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Anna Karina

Yester-“ago,” wrote: I instinctively placed a beautiful swollen glacial river within my inflamed baby of a heart, and I could charm a banana, as if it were like some gothic strangeness to willfully construct new “living spaces.” Actually living,

everything breathing like software, the ridiculous hum of a machine feels plausible. Technology has pulled the veil from off of its eyes and is using mankind like some Little Bo-Peep. But this “bride” keeps her name. There were times

when I would often inflate my sense of worth, like some lucious thigh that changes your perception when you realize one's heart is like a cruel thunder, a mass of synth-squiggles, expressed in the worst of terms. This, this, is reaching, with

temporal control, ecclesiastical concerns w/ both sides of the barn, redless, like old Mexican songs, voices of half-whine and half-coo, restless. I celebrate my birth each day, the service of the good, and for the record, I dislike certain

psychologists, and perhaps this is why R. never responded back after I quoted Nabokov who called Freud a Viennese Quack. Later, the unsubmissive window opened in my heart, like blue eyes hinting at a Scandinavian,

like listening to a Socratic seminar and struggling to widen my palms afterwards. Yesterday, O jesterday, there were specks in my eyes after meeting her, this her, this onda luminosa, eternal world-beautyin those eyes, that smile

(operating a smile seems like something she could do with her eyes), silky smoothe, my heart wouldn’t settle down, needed the Peace Corps after I left the building, an unexplainable exegesis, a Paean of hemisphereless (heavenly) light, an eloquent verandah

where I sit and wait for another moment like that in the soft city. Sweet, effecient lines. Later, much of the same disappointment, same heartache.

~

Listening to Robert Ashley’s “She Was A Visitor.” On The Brink of Space Dominance. Combining historic stills. I just collided—exploded—into myself. Now, tacks are all over the walls.

Janelle Wisehart sd that my photography reminded her of Alfred Hitchcock films.

~

“I’m bad to the bone / but x-rays can’t even see this.” (Binary Star)

~

Cornias of corn or cornucopia. One more swig of the last cold drop of coffee. Seeing two bats fly in front of the full moon, or perhaps that is merely the moon wearing raybans. “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” (Edward Abbey) “I credit clouds when wind produces rains. / A sober, sensate art provides us facts / That eyes and ears believe in, swift, untaxed.” (Boileau) Ooo, flew, went my heart, out of my chest. — Poor muse, the pettiest (prettiest) poetical muse now rendered as receding grey clouds, uncurvy status, like a dirty politician, a time capsule follow

-s suit. I walked around a foreign city once, years ago, felt like sky-rocketing out of the subway midday. The same, sky-rocketing out of this world, a muse that has just lost his/her blurb of supplementary info, escapes to approach broader things, like some genre-loving whistle-blower that ignores the liars, cheaters and swindlers. My hermit-fancied cove touches the romantic in me, to imbue ordinary objects as more impeccably-valid than awkward poignance . . . this is poetry! I had a dream that Jay Leno was a floating beautous ice cream truck; but as he floated closer to me, he scolded me over my lack of a fascination with Bukowski. My “Character Density” is in the offing. I am bolting out of this daylight like a late-night thriller. Anti-Catholic nastiness was stirring around her fake halo, chainsawed in half by her flaming ego, the kind of person that could easily be picked on and pick-pocketed. Manga-punk snobbish children, talking back, talking smack to their mothers. There is always a sensuous audio-environment around kind people. The perfect focus, like a hidden camera in a bathroom. Paradise Lost, I have found you!

~

Moving slowly in one direction, quickly; the cycle continues in the dream.

~

Certain lines of poetry crashing into me like on the lines of a shore. Thinking of Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Certain poets, as W.H. Auden predicted in the thirties for the years after the war, are “exploding like bombs.” Hemingway: “You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. (...) Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it. (...) Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill-health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.”

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867)

More free-flopping rambling—

Peter Tscherkassky, FILM STILLS

“I actually like the lack of a head here.”

Material—start with the classics by affecting a scary-movie-type growl full of fresh holes.

You get the idea: art is nothing.

Growing accustomed to the sun setting sooner. I had thought that I had fell in love with the shutting of the obscure recesses of giddy grammatically-totalitarian-mathematics altogether (just the trunk of it all), but there are certain days where I feel as though I am standing athwart in the path of babydolls that have “I love you!”-buttons.

Confucius culled the poetry of China for 300 odes that he believed were crucial.

Those that cater to pre-adolescent fantasies dive into a display of “humanism”—discretion enabled—the thrill is gone, but it still bobs up and down and is shiny like Linux desktops. We are here on Earth to illuminate some things about having a one-on-one session backstage with Britney. Love is in my thoughts as basic as an ironing board, %O among them—high boots worn by Greek tragic actors. Old intellectual and cultural divisions are negations of the intertext that I may use in the upper eschelon of multiplicative poetics—feelings of cognitive dissonance when you love a particular form of unadorned insistence of respect.

Aah, as you see, I only support what I cannot see.

—

I told the monster under my bed “goodnight” and it merely grunted.

—

EE Cummings, saith via the introduction of a collection of his poems from 1938: “The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most.” Earlier, tho’, Lloyd N. Dendinger must have been missing on the “genius of language” by misinterpreting the following: “A Plainclothesman, his entire being focussed on something just offstage to the audience’s left, stalks the invisible something minutely.” Dendinger considering this as some “delicate comedy” when perhaps the joke was on him (and everyone else). Back to the first line, I feel the same about photography, in which could be said, “The photographs to come are for you and for me and are not for most people.” But, who is “you”? Those that “understand”? Overstand. Overstanding. Overstood.

Whatever becomes inevitably butchered becomes Abrupt.

—

“I empty myself with light / Until I become morning.” —Charles Wright

—

Jean-Claude Risset must have composed Computer Suite From Little Boy - Fall (1982) precisely for me. What is within the initials, the city’s standard mountainous shoulders, arising like spiked-pads, like in video games, the people that angle themselves for the right look, the wrong way of right, the “design within design” so sayeth Philip Booth. A strange attraction to phony. Betty Boop. Science is dead. Autumn, the season of naked-skinned promiscious geographic configuration. The days go by too fast. To “fast” on time.

I feel as though I will be whisked away at any moment now via what I imagine will not happen when expecting what I want to occur. The air is a part of everything. Rash on left cheek. The trees are yellow. My long-sleeves are off-yellow. I am always On, like the beating heart of a Conquistador, or the suede palms of my hands, like musical instruments, delicately gripped. Tonight, the temperature will drop, the way a heart does when filled with sorrow. Winds up in the belly, winding.

I go to sleep, hoping to see you. This is the only way.

Concrete and mild rivulets, this city’s mouth, like Polish mothers, violet-indigo, stone-gray sky, reflections in pools of water on the road, seeing this from a window, the light behind falls in love with my back. I roam large areas of wooded-spaces, as if this were a zoo. Immature adults still sucking their thumbs. What is the relation of word-to-thing, golden-framed florescent monoprints, wilderness informs me like a warbled voice over an intercom. Every fiber of my “being” at times is idle, but with intense bonds, roads diverging in a thick wood, needing someone’s needle to pin-point me, guide me to you, you to me, refurbish this musicbox-heart, filling it up with the music that I long for.

Sometimes I think: I don’t mind telling you, if only you wouldn't leave me feeling desolate, wrestling with it.

“It.”

Not the cousin.

—

New poem:

THREE SIGHS

One of them is blind.
The Other searches
for a place to breathe
after being breathed
into existence, while
the Other rages in
the sky, falls smittenly
and faints back to the
earth, as if it had
made off with Insight
to where breath really
leads.

—

Poetry in my soul, like the asteroid belt. Paper lanterns. Feeling clairvoyantly non-spooky. My lips aren’t sealed, like how an ant eater's feels. The ants are poems. I was on a “midnight train to Georgia” for Halloween, which is peculiar because I live here. It feels like my left hand and arm was just placed into a meat-grinder. Lola-pop, the cat, just did “a number” on my flesh. Imagine jumping from summer directly into winter overnight, never to “fall” upon autumn. My uncle: “It is like watching a train-wreck about to happen, and there is absolutely nothing that you can do about it but sit back and dry your tears and wait for it to all happen before you.”

—blunt stillness while swallowing all glory with long ears, beating of drums in one’s mind, the tongue like a clay hut, to climb out of the stench-filled dark hole to make one’s way towards the noonday goldenlight, and then the bird lands on the window, obscures portions of the scene, like a newspaper clinging to a lightpole on a windy street and all can be heard through every house, the words, the struggle, the text that becomes splintered cut-up possibilities, and the guests are calling and their eyelids twitch unintentionally, nervous confusion, and all silence produces lessons, or lesions, and all of one’s voice afterwards becomes like soothing juicy fruits, and no one will know of you unless your tongue moves, save for those that move like you do; verses of no doubt, the end of my nose as red as a rosebud, cheeks in the cold are blushlike, and everyone is everybody, preoccupied and—

—

Earlier today, thought of the beautiful singing voices of flowers. The origin of the pearl necklace. Three color-receptors in the human eye. Insects sing in the crannies of rocks. A heart, larger than science; a mind, larger than thought, than imagination, the uncrossing of my eyes, like hysteria—a tribal freak-out—the sun’s “shine,” as if it needs explaining. Batting my eyes into handmade quilts, looking like a name that is “up in the lights” in the sky. Earth’s gravity gives honest answers. A personality that turns you off is like drinking sour milk that you didn’t realize was sour until it was too late. “taste my mouth in your ear” (Ginsberg)—What color is your “self”? What color are your cells? “Since of the charms, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what it has absorbed from the clichés of an art slowly assimilated, . . . an original artist begins by rejecting these clichés.”

O, the smell of verb-endings, the sequences of words and nouns. Ears, drooping into bell-bottoms when I hear certain jazz music.

—

Olson: “these days / whatever you have to say, / leave the roots on. / Let them dangle.”

—

I am going places without going.

TANGO WITH COWS: Image of “Haulhorsies” (Kruchenykh, 1913) from Getty slideshow of Explodity (1913)

This Oc . . . ean is spread out, like consciousness:

Portrait of Emile Zola, Manet

Imagine razors underneath the expressway, when a dilemma turns into success; then who howls? Blues goes away, but Howlin’ Wolf keeps a-howlin’, or what about the guitar, what about those fingers that strum, (k)not-minding the guitar; what about the 'Thelonius' or the 'Monk' or perhaps a grand piano that has suddenly been shattered, what then of the “grand”? What, then, of the disassemblages of the corrected errors that build up one’s narcissistic pleasurables?

Stop-motion connections. Someone had told me that their wall was corroding th’ oth’ evenin’, turning into powdery-dust, quote on quote. Imagined this evening: staring out at fisherman, or steering out the fish. Either way, I am glaring, raring back, examining people’s lack of concern with many things. Like Chia Pets. Kinescoping the video of my life, playing it back without a soundtrack. Mental-nudity. Nothing is as nude as a homeless person. I was just eaten by a Feed Aggre'gator'.

One’s with fragile attitudes, and when they squeal the loudest, this is when you know you have hit them where it hurts. There are certain melodies and desires that are for hire, and maybe while resting one’s spine made of chicken-wire on the floor while one’s tired, shadows're so gorgeous they become photographic-worcestershire. When walking around in public, I often hold my hands together because I do not know what to do with them, and putting them in my pockets gets rather worn-out. I could, say, put them over my ears, but then of course I would miss out on all of the soundscapes of that which is around. I could put them in rude spots, but that is not my style. I could put them to my chest where my heart used to be, but my hands may get lonely there. Maybe over my eyes. Certainly there will be a tiny voice to lead me around so that I do not bump into people or some metal fixture.

Photographing so close that you can see “thought.” Garbo did it without command of the english language. To be a hurricane, or a poet or artist or playwrite: what is the difference?

Everyday, a star is born. I am in the direction of a whisper . . . everywhere. “If you have a picture of someone in mind and then suddenly you see the person, no more evidence is necessary. (...) I’ll never recover from that first look.” “Conscience is a thousand witnesses.” (Hobbes)—No, no, no. Nunnunno. Thinking of the person that thinks that they have seen someone commit a murder, how would I react? Thinking of being the “heavyweight” feather of being “on the air" without being a DJ, and that really stands for “Divided Jumble.” Thoughts of what Beethoven would have done had he possessed a tape recorder. This thought existed in the 1950s. More on tape-recorders in a few moments. (ting-ting)

—

I am drinking an entity or an entiTEA.

