Like Water, Like Ice (2026)

"'Self-Reliance' Redacted" is inspired by Brion Gysin’s and William S. Burroughs’s “cut-up” method, but it is not a “cut-up.” It is closer to a “cut-out.” Every word below appears in the order printed in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841). I have simply redacted marks, phrases, and sentences, as a censor might with a sensitive government document. 

Graham Cassano 

January 2026 

I read with rejected inflexibility voices on a stranger. Forced shame in the eye of cowards does not hope, trust, accept. Revolution guides this text, divided arithmetic, unconquered, disconcerted, and gracious in neutrality. Darts into the ear are virtue in a nonconformist. Nothing is sacred. Absolve the Devil. I am ashamed, an angry bigot with rough love. I will go to prison if I confess. 

Give a dollar for spectacle. I prefer a glittering, sweet, bleeding man. (I must rule in solitude, live in solitude.) Men have eyes for asinine company, moved by tight whips, displeasure, and the by-standers contempt. Yet a firm man knows feminine rage when aroused. 

Eyes of others suppose the devout harlot thinks in hard words and flesh. I suppose this record should swallow my vice: consciousness, escort and ephemera, ridiculous mediocrity, squalid measures. Other suitors praise the sycophantic deference transferred to this colossal hieroglyphic. Without a ray, we denote sense, involuntary, thoughtless. Perception is the phraseology of the past. 

Conspirators, ashamed before my window, understand the strong man rubbish. His voice, strange and forgotten, perceives long intervals of time called death (and the gravitation of rich men measure all things real). The planet let the intruding rabble demonstrate the poverty of our native riches. Now we are alone, silent. And I have mechanical sickness, all confusion, curiosity, desire. If we cannot rise to war, let pain sell my debts. Faithful, desponding whimpers, parlor soldiers. Present death, and women see religion. Young men fall on city dolls, ashamed of the moment. 

Speculative views call for meanness and theft. Our rough electric shocks welcome desire. Our love embraces unbalanced minds, superstition. Americans like the missionary, and virtue, and domesticated ruins. A fool’s paradise is intoxicated. I am not intoxicated. My symptom fosters bodies created to be observed. We copy, insist, plume, and taste savage, white machinery. 

Centuries ago, the arts and inventions found the New World in an undecked boat. A wave, particle…a crime. Mobs, and sick spirits, believe nothing. 

Note: I included at least one meaningful utterance or phrase from each paragraph of the original essay. The punctuation is mine. GC