“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, January 15, 2012

Oh Patrick

Pritchett's poem Lyrics for the Lost Book of Ariel is “for Tim Morton.” It's been a while since I've read this—Patrick showed me the draft many years ago. Now I'm reading it in his book Gnostic Frequencies. Check out this bit:

Lyric, says Ariel, is the barcode of the dead.
It mourns us into dreaming.

But to be given over to the other
is as smoke from an arrow.

or music out of a goblet of apples
when all the guests have gone home.

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