—

A Scenario is “spending the night” in my mind till the morning-light, a rush to the head or a rush ahead towards the cold toilet seat during the winter, could stand on a podium and shout with fingertips what I want to be said, with cat

-shredded hands. What I want is someone to run to me without moving a muscle, like collecting the dots instead of connecting them.

What never appears is what is remembered as what could have been, and “experience” is mountanous: a shaky enterprise, a toppled landscape; this is before abjection, this is about the racket in the foreign room keeping you awake, like a person that stays on your mind, grinds rhythms into your chest, into unstitchable places, the beginning of a mad-rush, like a scream from the sun, an individual voice (or an image) that leaves aimless droppings everywhere you go.

—

Overheard a woman on the telephone: “Jackie . . . are you in my house?” (said in confused tone of voice)

—

Written a bit o’go: The faintest blush, the unexpected elegance of imprints (the sun has dimples), merely immovable expressions, distinguished beyond autumn, ours, ragweed sneezes, yellow blooms, side-of-the-road levitating and there were moments where I would became mute until your every smile made the earth audible, like a rushing noise that suddenly fills a mournful stillness. What am I but conjuring voices from memory, in my mind’s garden, digging up what was remembered? Every day slips by gradually becomes sown with what I have been accustomed to. I am filming us together, in my mind, all the time. I believe in our landscapes, which is more than enough, as if all of this time I have only imagined that you have existed within a flat echo.

“Acai Berry miracle exposed.” — “You have got to keep the horse happy.” —

Some kind of enfant terrible of contemporary music. Or portraiture in painting—:

Many years ago, it had become a kind of romantic metaphor expressed within a painter’s own vision, ex: Leonardo’s smiles, with their onslaughting-labyrinths of meaning; Titian’s tranquil, sumptuous princes; the tragical-dwarfs of Velazquez; the eroded faces of Rembrandt mined from the Amsterdam ghetto, along with the images of himself. At last, in the late 18th c., style called up procession of rococo courtesans, dressed in the latest fashion as Roman vestal virgins and Dianas of the hunt. It was that same rococo that drained the treasuries of the 3 Louises, bringing about revolutions and the modern world.

(...) For their part, many serious paintes after Delacroix gave up all hope of painting the kind of portrait likenesses they now critically labeled “photographic.” These artists tore their subjects and then reassembled the features. They speckled points of pure color over a field of flesh; they dragged their brushes through great clots of paint, then drew faces wobbly with terror or ecstasy, like faces in a dream.

The most fascinating modern portraits of this kind of private, groping study:

Manet’s model, her face blasted by sunlight; Cezanne’s wife; Van Gogh’s own wretched visage, a bandage over the mutilated ear. Picasso and Matisse tortured their likeness even further, into splinters of brown pigment or flat splotches of crimson and green.

In bold, I think of course of Francis Bacon and his mutilations; psychological-demolishings. In the 50s, the same could be said for the kind of “new music” that was aweing the existence of audio-experimenters:

The important point to notice is that any one phrase, or, for that matter, any one single sound can now be located precisely, and, because it is preserved on a piece of ribbon that can be held in the hand, it lends itself to all manner of manipulation. Suppose, for a moment, that we have recorded on the ribbon the sound of a single note that was played originally on the piano. It is the characteristic of the sound of the piano to start with the percussive effect of the hammer striking the string. The tone, or the note itself, then follows, and it dies away quite rapidly. It is because of these two characteristics, among others, that we recognize the sound of the piano and can distinguish it from that of other instruments. Now let us locate on the tape just the spot at which the percussive knock of the hammer is recorded, and, using a pair of scissors, cut it out and splice the tape together again, using a piece of cellophane tape. When we play that tape, we now have a sound that stemmed from the piano, but that could not be produced by a “live” pianist. This is what is meant when we say that the tape recorder has given the composer a means of manipulating or handling sounds in ways that could have been only imagined before.

And, to think, that now, with the click of a few mouses, these very things can be created within seconds, versus 50 years ago, when it took quite a lengthy period of time to create these particular “tricks” and “effects.” Imagine Schaeffer, imagine Stockhausen, imagine Varese, imagine Boulez, imagine Ussachevsky, or Stokowski and the like . . . what they would be doing today.

—

Jack Spicer: “This ocean, humiliating in its disguises / Tougher than anything. / No one listens to poetry. The ocean / Does not mean to be listened to.”

I listen too closely . . . and determine that I am the ocean.

—

“I’m 27.”
Oh, well you don’t look it.”

—

Albert [Be]CAM[e]US.

—

Plunged into inversion. Cut. The ribbon has been spliced in half.

’ ’ ’ ’

RRaissnia, Traces

A kind of roaring Incroyable, Pensive:

Catholic(k)-damage’d head, tornadic brown, scrimmages of wildlife; the impenetrable way a stare from a stranger seems to energize one’s imagination. As if intimidation is expel’d via anger, via unhappiness, via attempts to overwhelm one with lack of response, or quick-word trinitrotoluene, or hmmphs and ughmphs and I think of Susan Howe: “It is fun to be hidden but horrible not to be found—the question is how to be isolated without being insulated.”

~

What Kamikazes would sing in their commercials: Wait til we get our brains on you.

~

We are all a hop, skip and a jump away, are we not, not that we are not, but I can feel my heartbeat in my mouth, or your heartbeat, like hearing a random conversation, within static, on a land phone. “I would hate to be the mic on this song.” Something in the air tonight, and to take it literally, this: “I am back ON THE AIR.” I would rather be a “byrd” than a “tambourine man.”

From somewhere:

"A mother in London recently described her ten-year old boy's reading behavior: “He'll be reading a (printed) book. He'll put the book down and go to the book's website. Then, he'll check what other readers are writing in the forums, and maybe leave a message himself, then return to the book. He'll put the book down again and google a query that's occurred to him.” I'd like to suggest that we change our description of reading to include the full range of these activities, not just time spent looking at the printed page."

When things go bad, things are always worse somewhere for someone else. Betcha by golly wow, I am where information existed before search engines. What is inside the mind’s cave but a visual poem corked inside of another visual poem inside of a bottomless bottom of bottles that need to be tossed into the imagination’s ocean, later to be found in the nervous gut.

Receiv’d (receiving) peculiar looks, primarily from random males, when learning that I could care less about football; this kind of shockgrimace, eyes opened wider, squinched foreheads, smirks, &c. -- as if my masculinity has suddenly perished, become completely lackluster, because I do not necessarily care for football. There are estrogen-mushrooms sprouting from my eyes, since I was born. Since I was born, fatherless I’ve been since I’ve “been.”

~

ee cummings: “all which isn’t singing is mere talking / and all talking’s talking to oneself / (whether that oneself be sought or seeking / master or disciple sheep or wolf)”

~

This, intriguing spectacle, from JACOB COW THE PIRATE, OR IF WORDS ARE SIGNS by Jean Paulhan:

Jacob Cow, the pirate.

MacOrlan used to tell how having fallen into the hands of Cow, with his sailors and negroes, the pirate made them stand in line on deck. Then he passed from one to the other:
-- What's your name?
-- Dick Smith, from Chicago.
-- Good. Throw him overboard.
They threw Dick Smith overboard. When it was MacOrlan's turn:
-- My name's Cow, he said.
Here, so great was the terror this name inspired, that Jacob Cow himself hastily made for his pirate ship, had his sails unfurled and vanished.
We use words as if Jacob Cow were to flee on each occasion. There are also prohibited words, those that refer to devils and dangerous animals: the French word for weasel (belette from beau) is now a compliment, the original word having become lost. When old maladies re-appear, it is under the guise of new words: some years ago the censorship forbade us to talk of the pest. And young girls with whom one speaks for the first time, refuse to reveal their names (fearing thus to give us some power over them). "I had never been in the doldrums, says Alcidius, before knowing the word." A strange demand, indeed, each moment maintained; we must believe we could no longer bear to speak, if words stoppped for an instant being signs for us, such perfect signs that we are bound to confuse them with the things themselves.
-- But in reality, Cow does not flee. Béril does not let himself be seduced by the rhyme, any more than by the sugar ad: "They are trying to bribe us," he thinks.
Without a doubt; and the reflection of Marcus Auerelius is not such as to allow us to easily refute it. The pun has little standing. By reason of which we would remark that the cases in which we thought we were going to take this confusion of words with things red-handed, were also undoubtedly those where the confusion already threatened ruin: as it its defect alone, and its cleavage, already held our attention.
Our demands, too, in proportion to this defect, will take on a new aspect.

& then:

Poets' defect.

Some genius may separate us from the poet just as time has separated us from ancient latin, or space from the Kikouyou: it would be a delicate task to attempt to analyze too exactly the steps towards this separation. An inventor of language, our poet is doubtless no comparable from every angle to the child, or to the man who tries to speak a foreign language. But at least he is quite as little understood, and for the same reasons.

~

“I have come to ask myself if words are not the thing / least intended for” -- The P Botzarro op. VIII B 225

~

The other orange-pale afternoon, I saw a rather Jane Eyre-lookalikeish white-skinned girl, but nothing of serious paleness, but of which with beautiful porcelain flesh, who had dark brown hair up in a bun (black from a distance, until she turned her head, noticed differently). There was a roaring moment (and this should be thought as silent) when she was staring out of the restaurant window: partial-head turn, wide-eyed, with enormous blue eyes that were beaming on seemingly one object (of which I did not look to see what the possibles could have been, but was more focused on her composition and this unbelievably-hollow-y scene) -- the kind of gazing one does when pondering within a kind of enriched, distant thought. Her lips were eloquently unparted and her face was blank with a motionless-gaze for what seemed like hours, but was only a few moments (perhaps thirty seconds). She resembled certain “classic” women that were painted in the 17th century. I regretted not having my camera. O, I still do.

From The second part, section 1 of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:

. . . and I finde they agree with my stomach as well as theirs; I could digest a Sallad gathered in a Church-yard, as well as in a Garden. I cannot start at the presence of a Serpent, Scorpion, Lizard, or Salamander; at the sight of a Toad, or Viper, I finde in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them. I feele not in my selfe those common antipathies that I can discover in others: Those nationall repugnances doe not touch me, nor doe I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch; but where I finde their actions in ballance with my Countrey-mens, I honour, love, and embrace them in the same degree; I was borne in the eighth Climate, but seeme for to bee framed, and constellated unto all; I am no Plant that will not prosper out of a Garden. All places, all ayres make unto me one Country; I am in England, every where, and under any meridian; I have beene shipwrackt, yet am not enemy with the sea or winds; I can study, play, or sleepe in a tempest.

Pop! Bam! Crash! Kaboom! Old-school Batman and Robin thoughts. Oh, and, from the above gorgeous text: “I could digest a Sallad gathered in a Church-yard, as well as in a Garden” thrills me to the end, without an end, rather. Something tacit. The vice-versa in my own heart shines as this, but who will, or would, ever know? Explanation is like disproportionate numbers; failing Mathematics, errors in numbers, in speech, in inexplicitness.

Neoclassical music, avant-garde silent ballets and ambient electronic noise. Philip Jeck’s Vinyl Coda III.

~

I recall the spooky looks of men never disappearing in places where I had been treated like a snarling hog. The beauty of catastrophe can no longer be dataless, as if it ever was, and the teeth of the Great White pierce the silvery-finned fish-frustration. Let me id

-olize my whereabouts, the pebbles of the softest riverbottom, for my heart was not created to be the torching trashcan flame that it has been, great vigor, bowling

-alley-grit. I feel dandy yet thinking of where the grumpy general public can slur their tongues towards, in the cave

-rn, in a 15th century solitary cell, the king’s orders to flirt with their eventual nod to give them the boot, or to kill with kindness. I thought: Let’s make them all poets! In

-stead. Instead, I think of how beautiful her eyes were, this girl I once knew. These eyes of hers, like swimming pools in the winter.

~

If I had a pet rabbit, I would name it Dagnabbit.

~

Infinitesimal insect on the monitor. This is more than enough.

Chris Burden

Engaged through language, even if wordless:

The Poet, or Half Past Three by Marc Chagall

The other day, at one particular hour, saturated in-between, I had felt overwhelmed, but also felt rather collected and calm (the 2 c’s in this case), like Lewis Hine’s Waiting at the Clinic, Hull House Neighborhood—torn between many things, many subjects (two, to be exact, but who’s counting?) and wishing that I could have connected the pieces together, like some broken Rubik’s cube, scattered about on the ground, but that would have been far too simple. Given my ambivalence (something like Walter Benjamin, perhaps) things had blended together over such time, even when the overhead tracklist that was playing on an apparent loop (which I have since discovered is indeed true). My heart, like Max Richter’s “Old Song.” Something of new debris, each day.

