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Renoir and Mallarmé

At what point would dialogue with a particular person feel like sharp grammatical errors? And typically “error” is often equated with philosophical disquisition, but few monsters know of this. Take Stan Brakhage: “Primarily I write to exhaust language on a given subject, to drive the mind beyond words, so that I can begin, and begin again and again where words-leave-off, veer their references into vision, each verbal connective synapse, to effect that my mind’s eye have full sway so that I can commence my work . . . (also, Theodor Adorno: “What changes in people, what becomes alien to the point of unrecognizability and returns as in a musical repeat, are the images into which we transpose them. Proust knows that there are no human beings in themselves beyond this world of images; that the individual is an abstraction...”). Growing up as a relatively isolated child, I was immersed in films a lot (as well as being made-up as early as 8 years old [not much has changed]), which I think has something to do with my “style”; I feel emotionally unsettled by many things. Once you find out ‘who you are’ as a photographer, stay with it. But, never limit yourself. Anti-art wasn’t, and isn’t, Dadaism, of course not, because true Anti-art is limiting oneself.

Overall, the ego devours itself. The body attached to this ego is cut off, like an umbilical cord, and disregarded. (thirudan pidipattavudan thiru thiru ena muzithaan — “This sentence describes how a thief, when caught, would look and express his mood in his eyes.”)


from Maurice Blanchot: the refusal of philosophy By Gerald L. Bruns:

Imagine language not as a system for framing representations, nor as a native tongue, nor the expressiveness of a spirit--possibly it not even a vocabulary of any sort but is only something disclosed in writing: for example, the alphabet, but also the page on which letters appear. These letters of the alphabet are foundational: Mallarmé thinks of them as the origin of language. Language at all events is in some sense internal to the space of writing itself.

What appears on the page is not something that was merely invisible otherwise and is now suddenly summoned to show itself; that is, there is no sense to be made of a language existing independently of the alphabet. In fact, concepts of the visible and the invisible have only an uncertain application here, where writing is external to phenomena. In a certain sense writing is outside the whole idea of something appearing. Writing is incommensurable with revelation of any sort; writing is on the side of disappearance. This is, so to speak, Mallarmé’s Copernican revolution.

Mallarmé introduces the concept of ecriture into poetics, without however making l’ecriture the term of art it will later become. Poetry is the site or space of ecriture, where ecriture is more event than mark. It is the blank page on which nothing is to be seen, the white space that occurs as such in the appearance of letters. Poetry is made of letters, but only in virtue of the spaces between or around them. Mallarmé came to think of poetry as typographical composition, a total book, a book which is not anything except itself: paper, ink, leaves folded and bound together, letters of the alphabet sounding and resounding musically or of themselves according to every possible combination and permutation of relations. The space of poetry is outside anything we would recognize as semantic space. It is not so much a space that contains as one that disperses, the way Un coup de des disperses its letters. It is surface rather than volume. This does not mean that poetry is meaningless, only that meaning, for example naming something, is no longer anything productive.

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Lawrence Durrell: “If you write bad French you end up with bad French. Whereas in English you can make any number of grammatical errors and still retain control, so that mistakes (whether or not they are deliberate) turn into gems. Take Conrad: his mistakes had such a beauty about them that the English ended by imitating them. A French poet needs a lot more temerity before he sets about destroying the grammar. When Rimbaud writes ‘Je est un autre’ he is deliberately attempting to break down logical structure; as a result he is thought of as a phenomenon.”

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This ditty, written months ago: It is open sesame season in my heart. What lures these bobbers from my inward nexus, solar plexus plucked out, the weight of concrete, root canal of utter unintuition? What of this harrowing shriek that flourishes? My heart wearing its soldier’s garb moves forth with boldness, though plops into the mud & listens to bullets that do not pardon with wholly unprecedented interruption, that of which averts so awful a catastrophe. But at a juncture like the present, how can I not find ludicrous the actions of which give me the knee? I have been swept off of my speech, listening in monochrome, thinking in golden locks. Our fairytale began with pressure to the coal of initiation; a diamond had appeared, eyes as wide as Czech factory workers. There were instances where I could have slept inside of your touch, a snore beneath the forefinger, my neck on the car seat, half asleep, but you were asleep all along even when awake. I knew not of these abcesses within your mind. Nothing startles my bones any longer, green-brown weepy tendrils curling & creeping. Upmost-pouting dimples the cheeks, beaver beaks & cleats of athletes. How do you feel, dear reader; is this nothing more than a bore to the pores of your flesh or your freshly-worn iris (inside of you, a storm)? An Understudy turned potential Poem? Strange how one loses love, or perhaps never had love from the start. I dive into an unclear pool. I rise up above the waters, flying out as a dove that prowls the imperative air of tomorrow. I have made room for the undertow. Perhaps I could have delicately touched your cuticles & begged you to remain as my dear friend? Incomprehensible hoedowns, meltdowns, a tear slowed down before touching cheeks. So long, all of our sheer glances. So long, so long, so long.

per japs a pan

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Iceħand

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m or ph e us

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computer monitaur

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o RANGE


Gettin’ all vishhhual.


