Write What Can't Be Said

Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way
is an impasse
— Heraclitus, in Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, #7, p. 7, Brooks Haxton (tr.).

Of all the words yet spoken,
none comes quite as far as wisdom,
which is the action of the mind
beyond all things that may be said.
— Heraclitus, in Ibid., #18, p. 13.

The way up is the way back.
— Heraclitus, in Ibid., #69, p. 45.

Applicants for wisdom
do what I have done:
inquire within.
— Heraclitus, in Ibid., #80, p. 51.

Just as the river where I step
is not the same river, and is,
so I am as I am not.
— Heraclitus, in Ibid., #81, p. 51.

Oh well, all this might be very disquieting were it not that “sacred” has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrest where stabilization has gone on past the time. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
— William Carlos Williams, from Kora in Hell: Improvisations, in Imaginations: William Carlos Williams, Webster Schott (ed.), p. 13.

      So I come again to my present day gyrations.
      So it is with the other classics: their meaning and worth can only be studied and understood in the imagination —that which begot them only can give them life again, rekindle their perfection —
     Unless to study by rote or scientific research — Useful for certain understanding to corroborate the imagination —
     Yes, Anatole was a fool when he said: It [art] is a lie. — That is it. If the actor simulates life it is a lie. But — but why continue without an audience?
     The reason people marvel at works of art and say: How in Christ’s name did he do it? — is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination.
     It is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical.
— William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All, in Ibid., Webster Schott (ed.), p. 123.

So all things enter into the singleness of the moment and the moment partakes of the diversity of all things….
— William Carlos Williams, from A Novelette and Other Prose, in Ibid., Webster Schott (ed.), p. 282.