Afterword

The afterword, “Learning to Imagine What We Know” attempts to articulate a material poetics, rather than a metaphysics, of the mind in extremis, at the places where life, time, representation, and knowledge can go no further. Deleuze, in “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” contends that “the atom is that which must be thought, and that which can only be thought.” Angus Fletcher, in the chapter “Marlowe Invents the Deadline,” makes a stunningly similar claim: “Time, finally, can only be thought.”Impossible Desire recognizes the elusive hymen, too, as a conceptual morsel that fuses sexual and epistemological conquest. It demarcates, and arouses a desire to transcend, the limit point of human knowledge. But this erotically charged search for knowledge occurs, for the carpe diem poet, in the absence of teleology. He recognizes no promise of full revelation, and only a perpetually receding horizon of further things unknown. Despite this, he uses poetry to create unlikely but capacious domains for the unthinkable, an aspiration identified as an act of world-making. As George Steiner puts it, “deep inside every ‘art-act’ lies the dream of an absolute leap out of nothingness, of the invention of an enunciatory shape so new, so singular to its begetter, that it would, literally, leave the previous world behind.” The conclusion of Impossible Desire locates this ontological leap in carpe diem poetry’s attempt to expand the increments of existence within the interstices of poetry, ultimately the only mortal place wherein one can make “this one short Point of Time/… fill up half the Orb of Round Eternity.”