digging through pages of time

Long days of welling memories between the mechanics of living. engineering the sounds and sayings, looking for work and a roof, flashes of each time i've looked for work, a roof, strum and song and all the harsh grating of details. i almost got a whole house for cheap, but not cheap enough, so instead i went to goodwill to look for books to sell and came home with a stack for my own library. i can't help myself. of course there were some excellent finds. a copy of PKDick's Exegesis, a book on missing myths in america, a pocket edition of the surrealist poet Apollinaire's "alcools" who coined the term surrealism (in french unfortunately, but it was only a dollar. these texts can not be lost to time).

the greatest find, comparable to a DJ's record crate digging, was a copy of the Comte de Lautreamont's "les chants de maldoror" which i've been meaning to acquire for awhile and never expected in the snooty shadyside thrift shop. hailed as a masterpiece by the surrealists (it contains their founding quote "beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table") this prose poem was written in the late 1800's by a mysterious youth who died at the age of 24. many of the writers i admire, and the ones they admired, relied heavily on this text, which from the sound of it falls in the same type of journalistic literature as my two favorite novels, rilke's "the notebooks of malte-laurides brigge" or sartre's "nausea". where the "hero" of the notebooks is obsessed with and sees through Death, and in "nausea" with the existential horror of Emptiness, Lautreamont's anti-hero Maldoror is obsessed with Evil and the absence of god and how this is acted out (in apparently disturbing and imagistic passages that almost had the book banned for obscenity when it was first published). i look forward to reading this when i'm done with Henry Miller's "Plexus", along with the copy of Yeat's symbolist text "a vision" which i also recently tracked down. now if i can only find a copy of stephen mallarme's poetry in the trash...

lautreamont is also credited with saying: "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author's sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a right one."

and

"Poetry must be made by all and not by one."