The first book is a question for you. When I read a haiku a ku that mystifies I feel as though I were reading the first book, as there are so many unknowns. The poem teaches me in a language of its own. Where does the book come from, as an idea? The oldest known printed book is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra 868 CE; and consider Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (early 11th century). Both are haiku-related. As to the idea? We live in a belated age, the age of ending or oppositely, cocooning transmogrification.
Can you imagine equally both our impending extinction and ur-earth rebirth? This beginning is a new kind of ending, either way. I bet you can. And you can suss out no AI writes here. Worthy tool, AI, albeit creative content is “detection zero” in this and what’s to follow.
You write or you wouldn’t be here. The first book is on tip of your tongue, that one next word, concept, image you’ve not yet writ. Get to it! We need you. Language is remembrance, what follows on from now, a glorious unresolvable paradox, whether first or last.
One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too, understood otherness and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as another. It’s what they call ecstasy.
Anne Carson (Paris Review 171, 2004)
animal through animal
a bony sky
particulate red
whose body this. take it.
give it away.
(RG)
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