July 06, 2006
o'hara inedit
I don't like modern literature — anyway, no one does.It's too precise at the outset; in the end too vague, and dancing before our eyes.
I wish it was more indefinite and more precise, that is, just what it isn't.
I wish its content were closer to what matters, to the stockpile of vital forces within its signs.
Actually, it's not O'Hara, but Gabriel Pomerand, dreaming in 1949 of some set of signs that would be their own content: "metagraphics," which turned out to be all-too-Egyptian.
It was not the signs but the dream of the signs; this, one suspects, is what Warburg chased after, and Pound in his Fenellosan error.
And it was not the signs but the dream of the signs, of annealing the fissure between signifier and signified, that allowed Pomerand to hear, in the bedside klaxon that summons us to work, the sound's dialectical double:
Throughout my life, I've had no other goal than to be an extremist, at that battlefront which alarm clocks suggest even as they lure us into the traps of life.