Without Lifting A Finger

As I am currently rummaging through my closet of earlier poems (perhaps separating the keepers from the chaff, perhaps doing a little Audenesque retouching, possibly shaping another book), I found this Breyten bit ( Dog Heart , section titled FRANCOIS KRIGE) semi-apropos: I think to myself: Is it just as well he's too weak to destroy his own work. I talk to him about Kafka's instructions to Max Brod. He answers quietly. Maybe he wants to say: Go on, talk--you don't know what you're saying. What is quality? Who but the person confronting his own work will ever know? Is it not ultimately about the dignity of leaving a few marks?

Being a memoir it makes sense that "memory" would pop up a lot.  From one of the many sections called MEMORY : Like starlings, memory devours everything. We live, we move forward as if travelling through a landscape, continually sharpening the eye--on the cusp of passing into oblivion--and immediately, constantly, inexorably the experience topples into the domain of memory. One instantly, constantly, inexorably turns to past tense. I am my own defecation.

Left Sentimental Education (I sometimes jump back and forth between countries) for Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart . From Point C to Point B: From Coetzee to Breytenbach. The surprise rain (who would've thought) kept me in the coffee shop reading longer than usual, but I've still only taken a small bite: I got to page 25. Would I have thought "painterly composition" (this is memoir, not his poetry) if I hadn't known already that he was also a painter? Hard to say. From the opening section: BEGINNING, FOR THE READER : To cut a long story short: I am dead.    Do you think I'm joking? Am I not lurking behind these rustling words--perhaps a little thicker around the waist, a little darker in the mind? Am I not the writer sitting in the dappled light of the pepper tree, pursing my lips and closing my eyes to the glare of a yellow fire baking the valley?    My mind fumbles for a buried reference; I'm on the verge of remembering the odour of ancient cl...