leonard cohen

because ever since god-knows-when
these are the waits traditional to
christmas – chinese dinners & ham
radios, eucalypts bled into watercolour
: “the sun poured down like honey.”
irish drums behave, in this instance,
as genetic coding

a purpose-built jigsaw tray that pulled
the skin & nail off my big toe – the
exact geometries of resemblance &
what it means to have sameness

sneaking behind a cactus garden for a
joint with uncle P : the ants so fat they
pop under shoes, or worse, climb to altitudes

puddingless and clotted, and with one
large gravy spoon, drunk. a desperation
or else, a physics kit, skull tattoos, underwear
embossed with glyphs of semi-quavers &

the smell of lavender a hit of snuff

archaeology of knowledge

“And the great problem presented by such historical analyses is not how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how for so many different, successive minds there is a single horizon, what mode of action and what substructure is implied by the interplay of transmissions, resumptions, disappearances, and repetitions, how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given – the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations. What one is seeing, then, is the emergence of a whole field of questions, some of which are already familiar, by which this new form of history is trying to develop its own theory: how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break mutation, transformation)? By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing; what is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a concept? What is a text? How is one to diversify the levels at which one may place oneself, each of which possesses its own divisions and form of analysis? What is the legitimate level of formalization? What is that of interpretation? Of structural analysis? Of attributions to causality?”

– Foucault, The Archaeology of Knwowledge, p. 5-6

It’s paragraphs like these that remind me why I am doing a PhD.

notes for an essay

Prawns hung like small hooks on the edge of crystal. “Geraniums are an eighties flower,” and “dry-hump” turning up in a poem, then edited out. Macau as the egg-tart capital of the world, a nice in-folding of Chinese and Portuguese imperialisms. When I say composting is not a metaphor I mean it. It is not a metaphor. Yet when Fred says metaphor is a metaphor you ought to believe it is the truth. I am still in agony over whether your couch is the shade of avocado or honeydew. There is always a temptation to say something more abstract, like “mint julep.” “This is a grammatical rule and states a logical impossibility.” There are many things we could do with the book nearest to us – playful or otherwise – but the question of distance and the problem of equidistance means it will never happen. Swimming to edge of the pool, would you crack your nose or not, and if so, does that change physics forever?