There are times when I have my head against cold metal framework; the smell of cedar in the air, in a dimly-lit backroom, with certain pointy spots where one must be quite careful. In the back of the building, on the outside, there are small pine trees gathered thinly together (balding?) on a slanted hillscape. The way the light must shine on them is perhaps like stars and constellations, creating new presentations from nature to be exposed to (perhaps for me alone; at least in my tranquil and meditative atmosphere). I am thinking of photographing them, perhaps with film, shooting with film, hoping for light-leaks.

I feel thoughts leaking this day, waterfalls from the mind, overthinking like the Pink Panther; not as mysterious, or perhaps so when I am told that I am “unreachable” and “unattainable” and “overwhelming” (flattery, oh)—who knows which banana-peel will be the most slippery? Spoke with a woman in her late-50s about being an introvert and we connected well (one of my “floaters” just made my jump). After the conversation she said, “I know that you’ll make a great husband.” (flattery, oh).

I have graduated from gravitating.

3 year-old girl named Boston giving me an evil “look”—squinched forehead, observant eye! Later, I laughed, snickered at her poignance. She then looked up at me and said curiously, “What?”

Today, fleet-footed, sail away like Enya-clouds, Enya-waves. A little girl kept asking her mother: “Mommy, where’s daddy from? (she said it at least seven or eight times, but the mother wouldn’t answer, almost embarrassed, or perhaps wanting to keep where he was born a secret, or “private.” She then said, “you’re something else today!”—“exactly what, I wonder?” crossed my mind)

Often overwhelmed, I am, by lack of help—lack of action—grins and grunts-galore. Mouth not moving, words come out snapping, dynamite from certain one’s tongues, popping like bubblewrap-sounds, but perhaps powerful explosives wrapped within small constraints. Anger in people’s eyes, sadness within people’s lack of kindness. Oh, if they only knew what my heart speaks, but selfishness is a thin razorblade cutting slowly, delicately; a slow velocity, perhaps, but with a kind of demolition-force. We are all barcoded, numbered like the days, culturally-hungry like the waves. Saturday backwash; people and their vomit-y attitudes. “What kind of animal are you?” Complaints of things being “downsized.”

Earlier, saw two women are on each side of an elderly man holding his hand, walking with him around the cul-de-sac. Feeling so arrested by such unmasked “youth” where age, as a youngster, can be constructed through visuals. I dislike “Ageist Language.”

The history of eternity aches us, aches the cusp of the larvae of the future, and my fingers touch the keys of malfunctioning typewriters as if language itself, being an entity all its own, could usurp the words right from my mind and out through the tips of my fingers, and I am in favor of being kissed by sunlight, no history is as warm, no history could swallow me in its banks; I am constantly ripening like a mudslide giving certain portions of the earth a taste of its own gooey medicine. Tomorrow never leaves. The leaves die in a future tomorrow, today the air is of that future, the leaves have browned in their leisure, or no, not in their leisure, and

I mean to say that there have been instances where I have felt as if I could have been cuddled in the arms of a sweet soul, but there have been instances where another has remained crumbled in their fear, as I had crumbled in the way that I had been steered with different gears, like how a poem must die when it has no place to go, and I could be held like the black cat that John Cage is holding in the photograph that I am looking at. I have often thought, Where is the unremarkable silverlining that certain people choose to subtly shape into me, weaving into my imagination, stirring verociously into my heart? One’s monumental-hopes, one’s breathtaking promises having often made me feel as worthwhile as a wolf in a crowded forest of Little Red Riding Hoods; a world erupting into red, or like a clumsy child on a swingset, swinging too high. I have thought: I am David Copperfield-ing all over this geography without you, dearest. This means that I am not walking carefully. This also means that I could be stepping on the Jurassic shells of our sleeping memory.

Rigid paradigm. Paradise frigid. My plate awaits in the refridgerator. Interesting to note a bit of text via Avital Ronell’s book Stupidity:

Refusal, especially of theory and thinking, takes on many forms, visceral, fantastic, and linguistic. The first two are easily traced as "refusal" manifests itself as "strong reaction," either in tossing or in the fantasy of tossing a theory book or colleague out of a window--the complement to Wittgenstein's "poker." The third form of refusal is much more difficult to locate since it appears or seems to appear as something not there or not understood or not gotten. These "refusals" are "performative contradictions" in speech. Not understanding or, too simply, stupidity follows in this direction insofar as it expresses itself by its incapacity to properly express itself linguistically. "Duh," "er," "um," are instances of this refusal, a refusal of meaning. But is it altogether wrong to refuse meaning? Let's examine "duh." "Duh." It is generally understood to be an extra or para-linguistic symptom of discourse's pause or failure—something akin to Aristotle's "mere voice" or an animal phone. It is not a word per se since it references the "unavailability" of discourse proper, but it is the title of a book, a website, and, now, included in an academic essay, perhaps not the first. "Duh" evokes presence through a feeling of absence, marking that which is unavailable to discourse or that which is obvious. For example, "'Duh' evokes presence through a feeling of absence, marking that which is unavailable to discourse or that which is obvious, duh (or 'no duh')." Since "duh" or even "no duh" is an extra or para-linguistic phenomenon expressing or performing an unavailability of or obviousness within discourse, it has theoretical consequences and, more precisely, consequences for the future of theory. "Duh," as a pause or failure or refusal, has been and remains the response to theory. This is easily testable by saying "différance" in a departmental meeting. The testable "duh" transforms into the detestable "duh" as the pause or failure turns to "duh" as the expression or performance of the obvious--"duh (or duuuh), that's theory," a revving up or a coming to realization of some awareness, however minimal or previously unavailable discourse. "Duh" is not all bad, however. "Duh" has a significant place in the discursive practices surrounding academic, sometimes intellectual, discourse. "Duh" is evocative, calling up, as it were, stupidity's rich tradition and within this tradition "duh" stands the ground of refusal. Refusing "duh" means resisting stupidity and its double, a "refusing duh," conjures up a break between discourse and world. This duality of "duh," the evocation of stupidity and its refusal, also elicits a response from knowing, stupidity's reciprocal and necessary condition.

“No duh.” Ugh, or “uh.” Cat just made her presence known, entered the door, licking lips. Jon Schmidt’s “Morning Light” just finished entrancing me. Now, Myleene Klass. Spoke with an elderly couple from Orange County, California that are fans of Groucho Marx and Red Skelton. The wife said, “When we were living in California, we once went by Red Skelton’s house. He had many cars, oh, he loved cars. He had them everywhere; garages full of them! Well, as typically known, most celebrity homes are closed-in with large walls and gates, but Red Skelton’s house wasn’t so, and we parked, got out and walked up towards the house and began taking pictures. Suddenly the maid came out of the house and began screaming to us, 'No pictures! No pictures!' and then she asked us what we were doing there, and we said that we were just fans that wanted a few pictures. The maid then calmed down a bit and said, 'Oh, take my picture then!'”

I wish you could see the glow of the sunlight through the trees at this moment. “The fern in the corner / is one part of this feeling.” Thomas Carlyle: “It is all a Tree.” And I say, “calling all trees, calling all trees!”

Ring-ring. Go “figure.”

A Scene from my favorite Adventures of Superman episode
titled, Lady in Black (1954)

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Musical Oblongata --

Painting by Ilya Repin

The surface of the earth is musical; I noticed this earlier when a painterly woman that was sitting on a bench wearing red high heels looked back at me, or maybe that was my beating heart that erupted into the surface of the earth—a tiny earthquake. I will keep telling myself this, keep shaking hands with miracles. Ponderings: “Chess is a game of understanding, and not of memory.” Brings to mind “STOP RACKING YOUR BRAINS // nobody reads poetry nowadays // it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad” (Nicanor Parra). This is almost as silly (a most delicately-horrible term to use in this case, perhaps) as Hitler’s madness in thinking that he was a Christian. There is a delay in our heroic contendors, Andante by Shostakovich, anti-monumental sounds. Today, could’ve danced with Yogini, pressed into the wool of my sweater, tethered into “excuse me, like to dance?”-contemplation. Freeze Frame. “Potential” freezes. Out of sight, your love (“whom do you speak of?” , never to return to the surface. My pea

-ce, hints of relics, “I’d like to touch it first.” Thumb and index fingers together, afterwards. Walking through a hallway, the light indicated surveillance equipment. Some days I feel like I am shrinking to the size of a keyhole. Thinking of many-colored centuries. My camera laughed at me today. It said: “I would like to become what I was created to do, but my DNA is in knots. Why do you grin like that?”

While discussing my photographic experimentation to V. a few weeks ago, she listened intently, but my theatrical-tongue is always in knots whenever I speak to people, uncertain if they actually care to know, or if they are merely humoring me, and maybe this is mental-math for over-observation, but she sd, “Derrick, have you ever thought of modeling?” Moi: “Oh, please! . . . I hope you are just humoring me. The only modeling I do is with claythings and Play-doh and whatever else I can bend.”

Found this: “You can cut the bread off their sandwich, write critical appreciations and walk their mother’s dog and they’re still gonna treat you like “the hired help.” ” Not sure where. It’s like going through battle and the only thing left is an axe-handle. (Yi-Fu Tuan: “Strange to think that the question “Who am I?” can be answered by a landscape.” )

The word for echo is Pockadunkquaywayle. O, pitter-patter!—

(“[4] It was unusual for the woods to be so distant from the shore, and there was quite an echo from them, but when I was shouting in order to awake it, the Indian reminded me that I should scare the moose, which he was looking out for, and which we all wanted to see. The word for echo was Pockadunkquaywayle.” [from The Maine Woods, by Henry Thoreau, 1864])

There is a “poofy” bush somewhere out there that looks like a damaged sandwich. I met a girl named Abby the other day at Starbucks. We spoke of many things. She has been searching for a trench coat. She said: “I’ve been looking for a trench coat. Something extremely obnoxious.”

A thought arose last night: Vegetarians have beef with beef.

Night, oh, covers me, seemingly circumvently.

Claude Cahun, Photography:

Two Newer Photos, Two Older Photos:

B}a}c}k}b}o}n}e:

Picasso, Bust (1970) [This, yes, how I feel sometimes.]

I feel as though I could slip through the cracks of people as they look at me looking at them walking by. The bottom of dirty feet, like oily seas. How would I look in the fog? Something whispering: Come and find out.

(from?) The Kφpfe (a bit mysterious to me, but nonetheless, very interesting):

The saving effect of writing always resides in the secret of language . . . In eliminating the unutterable of language, in making it pure like a crystal, one obtains a truly neuter and sober style of writing . . . This style and writing, neuter and at the same time highly political, aim to lead to what is refused to speech . . . The intense orientation of speech in the nucleus of the most profound silence results alone in the effect.

Jealousy is such a vile, rotten thing. Ruins so many things. Including the mind. It does not take much to be happy for someone. “Puff of Word” (Nobukazu Takemura) telling me all that I need to know. Very Verily, Verily-very, some days Oh I feel like an ornament. I find it remarkable, or not (remarkably-sad?), that people “experiment” with “friendliness.” It could be compared to portable rain.

Experimental friendliness? Children do not perform these feats, or attempt to do so. The secret of true, genuine lovablity exists within the combined virtues derived from this mutual pattern of exchange. Every human being retains a childlike core in our natures. We are consistently searching for substitutes to replace the good parents of our infancy in our dealings with other human beings throughout our lives. (reminds me of “The man seemed young”). We will find these substitutes in many different entities, including employers, associates (those that help provide us with our “livelihood”); in a wife or husband who gives us love, comfort and protection; in heroic leaders who inspire us with courage and faith (at least, some of them). And, then, we find them in patient teachers and in companionable (and genuinely caring) friendships; those ones that lift us out of ignorance and loneliness through their sympathetic understanding of our needs (or when there is something in the air, blacker than Daffy Duck!).

In knots. Knotted. In knots. (Q: So there’s no knot equivalent of negative numbers? A: No, there’s not. But it’s more accurate to think in terms of reciprocals: If you take the number 2, then its reciprocal is 1/2, and if you multiply 2 and 1/2 together, you get 1. The knot equivalent of 1 is the trivial knot, or what is also called the “unknot.” But you can never cancel out any knot and get back to the unknot by adding it to another knot. There is no such thing as knot reciprocals.)

