Names Dropped

A! Tis some stale thorn.
I ache rich ballads, M!
I’m stagy when neer.
Live merman: hell.
Awful killin’ Erma!
Makz ‘n nice compote

Anagrams of eminent authors by Edmund Wilson in 1953. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Analysis

All I can do is
tell the truth. No that isn’t
so – I have missed it.

There is no truth that
in passing through awareness
does not lie.

But one runs after it all the same.

From the preface to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan. By Marika Rose.

Hearing Is a Way

Hearing is a way
of touching at a distance
and the intimacy
of the first sense
is fused with sociability
whenever people
gather together
to hear something special.

From ‘Soundscapes and Earwitnesses’ by R Murray Schafer, in Hearing History: A Reader, p.9. Submitted by Kate Guthrie.

A Certain Plant

I have written a monograph on a certain plant.
The plant lies before me;
I am just turning over a folded coloured plate.
A dried specimen of the plant,
as though from a herbarium,
is bound up with every copy.

From Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams: ‘Dream of a Botanical Monograph’. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Thought and Jocularity

When I was twelve, I was interviewed by
a doctoral candidate in
education and asked what I wanted
to be when I grew up.

I said that I wanted either to be
a philosopher or a clown,
and I understood then, I think that much
depended on whether or not

I found the world worth philosophising
about, and what the price of
seriousness might be. I was not sure I
wanted to be a philosopher,

and I confess that I have never quite
overcome that doubt.

From ‘Undoing Gender’ by Judith Butler (London: Routledge 2004), p234. Submitted by Marika Rose.