The German poet Paul Celan came to feel that it was impossible, after the Third Reich's corruption & cruelty, to write in German any longer. In the past eight years when people were calling for witness to resistance to the vast machine here, I fell silent & felt as if I were orbiting a strange world, without any navigation or propulsion, or as if I had been given a bow & arrow to stop an avalanche.
A friend's repudiation of the 'write what you know' dictum makes me realize how much I've waited to know, only to learn the insidious quality of all knowledge -- like Ouroboros, knowledge simply consumes itself, a worm forever swallowing its own tail.
