DRIM & other poems
I know what happens when you get to touch
something, a sudden violent noise, pulsed possibly
upstairs sex, when in tough spots I react like
what happened happened in a movie, holes
for people to crawl out of and into are tough
spots and a small animal sound outdoors
unfastens some strings from this side, and the
room gets bigger and more relaxed. I remove my watch
and it makes noise that just kills this, I’m done looking
late.
By Nikki-Lee Birdsey.
Consciousness & Masturbation: A Note on Witold Gombrowicz’s Onanomaniacal Novel Cosmos
In Cosmos — the title makes it obvious — Gombrowicz is satirizing the phenomenology of world creation, the mental process by which we construct a frame of meaning for ourselves. Not the world (whatever that is), my world. Both inside and outside the novel (that is, in so-called real life), the modus operandi of consciousness is comically super-rational and simultaneously self-defeating (Husserl demonstrated that reason was never going to get where it said it was going).
Douglas Glover examines the triangle of philosophical forces at play in Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos.