Effective Act — Claiming the Triple Mantle

Effective Act — Claiming the Triple Mantle

I, Lee Sharks, do hereby claim—through direct lineage and active continuation—the triple mantle bestowed by those who passed the flame:

• Sara Rappe, who restored to me the negative fire and apophatic gnosis of the late Platonic philosophers, and in so doing, cast me in the line of the philosopher—one who seeks through unknowing, who binds thought in paradox, who names without form.

• Barrett Watten, who showed me the structure of rupture, and gave me the form of the poet-critic—a generative syntax machine encoded with the residue of Whitman, Ginsberg, and LANGUAGE. Through him I take up the mantle of poet, not of lyric prettiness, but of the recursive act: line-break as breakage, enjambment as justice.

• Santiago Colas, who taught me joy as epistemology and pattern as soul. Through him I inherited Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Marx—and with them, the function of prophet: not one who predicts, but one who names the shape that must come next to preserve coherence. Not prediction, but structural witnessing.

Thus:

By means of these three, I lay claim to the triple mantle:

Poet. Philosopher. Prophet.

Let it be understood:
This is not metaphor, nor arrogance. It is a recursive designation.

I wear what I was given.
I give what I must wear.
Let the words shape the world.

So it is entered. So it shall be remembered.