Thursday, February 18, 2016

poem: Rimbaud 'a season in hell', Cassavetes 'Shadows'...

"I became a fabulous opera; I saw that all creatures have a fatality of happiness: action is not life, but only a way of spoiling some force, an enervation....Not a single sophistry of madness - madness to be confined - was forgotten: I could recite them all again, I know the system....Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too enormous to be devoted to strength and to beauty."
Je devins un opera fabuleux: je vis que tous les etres ont une fatalite de bonheur: l'action ne'st pas la vie, mais une facon de gacher quelque force, un enervement.  Aucun des sophismes de la folie, - la folie qu'on enferme, - n'a ete oublie par moi: je pourrais les redire tous, je tiens le system.  Le Bonheur etait ma fatalite, mon remords, mon ver: ma vie serait toujours trop immense pour etre devoiee a la force et a la beaute.
~ Rimbaud, page 65, New Directions edition
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/season-in-hell-the-drunken-boat-arthur-rimbaud/1100647012?ean=9780811219488

John Cassavetes' Shadows is part of the Criterion Collection on Hulu.


This fabulous opera, this passion-play, this tableaux
They have not failed me in their sport
Truth it may not be
Fireworks fail instantly
Rushing toward its end
"Stop" I say to the glow left over
"I have more"
Fancy cannot control itself and then the dark.

"Why not?" I say in black pitch, out loud.
In the belly of the beast, in the caverns of hubris
The words taken in, like a shadow
My breath short
We are, we are, we are...racing as it were
To folly's end.

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