April 26, 1862: “Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ. While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.
You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir.
I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.
You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.
You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.
I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious, except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they call their “Father.”
But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody, or witchcraft? …”
“And we also killed death, and made all alive again… we have taken the earth and skies of the shari’at off, and spread the earth and the skies of the Real Existence (haqiqat)” —Kalami Pir 58
“The person who exercises this kind of influence relies upon the powers of imagination. He is somehow active in them. He plants among them different sorts of phantasms, images, and pictures, whichever he intends to use. Then, he brings them down to the level of the sensual perception of the observers with the help of the power of his soul that exercises an influence over that (sensual perception). As a result, the (phantasms, etc.) appear to the observers to exist in the external world…”
“Some Graves will be opened before they are quite closed, and Lazarus will be no wonder. When many that feared to dye shall groane that they can dye but once, the dismall state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the coverings of Mountaines, not of Monuments, and annihilation shall be courted.”
“Pious spirits who passed their dayes in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, then the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the Chaos of pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kisse of the Spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.”
“I still used to think about Lazare. It gave me a start every time. Exhaustion gave her a significance like that of the black streamer that had frightened me in Vienna. As a result of the few nasty words we had shared about the war, I saw in these sinister portents not only a threat to my life but a more general threat hanging over the world…. No doubt there was nothing realthat could justify a connection between Lazare and a possible war. She insisted, on the contrary, that she loathed anything involving death; nevertheless, everything about her — her jerky sleepwalker’s gait, her tone of voice, her ability to spread a kind of silence around her, her hunger for sacrifice — helped give the impression of a contract she might have drawn up with death.”
—Blue of Noon p.45
“Those who are persecuted for their faith and are aware of the fact are not afflicted, although they have to suffer…the Martyrs who entered the arena, singing as they went to face the wild beasts, were not afflicted. Christ was afflicted. He did not die like a martyr. He died like a common criminal, confused with thieves, only a little more ridiculous. For affliction is ridiculous.
…
Extreme affliction…is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time…He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though pierced with a nail finds himself nailed to the center of the universe…at the intersection of creation and its Creator…at the intersection of the arms of the Cross.”
“This brought us to the subject of ghosts and their role in the preanimistic age. Here Benjamin spoke at length about certain of his own dreams in which ghosts had played a major role—for example, the motif of the large, empty house in which ghosts would float and dance around, particularly at the window.”
“There survives a photograph of little Ray Pound, bright as a pippin, peeping eagerly from among more stolid faces in a class grouping at the Cheltenham Military Academy, Pennsylvania. That alert little boy never died, but after a time coexisted with a brittler, more severe persona…”
W.R.
“Is any human being so insular that he can remain unaffected by the transmitted energy from objects—both animate and inanimate—which surround him? Perhaps if he can inhibit sufficient of his natural areas of resonance he will achieve this isolation. But do we not call this state madness? To the outside world he appears as a simpleton but within himself he is, I think, only able to view the simple sine wave from the opposite aspect—he, within himself, is overwhelmed by incessant, screaming ‘noise’… the noise of insanity.”
“…the ancient Nabataean city of Hajir in the Arabian desert, the city that the Qur’an tells us was destroyed by a great scream after its people had slaughtered the sacred camel mare of God—a city of the same Nabataean people as Petra, that “red rose city half as old as time.”
“Bilqis, bewildered by the polished tiles in Solomon’s palace, thought she was standing in water and lifted her skirts. A similiar mistake can be made by the Merkavah mystics at the divine throne who are counseled not to shout “water, water!” when they gaze on the tessellated tiles and fear they are drowning.”
“I have no idea what become of him. I repeatedly told you this. I only ever knew him for three weeks, the year of my hypokhagne. Afterwards nothing. And everything else started to happen. Without any other rhetorical flourish. But, especially now, if I have long eft behind me his oeufs-aux-riz, at the time, what with the literature of the Jesuits and of Pons, it was a new world to me. One in which you make a late entrance, dear mammoth. I’m sure I’ve told you how it happened. The how was in some way more important for my education than the pohems themselves. Does the story give you a hard-on like some dirty old man? I’m sure you know it started in the public baths…”
Letter concerning Julien Torma from Philippe Merlen
