lecture fifteen:

"Wisdom is something beyond language."

Then knowledge, knowledge must be learning, skills, reeling, writhing, drawling, sketching, and fainting in coils. Is there wisdom contained in knowledge? Is there knowledge contained in wisdom? And where does enlightenment live?

Breathe.

Give 'em the old razzle dazzle, razzle dazzle 'em.

lecture fourteen:

Everything is everything.

There is no lowest common denominator. Nothing stands separate, alone. Everything interacts with everything else, and the seemingly smallest, most insignificant change affects all of eternity, and everything in it. The shift of an electron in Nunavut causes lightning strikes in Korea, and the lightning scorches Brazilian earth. The wisdom of the body, the wisdom of the spirit--how do we allow the earth to age gracefully?

Sanity, in a context of insanity, is insane.

lecture thirteen:

she is wise
in her madness
the solitary wren.

wingtips flutter,
perhaps, after all
she is peregrine
as she swoops and dives
but What’s in a name
when the question at hand
is speci-alis

Unlucky Thirteen, or
so it’s been told
but what if
it were eggplant?
a difficult matter
so muse.

lecture twelve:

"When one has expanded his consciousness, one’s thoughts enter the paraverbal. Then to communicate with others who have not yet crossed the bar requires parable, metaphor, satire, or nonsense. Indirection is then seen as guidance."

Arises again the question of originality; my question, though, is as follows: what if the grinding of the stars is the phenomenological moment? What if in dimly perceiving ethereal wheels is the source of all creation, if the sparks from the vessels are the momentary flashes of inspiration that allow us to breathe in the sound and perceive it in a way that the senses we have trained cannot? Is madness as fleeting as sanity? As creativity? What if, in reading and perceiving such moments, the spark is rereleased and is free to return to its vessel, to add its part in healing the world ever so infinitesimally? Perhaps this is why “literature is inexhaustible”; because it exhumes, rather than exhausts, exhales to make room for clean, fresh air...

lecture eleven:

“Games are nature’s most beautiful creation”; it is lucky, then, that humans fall under the category of Nature, and can partake in such ephemeral bursts of beauty. They can touch, breathe, feel, and dance like telephones in the rain.
Senses are sensational.

lecture ten:

i.

Is suffering the opiate of the individual? How else does one explain the addiction to faith? Perhaps this is the “true” nature of the addictive personality; an inability to self-soothe, a need for external opiate to alleviate life’s suffering.


ii.

Why can’t coincidence be profound? What is it about texts that despite characters such as Barthes and Foucault, despite revision of history, despite all evidence to the contrary (I suspect we may all be secret solipsists) that makes authorial intent still so sacred? I’m not sure it should matter whether the coincidental references to red are such or not. They are there, no? The red can be read!



iii.

Connect nothing, but the dots. Here lies isomorphism:


iv.

The screws holding the ground to the world are actually sprinklers for the lawn. This I cannot emotionally believe, despite all rational and ocular evidence to support it. I am certain that they are a ploy, a ruse, and that one day soon the warranty will expire and we will all be cast hurtling headlong into the black hole that waits patiently behind a mask of brilliant stars. I’ll be ready, Chicken Little. I’ll be ready. We will fall into the sky, ascending from Terran wheeling through the hearts of Luna and Sol.


v.

To suffer the madness of the muses, we must stick with odd numbers (from whither doth that phrase appear? the odd-numbered muses? she mused, and puzzled, and bowed out gracelessly). The novel may indeed have been one giant sunstroke, but perhaps so is life. To be punch drunk, we need substance (or at the very least, a substance).

lecture nine:

All of the losers are beautiful; beauty and terror intertwined, suffering and joy (not mere pleasure, mind you), coherence and chaos, self and Self.

Because the notes are so haywire, I thought they’d be worth transcribing in part for this particular journal entry:

Huxley – Doors of Perception
[my name crossed out] thatched roof sensibilities


Name; Student #
Class: Professor
Date

[center] Title: Subtitle

[insert paragraph symbol mentally here] essay



to try...essayer. en Francais? peut-etre, mais Frenglish is infinitely mieux quand on parles of Montreal.

MLA—modern? I suppose...or perhaps merely missive.