I remember the tears in her eyes; the kind that wouldn’t fall, just filled and filled until the eyes were completely pooled. I can often better understand the meaning of a stare.

The colassal jungle of a stare, like Holbein. Trading places with the surf.

Thomas Cromwell Holbein, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532-33

Photographs by Sophie Calle

Trusty Wiki: “Sophie Calle (born 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle’s work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.”

More Here, Here, Here.

Strolls: the bones of my arms, waving, in the sunlight:

Such a glorious day. Bought film, took a stroll through the forest, felt like an eloquent phantom amidst the sunlight, bedecked by the endless charms of nature. Two yellow butterflies followed me around the entire time (as I predicted would occur). While in the forest, came across an enormous mushroom, lying on its side, was catching the light in a glimmer of gold; so many words polishing my esophagus.

Yesterday, spoke with a 60-year old-ish woman. In the late sixtees, she said that she once stood on a street corner looking at all of the hippies parading around. I asked if she were a hippy, and she said (laughing), “I was too busy having babies!” She said, “I stood there, thinking, My goodness, what in THE WORLD is going on?! But then, about ten years later, I was yoohoo’ing all over the place, just like one of them!”

Breezy-blowing wind through trees, through the window with which comprehension increases. Feeling Oscar “Wilde” and wowed today. I sometimes feel the urge to apologize to certain people for who I am, for what I am interested in, and it is like the essence of something contained within itself, and the only way to find out what it is is by becoming what it isn’t, therefore contradicting its contradictions and finding out what is sacred and less commonplace. A revolt in a whisper.

In my “spam email” inbox, the sponsored links are providing me with Spam recipe links.

Squeezed like a squid.

(Note to self: The texture of this day, like flaunting fruit towards a hungry mouth.) Cannot remember who, but this flips me: “Sometimes I misread people’s behavior if I’m having a bad day or feeling vulnerable and then later am gratified to find my vision was distorted or skewed.”

Back to my stroll: Sometimes my careless attempts have glimpses of truth intertwined in them in a way that makes photography seem like some “abominable satisfaction,” and some would see it selfish to find that one wants to “invent” the future, but the future is already existing; we are just consistently creeping towards it, second by second (some people, as I have noticed, live in inappreciable moments of time) with nary underbrushes of thought (like how, when venturing about the HOT October 8th road with my camera earlier this afternoon, I found myself commanding the attention of everything surrounding me, in ways that perhaps would have not been the case were it not for my Object d’art. It is like certain listening skills, certain lacks and gains, and the eyes “search out” something to photograph; intense observation, like Christopher Colombus in his prime, the “fat” of the land like a goldmine (gold-mind) to those explorers)—and I have a love-affair with nature each day, like some John Keats and Fanny Brawne sunshine (Keats to Brawne: “My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet - You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist: and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more - the pain would be too great - My Love is selfish - I cannot breathe without you.”—and I, Derrick Tyson [Patty once said to me in late 2007: “You should start using D.H. Tyson like D.H. Lawrence” . . . how flatteringly-embarrassing, I thought—I think of our emails, how lengthy and divine they often were, how expressively-poetic, how she printed them all out, had our stacked-correspondence in one enormous box—wondering what became of it, if she still has it all]) cannot breathe without nature (poetically, and lyrically and, well . . . literally).

Truth is, I have stop being so lazy with art, but “moods” are like moon-phases; I feel gagged on questionings and objectivism, but in a serene way; nothing violent. Felicia said to me after I told her that I am happy and content with my life: “How do you know that you are this way?” I said: “I just know. One just knows.” She said: “But, if you have never known the differences with sharing happiness with someone, how do you know that you are fully happy?” and I responded: “I have known the differences, which is the reason why, and how, I know. I know what to expect, what not to expect . . .”

I tend to stay silent for the most part—murmuring to myself, almost forcefully—always standing transfixed.

Back to photography: Recently, I am loving nature photography (why does that sound so . . . strange to say?). “Nature photography”—what is the nature of that phrase? Sounds so barbarious in a way, and I thought, “Every picture that I take is . . . a self-portrait. It has to be.” I ponder to-and-fro, restlessly, at times, the unavoidable noise in my mind clankering around, giving me speech-candy to taste on. Why should I apologize for my ways? This would be absurd. I was perhaps mentally-heavier as a child. Photography is dangerous in the right proportions—a wide semi-circle, a gap here and there, an empty space (fill-in-the-blank). Helps to make good friends, good conversations, but I cannot conceal what I don’t have, like some unbearable weight oppressed to one’s breast—a glance back in the dusk of day, before disappearing completely.

Revolving words. Thoughts. It is time to eat! (I’m staggering forward).

Sun Yat Sen Garden

THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF TRADE:

The Entomologist

Hattier

Laboureur

Fireworks Tradesman

Larmessier Habit de Meunier

A list of flops and flips, daily thoughts, other things

By Lucy Skaer

Today, had an ear-conversation w/ a deaf fellow; initial glances, outer words spoken, he clung to himself, thinking that he was merely ignoring me, until I learned of his disability in which he let me know by slightly-shouting and pointing at his ear. Moments such as this make me feel more appreciative with a kind of overwhelming industrial power, feeling more blessed than ever. My mind keeps rushing around all over the place like angry Christmas shoppers. Watched a group of women speaking in a foreign language—babies squealing like little piglets (one of them dressed in pink)—feeling so foreign like Alvin Curran’s “Wonder Bread”—feeling so foreign in certain places (she once said to me: “It is like we’re foreigners in this city”—we’d been in a certain city, unknown and wide-eyed with comprehension in our highest interest).

A particular man (seemingly unhappy; looks as if he probably snores) told me about his problems, how his son passed away—the german shepherd would stay in his room, would inform his son of when the alarm would go off for time to arise, but one morning the alarm went off, the dog was even suspicious this day, and his son never arose. He said, “I thought he may have just did not get up—being lazy—but he never did. I went upstairs, turned him over, his face had already turned blue.” His wife, passed away not long ago, as well, and he said, “I don’t know why, either. It’s crazy. Certain people in the hospital are NUTS, man; I think there is a cult going on in there. I knew someone that knew of certain nurses that would laugh at the way people were dying.” He went on, “To this day, I don’t know how she died. I didn’t have an autopsy done on her.” He had just had an operation, had been out of work for four months, had three to go, but they want him to come in to work now. “The ends of my fingers are really numb...” Later, he said, “...and I just had my truck fixed up, and now I’m looking for pots and pans, because my old ones are worn out. Everything is so cheap these days, and isn’t worth a crap. I hate glass tops on my pots and pans; they have to be metal.” The only thing left is he and his dog. He was grumpy, unhappy, foul-mouthed, and had a stick-it-to-you type of attitude, which, I thought, may be the primary reason for all of the problems and disappointments. I tend to always hold my tongue in these instances and just listen . . . and just, glisten. Grumbling, unhappy people? Be kind to them.

Something about the seashore, as a child, was like a “seasnore.” Anyhow, thoughts from work: this October-warmth feels like a tease; soon the freeze will chapmark every ground—one’s tongue, like a weapon, shall never prosper. Attitudes-aplenty around every surrounding ground, like gulping on rotten things, pulp of life unappreciated, so tragic, so dewy and “fooey”—chewy loosened teeth, corroded buildings taunt—Lesley once sent me photographs of the wounds on her legs—“I think of you in all types of weather,” she says, and last night the thunder woke me up with a dash, thoughts like “need to unplug the juice to the computer”—never got up, drifted dreamily, unremembered—woke up in a pool of language.

I stick to myself, taking that literally, as if my body were velcro on one side—a kind of yin and yang, or not really. A curious trail of something positioning itself around me?

People putting their trust in planets is silly, as if planets will somehow have some cosmic effect on one’s energy and life. It’s like trying to set in screws and wheels towards something that is unapplicable.

Sarah Mclachlan’s music depresses me, not to mention people’s toilet-mouths, the kind that go “kerplunk” and needing “fixing.” Maybe,

just maybe, I should have been a clock builder, making time go slower (reminding me of a particular “The Prisoner” episode, Patrick McGoohan-style). Imagining living outside of time, like God (soon to come).

Making “no bones about it.” Making muscles be about “it.” A wireless fantasy, like some Ussachevsky composition. Ah, then there is Luc Ferrari. Musique concrete delights. He once described his work as being like “electroacoustic nature photographs.” Ooo. I often thought, often pondered, thinking and wishing how I could've seen Arthur Rubenstein play Chopin. Time, time, it never, never settles, it never settles but it constantly changes, re-arranges, and projects itself all around like dust particles. I realized not long ago that the reason why I love avant-garde/concrete music so in-depthly is because it represents, for the most part, what is going on in my mind.

I chew gum when I am nervous. I also shake my right leg uncontrollably if I am sitting down while nervous. “Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.” Guy Debord (was bored?).

Robin sd: “You know, you remind me of my son’s friend." I sd: “Do I?” She sd: “Y-yeah, you, you do, and I know that I have told you this before, but you totally do.” I sd: “Ah, well that’s okay...” She sd: “You look like one of those hip ... hipster-type guys.” I laughed, sd: “Do I? In what way?" She sd: “Oh, you just do ... my son’s friend is kind of the same way. The glasses, everything.”

When I was 13, I was really into ninjas, and one year dressed up as one for Halloween (but I ran from people—My ninja-ness was like a soaking rag). Some people do not understand poets because poetry does not exist inside of them. It tries to enter into them, but it just exits, flees quickly. It has to be “wanted.” Recently ran across (or it ran to me?) Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwan. This, from 1987 from Afterwards, titled “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear”:

Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.

You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.

You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don't care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have every cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
Is is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.

How delightful.

The U.S. dollar isn't so “almighty” anymore. Congress cannot stop the death of the American dollar because congress doesn’t control its destiny. “Every peregrine has a toothlike projection on each side of its upper mandible that enables it to dislocate the vertebrae at the base of its victim’s cranium.” This, like a perfected-metaphor for our government; certain politicians are like frollicky peregrines.

No apparent notice in such tsk-tsking!

Sleepy. Looked in the mirror earlier, noticed that my head looks like Sinead O’Connor’s. “Nothing Compares” (or compared, in this case) to this evening’s light. I will most likely repeat this tomorrow.

(found): N40570321072

Thoughts, like Bombs

He meant: “H” as in “Hello” (No “Hello” Bombs)

Today, the mist of rain began with cold-flux of wind, arising from the “great white north”; ice-spots collide in my blood, dancing birds dance no longer, hide in their nests, the seasons are like shifting sands, but they linger, lasting throughout the elongated days; white and brown (collect ideas, never frail, like loosened leaves), my elbows ache when I bend to write about the oncoming winter, but the swift, delicate, pillowy-heart of mine sighs with the deepest relief as winter approaches calmly to collect me up into its luxurio

-us air. “Us air.” We are the air. Walking lungs, walking in gaping spaces. O such relief from warmth (crystal clear skies and the sunshine feels “treated” somehow, with change like a bouquet of spice dancing upon our skin. Each day passes, winter greeting dinnerware of clouds and windsongs. My fingers pinken, as do my ears, my cheeks, my my, my, my. Such sweet validity. The end-of-day sunset, like damask stripes of coordinating patterns. I sd: “You think I’m weird, don’t you?” and Ashley A. sd (with her wonderful Californian accent):

“No, I don’t think you’re weird. You’re just different.” Feeling overly-modest, always. At work, thought of cyborg technology, thought of how knowledge “grows” like biology if one keeps an open-mind, if one listens. I have learned that listening to someone that is much older can really deepen the canyons of the mind. Anyhow, if I had a nickel for every rude look I have received from someone, I would be rolling in mountains of mula, or mula-meadows, something like a hulahoop, my veins flow quicker when the ticker of the clock gets nearer to the “freedom” destination. Dry throat and a tongue as stale

as hour-chewed bubblegum (the color pink! again! come to mind). I feel surrounded by women in the nursing field, raised within estrogen, with our without it, and when I think of poetry, I think of women, like how felines always remind me of females (even male cats are feminine-like). Winter is boiling autumn in its fiesty pot. An old man was staring at me today in Applebee’s. I saw another man at the bar frictionize his hands together before grabbing a hold of his enormously-large glass of foaming beer. I tend to . . . feel . . . in-between . . . emotions this day;

expectations and hopes that tend to exceed my own barriers, but of which clngs to my heart and mind (not like some offthewall love story, like Keats or Chopin-like love, but a kind of exploding of the solar-plexus; my brain sitting atop an enormous “stake” as Vlad The Impaler snickers from below while eating his supper), but thinking of how blessed I am to be so top-sided at times; perhaps unintentionally lopsided. My heart flutters for my dear Lord, flooded smorgasbord, flurry of boredom at work, or lackthereof. And then comes

THE ECHO

O

O

o

o

.

John Wieners: “When the echo falls / one will dismiss it. / When it calls again, / one will miss / it, falling in love with the present, / while one is able of it. / When the shadows enlarge, will one / enter it, or stay where / he is now. What will one do, how” . . . The mind, often like an echo, is in a state of trepidation from the slightest noise (like the slamming of a cabinent or a door), and skin, what is flesh, what is skin? What is it but odd typeset, long sequences of earthly-dust, eruptions of knuckles and fingertips . . . smaller patches of “showy” vesicles “containing a white serum, burning” . . . burning worse than anti-illuminati symbolism; something of a libido. The Gaping Mind. The soiled roots are expanding.

The Army National Guard: “We can read your minds.” (Spam-mail).

“Abandoning bravery.”

Received Flickrmail today. He sd: “I like your work because it Speaks. I don’t like your work because of what it is saying.” Hm, so if what the images are saying creates dislikes, then what are the images speaking that creates likeness? The images expel speaking, but they are saying two different things to him, I suppose. Well, as long as they do not sound like Pee Wee Herman playing in a Fun House, then all is a warm fireplace.

I used to think that it was I that made the ocean blue, but it was all because of you. I don’t need light for sight, because I have eyes within. An appendage of the fantastic. The waves take each breath we take, hides them in oysters. This, the true manifestion of pearls. “...and they say everybody steals somebody’s heart away.” This is quite true, except that sometimes they only take a small portion, while leaving the remains gasping in solitude and bafflement.

“If I were a swan / I’d be gone”

The man who really was Jekyll and Hyde --

DOUBLE TROUBLE!: Deacon Brodie with the
dice and cards that lead to his downfall

William Brodie was a well-respected man in Edinburg in the mid-18 c., and he shone as a model of “civil sobriety” in a straitlaced-type city. He was the son of a prosperous cabin-maker and was a deacon of the masons’ guild, as well as a city councillor (featherless fellow, perhaps, but well-gestured, distinguished and meant a great deal to the “big wigs” in the area). However, Mr. Brodie was also the model of one of English literature’s most horrifying characters, Robert Louis Stevenson’s schizophrenic scientic, Dr. Jekyll. For Brodie, like the gentle doctor, had a secret life behind his mask of virtue. By day, he was a businessman, but by the time the night-gulp crushed itself into the aura like stepping on dark-purple grapes, he was a mighty gambler (perhaps irritably?) and a vicious thief (very irritably). Bizarrely-enough, these “self-involved” secrets were unknown by anyone, not even known by his two mistresses (who had given birth to his five children). In fact, they did not even know about each other (not exactly Dostoievskyan!).

William Brodie was 27 years old when he turned to crime. In August of 1768 he made copies of the keys to a city bank and robbed it of 800 pounds (about $4,000). But as he went on to burgle scores of buildings over the following 18 years, no hint of suspicion from anyone ever fell upon him.

__________________

Getaway and Capture
__________________

The beginning of the end, however, came in 1786, when he joined forces with three petty thieves. Together, this thieving-conglomeration planned Brodie’s most daring “raid.” The head of the Scottish Customs and Excise. The gang was surprised by an employee, and even though Brodie escaped the chaos, one of the thieves, John Brown, turned king’s evidence to escape deportation for other crimes he had committed in England.

Brodie fled to Amsterdam, hoping to escape to America. But on the eve of his departure, the police caught up with him. Brodie was extradited and put on trial in Edinburgh. The evidence was damning; the police found the proof of his double identity: false keys, pistols, and a burglar’s black suit (reminding me of a particular Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode). Brodie was condemned to death, but on the night before his execution, he wired his clothes all MacGyver-like from neck-to-ankle to lessen the jerk of the rope and lodged a silver tube in his throat to cheat the noose. Unfortunately for him, neither trick worked. On October 1, 1788, he died on the Edinburgh gallows.

Nearly a century later, R.L. Stevenson and William Henley wrote a play based on Brodie’s exploits, which was titled Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life. The play was first produced at the Prince’s Theatre in London in 1884. In the play, the burglar explains the freedom he finds in his nocturnal life of crime. Two years later, Stevenson turned the theme into The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which of course was his memorable short story about the darker side of mankind. In the story, Dr. Jekyll discovers, through experiments with a drug (and in the book, Stevenson provided the concoction [recipe] for what he was drinking), that “man is not truly one, but truly two,” and describes how “I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man.” He goes on to explain the fascination with the experiment:

If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

In this way, Stevenson explained the way in which the evil inherent in man took its hold on the good Deacon Brodie.

Deacon Brodie’s Tavern, Edinburgh

The Curious Cures of Dr. Graham

Natural public speaker: Dr. James Graham lecturing
from a podium, to a crowd of ladies and gentlemen.

In 1781, childless London couples were invited to cure their unfortunate state by spending a night together in the Celestial Bed (for fees up to £500). The proprieter of this remarkable device was Dr. John Graham, who was an Edinburgh, Scotland physician, who had created a fashionable cult of cures by magnetism and electricity.

His bizarre treatments became the rage of fashionable London, and he opened a Temple of Health in the Royal Terrace of the Adelphi. There, attended by Negro servants, he administered special baths, sat his gullible patients on “magnetic thrones,” or gave them mild shocks in an electric chair.

At the Temple of Health, his chief assistant was none other than the beautiful Emma Hart, who later became Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson’s mistress. Dressed in scanty robes, she entertained the patients as “The Rosy Goddess of Health.”

Of all of Graham’s equipment, the Celestial Bed was the most splendidly-gorgeous. An ornate couch standing on eight brass pillars, it owed its curative powers, he said in his advertisements, to “about 15 cwt of compound magnets . . . continually pouring forth in an everlasting circle.”

The treatment does not appear to have worked, for he was obliged to return to Edinburgh, where he was sent to prison as a lunatic.

Dr. James Graham’s “Celestial Bed”

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

Silver spear in the side of the fish, becomes a side dish.

Thelonious Monk, “Ruby, My Dear” plays.

She put my camera in her bag with her camera for a moment, and they became good friends. Camera, my dear. My dear, camera.

Xenakis’s “Bohor” (afterwards, thinking, I have GOT to find a way to hear this again: “To have great music we must commission it. To commission great music we must have great commissioners” also filling the sense [O! O’hara!]) is racketing me away; well, only in dazzling supplements. Also: “The collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as totality, is a new sonic event.”

My youth, renewed like the eagles (I had always pondered this verse (my uncle having told me the depthly-meaning years before, but having splayed with forgottenness, I had offered to remember many times)), and Sir Thomas Browne came to the rescue again: David saith, (Psalm 103. 5.) that his youth is renewed like the Eagles. Now the Eagles, as Saint Austin observes on that place, when with age the upper bill is so over-grown, that they cannot feed, they use by beating their Bill against a rock, to break off the excrescence, and so by feeding to recover their strength and youth again.

Youthful streets, sighing reliefs, and I ponder Newman and Woodward. An affair to remember? Really? Well, otay: “We were married finally - of all strange places - a hotel in Las Vegas which gave us the bridal suite, the wedding cake, and most of the wedding guests, some of whom I haven’t seen again since that day,” recalls Joanne. “When the preacher had finished the ceremony, instead of kissing one another, we surprised our best man by simply falling into one another’s arms with a sigh of relief.” (...) “Certainly we’re different,” says Joanne; “that’s what keeps a marriage alive, plus the fact that I adore him. Just that. But think how boring a marriage would be if we were the same.” Ah, Woodward; once an ingénue, a sea-she.

I realized yesterday that I say “I’m sorry” a lot, when in fact it is perhaps more like feeling sympathetic for situations that make me feel at a loss for words, or maybe more like attempting to make one feel at ease, comfortable. I feel compulsively-conjumbled at times, but in the best way possible. My heart changed places with my brain, but I still feel the same. My treasure is not of this world, in fields or vineyards, nor in markets or luxury stores. I will follow the road with thorn and barefeet, for at the end is a whirlwind of greater Becoming.

I have let go of the echo in my mind, because it is no longer accessible. The powerful trigger of nostalgic development manifests itself over time, in a way that shapes our imaginary ruins. Sentimental lament. Mental mint. What is ever authentic? The unrevealed? Does the spectator ever come to a resting point? Three-dimensional spaces are life. Why bother overwhelming oneself with questioning such beautiful etchings when they just need to be left alone? Such is the case with humanity. “Genre” of one’s tastes can be transgressed between rhythms and melodies. If only one would give “chance” to things, rather than quickly diminishing their “value” with notions and assumptions. I would like to be where things are only happening within my comfort level, like maybe playing both sides of the chess board, or sitting cross-legged in the kitchen floor when the cats are lapping water from their bowls. Mediterranean mouths.

Running for the hills, but joyously. (Nevermind the man below. Too much coffee juicing the senses.)

Teorema

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham

“(...) Cunningham’s work taught on how to practice a kind of selective inattention, necessitated by the competing and often irreconcilable claims being made on one’s sensorium. Often, it was impossible to “take it all in.” To make everything fit, to make it cohere: that way lay madness. Only a conspiracy theorist out of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 would even attempt it. Pynchon wrote about “the true paranoid, for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself.” And in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Pynchon would write about the other side of the perceptual coin, the state of “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” The alternative to both was solipsism: a crowding out, a turning inward, a refusal to confront complexity and simultaneity. The dandy, by contrast, is someone who pulls back without turning inward. To Moira Roth, the dandy’s “unshakable determination not to be moved” (or in her words, his “indifference”) is apolitical---or worse. But the jarring events of 1968 convinced me that the dandy’s detachment could become an essential ingredient of radical politics.

“Cunningham’s performances provided a special place, a “manipulation-free zone” in which you could begin to reclaim control over your own sensorium. Consider the relationship between movement and sound in a Cunningham dance. In order for the movement to remain independent of the sound, it was necessary for Cunningham’s dancers to perform a remarkable feat of selective concentration. (…) If some of Cunningham’s works were exercises in sensory overload, others were studies in silence. The sound scores for a number of dances were set at the very lowest threshold of auditory perception. Cage, for example, claimed he could never hear any of Gordon Mumma’s contribution to “Landrover” (1972).

Sensory overload and silence; bone crushing energy and perceptual clarity: the two complimentary poles of Cunningham performance in the late 1960s and early 1970s...”

Oswald Von Wolkenstein

I am uncertain as to why this blog has become like a Force Majeure; lacka-whatever-sical, and almost random spurts of journal-writing, but let me say, my halo has fallen over my eyes, and now it looks like Geordi La Forge’s prosthetic Visor. My camera has an inflammation on its trigger. I keep saying, “in due time, friend, in due time.” Permanent winking, like Wolkenstein.

Today, rain pours, licks the sores of the earth, the core of the earth, rebirth? Floating in the air like a Robin Hood-arrow. Pull me, shake me, as flexible as bone-marrow. And I think of Lorine Niedecker: “True bravery is / shown by performing / without witness what / one might be capable / of doing before all the / world.” I just discovered that there is a mental hospital about 10 miles down the road from me. If only it were abandoned.

I miss her. Sometimes in the forest I make crucial discoveries, like the Wright Brothers and their novel wind tunnel. Wind-tension diminishes, yet seems angular. Passionate attachments, like a Spanish dancer, like how the “mood” was changing in 1889 Paris, depictions of gaiety. Clouds drift in front of the sun, “None of these things are fool-proof.” Color outside, Monet-smears, Renoir must have been struck by gusts, blind aeronautical wind-cells. If only I could train myself to fly. I am knitting scenarios and I miss you already; my heart often suffers (clear framework) with different temperaments these days. Awkward stance, inward telescope of memory, whiplike flagellum. What would be a mind that could reach the speed of sound? Samuel Johnson: “there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man.”

I saw the half-clear sky spill rain. I miss her. My wrists are sighing. Felt something shoot up my arm; might’ve been a “shot" star. Might’ve-not’ve-been. Flowers cling to one another on cloudy days, the television still blaring John Wayne galloping on his horse on a dusty road, prefaced by nothing, pre-faced, the tip of the swallowed tongue closer to the whisper, or the rugged esophagus of the smoker’s pistil. An ant bit me, but I didn’t mind it so much. Grandma: “Scoop it out, but not heaping.” Plausible gunk.

