Draft 91: Proverbs
To pass a successful night in the forest, don’t sleep in the clothes you cooked in.
We are living in the incalculable. Passport may not work.
A lump in the throat is never food.
Sometimes there’s a loss of a sense of the verb.
How even is with odd.
A book: transparent pages, opaque letters, and errata.
Worship is a sinking ship.
Always calculate the cost of whiteness.
When flooded with shame, endure.
The ones who broke the hinges should pay double fines.
Zim-zum, strum, strum, zero sum, wikipedia.
How many times can books talk about books? How many stars are in the starry sky?
The torn are always laden with further burdens.
Birds of a schnozzle flock to the nozzle.
Shake it upside down; you will see capital falling from the Capitol.
Make the book an imitation mountain, but with real hard strata. Data.
Work is struggle in time with plenitude’s scarcity.
Departing can be arriving.
This entanglement reveals ever more attractive labyrinths.
The beyond is in two places: here and there.
Whenever there is critique, there is a third grammar.
To read well, you must open the whole stained cloth.
When dreams are as real as the everyday, one is reading a higher order of clues.
The Spider poisons for only an hour; the Justice Department saturates.
Clean the lanterns once each year.
We need a last person singular.
To write is to choose.
Think of yourself before you obey.
What is redeemed is but a token of a token.
Though always on time, you must run for the train in your dreams.
One can never stabilize the line of signs.
Better to have agon and discovery than the guidance of beneficent spirits.
Better still to have gloss.
When π is solved for, perhaps there will also be justice.
If legible, find the illegible in it.
The Global Leader in Portable Blank Media could be You.
When people burn schools, cry out.
Let the mite live. Let the girl become literate.
Economic bulimia equals social anorexia. But who is gathering up the vomit?
Even picking every 7th word is not random.
Take this question as your conceptual muddle.
Bends should be tied only in two ropes of the same size, stiffness, and smoothness.
On the other hand, not everything is rope.
Deep back in the cobble of languages, knot and knife are linked.
Thinking is a problem in knowledge.
Never believe the word “disinterested.”
Not hero, not polis, not story, but it.
If you are on crutches, people will talk louder to you, and more slowly.
Wild horses wouldn’t melt in my mouth.
Language wants language.
Write only hungry sentences.
Do not always finish the same book.
Look down. Look down, your teeming site.
Can complexity be fathomed without personification?
Even the air you cannot breathe remains your only air.
To redeem the pledge, offer thirsty animals water.
When the government can read your laptop, it’s time for cryptography and resistance.
If Duchamp is turned on his head, he is a unicycle.
“I give to you a paper of pins.” This is it.
There are red and yellow and blue. Then there is the unidentifiable “sad.”
Don’t bottle honey in long-necked jars unless you own a very long spoon.
If rhyme is the motor, what is the machine?
“The implication of this gesture was enormous”: never again to use the word “gesture.”
Look into your own heal and ride.
Reduplicate the awkwardness.
If given text in a dream, try extra hard to read it.
If you are a match, will you donate?
One one-off at a time keeps people in line.
Spotted dick is an example of a cultural difference.
Make sure the main socket has an earth-wire.
If you dream of numbers, watch out.
Keep things cut back or your hill will become bramble-thorns.
Things suddenly happen on a bed.
Integrity in the micro-space is seen from the stars. But even if it isn’t!
Winnow the old words; harrow the new; seed from the few.
Adding sugar to make wine is not illegal, but think twice.
Pitch knaves.
Deep back in the cobble of languages, knead and knock are kin.
Plant trees, but also water them.
Gamble only on Language, that wager well beyond Pascal’s.
When Serifs get deployed as Law, back away slowly, but always face forward.
Stand forth, mystery. Learn mobility. Learn humility.
Even if you sing a little, little song, still are the words behind the song you sing.
Much obliged. Obbligato. Obrigado. Say it.
Dog’s letter for the wonder of it.
No matter what, it cannot be called back.
Is it possible to say what else might be found here?
Don’t listen much to other people’s rules.
Hold out the cup of dust; show it to those who control water.
Resignation is anger spread over long, lonely acres.
Wake again into the wake of watchfulness.
August-September 2008
Notes to Draft 91: Proverbs. The upside down Capitol is a motif in Theodore Harris’s collages. Draft on the “line of fifteen.”