Clive Faust

"Few men know death: we do not usually undergo it deliberately, but unthinkingly and out of habit and most men die because men cannot help dying" -Francois de La Rochefoucauld "And we open our eyes and feel our way in the dark." -William Bronk "The changes that have occurred in places you return to, the demise of attitudes that once seemed `inevitable', show not so much how things change with time, but how transitory they always were. The fundamental truth is not that things change, but that they have hardly ever existed." "All my friends, dead for so many years - even their ghosts are dying." "The moon at last quarter sliding out of black cloud, giving body to darkness." -Clive Faust

"Back forty years ago I wrote of The Gist of Origin: 'In such a bare age as ours, the truth, though terrible, is clean. The worlds of Chaucer, Homer and Tolstoy were conventionally realized ones-even if the men in them shifted between realizations, incorrigibly. We now are in the same ferry as these chaotic Americans: we have no fixities to shift among. The only order they bring with them-and it is not nothing-is an economy of means. Ultimately the variety-of place, of instance, of event, of impression is deceptive. Also the enormous amount to be learnt from them, deceptive-because it is all the one thing. And the one thing is terrible, because it is unclear whether it is not ourselves.' I think this era of thought/feeling is now obsolete in the culture, which is now based upon a sort of decorative wit-adapted for the computerex machinery, but on the way to being mechanically replicated by it. Incidentally, the prosody of this perhaps outdated poetry is based at its best upon simply "the taste of words, the pleasure of utterance as a physical act", in the words of Cid Corman.-Clive Faust