Inquiries for photography submissions to: High Museum of Art, The Opal Gallery, Jackson Fine Art, Nexus Contemporary Art Center. Drew blanks, drew blanks on the walls of emails, drew snails walking in trails, faster than cheetahs. I wrote lyrics to a song a while back to the tune that is inside of my head, and it goes a little something like this:

There’s a man up the road, well he told me one day
how he was once in Vietnam, wishes the heat would stay away.
I walked on by, gave him a warm goodbye,
He gave me a crazy look, I smiled but shoulda cried,
'cause some people are grumpy no matter how hard you try,
like hearing ominous thunder but only seeing blue skies.
I told him I was Derrick, maybe I would seem him around,
he just yelled for his dog to come back safe and sound!
Well, I kept on walking, sweat running down my brow
No one is a stranger to me, but I often wonder how.
It must run in the family, but I really don’t know,
he had a good point about the heat, though, bring on the snow.

Waylayed into “way late.” Once, I was told, “I love it when you sit like that." “Like that" was with my right leg crossed over my left. Sometimes people can be shockingly-surprising.

I bet Shakespeare had a gimpy leg. His “Miranda” was likely based on a real-life pulchritudinous charmer that did the deed. While L. and I were in the grocery store (she calls it “the market”), I pointed out that the text on a particular bottle of whateveritmayhavebeentodrink resembled Russian writing. She then said, “Well, you’d know; you’re the smart one.” Embarrassing. I often wonder if she saw my reaction, the goofiness of my appearance, and I am well aware that this blog is public, so if you read this L., then first, “Hi!” and second, “So, did you?” (I remember everything you said).

Nothing settles your food like a Miles Davis tune, preferrably from “Kind of Blue.” Choo-choo.

Well, thass my “entry,” goo’bye.

Cortazar

Thoughts like a drive-in movie, tickle-rambles, &c.

Edvard Munch, Self Portrait with Skeleton Arm

Frazzle’d today, shiny shoes no where to be found, all my love is hidden deep within, could anyone break through the frozen grounds? Would anyone want to? I ask myself things often; how strange to possess certain thoughts, a flood of memory like a rain-pour down-pour, then the frogs levitate elsewhere, then the worms are washed up, and dry up in the next sunlight.

Thinking of Sir Thomas Browne, portionables of Vulgar Errors:

“But the longevity of that piece, which hath so long escaped the
common fate, and the providence of that Spirit, which ever waketh
over it, may at last discourage such attempts; and if not make
doubtful its Mortality, at least indubitably declare; this is a stone
too big for Saturns mouth, and a bit indeed Oblivion cannot swallow.”

– or, “every breath you take, every move you make...” Do not watch me, just make me more Intense. Bellyful of clocks. If there were nothing, we would all be portrait-only photographers. Would we not? Nay?

What about Vulgar Eros, instead? What is nameless? The-thing-that-is-unseen? Irrational. Poignancy in a pogo-stick when the little child jumps, watch out below when springing upon the diving board, no fluffy water below for the flesh. I tried to be different, like an aardvark, sappy bark, crying trees, crying breeze, cat-scratch-fleas. I felt your love like politicking for more love like hippies. Eat the babysauce, baby, let us hold one another at the carnival, I have found you to be like a bird, and my mouth opens, no words can be spoken, you're a rosebreasted grosbeak.

(check the clouds, and you will see a ‘Y’ or ‘Yes’ –- to hold on to the bridge railing. Multiply your ______)

If I had musical talent, I would be a musician. So, since I do not, I write lyrics with the music in my mind, hoping that I could eventually explain the music to someone, while I sing the lyrics. So, since I have no musical talent, although I have an ear for it in a strange kind of way, I write poems instead. O, bright metallurgy-mind!

What of “further illustrations”? Of “Meteors therein”? Stuck in my head, a galaxy, she said, “You seem to have so many cities in your head,” and why do these things make me feel embarrassed? Trying not to put on the “supernatural spectacles,” trying not too hard, trying to be a moon over a night-ocean, moonlight shimmer, inventing inventions, but only as rhymes, as poems. The season is changing, I felt it today –- went outside to grab coffee, choco-chip-KOOKie; surprised by the cool breeze, happily, I should say. I’m ready to be frigid; I’m thinking of frigid, thinking of Browne again:

“But Ice is water congealed by the frigidity of the air, whereby it acquireth
no new form, but rather a consistence or determination of its diffluency,
and amitteth not its essence, but condition of fluidity. Neither doth
there any thing properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity; for
the determination of quick-silver is properly fixation, that of milk
coagulation, and that of oyl and unctious bodies, only incrassation;
And therefore Aristotle makes a trial of the fertility of humane seed, from
the experiment of congelation; for that (saith he) which is not watery and
improlifical will not conglaciate; which perhaps must not be taken strictly,
but in the germ and spirited particles: for Eggs I observe will freeze,
in the albuginous part thereof. And upon this ground Paracelsus in his
Archidoxis, extracteth the magistery of wine; after four moneths
digestion in horse-dung, exposing it unto the extremity of cold; whereby the
aqueous parts will freeze, but the Spirit retire and be found congealed
in the Center.”

Language lights up the sky; no “Ethiopian blackness,” “does anybody really know where we really gonna go” says Verve-leader, I know where I’m going. Panic, picnic. Empathy is seeing through the wounds. Kindness is seeing through a body, looking into the shell as if with x-ray vision, always finding goodness in everyone. Blossoming like an anamita spore. For.

At The Drive-In

Portrait of Marten Looten

Portrait of Marten Looten, by Rembrandt, 1632

Letter from Rembrandt to Marten Looten (who is holding the letter, obviously):

Marten Looten—XVII, January 1632

“Lonely for me was Amsterdam; your company, friendship just gave me unforgettable peace created from an endless respect.” (He signed it “RHL”)

In regards to the letter, there were countless theories about it and its significance and meaning. Apparently a Dutch physician had deciphered the words on the letter by a chemical-optical process, the nature of which he steadfastly refused to divulge. The “Marten Looten” and the date are perfectly legible in the painting. The “RHL” of course stands for Rembrandt’s actual name, Rembrandt Harmensz Lugdunensis, which is also legible. But the text, four lines in the painting, remains gibberish even under the strongest magnifying glass.

Rembrandt, Self-portrait

Painting by Charles Burchfield

I love the way Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel sampled a whining, panting dog in his composition, “Szenario.” The whole piece is quite curious, feeling as if I am on the verge of an explosion, but unable to go any further. I imagine that there are portals hiding in certain clouds, like Super Mario suddenly ‘bumping’ into something. Making something out of nothing. My lips are sealed, like frozen waterfalls. Time closes the lids on everthing; how you act within it all is what most matters. If a frozen waterfall is, indeed, frozen, wouldn’t it then be logical to call it “waterstill”? In the ‘60’s and ‘70’s (guesstimations for the ‘60’s, however; going by the words of former player, Joe Simpson), players would place cabbage leaves in their hats to keep them cool during the sweltering summer.

Where is the gentle floor for the hard-nosed drunk? Choices, reflecting a landscape of revolutionary-dishonesty. Mr. Bukowski, if the world had failed you, then your poems failed you, too. You relied on writing your miseries within your misery while your eyes were like a good pair of death. Some people search for vile rumors -- of stench-filled rancidness to plead with them, to show sympathy for them. Ambition, Chaplin-like, severs them, shakes them to the very core like a brain haemorrhage. The sting of a fracture roars like an earthquake. Gestures of landscapes. And to think that you, Buk, were always loved, like the earth gulping down heavenly rain. To this very day, people still relate to you; caricatures of you; as drunk as you, as filthy as you, as hungry as you, as loved as you. The biggest illusion of all is in the world, like how a flower will bloom to die.

A poet’s tongue is curved, words fill, overflow, what to reach for, what to take, the entire mouth like a river dam, flooded, these skinnable whispers. The poet’s tongue, yes, it is folded in multi-patterns, fish-patterns, silvery-sparkles in the sea-light, waves awaken, tropical storms, like a heartbeat, and if you say that you are not, you really are, and with shouts, with imbalance comes a friendly-wisping to come out with.

This, written after meeting Lesley Kerr on a warm summer day:

“We met for the first time / at The Hanging Couch, / and for as many miles apart as / it seemed to have traveled there, / I felt that there had always been a connection somewhere, like / roots hidden, like the up-gulp / of the plants that are jubilantly / erect from the ground. Whatever is / hidden is always followed with / more expectation of what exists; / with what keeps something energized, / mobilized, nothing at a rectangle, or / a wrecked-angle, or the shapelessness of words. Yes, at The Hanging Couch, / I was hanging all over your words. / I had actually thought of that / before we even met, as I sat there / on the sidewalk in front of the / beautiful antique shop, awaiting / for your arrival, as nervous as a / new-born puppy.”

Later, wrote:

“I guess if someone were really into me / I’d hear from ‘em like the wind through trees.”

Wrote this on Facebook once: “Greediness is a form of anti-happiness, and selfishness is a root that makes many things rot away. Sharing is such a great gift, and produces many great fruits along the way, truly. I always give things to people with the expectation of never getting it back, and that goes for borrowing, as well. It is quite amazing how you gain more from giving than you do from the want-want-want, me-me-me bug.”

A Lady With A Squirrel and A Starling,
by Hans Holbein the Younger (1526-28)

Gustav III of Sweden (coffee . . . poison?)

Gustav III of Sweden

Gustav III of Sweden believed that coffee was poison, and to prove his theory, he sentenced a murderer to drink coffee every day. To provide comparison, another murderer was pardoned on condition that he drink tea every day. Two doctors were appointed to supervise the experiment and see who died first. The doctors were the first to die. Then the King was murdered in 1792. Finally, . . .after many years, one of the criminals died, at the age of 83. He was the tea drinker.

Gustav III of Sweden

Grazings, pigments, mutterings, . . . going downstream:

What would you do for a book of “nothing”? Most would do just that, nothing. And I may do nothing, too, but certainly I would be doing something by merely thinking about doing that nothing. “Nothing” is not necessarily a blank space. Some people find dirt to be highly unimportant in their daily lives, but when one thinks more about that dirt, one realizes that it is vastly important. The term “nothing” is always “something.” Before one can think of nothing, one has to know the difference between nothing and something, and that’s a simple formula, really, because ‘something’ can be anything, whether it is an ‘act’, a ‘thought’, an ‘object’, &c. What is more intimate within the Nothing’s nucleus? Nothing can be easily ignored, and it (whatever it may be) shouldn’t be ignored, because like shadows, there is always a light somewhere to create that shadow, and with a Nothing, there will always be a Something, and vice-versa. We cannot go through life with our eyes opened and never visually see “nothing.” It’s also quite impossible to think of “nothing,” too. One will think of the word, but with words are images, and a Nothing will always be linked to a Something. Something that is blank may appear to be nothing, but within that blank there is a Something in which that Nothing is canvas’d upon. It’s similar to when you call someone and you may ask them, “what are you doing?” and they respond with “nothing.”

Shoveling down Golden Grahams, why am I not a sentence-seeker? I write letters, as if by memory, with memories, to those that are perhaps overly-satisfied with detail. Detail, like kitchen remnants left after moving, accidental crumb-droppings on Granny's table, her eyes check, same continuum, bloquees of loopy speech; reiterations. What else but the sunlight-screech in summertime, peach-orange light, prolonged, falling on the flower-pot full of light green Hedera helix in an eternal instance, thick as the beard of Ives, could strike a chord with cordial reminders of a future love? Air released, like in a flattening tire. I often sigh when I wake in the morning, but not out of hardships or struggles or pains, but something of tenderness, often humorous, a “know,” a satisfaction, of what is to come. A Brahms allegretto in the evening. Flip-flops are still on my feet, like turf, rough terrain ruining the knees of athletes, I crawl around this place like a caterpillar. Scribbling verse. Sounds of string quartets. Sounds of what will be.

Saturday morning wake, where is vacation, other than cold sheets, daydreaming all night, pleasant smiles, I love old folks. I love picnics but only when there are ants present. I feed them, they are happy, makes me happy, happier. There is a beach on the moon. I hit my head on the wall while walking down the steps today. Felt like a statue for a moment. Elagabalus The Horrible-headsplit for a minute, it did not last long, though. As delicate as pushing a baby carriage, I want to go far away, never wagering, bewildered, unsheltered. I saw your face in my mirror. My coffee cup is empty. I have hung a grape-vine on the edge of the cup. I had beanie-weanies today for the first time in at least a decade-plus. How does one that is unable to read or write music explain to musicians how the music sounds in one’s head? By humming it? Making sounds with one's tongue and lips and mouth where certain parts would be within the piece? There is an entire symphony in my head, wanting release, and I can only ponder if I have just subconsciously re-created---like a cut-up---pieces of music (over very long periods of time) and re-arranged them, or is this something completely foreign, or perhaps unique?