‘I’ve never loved a woman for herself alone.’
‘I’ve never thought of women as a remedy for loneliness.’
I don’t care if it’s real or not, it’s just a good memory [for some reason not in quotation marks].

‘Tomorrow you may have become pure light.’

drugs=religion?

Cohen’s approach to ‘matriarchy.’ I find it problematic, too.

Phew!

lecture eight point one:

And today is existentialism.

Bella heard essence
in the gentle warmth of sunshine,
and crushed a moth.

lecture eight:

And today, existentialism is.

He speaks of essence,
but the classroom’s hot
and butterflies don’t.

[interlude/mission/cession/ruption/stice/pellation]

pour l'edification (alors, je suis un peu fou!) de le professeur:

there are extras, sort of like DVD easter eggs but less intense and much more obvious, in the entries; some are in the form of comments (you'll see them numbered along the sides), some in the form of external links. hope you're entertained so far!

lecture seven:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring..."

What a spicy idea! But where is the substance? Poor Uncle Melech, bound to a society that demands superficial appreciation of all but one blind faith; finally, it matters less which one that might be, but that it is is essential. The Pierian spring seems to have leached into the soil, and from there has grown a stalwart fruit-bearer that dangles enticingly death and menstruation.

lecture six:

deicide,
perhaps.
decide!

form before function?
matter?
(does it? perhaps.)
or myth?

alone in the garden, she waits patiently for her father, her brother, her lover, the image of God (a piece of His soul) to bathe her of sin. sweat drips, and the sunscorched garden is tangible for the first time; is. here is the mirror, and langue hath intruded in her solitary sibilant somnambulation; in her exalted ghetto, Pandora chokes and wails.

lecture five:

It would seem to me that the Major Arcana of the tarot speak to the Jungian archetypes; perhaps this is what the elusive Drew was trying to explain in the aeons ago that was last semester about the Tree of Life and how everything is so carefully linked, that I may have understood then but understand completely differently now. The collective unconscious, indeed, may emerge in places other than dreams; what, though, is divination as an art if it is not the interpretation of waking dreams? There exist the Fool, the Magician (wise man), the High Priestess (wise woman), the Emperor (animus), the Empress (anima), the Lovers, the Devil (or horned one, complete with playfulness); the collective unconscious divine, divining in conversation with the personal unconscious through the minor arcana and the ego through the interpreter a brief glimpse of time, awake.

lecture four:

metalep-what?

nah. Pity. but of what sort? at a distance? cue sympathy, the pathos of binary in which the indomitable-I can feel sorrow for the pitiful you. if, however, i have been there before (and am ever there now, present in my solemn assurance that there is naught but now), what then? if my sorrow is with you, i must empathize. the binary shakes and collapses, and we together suffer.

shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased. thus we refute entropy.

lecture three:

“Love is its own justification.” What about the kind theoretically steeped in sin? Must or may you overcome it? It is, after all, the word that makes her fall in love. The Word? And how does she fall? Is this original sin, repeated again and again as she falls? If so, it seems categorically unfair to punish her suffering, since the Word has made her fall (or possibly just may’d her fall; permissive or conditional? Does it matter? Should it?). Does one ever do more than bandy with words? Does one ever do more than bandy with words?

lecture two:

Truth is subjective. It is the subject, fiction, and the object is you. Don’t object, gentle reader, but settle back into the space of metafiction; learn to be comfortably uncomfortable with the notion that biography, and perhaps especially autobiography, is categorically untrue. Either that, or it’s at the very least one-true. “There’s an ethereal quality to this,” he says, and I rather suspect this might be delightfully, convincingly untrue. Fiction must be compelling, or it disappears. Now, how best [sic] to embrace the mystery?

lecture one:

Fuck a saint.
Any one will do; the martyrs are best.
It’s not polite to refuse
if a Canadian saint
lays before you and begs
with her innocence.
Well, maybe she was standing,
and he saw her,
but still
she was begging.

A point of departure from a lecture
in class
that floats from conscience
to consciousness.
This poem, self-reflexive
and awkward as it rests
is a Canadian saint.
Why not?
“Then indirection is seen as guidance.”

What if? Does it matter?
Should it matter?
Who cares?
Who’s asking? And telling?
Who’s Seussian scared?
What the fuck. Fuck a saint.
Oh, oh, oh,
O!
Canada.