(no subject)

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

Hard to remember why you looked that passage up after you look it up.

(no subject)

Finding the right metaphor for metaphors requires ... a lot of other metaphors, since who they're used by and for what purpose and to what effect are necessary context, sans which the chosen metaphor-metaphor will fall back into mere vesselhood, thinghood. And all those other elements must also be metaphors, or how else would they plausibly interact with this far-fetched standin? To keep what poetry is figured out, thus use it for what you need to use it for, you'll have to find some part of the world that is already a model of what all these things are to one another. Lucky for you "the world" is not some static thing but a manipulable one, a shortcuttable one, subject to tucks, cuts, fast-forwards, overlaps, interweavings, associations, narratives, puns, trompes de l'oeil, projections, dialogues, restatements, parentheticals, and other discontinuities. Within that juggled-rhizomes flux there will be many pictures - the trouble will be to see them through all the others occupying the exact same space, like Michelangelo's statue through his marble if his marble were a flaming ship in a thunderstorm, and then to fix them in some sortable sort of order.