Nomad Manifesto from Pierre Joris

The opening to the poet Pierre Joris' Nomad Manifesto:

The days of anything static - form, content, state - are over. The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies. All revolutions have done just that: those that tried to deal with the state as much as those that tried to deal with the state of poetry.

• A nomadic poetics is a war machine, always on the move, always changing, morphing,moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping. Refuelling halts are called poases, they last a night or a day, the time of a poem, & then move on. The sufi poets spoke of mawqif - we will come back to this.
• A nomadic poetics needs mindfulness. In & of the drift (dérive) there is no at- home-ness here but only an ever more displaced drifting. The fallacy would be to think of language as at-home-ness while "all else" drifts, because for language to be accurate to the condition of nomadicty, it too has to be drifting, to be "on the way" as Celan puts it.

The line that speaks to me most deeply is this -- "anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies." I couldn't agree more. We must constantly transform ourselves, or perhaps in reality we must simply recognize and open our eyes to the fact that we are constantly changing and transforming, whether we like it or not.

We can either embrace this change or try hopelessly to block. By refusing to accept this truth, much pain and sorrow is unleashed into the world today.