hyperion-verus

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The Course of Empire is a series of five paintings created by the English-born American painter Thomas Cole between 1833 and 1836, which depicts the growth and fall of an imaginary city. The Course of Empire comprises the following works: The Course of Empire – The Savage State (1); The Arcadian or Pastoral State (2); The Consummation of Empire (3); Destruction (4); and Desolation (5).

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But this very technical shape which renders truth visible to the understanding conceals it from the feelings; for, unhappily, understanding begins by destroying the object of the inner sense before it can appropriate the object.

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The ritual of loss.

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Gustave Moreau - The Apparition (1874-1876)

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We keep our distances, preferring the symmetry of thought.

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Abraham Mignon - Still life (c.1660-1679)

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The rational and the conscious are fuel for the experience of self (knowledge is a worthy goal, but not unto itself).

A different reading of Eliot’s Waste Land: if, after you’ve made use of it, you can lull the intellect to sleep; if you allow yourself to become insensate to the poem’s modernist aesthetics and resist the lure of the soundscapes opening up to your ear, something else emerges: the words grow roots and reveal themselves as far older and more charged with meaning than understanding allows for. Read that way, the poem leaves no doubt as to the existence of an unbroken thread between Homer and Eliot (a very short thread that does not span millennia, just from this room to that), and it becomes easier to grasp a truth that all readers of poetry are aware of:

reading poetry is a ritual.

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From the poem "elegy to a murdered cat" The ritual continues at https://hyperionverus.substack.com

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Contemporary poetry often reaches for sincerity (as technique), and just as often fails at translating the detail into language. This is not so much due to a lack of desire for sincerity on the part of the poet as it is a lack of practice in being sincere – one reveals oneself as shaped not by sincere experiences, but by representations of experiences. It is always easy to spot those who have never heard the mountain sing but are nonetheless aware that writing 'the mountain sings' lends their work a vaguely poetic aura.

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From the poem "distances" The ritual continues at https://hyperionverus.substack.com

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Fragment from the poem "bloodnymph" The ritual continues at hyperionverus.substack.com

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From the fragment "bloodnymph"

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/fragment //a church by the river

The ritual continues. Gather at https://hyperionverus.substack.com/

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Agamemnon became Sweeney, the pantheon grew fat, demythologized, and died.