there is a shrinking and flattening that comes with being owned by people whose interests, on balance, are themselves notably small and flat. Every business these people touch winds up cheapened, worsened, and dispiritingly similar in its overall enfeeblement as a result. This, more than any heroic acts of innovation or creative destruction, is where the market is right now—driven to find just how diminished and demeaning a version of a once-useful service people are still willing to pay for.

"I like nouns that go up: loft. And ones that sink: mud. I like the ones that peck: chicken. And canter: canter; those that comfort: flannel and pelt. Cell is an excellent word, in that it sweetly fulfills its assigned sound in a small, thin container. Unlike hell, which is disappointing. Overall. Wanting in force and fury. I like that a lone syllable names a necessary thing: bridge, house, door, food, bed. And the ones that sustain us: dirt, milk, and so on. What a thing, that a syllable—birth, time, space, death—points to the major mysteries with such simplicity, as with a silent finger. And to our very vital parts: head, snout, heart, butt. And our fundamental feeling, fear."

The structure of the miracle has a similar form: out of another time, from a time that is alien, arises a ‘god’ who has the characteristics of memory, that silent encyclopedia of singular acts, and who, in religious stories, represents with such fidelity the ‘popular’ memory of those who have no place but who have time—‘Patience!’… But all these variants could very well be no more than the shadows—enlarged into symbolic and narrative projections—thrown by the journalistic practice that consists in seizing the opportunity and making memory the means of transforming places. … In short, what constitutes the implantation of memory in a place that already forms an ensemble? That implantation is the moment which calls for a tightrope-walker’s talent and a sense of tactics; it is the instant of art. Now it is clear that this implantation is neither localized nor determined by memory-knowledge. The occasion is taken advantage of, not created. … Like those birds they lay in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it. … Memory derives its interventionary force from its very capacity to be altered—unmoored, mobile, lacing any fixed position…' - Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

“Don’t—or at least I don’t think it is reasonable to—feel sad about the transitoriness of things. What you have had you will always have if you are a rememberer.”

"Everything is not a poem. How could there be any solidification? My recent feeling is that poetry is nothing more (or less) than the attempt to make a thing called a "poem," which means that nothing is actually a poem, and everything is not. Nothing short of our last day on earth, the one we will not remember, for having quit life on its heels. And so it is, simply, life, another way to spend it. Consolation is often confused for salvation. But poetry?"

Why do I keep reminding myself that Homer wasted away to his death, refusing to eat or drink, because he could not understand what the young boys fishing meant when they said, What we caught we left behind, and what we missed we bring home. Homer being that poet who is some figure of us all, that poet who went blind because he refused to alter what he wrote about Helen when Helen’s spirit demanded he retract. He could not see through the riddle, and so he died. The boys were speaking about lice.

I am a neighbor to myself, tapping behind the wall, shifting, trying not to panic. Without the notebook, who knows what anything means?