetry is a cry without language, beyond language... that cannot exist but with language.

A contradiction that is both the creation of language, and beyond it.

In silence, the contradiction and its resolution are at peace. The lion and the lamb. The asp in the hand of the child. Death and silence.

That is not a world we are able to live in. To sustain ourselves, everything must be put to use, and in using and being used (the music played on the instrument of language... what language is for) ... we lose the sovereignty of being human.

Our only defense... language that becomes the silence.

Poetry

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