#constructing ruins

[plasmapop]

02/11/2025 • catullus 51 translated via words cut out from this new scientist article on quantum reality

I try to find you and observe a ghost,  a human by its side. no comparison  is possible. again and again there is  only my looking,

your laughling; and all evidence of my heart  dissolving into unobservable light. then  I name you and I split you from yourself.  the superposition of language

collapses —the image of your empty embrace— subtle inexhaustible electric fire —tell me  how to bend—the question, the spirit, the story— and I see nothing more.

I look for you. a ghost is all I find.  mystery is a product of the mind. I know I am no quantum physicist. But look—the dreamed becomes definitive.

[plasmapop]

29/09/2024 • catullus 51 translated via words cut out from a new scientist article on sleep. and also heracleitus is there

by which i mean ok so you know heracleitus fragment b26—'a man kindles a light for himself in the night when his eyes are extinguished. while he is alive, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper' (translation by victoria wohl).

is it just me or is that basically the same shape as translating(/necromancing) a translation in a dead language of a poem in another dead language. the various triangulations between poet and poet and translator and translation and reader across time and the death of language. and also heracleitus is there

in my sleep, i manufactured a god  out of the man by your side—then  took a breath, refocused and eavesdropped on the technology of your laugh.

that sound entered my insomniac heart  like an electrical current, a pink ember, a promise.  my body didn't respond. at the sight of you— all data is lost.

keep me in your bed or under the electrodes in your laboratory of dreams. i'll jitter with analysis, words rhythmless, eyes on only you.  you could even touch me.

zzz

Catullus, you know that in sleep you touch  the dead. the pulse is slowing, the dream is nearing its end. the rest is history—no—science— no—magic—no—memory.

[plasmapop]

cheeky preview of my translation (‘catullus 51 translated via words cut out from a new scientist article on sleep. and also heracleitus is there’) in @kallistoi’s fundraising zine!

all proceeds go to operation olive branch, a grassroots organization that collates and amplifies fundraisers for gazans in need. oob also collaborates with palestinian community partners in direct aid initiatives, such as the construction of a humanitarian encampment in gaza to provide food, shelter, water, medical treatment, electricity, wifi, and other necessities to 300 individuals. funds from this zine will be donated specifically to support this encampment initiative, which you can read more about here.

get the zine here!!! :-)

and the heracleitus fragment in question (from ‘the sleep of reason: sleep and the philosophical soul in ancient greece’ by victoria wohl):

this is about translation and especially translation through time. to me.

[plasmapop]

01/11/22 • catullus 51 via sappho 16 via new scientist issue 3397

Some say aircraft and helicopters and some say telescopes and batteries and some say fuels and flight technologies are the most lovely thing on this dark Earth,

but I say it is the aim of holding you skin-to-skin, human-to-human, text-to-text, without any reflection of a god written between us.

this isn't the real issue. you smile, and your mirror image in history looks away, and I watch and lose focus and all communication systems fail—

(I have been running out of the words for this story for the past 2000 years.)

We need surgery to repair a broken silence. We need pulses of electricity, coursing through bone and muscle and skin. to replace the malfunctioning solar panels of my eyes.

and I remember. I would rather see you again than all the emergency luminescence of a major spacefaring nation, burning through the future like jet fuel.

[plasmapop]

01/11/22 • epic lacuna of The Rest Of The Poem Is Missing Because I Ran Out Of Glue :/

[plasmapop]

30/04/22 • poem for the anniversary of lucan's death, cut out from his wikipedia + talk page

Lucan's Death - clarify

a youth born in a century he regarded as a kind of death, who grew up in a city burning with rhetoric.

he studied poetry until it bled into history, the biography of a dying Republic

the wound at the core of the Silver-Voiced war-ode he was not allowed to recite or publish.

A conspiracy is when you are discovered breathing fire (and the rest of the story is better unsaid).

bleeding to death—30 April 65 AD—what survives, or who? an Orpheus looking back on a City in flames,

the poem superfluous. his last words were disrupted. an unspeakable judgement given to crime. but

his masterpiece of grief escaped, circulating unfinished in the veins of other poets. read it and he lives.

[plasmapop]

01/04/23 • trying to tidy my desk + getting distracted by leftover words + recycling them into Something

[plasmapop]

18/11/18 • if i don’t rearrange leftover magazine cuttings into silly little catullus 51 translations before i clear them away i’ll explode and die