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despair has three pairs of legs despair has four pairs of legs four pairs of airborne volcanic absorbent symmetrical legs it has five pairs of legs five symmetrical pairs or six pairs of airborne volcanic legs despair has seven and eight pairs of volcanic legs eight pairs of legs eight pairs of socks eight airborne forks absorbed by the legs it has nine symmetrical forks for its nine pairs of legs ten pairs of legs absorbed by its legs that means eleven pairs of absorbent volcanic legs despair has twelve pairs of legs twelve pairs of legs it has thirteen pairs of legs despair has fourteen pairs of airborne volcanic legs fifteen fifteen pairs of legs despair has sixteen pairs of legs sixteen pairs of legs despair has seventeen pairs of legs absorbed by the legs eighteen pairs of legs and eighteen pairs of socks it has eighteen pairs of socks in the forks of its legs that means nineteen pairs of legs despair has twenty pairs of legs despair has thirty pairs of legs despair has no pairs of legs but absolutely no pairs of legs absolutely no absolutely no pairs of legs but absolutely no legs absolutely three legs

Three poems by Ghérasim Luca, translated from the French by Austin Carder. From “Luca’s Legacy: A Microfolio,” forthcoming in VESTIGES_06: APORIA {utterance as a fraught passage}.

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For pain, forgetting is an island of flowers. Sweet smell of emptiness.

Edmond Jabès, translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop

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[FRAME TEXT 1]

    Children of this century, avert your gaze.

    Lips are no longer on every word. Words climb pell-mell onto the backs of things. And things, wandering in the desert of their own erosion, seek to bribe our bones, the uncertain keepers of a fortified mirage. Foreseeing nothing, the wayward herds of our actions race toward the toxic wells of their own garish reflections.

    Children of this century, the landscapes are all pierced through with the holes of our sovereign absence.

Fragments from Annie Le Brun’s Annulaire de lune, translated from the French by Alicen Weida, in #digitalvestiges.

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for it's the night of you who have died inside you awakening

Kim Hyesoon, “Such Painful Hallucination”

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"Sea, listen. Cliff, I'm coming." APOSTASY by Katy Mongeau, forthcoming from Black Sun Lit March 16th, 2020.

Apostasy is a becoming and a deathwish—bloom, raunch, wilt, and rot. Ecstatic and erotic, mythic and mystical, fecund and feculent, Katy Mongeau’s debut collection of poems expresses at once the delight and despair of discovery and renunciation with ballads to burning horses that drag behind them a deeply fraught and frantic love, galloping us to the gallows by the rhythm of a flame and the withering of a flower. Reminiscent of Acker and Bataille, Apostasy is the wheat field we visit to die.

“At the center of speechlessness Katy Mongeau attempts utterance—recklessly, sentimentally, desperately, sometimes with erasure and cancellation, sometimes with embellishment, hanging on to the vestiges of violence, wreckage and sensation, writing and unwriting, tending the wound at its core.” —Carol Maso

Preorder : http://blacksunlit.com/apostasy/

Email editors [at] blacksunlit [dot] com for an advance review copy.

[blacksunlit]

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion.

Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”

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Georges Malkine, Aux Ils Sanguinaires, 1966

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To be nothing. Of all the ways the sunflower has of loving the light, regret is the most beautiful shadow on the sundial.

André Breton & Paul Éluard, “Intra-Uterine Life”

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I am only well when I am what is necessary to be the other.

Pierre Guyotat, Coma

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17

       There is in the act of love a great resemblance to torture, or to a surgical operation.

       There is in prayer a magical operation. It is one of the great forces of the intellectual dynamic. It is like an electric recurrence.

       If a poet asked the State for the right to have a few bourgeois in his stable, one would be very astonished, whereas if a bourgeois asked for some roast poet, it would be quite natural.

       When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I shall have conquered solitude.

55

       Why is the spectacle of the sea so infinitely & so eternally pleasing?        Because the sea evokes both the idea of immensity and of movement. Six or seven leagues represent for man the radius of the infinite. There’s a diminutive infinity. Of what importance if it suffices to suggest the idea of the total infinite? Twelve or fourteen leagues (on the diameter), twelve or fourteen of liquid in motion suffice to give the highest idea of beauty that is offered to man in his transitory dwelling.

9

       To be a useful man always seemed to me something quite hideous.

Excerpts from Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, translated from the French by Rainer J. Hanshe, in #digitalvestiges.

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In his escape from the human world the young artist cares less for the 'terminus ad quem,' the startling fauna at which he arrives, than for the 'terminus a quo,' the human aspect which he destroys.

José Ortega y Gasset, “The Dehumanization of Art”

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The darkened splinterecho, brainstream- ward, the portcullis over the meander on which it comes to stand, so much unwindowed there, just look, the truss of lazy fervor, one gunbutt blow from the prayersilos, one and not one.

—Paul Celan, translated from the French by Pierre Joris

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The definition of beauty is easy; it is what leads to desperation.

Paul Valéry, “On Mallarmé”

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As long as I could imagine myself the result of passion, misunderstanding, chance, drunkenness, conflict, or even hatred, in short as an error arising out of equivocation, double entendres, or approximations, it seems to me my freedom, though difficult, to be sure, and harsh, inaccessible, was guaranteed. On the other hand, if I am the technical result from a clearly expressed desire, my passions have no right to be, however living and feeling I may be. If I am a consequence of passions (or, why not, of Sin, of Evil), my reason can function as my own. If reason gave birth to me coldly, without malice, not even examining the possibility of malice, but because it wanted to, because it’s done and it’s like that, my reason has a Master and I will never be capable of the act that cast me into respiration and perception.

Read an excerpt from The Secret by Philippe Sollers, translated from the French by Armine Kotin Mortimer, in #digitalvestiges.

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Expression is the suffering countenance of artworks.

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

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Paule Thévenin's interview with André Masson was originally conducted to coincide with the 1980 publication of Jean-Michel Place's facsimile edition of Bataille's Acéphale. Thirty-six years later, on the anniversary of Masson’s death, Rainer J. Hanshe, founder of Contra Mundum Press, gives us the first-ever English translation of this dialogue, which offers a reserved proximity to the foundations of Bataille's vision, the secret society, Masson’s resistance to the latter, related efforts made by Breton, and the question of a sacrifice that, before a lightning-struck tree, was to establish the religion.

Read the interview in #digitalvestiges.

[blacksunlit]

An essay on Cioran, Robbe-Grillet, Markson, and despair by BSL Editor Jared Daniel Fagen in The Quarterly Conversation.