the air and head for the nearest cliff? This
unreasonable attachment to the bliss
of falling — what accounts for it? Unlike the hiss
announcing a reptilian presence, the word Abyss
creates the object of our dread: it exists, it is,
widening like the gulf between whis-
key and wine, and we, drunk on neither, miss
the days when we, too, tumbled headlong out of heaven, pissed
I thought it meant‘I’m a failure’which was my errorwhich is whatmein Fehler meansin German whichis what my parentsspoke at home
I remember where I was and what I was doingone hundred years and two months later:elementary algebra, trombone practice,Julius Caesar on the record playerwith Brando as Antony, simplebuttonhook patterns in football,the French subjunctive, and the useof ‘quarantine’ rather than ‘blockade’during the Cuban Missile Crisis.It was considered the less belligerent word.Much was made of it in…
out of her bath, breastsbare, towel around her waist,before I knew she was youin that one-bedroom inthe Village sunny and coldthat Friday we woke upslowly & our breakfast tablearranged itself intoa still life with irisesin a vase and a peeled orange,espresso cups and saucersand The Necessary Angel byWallace Stevens, a little violetpaperback opened to page…
in New York light is the variable and structurethe content according to Rodrigo Moynihan’sself-portraits at the Robert Miller Gallery wherethe painter is serially pictured holding a canvas,painting his mirror image, shirtless in summer,with a nude, etc., it’s two o’clock and I’m walkingat top speed from the huddled tourists yearning to bea mass to Les Halles…
the guards arein those POWmovies with brutalbut easy tofool fat Germansor sadistic Japanesewho never smiledthey’re the grown-upswe’re the kidsthat’s the secret
nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climbup beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladderafter he has climbed up it.)’ — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus1.The first time I met Wittgenstein, I waslate. ‘The traffic was murder,’ I explained.He spent the next forty-five minutesanalyzing this sentence. Then he was…
