lament of a lost art

Look!  Look!  Alone again.

Down into the back of the skull

Imagining and dreaming,

And beyond the edge of the frame -- darkness. 

The black night invading,

The soot from the candles darkening the varnish,

Creeping round the empty studio,

Wreathing the wooded paintings, 

Smudging out in the twilight,

Sharp knife-wounds that stab you in the groin,

So you gasp and gulp the air,

Tearing your last breath from the stars,

As the seed runs into parched sheets

And you fall into the night.

I float on the glassy surface of the still dark lake,

Lamp-black in the night, 

Silent as an echo;

A mote in your eyes.

You blink and send me spinning.

Swallowed in the vortex

I shoot through the violet depths

The unutterable silence of these waters.

A tear forms and drops.

A ripple spread out beyond the farthest horizon, beyond matter. 

Scintilla — Star!

I love you more than my eyes.

Derek Jarman, 1986

hyperdimensional piscary

“His cat having passed to the hands of an elderly relative, the files of the late Dr. Hunsbaum were at last uncovered in the basement of one Frau Anna G--. The relation, his neice-in-law-by-proxy, had a hysterical affection for the accumulation of old papers, and thus could not bear to be parted from them. She did permit, however, the historian and prolific author Sir Martin Caterwaul III, to review their contents under her strict supervision.”

“Case 932: Fisherman, Middle Dementia

Upon examination, the man, a Mr.  R— was found to suffer from severe cognitive decline. He recounted having gone fishing the day prior and catching a large Norweigian bass. At which moment he suffered what we subsequently surmise to have been a cognitive break. He claims to have become instantly aware of a “different direction,” which he described “like as if all of existence were multiplied continuously along some unseen dimension.” He described this sensation as akin to discovering that a “tiny piece of yarn were in fact a constantly unravelling spindle.” Following this revelation, he claims to have “gone skew-whiff” and found that the fish he had caught was both on the line and off of it, both dead and alive at once, both on land and still in the river.”

“The rotational transformation thereby enacted may be understood via the introduction of a fourth spatial coordiate.  We wish to generate a graph of the projection of this space for arbitrary orientations of the the axes (height, breadth, depth) and the fourth axis which we shall call “wracsth”, from Old English “wræcs” meaning “the path of peril.” These give sixteen vertex locations, with the vertices forming twenty-four intersecting squares and eight intersecting cubes.”

The History of N-Brane Theory in Psychoanalysis

by Prof. Sigurd Gansgehen

the malarial parasite

"Segmenting bodies are not commonly encountered in the blood of estivo-autumnal fever, and it has been suggested that the asexual reproduction occurs in the viscera.  When segmentation is to be seen, however, the segmenting bodies are much smaller than are either those of the tertian or quartan fevers, and all evidences of the red cells are destroyed."

"For a long period of time there has existed considerable question as to whether or not these bodies represented a definite stage in the life-history of the more common forms of malarial organisms. The weight of opinion, however, seems to favor the fact that crescentic forms are derived from pigmented intracellular forms."

Clinical Diagnosis by Laboratory Methods p. 161 

by L. Napoleon Boston, A.M., M.D.

the tent

outside, the freezing desert night,
this other night inside grows warm, kindling.
let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
we have a soft garden in here.
the continents blasted,
cities and little towns, everything
becomes a scorched, blackened ball.
friends, our closeness is this:
anywhere you put your foot, feel me
in the firmness under you.
how is it with this love,
i see your world and not you?
listen to the presences inside poems,
let them take you where they will.
follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises.

by Rumi