I do take a lot of delight from the way words fall together. What lasts? Who knows? Perhaps some of the pleasure will linger in the reading. Today's words are from pages 756-757 of the desktop encyclopedia, Hoffman to Holderlin. Hokusai provided a serendipitous echo of March's pieces....
A private kabuki of strange stories
Straight lines and white squares roll over, tongues lolling. Decline requires life-size and miniature excesses in sequential sets, a ballad of personal failings, the psychopathic hero. The struggle is exterior, a circular dance of reputation, blotchy experience, masquerades, abstraction. To Hokusai, this failing structure was the domain of the hypothetical, a private kabuki of strange stories. His Thirty-Six Views of Invasions, Meatpackers, and Fever was lost, but a number of erratic surimono prints turned to political theater. The whole constructed fantasy succumbed irretrievably to “conversation pieces,” rash parody, progressive paralysis—comic sets in pirated editions. Wild flights of thought evolved. Enlightenment, the superfamily of depth, moves reluctantly, no wake or hiss, no effective prevention or treatment. The bluff fails. Survivors become chronically the fool. Yet a shepherd covered with mud and smoke anticipates the conflict between the ideal world and outlying life. Struggle becomes hereditary. Coma follows, perspective lost in the domain of shotmaking, missiles, paint-dripping quarantine. Art fought this. But mythology worked. The daughter married the rising sun. It cannot rise.
Photo by kumon, via Flickr.