Jindrich Pilecek

Ecce signum!: Titus Flavius Josephus and other historical truths:

Titus Flavius Josephus (AD 37 – c. 100)

I recently read this interesting conversation between a believer and a skeptical individual in regards to the existence of Christ. The skeptic said: “On what basis would Christianity be if the bones of Jesus were suddenly found? And going through history books, one notices there is no mention of Jesus except in the Bible...hmm!”

And the response: “This is perhaps one of the most irrational arguments used by those who try to discredit Jesus and the Christian Faith. To believe that even a small group of people (the 12 disciples) would fabricate a ‘mythical’ person and claim him to be God, then promptly lay there own worldly desires aside, remain in poverty the rest of their lives, be continuously punished and tortured for holding on to their claim that this ‘Jesus’ was God, even to the point of death (all of them were either killed or imprisoned until death), takes a far larger leap of faith than simply believing that Jesus existed in the first place. Not to mention the fact that when these disciples went about “preaching the gospel” of Jesus to the people, these people could and would have easily been able to refute their “ridiculous” claims of some man named Jesus going around healing the blind, being put to death on a cross, and even the “far fetched” notion of resurrection.”

Furthermore, “The Jewish historian Josephus, writing for the Roman government in the ‘70's A.D. records some incidental things regarding Christ and the church. He confirms that John the Baptist died at the hand of Herod (this same incident is recorded in the gospels) as well as the death of, “The brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James. . .he delivered them to be stoned” (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII, ch. V, p. 20; Book XX, ch. IX, p. 140). Again, there are many sources external to the Bible that demonstrate the historical reliability of the text. Josephus, who was probably alive during the time of Christ, is attesting to the reality of his existence. What this also tells us is that within 40 years of Christ’s death, the knowledge of who he was widespread enough that Josephus could reference him and expect his readers to know exactly who he was talking about. Roman records of the time indicate that there not only was a Jesus, but that He was crucified. Many other writings at the time support that Jesus existed as a historical figure — thousands of people saw him. The Jewish opponents during the rise of the Christian faith would have the most to gain by denying Jesus ever lived, but guess what, they DON’T! In fact, in several Jewish writings, His opponents don’t deny Him at all, and they speak of Jesus as a real person, though an opponent to their Jewish beliefs. Both Gemaras of the Jewish Talmud refer to Jesus, although they are quite bitter against Him. They speak of Him as having really existed, but of course to only deny His deity and slander His name. There is just a drop of proof for you out of many of them that Jesus walked this earth.

Also, one of antiquity’s greatest historians affirmed that Jesus had suffered under Pilate. That historian’s name is Cornelius Tacitus. Tacitus was born around 20-25 years after Jesus died and he had seen the spread of Christianity just begin to impact Rome. He wrote negatively of Christ and Christians identifying them in 115 AD as “a race of men...detested for their evil practices.” If compelling claims existed that Jesus was never a real person, Tacitus would have naturally hit Christianity with this claim...not that He really existed.”

And from Return to Biblicism: “One of the more popular accusations brought against Biblical Christianity is that there are no external sources that confirm the Biblical record of Jesus of Nazareth. Most simply deny the accuracy of the New Testament in details of the life of Jesus, but others boldly deny that He existed at all. Either way, the accusation is based on a supposed lack of written historical evidence outside of the Bible referring to the existence of Jesus.

However, there are numerous sources that yield historical confirmation of the Biblical record, such as in the field of archeology. The fact is, whether it is simply the result of misinformation or plain ignorance of the facts, denying that there are extra-biblical sources that confirm the existence of Jesus simply has no credible basis. But, far be it from me to make such a claim without giving any supporting information.

The question is, are there sources outside of the Bible that give historical evidence of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth? The answer is a resounding yes. There are actually twelve known non-Christian sources consisting of historians, government officials and documents that give historical accounts of Jesus. The following is a list of those sources:

1. Cornelius Tacitus
2. Suetonius
3. Flavius Josephus
4. Thallus
5. Pliny the Younger
6. Trajan
7. Hadrian
8. the Babylonian Talmud
9. Toledoth Jesu
10. Lucian
11. Mara Bar-Serapion
12. Phlegon.

I would like to discuss what each of these sources have to say, but for sake of time and attention span I will save that for the next post. For now, suffice it to say that what this non-Christian evidence suggests about the existence of Jesus may be summarized as follows:

* Every witness confirms that a man named Jesus actually existed, most by statement, only two by inference.
* Two witnesses explicitly state that Jesus was considered a virtuous man.
* Six of the witnesses explicitly state that Jesus was worshiped by His followers.
* Seven of the witnesses explicitly state that Jesus had life long disciples that took preeminence as leaders of His other followers (Apostles, perhaps).
* Four of the witnesses explicitly state that Jesus was a renowned teacher.
* Seven of the witnesses refer to the fact that Jesus was crucified. Only one of those seven were by inference.
* Seven of the witnesses refer to the discovery of an empty tomb. Three of those are very specific.
* Two of the witnesses explicitly refer to Jesus’ followers’ belief in His resurrection.
* Six of the witnesses explicitly refer to the rapid spread of Christian belief.
* Seven of the witnesses explicitly refer to the persecution that Jesus’ followers faced because of their belief.

All twelve of these witnesses do nothing but confirm the Biblical record of Jesus and His followers. So why are these twelve so important? To appreciate their importance more fully, three things must be understood about these sources.

The Time Span

First, they are all confirmed to be within 150 years of the ministry of Jesus, some living during same time as Jesus. Though 150 years may seem like a long time for us, we can put things into perspective by comparing how people wrote of other progenitors of various religions after the religion took hold.

Although the Gathas of Zoroaster have been authenticated to date back to 1200 BC, most of the Zoroastrian scriptures were not put into writing until after the third century AD. That’s a span of over 1,500 years. The first biography written about Zoroaster was written in AD 1278. That’s a span of over 2,200 years.

Buddha is believed to have lived in the sixth century BC. However, the Buddhist scriptures were not put into writing until after Christianity took hold as a religion. That’s a span of about 800 years. The first biography of Buddha was written in the first century AD. That’s another span of about 800 years.

We have the sayings of Muhammad in the Koran, but his first biography was not written until a full century later.

By comparison, all of the New Testament was completed in less than 70 years after the life of Jesus. As for these extra-biblical sources, Thallus wrote of Jesus within 20 years of His crucifixion. The very latest of the twelve sources, Mara Bar-Serapion, stretches the time period to within 150 years.

The Number of Sources

Also, we are prone to look at twelve sources as being a small number to confirm someone that has had as much influence as Jesus. Surely, more would have been written outside of the Biblical record, or so it seems. However, we must compare the fact that Tiberius Caesar, the Roman Emperor of Jesus’ day, is only mentioned in nine other places outside of the Bible within 150 years of his lifetime. Those who assume that there is not enough if any historical evidence for the existence of Jesus must also write off the Emperor of Rome to be a myth as well! The truth is, this Jewish Teacher and His followers got more coverage than the Emperor.

The Nature of the Sources

The next thing to understand about the twelve sources is that their record is secular in nature, and that they are all markedly anti-Christian. In the field of law enforcement, a good witness is priceless. There are, however, types of witnesses whose testimony is more telling than others. For example, there are “friendly” witnesses who are likely to be partial to the one on trial. These, of course, are not very valuable. Then, there are “impartial” witnesses. These are strong witnesses because they have no incentive to help out or hurt the one on trial. Finally, there are “hostile witnesses. These are evidently opposed to the defendant. If a hostile witness admits to any good about the accused or testify to the viability of the defendant’s story, this will carry the most weight with any jury.

All of the twelve sources, falling under the “hostile” category, offer a most valuable testimony. The wealth of historical corroboration is undeniable.

I’d like to make a couple of final points in closing. It is obvious from both this evidence and other later writings on the subject that not even Jesus’ enemies thought to challenge His historicity until centuries after His death. The fact is, with these twelve non-Christian sources confirming His existence we cannot make that challenge either.

Obviously, there are no references to the miraculous events spoken of in the New Testament other than the Christians’ belief in them. But, you could not honestly expect that from hostile witnesses. Nevertheless, the fact that these non-Christian sources only confirm the basic outline of the life of Jesus and the acts of His followers as presented by the New Testament gives credible evidence as to the reliability of the Biblical record. It only follows that this evidences gives a sound basis for trusting the One to whom these twelve witnesses point.”

Publius Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 56 – ca. 117)

19th-century Pregnant Dolls:

In the 18th and 19th centuries, sideshow carnivals known as misemono were a popular form of entertainment for the sophisticated residents of Edo (present-day Tokyo). The sideshows featured a myriad of educational and entertaining attractions designed to evoke a sense of wonder and satisfy a deep curiosity for the mysteries of life. One popular attraction was the pregnant doll.

Although it is commonly believed that these dolls were created primarily to teach midwives how to deliver babies, evidence suggests they were also used for entertainment purposes.





For example, records from 1864 describe a popular show in Tokyo’s Asakusa entertainment district that educated audiences about the human body. The show featured a pregnant doll whose abdomen could be opened to reveal fetal models depicting the various stages of prenatal development.

Similarly, records of Japan’s first national industrial exhibition in 1877 indicate a Yamagata prefecture hospital doctor named Motoyoshi Hasegawa showed off an elaborate set of fetus models illustrating seven different stages of growth, from embryo to birth.

Although it is unclear whether the fetus model set pictured here is the same one Hasegawa showed in 1877, records suggest his model was a hit at the exhibition.



From Here.

Philosophy, Non-believers, Prophecy, &c.

Plotinus, the famous Greek philosopher, once stated that “If life and soul exist after death, then death is good, all the more so in that the soul is better able to carry out her proper activities without the body.” — and if one is a Christian, there is no “if” here, because life does indeed exist after death (one’s body dies, but one’s soul lives on), and those that have that “spiritual understanding” (through the love and knowledge of the Word of God) all realize that death is not something one should fear or be concerned about.

2 Corinthians 5: 6-11 states:

6 Now we look forward with confidence to our heavenly bodies, realizing that every moment we spend in these earthly bodies is time spent away from our eternal home in heaven with Jesus. 7 We know all these things are true by believing, not by seeing. 8 And we are not afraid, but quite content to die, for then we will be at home with the Lord. 9 So our aim is to please him always in everything we do, whether we are here in this body and with him in heaven. 10 For we must all stand before Christ to be judged and have our lives laid bare—before him. Each of us will receive whatever he deserves for the good or bad things he has done in his earthly body. 11 It is because of this solemn fear of the Lord, which is ever present in our minds, that we work so hard to win others. God knows our hearts, that they are pure in this matter, and I hope that, deep within, you really know it too.

