words

hypocaust
n. a hollow space under the floor of an ancient Roman building, into which hot air was sent for heating a room or bath.

Stone of Scone
n. - Often referred to in England as The Coronation Stone, an oblong block of red sandstone that was used for centuries in the coronation of the monarchs of Scotland, and later the monarchs of England and the Kingdom of Great Britain.

anathemata
So I mean by my title as much as it can be made to mean, or can evoke or suggest, however obliquely: the blessed things that have taken on what is cursed and the profane things that somehow are redeemed: the delights and also the 'ornaments', both in the primary sense of gear and paraphernalia and in the sense of what simply adorns; the donated and votive things, the things dedicated after whatever fashion, the things in some sense made separate, being 'laid up from other things'; things, or some aspect of them, that partake of the extra-utile and of the gratuitous; things that are the signs of something other, together with those signs that not only have the nature of a sign, but are themselves, under some mode, what they signify. Things set up, lifted up, or in whatever manner made over to the gods.
David Jones, The Anathemata, 'Preface'

colostomy ethnography

Deep brown, burnished shit is extruded from the bright, proud infoliation in a steady paste-like stream in front of you: uniform, sweet-smelling fruit of the body, fertile medium, not negative substance. It hangs hot in a bag, flush with the abdomen, with the raised temperature even of congealed life. This is to describe a new bodily function, not a redescribe the old. The organ of this facture has achieved that pipe-dream of humanity: evacuation of the body is far removed from the pudenda, pleasure and pain. There are no nerve-endings and there is no sensation in the stoma.

Gillian Rose, Love's Work

very poor substitute indeed

However satisfying writing is - that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control - it is very poor substitute indeed for the joy and the agony of loving. Of there being someone who loves and desires you, and he glories in his love and desire, and you glory in his ever-strange being, which comes up against you, and disappears, again and again, surprising you with difficulties and with bounty. To lose this is the greatest loss, a loss for which there is no consolation. There can only be that twin passion - the passion of faith.

The more innocent I sound, the more enraged and invested I am.

In personal life, people have absolute power over each other, whereas in professional life, beyond the terms of the contract, people have authority, the power to make one another comply in ways which may be perceived as legitimate or illegitimate. In personal life, regardless of any covenant, one party may initiate a unilateral and fundamental change in the terms of relating with renegotiating them, and further, refusing even to acknowledge the change. Imagine how a beloved child or dog would respond, if the Lover turned away. To be at someone's mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.

Love in the submission of power.

Gillian Rose, Love's Work

Love-making

Love-making is never simply pleasure. Sex manuals or feminist tracts which imply the infinite plasticity of position and pleasure, which counsel assertiveness, whether in bed or out, are dangerously destructive of imagination, of erotic and of spiritual ingenuity. The sexual exchange will be as complicated as the relationship in general - even more so. Kiss, caress and penetration are the relation of the relation, body and soul in touch, two times two adds up: three times three is the equation. The three I harbour within me - body, soul, paraclete - press against the same tripicity in you. What I want, my overcharged imagination, released inside your body, taken up into mine, with attack and with abandon, succumbs so readily and with more joy than I could claim, to your passion, pudency and climax.

The Name: there is yet the Name. The Name of the Beloved cries out in rhythmic throes words the world: it abolishes the safe uncanniness of the ordinary, when the world is normally absent to the world. My name at every thrust returns me not to myself, but to the root of you flush in me.

Night time is psyche time: the accumulation of excess emotion, aroused but unattended during the day; it must have its say - in dream or in prayer, in love making and taking. Neglected or unrehearsed, these residues exact their revenge: they trouble my sleep or keep me awake with an acuity unknown to the day.

Morning is holy terror: awakening, a naked dawning with no consolation of the work of mourning. Grief has been expended during the night; curiosity for the day is still held at bay. There can be no preparation or protection for this moment of rootless exposure; the comforting contraries of diurnal acknowledgement are in suspense. Eros passion is fled: its twin, the passion of faith, is taunting my head.

To spend the whole night with someone is agape: it is ethical. For you must move with him and with yourself from the arms of the one twin to the abyss of the other. This shared journey, unsure yet close, honesty embracing dishonesty, changes the relationship. It may not be a marriage, but it will be sacramental even without benefit of sacraments. To navigate this together is to achieve the mundane: to be present to each other, both at the point of difficult ecstasy and at the point of abyssal infinity, brings you into the shared cares of the finite world.

Gillian Rose, Love's Work

Ikaros

And that young man fitted with bone and thong
and membrane from his withers by his father
the maze molder, when he climbed into flame
itself in the high nucleus, dripped as slather
down the sky’s maw. Union there, with an aim
at the center, crisped on a central soundless gong,

sizzling from his overreach extended
back on itself and down, the soundless hurry
of the sea far below minutely riven,
trembling in place, diamonds in blue slurry
nowhere disturbed yet flecking everywhere, driven—
all this boy’s cry endlessly thin, suspended.

John Peck, "From the Headland at Cumae"

for what is more true

than a snowy night, down it comes
sifting over branches and railings and the secret air itself,
down the steep, down the stops, down the deepenings, down the grooves in the nails.
They fall asleep and dream
of muffled corridors,
greenish glow
along the edges of mirrors, faces, cities.
Snow spins over it, down over it all.

Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband "XVIII"

by being a little world

O multiplied misery! we die, and cannot enjoy death, because wee die in this torment of sicknes; we are tormented with sicknes, & cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions and presages, prophecy those torments, which induce that death before either come; and our dissolution is conceived in these first changes, quickned in the sicknes it selfe, and borne in death, which beares date from these first changes. Is this the honour which Man hath by being a little world, That he hath these earthquakes in him selfe, sodaine shakings; these lightnings, sodaine flashes; these thunders, sodaine noises; these Eclypses, sodaine offuscations, & darknings of his senses; these blazing stars, sodaine fiery exhalations; these rivers of blood, sodaine red waters? Is he a world to himselfe onely therefore, that he hath inough in himself, not only to destroy, and execute himselfe, but to presage that execution upon himselfe; to assist the sicknes, to antidate the sicknes, to make the sicknes the more irremediable, by sad apprehensions, and as if hee would make a fire the more vehement, by sprinkling water upon the coales, so to wrap a hote fever in cold Melancholy, least the fever alone shold not destroy fast enough, without this contribution, nor perfit the work (which is destruction) except we joynd an artificiall sicknes, of our own melancholy, to our natural, our unnaturall fever. O perplex'd discomposition, O ridling distemper, O miserable condition of Man.

John Donne, "Meditation I"