Yield to the charm of catastrophe, the climax of a certain convulsion; this is your door to the new way, this is the new way inside the old. Retreat in step with common faith, the topos of a certain break can’t hold you back, can’t see you through. This is what you can do, what your peevish path to dispatch coalesces from the molder; this is where your triumph lies, don’t doubt it …
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If I were silent I’d hear nothing. No time for inflection. If the pauses are not endless, then they have not really happened. What right have I to stop even a moment? Only the dead have rights, but there are other forms of warrant …
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The far-away begins by being within sight. One must glimpse a fixed horizon in the distance for the distance to have meaning, for the promise of the harbinger to differ from mere faith. If some consummate conceit is made to seem a final purview; if the time for second guessing is to come around …
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The liberation of beauty from virtue, of death from the dying. Fate is the anticipation of future imprisonments. How else task the vergeless eye — an ass between two burthens — against sense …
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A room that resembles a dream, surfeited with angles. A stomach of a room, split up floor to transom. A room egressed by trapdoor, tripping into … over … into … This is my abiding stead, this my changeless purview. Here the god of my arousal swallowed by some grubby lintel, there I yield my viscous middle to the ordure of repose. How will I plead, who will receive this turbid spew of lucubrations? Who apply a measure to the missing, or the culled …
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The whole structure engendered by blisters; lungs wheeze into raillery, a final transformation. One would like to think the ferment of desire interdicted by forbearance — by the thrust of disavowal — but the contrary is true; it’s the farrago of sinew— of putrescence — that occludes …
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Politeness is the most pernicious heresy; the deity addressed with easy gratitude — as a sovereign office — is denied its due opprobrium, the guilt for which its nihilo effectuates a world…
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An unaccountable obliquity when I become surveyor, that most dear of all successions, despite my vain endeavors to keep nothing but the quietus of sacrificial grazing in the languor of my purview, the comfort of my thrall. I have done all that I can, but I have nonetheless been chastened to this venery unchallenged; someday soon the fawn will take the mastiff by the nape. Which is to say I’ve found my purpose somehow over-proved by this ecstatic acquiescence to an incoherent standard, a ravenous degenerate made carrion to myself …
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But I have no monopoly on lassitude, nor an appanage whose produce is surrendered to some unborn king. I have not been made manic by my manic perseverance, nor is having thus appeared a resignation to regard. Aspire to the vegetal and — duration knows no law. Sometimes we … this intimate plurality I carry as a latent scar … sometimes we fear everything, every possible mark. Sometimes I wonder — must I always suffer to avoid beauty? I, too, had dreams before I dreamed this dreamed world from its tacit void, but …
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Approbations, denials. The obscene impassivity of inherited vices. One would like to speak submission to the dream of form and substance, but no one can find a mouth, can force the lips to part … Approbations, denials; but nobody asks you anything …
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Radical doubt appoints us to the public institution of the soul. The surface of attention stripped of sense and elasticity, we have no greater recourse than replacing our invention of a vigorous transcendence with a lazy null …
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I search the ground that promenades before me for the shiny bits, the scrum of scattered moieties beguiled into gleaming. Such sediment may galvanize a negligible squint from those who live in service to more rarefied refinements, but only for the subsequent bequest of such arousal to the wholly exoteric conformations of exchange. Love is an equivocation, equal in all objects of its protean carouse. And one for whom the view is gently whittled from the shadows of a grander scheme will always fail to recognize the commonplace pursuit of this insuperable ransom, the dithering enthrallment of the hidden and the bared. I repeat: All is equal when one loves true. So what that I devote myself to the trifling propinquity of a pebble in the road or the Parnassian grandiloquence of the stars …
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Consciousness has three tombs: its body, its world, and its representations…
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Some skin burns. A boil fills the hollow. Sometimes everything is lost, sometimes all is ripening to conquer worlds unknown, to scrape discharge out of pustule in a guaranteed subtraction from the scale. I hear whispers in dead languages. I think, that spot’s empty. I grow brave in my persistence, then — another look. Here the rotting gums restrain a mouth from osculation, there the bead of turned-up glances stimulates a vain remorse. Once on this escarpment laid two lovers whose fecundity resulted in the Black Death. Duration knows no law…
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There are readers of the world who are not really readers at all, who find themselves released from such remedial transference by the yearnings of a lofty brood, an eager scorn. And so they ask the secret of all things from last to fore, the meaning of all mysteries and signs that will concern you …
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Excerpted with permission from plain sight by Steven Seidenberg, published by Roof Books on May 15, 2020. Copyright © 2020 Steven Seidenberg. To obtain a copy, here is a link to Small Press Distribution.