Sorgmantel

When I grow up I do not want to be a professional poet. So far as I am a poet at all, I write for members of the Codex, about which I have written before- We represent the anonymous practitioners who spend their lives quietly transforming and transferring the culture to the next and the next generations one by one and all at once. Like Transtromer’s Adam Ileborgh, like you perhaps, we are those who are never missed-and who refuse to be missing.Lately, I’ve been reading The Magic Mountain again after close to fifty years. I am thinking of the book as a sort of ascent into the underworld, and I doubt that Mann, with his pattern of descents in his work, would argue much. This book seems to have been composed with a similar attention to space and time, the probability added that those concepts lie in such political and technical jeopardy as might be a shock even to Jeremiah. And so do we.