Desire and Deceit

girard

For Rene Girard, 1923-2015

Not again, the old men with beautiful manners.
– Ezra Pound

The old men of our age are young against
The violent, suffering such sacred cries…
We live as if the times were free and cleansed
Of envy, but we know from these
Embarking ferries what cruel death would say:
The fire rises every dawn to mystery –
Familiar as desire, lost as memory.
So truth is night that verges every day
Which hates itself, yet knows itself as day.

We try to capture every moment’s breath
With flesh, but lose the soul of argument
Because the body knows that only death
Provides the wound – unless the sentiment
Of beauty heals the foreign element –
The other – those – the sin that takes the step
In which we place the body deep, deep, deep…
I wish that nothing were the case – but take
It life will some day give what death will take

And knew no French but heard you anyway
By age and time. By youth and wonder’s books
I sat and heard you lecture, heard you say
That creatures live and imitation speaks
The grammar grace’s tender mercy brooks
Between the prepositions of and in.
I loved a woman of the world – taboo
And token sin – and urge and instinct knew
That beauty suffered what my conscience knew.

Remember, man, that dust remembers man –
Recalls the day angelic beasts renewed
Our call to human living. Manners can
Propose a mystery: the stage construed
With shadows, fictions made with words and breath;
But understand by holocaust of faith
That noon escapes, confirmed by midnight’s dark,
And night corrals the stars, each a splintered spark,
You ancient man, that hates and loves the dark.

For Yhwh

Maybe you’ve already heard of Goat Simulator. Maybe you’re already playing it, or maybe, like me—until yesterday, anyway—you have no idea what it’s all about. I have a feeling the best part about Goat Simulator is this preview.

For more info, read the Wiki entry.

Four Short Poems Loosely Related to Ideas Developed by René Girard

Discipline and Begging for Attention
Needing others to need him, the dandy
feigns indifference, his modus operandi.

Beauty Will Indict the World
There is a great and terrible beauty
preserved from the antebellum
South, in records kept for business
so elegantly written on vellum.

Jealousy and the Politics of Dancing
How much he envied her well shod skill
at les chassés et croisés of the quadrille!

Perfect Match for Not-So-Perfect Catch
The kind of girl I like is the epitome
of the kind of girl who’d be rid of me.

More Evidence that René Girard Really is On to Something …

… is that he’s verified, not by polls offering a consensus or double blind experiments, but by the likes of Billy Joe Shaver. As the original outlaw says in the introduction here, He’s the one who made us all #2 … that’s true! Then you don’t have to compete, you see …