The Seven-Year Shaman

The poems (shall we say?) that agitated our fathers? That invented our world. If they now seem always to have existed in it, they always have.

These words, first joined more than fifty years ago, do not make a statement about the streets, nor about the feelings of the speaker. They make no statement at all. They invest, rather, that zone of consciousness, prior to analysis, where speaker and streets are indistinguishable from one another: before the mind has said “I” (separating an element called myself from the continuum of experience) or said “street” or “sky” or “fog” (separating other elements from that continuum).

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Hugh Kenner

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The poems (shall we say?) that agitated our fathers? That invented our world. If they now seem always to have existed in it, they always have.

These words, first joined more than fifty years ago, do not make a statement about the streets, nor about the feelings of the speaker. They make no statement at all. They invest, rather, that zone of consciousness, prior to analysis, where speaker and streets are indistinguishable from one another: before the mind has said “I” (separating an element called myself from the continuum of experience) or said “street” or “sky” or “fog” (separating other elements from that continuum).