Plotinus goes on to ask, “If she becomes a part of the universal Soul, what kind of evil could affect her there? — and then: “...In general . . . there is no evil for the soul who has maintained her purity; and if she has maintained it, then it is not death that is an evil for her, but rather life. Even if there are punishments in Hades, then once again, it is life that is an evil for her, for it is not life and nothing but.” — and to answer his question, no evil of any degree can affect anyone whom has become saved and has become “one with Christ,” because all of evil flees and trembles in the name of God, which brings me to something else in which is interconnected with what I have written thus far:

A frequently-typical quote one may hear from a non-believer in God is “What kind of God creates man and then damns them?” In Ezekiel 33:2, this particular scriptures meets this common complaint by enlightening us and showing us that God has absolutely no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but desires their welfare and that the wicked bring damnation upon themselves by their stubborn refusal to repent. 1 Timothy 2: 3-4 shows that God, 'so far from creating man to damn him, desires that all men be saved.' 2 Peter 3:9 teaches that 'God is not willing that any should perish and is delaying His purposes in order that all may come to repentance.' John 5:40 and Matthew 23:37 shows that the entire cause of man’s damnation is his own willful and persistent refusal to come to Christ. And, of course, then there are those that complain about the bible, labeling it as contradictory and absurd, or perhaps, “The Bible just seems foolish to me.” However, in 1 Corinthians 1: 18-31, the Word of God says:

18 I know very well how foolish it sounds to those who are lost, when they hear that Jesus died to save them. But we who are saved recognize this message as the very power of God. 19 For God says, “I will destroy all human plans of salvation no matter how wise they seem to be, and ignore the best ideas of men, even the most brilliant of them.” 20 So what about these wise men, the scholars, these brilliant debaters of this world’s great affairs? God has made them all look foolish, and shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense. 21 For God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find God through human brilliance, and then he stepped in and saved all those who believed his message, which the world calls foolish and silly. 22 It seems foolish to the Jews because they want a sign from heaven as proof that what is preached is true; and it is foolish to the Gentiles, because they believe only what agrees with their philosophy and seems wise to them. 23 So when we preach about Christ dying to save them, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense. 24 But God has opened the eyes of those called to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, to see that Christ is the mighty power of God to save them; Christ himself is the center of God’s wise plan for their salvation. 25 This so-called “foolish” plan of God is far wiser than the wisest plan of the wisest man, and God in his weakness—Christ dying on the cross—is far stronger than any man. 26 Notice among yourselves, dear brothers, that few of you who follow Christ have big names or power or wealth. 27 Instead, God has deliberately chosen to use ideas the world considers foolish and of little worth in order to shame these people considered by the world as wise and great. 28 He has chosen a plan despised by the world, counted as nothing at all, and used it to bring down to nothing those the world considers great, 29 so that no one anywhere can ever brag in the presence of God. 30 For it is from God alone that you have your life through Christ Jesus. He showed us God’s plan of salvation; he was the one who made acceptable to God; he made us pure and holy and gave himself to purchase our salvation. 31 As it says in the Scriptures, “If anyone is going to boast, let him boast only of what the Lord has done.”

And then in 2 Corinthians 4: 3-4, it states:

3 If the Good News we preach is hidden to anyone, it is hidden from the one who is on the road to eternal death. 4 Satan, who is the god of this evil world, has made him blind, unable to see the glorious light of the Gospel that is shining upon him, or to understand the amazing message we preach about the glory of Christ, who is God.

With that said, I am waiting for the Rapture to take place, because when it does eventually occur (and it is on the way!), everything else that was predicted will unfold according to what the Bible has stated would happen. I believe that the first rider of the white horse of the Anti-Christ is already walking the earth, but hasn’t risen to power just yet. The UN, NAU and European Union will all play a major role in fulfilling prophecy. After the leader of this new global government signs a 7-year peace treaty with Israel, the Tribulation Period will begin and prophecy will be fulfilled. I truly believe that we are in the last days, because everything that the Bible stated would occur has already been fulfilled (I can’t stress this enough!), and there is much more to come. The falsitivities of man’s desire to learn about what “science” says about everything is also a part of the deceptions that many people would fall under. What people have to come to understand is that science was originally based off of Biblical terms. It is when people not of faith began “experimenting” with things that went amiss. John 8:31-42 says: “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” I truly grieve for those whom speak against or “mock” Christianity. However, it is perfectly-evident and proves another prophecy in the Bible in which clearly says that God’s people would go through much humiliation and persecution.

Something else that I want to quote in regards to Bible prophecy, and it is what the wonderful Joel Rosenberg recently stated last month:

“...the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, understands that there is an apocalyptic, genocidal death cult running Iran right now. They are determined to get the nuclear weapons and destroy Israel. (...) [To them] Israel is only the little Satan. The United States is the great Satan. And (...) the president of Iran and top leaders of Iran want to annihilate the United States. And the idea that we will drop this pre-condition and not force Iran to stop enriching uranium before we sit down and talk is a huge mistake. I would describe it as appeasement. The leaders of Iran believe that the end of the world is here. They believe that the Islamic Messiah, the Mahdi, or Thelfth Imam, is coming imminently, and they believe that their mission in life is to hasten, or speed up, the coming of the Islamic Messiah, by destroying Judeo-Christian civilization as we know it. We’ve never had any nation, ever, to have the ‘death cult’ features that Iran has now. The United States Administration does not realize this, and I believe that a train wreck is coming between the United States and Israel over how to handle Iran. This is the worst moment in U.S.-Israeli relations in 61 years. I’m an evangelical Christian and I believe in end times prophecy, but Jesus’s end time prophecy is that we’re supposed to go out and try and share the gospel and try to save tens of millions of people, whereas apocalyptic Shi’a Muslim end times theology says to kill all of the Jews and Christians or convert them to Islam, and that’s the danger, is that the current administration doesn’t understand it. (...) The American Government has to understand who is across the table, and they have to make a choice. The top experts believe that Iran will have nuclear weapons within a year or year and a half tops, so if you’re going to talk to them, you better understand who you’re dealing with, but personally, I believe we’re out of time, and North Korea is the evidence. We’ve been talking to North Korea, in six party talks, for ten years, and where are we? They have their first nuclear weapon tested. They have an intercontinental ballistic missile that they’ve tested. Fifteen Iranian Military advisors were at that launch last weekend, and now they’re starting their nuclear wars program. When you’re talking with two genocidal maniacs, talking won’t work, and unfortunately we are headed into war with Iran, and either the United States will launch it to protect western civilization or Israel will. Unless there’s an act of God, there's a crisis coming of Biblical proportions.”

And this insane maniac, Ahmadinejad, states that by creating an enormous war and killing as many Jews and Christians as possible (and whomever doesn't practice their religion) that that will suddenly spark the return of their "messiah" to come down and "finish the job" and then take the remaining individuals to the "after life." They believe that there has to be a vast array of blood-shed before their 'messiah' returns. So, if there are certain people out there that don't believe that these "genocidal maniacs" won't attempt to try and murder and destroy millions of people, then they have another thing coming. For those that are ready, however, do not have anything to worry about, because God has this all in the palms of his hands (he soothes all worries). The signs are all there. As one source states, "The Global Age is right upon us. It is on the horizon of our lifetime." Also:

"This New World Order" is not some prophetically speculative or futuristic fairy tale, but a real world reality. It is not some "wacko conspiracy theory" advanced by the fringe of society like the powers that be would have us believe. It is not a "conspiracy," rather it's an agenda. Anybody that will end their soma induced "holiday" and unplug from the delusional "matrix" will see the evidence all around them. It has been a long time in the making, its pieces fitting into place from divergent realms and different players. Gears and levers of history have been moved and adjusted, and a large-scale game of Monopoly has been played, with real currency and real assets shifting hands - a game with very real winners and losers. The players in this grand deception understand it is a dangerous and risky undertaking, for they are vastly outnumbered. If average Americans woke up and understood their true agenda, there would be an uprising of revolutionary proportions. Therefore, demonizing the opposition and controlling people through disinformation and fear is critical as they conceal their true agenda. Published government documents characterize patriots as terrorists and a threat to law enforcement. World economic systems are threatened with catastrophic consequences unless the international banksters are allowed to consolidate their power into a global banking system.

"It is well the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford

Even though the power of a small group of International banksters is colossal today according to Harvard and Princeton professor emeritus, Carroll Quigley, they are finding it increasingly difficult to conceal their true nature. He said of this group:

"Their aim is nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. The system was to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences." (Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1966)

Alas, a New World Order.

While it is nearly impossible to accurately trace the interlocking agendas of these organizations, the supernatural dimension is the one that gives the puzzle meaning. While some may ascribe leadership of the New World Order to elitists's in the Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission or Council of Foreign Relations, the truth is these people are mere pawns in a much grander agenda of the Antichrist.

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark of his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. [Revelation 13:16-17]

Scripture tells us of the establishment of a New World Order by the Antichrist in the last days. Indeed, the devil must have a dictatorial form of government if he is to rule the world. It is being slowly implemented in our governments through legislation and in our churches with a new spirituality until ultimately it will be in the hands of an elite of intelligent politically-connected religious-minded people in league with the Antichrist.

As mentioned, this is nothing to worry about if you follow Christ, because this is God's work, and he has given us these "warning signs" of prophecy to help us become more eager for his eventual return!

The clock is ticking!

Interventions: Ruth Claxton

Proof That We Were Made By A Creator (God), “A Question of Origins” (Completely Debunking/Destroying the Theory of Evolution):

If one watches this particular video with an open mind, then one will find that the proof is here that Evolution (Darwinism) is completely false. Being a believer of Creationism, one can believe in Creation and Science, because the Bible already provides details into our world (scientifically) before Scientists ever began experimenting with theories, &c.

For example:

Atomic Fission is mentioned in 2 Peter 3:10. Oceanic Currents are mentioned in Psalsm 8:8 and Isaiah 43:16. The Hydrologic Cycle is mentioned in Job 36:27 and Amos 9:6. The Jet Stream is mentioned in Ecclesiastes 1: 6, 7. Dinosaurs are versed in Job 40-41 and Psalms 74:14 and Innumerable Stars are versed in Jeremiah 33:22.

xxrrxnz & interconnections:

“Babe Ruth’s Legs”

When Babe Ruth got to be an older player in the latter years of his illustrious career, the managers would naturally have players pitch-run for The Bambino after he got on base, and the two most “famous” names that would often run for him were Myril Hoag and Sammy Byrd, and their nicknames became “Babe Ruth’s Legs.”

Birgit Jürgenssen

Many More Here.

DREAM

from The Vampyr (1932) by Carl Dreyer

I was at my Grandparents’ house (although it was as if it were a cross between being at my Grandparents’ house and somewhere else [obviously influenced by the subconsciousness of imagination]) and there was a film that being “worked on” in the area, although I wasn’t aware of exactly “where,” I just knew that it was close-by. I was in the living room, sitting on the couch, and the milkman that would often come into the store that I used to work at was standing directly above me, holding a manual-lighting candle (similar to a long-nozzled lighter). I was looking up at him, and suddenly he strikes the lighter and then holds the flame to my mouth, inches away from my lips, and says, “Blow it out.” So, I blow the flame out as he says. It is at this time that I have quite a peculiar feeling that he is the director of the film that is being made somewhere in the area, and then I began wondering if perhaps I am going to be involved in this film somehow.

CUT.

I follow the milkman into the kitchen. As he walks along, I continue to follow his lead until we make our way onto the back porch. As I walk out onto the back porch, I see my Grandmother standing in the kitchen watching me as I leave the vicinity. It is at this time when I think to myself that she is probably thinking to herself where I am going and what the milkman and I are up to. Alas, I continue out of the back door.

CUT.

I’m standing in the backyard with the milkman, facing towards the house. He is still holding the long-nozzled lighter (in his right hand). I continue to stand there silently in awe, watching as he strikes the lighter several times. As I continue to watch, I realize that he is now motioning for me to come closer to where he is (as if I weren’t already beside him). He says, “look over there” while pointing towards the right-side of the house where a hill is obscuring the body of an animal so that I can only see the animal’s tail (which appears to be a cat’s tail). He then blurts, “that’s the tail of a black bear.” Confused, I ponder it for a moment and then realize that it couldn’t be a bear’s tail, in which, at that time, a sudden fear washes over me; a wave of horrific emotions flooding my entire being. I kept thinking about how strange the situation was, considering the fact that black bears wouldn’t ever been seen in “these parts.” I really didn’t know what to do, but I was definitely certain that I had to see if indeed there was a black bear lurking about the front yard. At this time, the milkman had metamorphed into a yellow cat and was acting completely paranoid, his body low to the ground. I watched him as he bolted towards the left-side of the house, disappearing from my viewpoint. I then decided that I also needed to go into that same direction, while thinking that the bear would perhaps be walking towards that direction. With fear and desperation upon me, I began walking around towards the left-side of the house, and began making my way closer to the front yard. I slowed down as soon as I got to the corner of the house, in which I stopped and then peaked around into the front yard. Not to my amazement, there was indeed a large, black bear walking across the front yard and into my direction. At this time, I became even more horrified and I quickly turned around and ran back towards the opposite direction and back into the back yard. I thought to myself that I needed to get inside of the house as quickly as possible. As I entered the back yard, I quickly turned and ran up the stairs. As I made my way up the stairs, I noticed that the door was open and my Grandmother was sitting on the very top step, while a child was standing behind her saying something to her. When I made my way up to the top step where she was located, I told her what was going on, and at first she seemed perplexed by the way that I was acting, but I told her that there was absolutely no time to talk about anything because there was a large black bear in the area and we needed to get inside the house as soon as possible before the bear made its way into the back yard. As I was telling her all of this information, I kept imagining what would happen if the bear eventually got a hold of us, and the many horrible scenarios that would cost us our lives.

American Black Bear

Onésipe Aguado's "Woman Seen From Back"