Pynchon: “when the recurrent momentum of things / completes itself nothing has an ending”

Sunset-snuffe’d in a swooping dash. Day-by-day, night-by-night, the “green earthen pots” of the open-breasted sky is a highway towards new plants, vines, dew-filled fillings. I am compounded, but for what? God is always near; inside, inside, inside of me; ‘God-shaped’ spot within me, filled, filled, filled. The future, in arrear; a contrast of the unshapable thought. Don’t sleep on your organs. Don’t leave your organs sitting in the hallway later. Nevermind urgency, uninterrupted configurative affectionate confection. Tonight I realized that the white beard of Ed Baker looks much better than Santa’s ever will; modern-day Tolstoy. We’re all walking around as one enormous data-thing for a Data-based world that is bent on data’ing us (“dating”) ‘til we are controlled completely, and definite indications are “in store” as we speak. A ‘Global Bank Tax’ in 2011? Looking more and more likely, sending us towards a one-world political/economical government. The Bible predicted that this would occur 2,000 years ago, and lookie, lookie!

from The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature by Wyndham Lewis:

Miss Stein announces her time-doctrine in character, as it were. She gives you an ‘explanation,’ and illustrations, side by side; but the explanation is done in the same way as the examples that follow it. A further ‘explanation’ would be required of the ‘explanation,’ and so on. And in that little, perhaps unregarded, fact, we have, I believe, one of the clues to this writer’s mind. It tells us that her mind is a sham, to some extent.

In doing her explanation of her compositions in the same manner as her compositions (examples of which she gives), she is definitely making-believe that it is impossible for her to write in any other way. She is making a claim, in fact, that suggest a lack of candour on her part; and she is making it with an air of exaggerated candour. Supposing that the following line represented a
typical composition of yours :—

FugfuggFFF-fewg:fugfug-Fug-fugue-ffffffuuuuuuG

Supposing, having become celebrated for that, you responded to a desire on the part of the public to know what you were driving at. Then the public would be justified in estimating your sincerity of a higher order if you sat down and tried to ‘explain’ according to the canons of plain speech (no doubt employed by you in ordering your dinner, or telling the neighbouring newsagent to send you the Herald, Tribune, or Daily Express every morning), your verbal experiments, than if you affected to be unable to use that kind of speech at all.

We must all have a narrator, no? The shrubs illuminate the actions which take place in the garden. Mirroring ones soul. More ammo than Rambo. Figures, we are, figured, it figures, combined like sand, combined to fabricate glass, combined to distort categorical commonplace. I stand before you, as uncommon as senses, my nose itches, I am unstable like a somnambulist who is uninterruptible beyond report, a treatise, a prospectus for the imbecile that perhaps unspools himself from struggling to assume the worst. Combinatory figures, gap-mouth’d—pleasure & relict, the gainly italic. A complete Nothing is always in motion. An arched orchard within.

“What had my face to offer / but reflexes of earth . . .” is, I believe, what Hilda Dolittle once wrote, but I could be mistaken.

Overheard: “Hey, is that beard your first?”

The other night, my uncle said: “You know ... if I were to flip my heel upside-down and sit it on top of my head, I would look like Frankenstein, because it’s rather flat.” Later, while taking photographs of himself with a cell phone (while still on the phone with me, of course), he said: “...all I need is a mirror ... but perhaps that'll change my mind about photographing myself.”

I always think of ‘x’ as an attachment to outer space. No other letter comes close to making me feel this way. Odd obstructions of immovability—it’s like having a gravity deficiency. Perhaps I just need to be launched through space to obtain a lighter “structure”? Chasing disappearance; moving to the right of the room when the room is to your left. Like Maurice Blanchot: “Keep watch over absent meaning” . . . just like that.

It is almost as if Picasso created peacocks. I’ve said this before, in a poem. It’s worth repeating, worth rementioning, worth re-re-re-everything’ing. Like Wittgenstein: “When one does not force oneself to express the inexpressible, nothing is lost and the inexpressible is contained inexpressibly in that which is expressed.”

There is the Poe-esque notion that if you have the right theory, then the masterpieces will appear automatically. The theoretical body, a mixture of postmodern fantasies, canceling the strange symmetries or form & destiny are shown the atrocity of violation & the grotesque. While observations tend to replace schemata interpretations, less has been said about erotic acts inside the body (mind). God cannot be “tamed” no more than a natural metamorphosis. All text functions as a schematized replica of emancipatory gesture. Robotomies. Perhaps there’s wedding rice still stuck in certain people’s ears after all these years.

Imagine every photograph morphing into zombies and eating as many cameras as possible.

My throat is like a vocabulary airport: words going to and fro.

Adolph Loos by Oskar Kokoschka