Lumpy pudding
Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery. (Wimsatt & Beardsley)
Here we celebrate the excluded, lumpy parts of the pudding!
Emil Cioran - RULES AGAINST FALLING PRAY TO MELANCHOLY
to think of the world politically (power and domination);
to make rhythm divine: a military march before a symphony;
to hate all the colors: they awaken spiritual states which end fatally in melancholy; even red dissolves everything, if we are immersed in it a long time. To lose ourselves in the last degradation of the color white, to lose ourselves in the absence of color;
to not look for nuances in feelings; each of them exerts a suggestion, seducing us, and one by one we glide into ourselves as into the unknown;
everything is heartrending, melancholy tells us. To which we would answer: to die objectively;
to be a margin to yourself;
to give a dancing expression to all feelings; to search ourselves on the outside; to take ourselves out into the world of exterior signs;
everything is about overcoming the sensation of weakness which dissolves the body and the soul. And in order to conquer, there is no modality that is either too delicate or too vulgar. To think music politically;
to deliver force through thoughts, and to force the feelings to serve it;
to tear yourself apart in form. A methodology of breaking-up; to liquidate yourself in good taste and in control; to die, that is, to lose your trajectory;
to untie the fear of your own destiny.
(Excerpt from Cioran’s never before translated Book of Delusions, transl. by Camelia Elias, publ. by Hyperion - PDF here)
