Hermes

I have before me Derrida's book-that-is-not-a-book Dissemination.  It is of course not the same book I am reading now that I read long ago, carefully and obsessively, at the Edge in Memphis  over the course of what must have been three weeks.  Out of a sense of the faint resemblance of the book I read now to that past book by the same name, I try to study now.  A recap of some inaccessible past at best.

Page 84-- Plato's Pharmacy, I, 3: "The Filial Inscription: Theuth, Hermes, Thoth, Nabu, Nebo"

Three quotations, unforgettable, or rather, very forgettable, so I try to reconstitute them here.  Or some trace thereof.

Universal history continued to unroll, the all-too-human gods whom Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to demons-- although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of Alexandria; 20, 000 according to Iamblichus; 36,525 according to the priests of Thoth--  who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things.  Fragments of this illusory library, compiled or concocted beginning in the third century, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum...

---Jorge Luis Borges, "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal"

That's it, I am going to sleep now.

all the news that's fit to print

I am wondering these days about the boundaries, the margins, the content and the form, of journalism.  As the institution of printed journalism, the press, undergoes transformation, is gradually dismantled, or just plain shuts down one dreary and windy day-- what remains?  As the task of objectivity about the collective world is decentralized or outsourced to "citizen journalism" what is being reported and from where, to where?  Are we really living in a time of interconnecting blogs unscrolling in the void?  And we, are we more real and substantial than our blogs?

And our minds, and all we witness through the screen, are our minds being "rebooted" to take in some vast new terrain?

Or simply erased?

Train

I wrote this here poem:

Concourse
of the moving, quietly rocking train
over the tracks
Through deep blue on the horizon
And the ghostly shapes of
the deciduous landscape
of the Southland
The bank of the river
appears and then recedes from view
Like long curtains of stage
scenery shuffling across
And as the city outside
moves slowly into view and
Finally comes to a stop
I have been awake and fascinated