Every Monument a Marble Janus
poems from 2017-2019
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
This collection might variously be considered a journal of the strangest years of my mind that I can recall, an attempt to establish a personal imaginative mythos, or the fulfillment of an obligation to a younger self. I hope that in my attempts to write myself, I might also affirm a general principle: that it is always worthwhile to wrestle with your own mind, to ask questions of your world, and to thread your own golden lining through whatever circumstances you might inherit.
“Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.”
“Does that mean,” I said in some bewilderment, “that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?”
“Of course,” he said, “but that’s the final chapter in the history of the world.”
Glossary:
Blue: hope, fantasy, desire. The intoxicating pull of our projections on the future. The opposing force of green.
Purple: ontology of time, particularity, history. Every moment has a particular shade, one cross-section of the infinite braid of all-purple.
Pink: The color of after-death, particularly the more fantastic aspects of its experience.
Yellow: prescription, code, habit – in constant conversation with the opposing forces of blue and green, translating the relationship between desire and its limits into livable thought.
Green: totality; the mutuality of poles, dialectic synthesis. The cyclical ambivalence of the natural world, even the entire universe. The opposing force of blue.
Red: Doubt, criticism, especially when directed at the self. At its best, it is the constructive cynicism underpinning all knowledge. At its worst, red-eared shame: agonizing paralysis through self-doubt.
Every Monument a Marble Janus 