For Carol Mirakove

In the history of self-possession we have the misfortune to have woken up in, things have reached what may be a critical point. How now can we claim to possess our lives? How in the deepest thick of commodity culture, proceeding in the endless wake of socialism through life like a stream of piss through a sea of glue, are we able to say that these are our lives? The retreat of Hölderlin into the “asylum” of poetry is impossible, it took up long ago the place offered to it by the great Lonely Planet among the Himmelskräfte. So where’s our retreat? Is there a place that we own, where to be self-possessed still means more than to be calm and undisturbed?