9.10.2004

Two faces, two aspects of literature - light & heavy. Pastime - and funeral rite for past time.

Literature, memory, nostalgia, time-travel, reincarnation. . . all efforts to ameliorate Time's irrevocable power, to soften the blow. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality" (or something like that). Who wrote that history is not simply the past, but the "pastness of the past" (more Eliot?)?

But what good is the present without memory & memories (personal & collective)? Question has a bearing on my "poetics", I guess. Memories (commitments) which we share - & in so doing "redeem the time".

After the Good Friday end-stop of Stubborn Grew, the "return" of Juliet-Eurydice, the Forth of July - an expansion/acceleration/attenuation in two directions: toward a remote (& secret) personal past, and a remote (& imaginary) collective future (Jubilee). By way of the Mississippi River ("upstream, down").

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