What’s the source of my crab-persnickety feeling about D’Oyly Carte-ism, the Hurokesque, impresario-rutting, Diaghilev-ism. Self-satisfy’d nonstop poetry boosterism, who needs it?
Here’s what we mean by life: all the rules are rescinded except the ones that keep things standing, and it’s bigger and whip-like, uncoiling with a snap that flicks the quivering cigarette out of the lovely actress’s mouth so she can go back to licking and being licked. Sometimes it just slides in and out like a mink through the boards at the base of a barn wet with snow melt. Here’s what we mean by life: I want to be the street. Because some things are immortal in keeping with the personal, it offers each one more access to the rest. It tells each beading mystery with chalky fingers.
Ed Barrett, Rub Out, (Pressed Wafer, 2003)
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Note: Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers
E. H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles
