(no subject)

Some 20th century American sublimities (verse):

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round
Under the front of the westward evening star
The vigor of glory a glittering in the veins
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved
Either in distance change or nothingness
The visible transformations of summer night
An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away
There was an insolid billowing of the solid
Night's moonlight lake was neither water nor air

The forehead and the little ears
Have gone where Saturn keeps the years

There came a day there was a day one day
A man walked living among the forms of thought
To see their lustre truly as it is
And in harmonious prodigy to be
A while conceiving his passage as into a time
That of itself stood still perennial
Less time than place less place than thought of place
And if of substance a likeness of the earth
That by resemblance twanged him through and through
Releasing an abysmal melody
A meeting an emerging in the light
A dazzle of remembrance and of sight

These are your waters and your watering place
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be
dark salt clear moving utterly free
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world derived from the rocky breasts
forever flowing and drawn and since
our knowledge is historical flowing and flown

As if the story of a house
Were told or ever could be

Wanderer
This is the prehistory of February
The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun
You were not born yet when the trees were crystal
Nor are you now in this wakefulness inside a sleep

(no subject)

Other 20th century American sublimities (prose fiction):

The Judge addresses the Kid.

Sabbath talks to an old man.

Rush that Speaks gets a letter from Dr. Boots.

Quentin Compson doesn't hate the South.

Delilah the slave wanders off after her owners kill themselves.

A 350 pound prostitute is possessive of her false memory of Steve Ketchel.

Suttree visits a ruined house.

Oedipa goes for a walk at night.

Alice and Smoky fall in love.

Auberon sees a parade out the bar window.

Pierce realizes a mistake was made.

Cheung's mother remembers leaving Vietnam.

Billy sees wolves outside in the snow.

Billy hears how a man lost his eyes.

Billy is lectured about maps.

Billy loses a dog.

Miss Lonelyhearts reads a letter from a girl with no nose.

Joe Christmas runs.

(no subject)

More 20th century American sublimities (misc.):

Jake learns about Chinatown.

Things go different than we thought with Jim and Laura.

An enraged David Cross shows the television to the camera.

(no subject)