10:04

by Ben Lerner

They have just summoned Joan, who has been working at a loom in her parents’ garden, to rescue France. One angel holds her head in her hands. Joan appears to stagger toward the viewer, reaching her left arm out, maybe for support, in the swoon of being called. Instead of grasping branches or leaves, her hand, which is carefully positioned on the sight line of one of the other angels, seems to dissolve.

the approaching storm was estranging the routine of shopping just enough to make me viscerally aware of both the miracle and insanity of the mundane economy.

I walked home through the park. “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees,” I said to the mist.

each of these experiences of reception remained, as it were, in situ, so that whenever I returned to a zone where significant news had been received, I discovered that the news and an echo of its attendant affect still awaited me like a curtain of beads.

I felt lonely, felt sorry for myself, despite the fact that I was so often cooked for, because, as I stood there in my little kitchen stirring vegetables, stood there at the age of thirty-three, I was crushed to realize nobody depended on me for this fundamental mode of care, of nurturing, nourishing. “Don’t leave me,” Nina Simone begged

What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch out horizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and coconstruct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.

He leaned against the iron railing; the intensities of Manhattan loomed across the water.

“Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.”

My friend told me this and told me that now he felt even more confused, more alone, because he’d had this intense experience of finally confronting his brother, and that experience changed him a little, was a major event in his life, but it never really happened: he never did confront his brother because of patchy cell phone service. It happened but it didn’t happen. It’s not nothing but it never occurred.

I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred.

the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.

“At times I have, but most times I haven’t.”

“Perfume and youth course through me, and I am their wake.”

Because nothing is like nothing.

Do you know what I mean if I say that what was most powerful about the experience was how it changed nothing?

“And in any new civilization you need those who have a sense of usable history and can reconstruct at least the basic concepts from science. Also there is the literalization of all literature because the sky is falling, if you know what I mean—that’s no longer just a phrase.

I am with you, and I know how it is.