10.24.2010

The quieter tone, like a disrupted denouement:

 Girl With A Gold Medallion by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer




Carlos Pardo: “Even if we fell into a mirror / the compass would still look / for a hole in our ribs / to trace the world”—

Thinking of François Rabelais’s “The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel.” A 16th c. masterpiece of comedy and peculiarities abound, from such: “How small rain lays a high wind”: “Cease to fear, good people, cried Pantagruel; this huge Wide-nostrils, this same swallower of windmills, is no more, I will assure you; he died, being stifled and choked with a lump of fresh butter at the mouth of a hot oven, by the advice of his physicians.”

Like Gargantua, I wonder if I was perhaps carried in my mother’s belly for much longer than nine months. This may explain my hot naturedness, and also other peculiar things.

 *

James Wright: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom”

Loretta Diane Walker: “If we could move our souls / to forgiveness / like the hummingbird’s wings, / hate would disappear, / evaporate like a morning mist.”

Youtube comment: “My unborn son & I are jamming.”

*

Molière’s “Tartuffe,” W.H. Hudson’s “Green Mansions” and Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage.” By the time that I get around to reading all of the books that I want to read, I may be an 80 year-old grandpa, sitting by the fire with my grandchildren, reading fairy tales. Perhaps that’s the answer after-all. Later, reading Old wives’ tales to my old wife, like walking anywhere with one shoe on could lead to the death of one of your parents; or the hare, like the cat, was thought to be a witch in disguise. 

Taking a sip of water, then swallowing it. Then thinking, “There wasn't supposed to be texture to that water...” leaves one with a disconcerting sensation.

“Conspiratorially speaking.” Or, nay. Ventured upon a ‘thought’ that had, at the time, suddenly came to mind when my heart was awashed with fluttering solar-plexus magic, which was this: “Leaves leaving their figures in places, like soft tender lips pressed into a cheek, as if they were cumulus clouds pinned to the sky.” I give myself credit, sometimes; Antarctic white shadows. Ant art, like Salvador Dali, dark shadows, darker shadows in Collinwood, perhaps. Let this soak in, by the way: Jim Elliot once said, “He is no fool to give what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Where has my cursor vacated to? My redemption is soon to draweth nigh, and O how exciting it is. Division within the church is the enemy’s primary goal.

Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Ah, peach, plum, pear. Ah, Miss Newsome. But, more-so on a Kate Bush swing lately; such unique originality (second to Yoko Ono, perhaps?)—but let me carry onward: There are many people that have enough morality to keep them out of trouble, but not enough righteousness to get them into heaven! A Christian’s “good works” are the results of his/her faith, not the basis for his/her salvation. There is only one “good work” that takes the sinner to heaven, and that is the finished work of Christ on the cross (John 17:1-4; Hebrews 10:11-14).

*

John Ashbery: “How are we to inhabit / This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing, / As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are, / In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet / Unrealized projects, and a strict sense / Of time running out, of evening presenting / The tactfully folded-over bill?”

*

Ah, I travel, travel, at 186,000 miles per second (speed of light). I could go to sleep right now and not wake for twenty years, channeling Rip Van Winkle. Nevermind that Sleeper behind the transparent curtain.

A poem:

I stood with you at the end of our weight

like a sheaf of stalagmites.

Niagara Falls roared beside us
as if wanting to give rise to a place
where there are no mirrors, eyes, reflections.

Your sisters stood ajar to give us “privacy”
as if they knew of this world that we obsessed,
like the Romans

that conquered & plundered—
& there they were, before you & I,
the nervous peeks of your Sherlockian kins;

their eyes of cross-fertilization,
unplanting & absorbing us
as if like foreigners,

as if perhaps they were imagining
that they had merely imagined me
& that they were therefore existing in the snow,

at the edge of this great Fall,
only, & wholesomely Only,
with their rosy-cheeked sister.

*

My dearest uncle: “I’m never going to have a mid-life crisis, because I never grew up.”

I often find myself grooming in the middle of the night. Ah, I’ve gotta look good for the stars, I suppose. Everything is a Sphere, as if what we see is always the shape of our pupils. The Blind re-invent shape. The smell of spirit gum. Vivid canvasses of sound.

Joanne Linville, Mimi Gibson—from “One Step Beyond”—“Your conscience is your executioner.” Hushtones. Illustrations by James Hill (oil paintings)—“Short stories of Oscar Wilde”—Canadian, b. 1930, etc. Brilliance-abound!

I am too close to the act of winking. I’m in fine position for blinking but am I truly sinking in the evening? Morning now. I feel camouflaged by the astonishingly-gorgeous light———Caught off-guard, literally, like an imposter. Engraved into the entire roster. Tainted with abnormalities with faint gushes of sentimentalities.

Human love is shallow compared to God’s love. Humanity is massfully selfish in nature & this selfishness seems to grow more prominent daily; too many fingers in the ears & too much tongue-flapping; too many Me’s & I’s; too much focus on “status” (the great equalizer to that is death). Not enough love & what one can do to help others. Too many micro-social practices for the dissolutions of one’s own revolving doors.

I asked my uncle, “What, to you, does the ceiling look like?” He answered, “The moon.” I then asked him, “Are you a hunchback?” He responded, “My Mama told me that if I didn’t straighten my posture, that I may turn out to be one.” I then asked him, “What do you want for Christmas? A pacifier?” He responded, “To be left alone.” Heartily-morose jokes, though partially true, produces branches of comedy, scratching the itch of boredom (boredom is always one’s own fault). Speaking of such moon-ditties, recently watched “The First Men In The Moon”—then read the novel by H.G. Wells and found it to be quite entertaining (and better than the film, of course, but the film was delighted all in its own way). Discovered another film based on the novel, of the identical title, from 1919, by J.L.V. Leigh, Here. Apparently . . . “it was the first film to have been adapted directly from a work written by, not only one of the foremost British authors of the period, but arguably the most influential of all science fiction writers.”

The sky is so gorgeously overcast that it resembles the shades of silvery-white moonstone.

Termites and carpenter bees shop at Hole Foods. 

Onward.





 Presentimiento - Vanitas - Paintings by Fernando Vicente 
(Being a fan of anatomical models, books, paintings, and old laboratory manuals, venturing upon Fernando Vincentes work was quite rewarding. These paintings are intriguing in that they essentially inhabit a realistic, yet illusionistic, display of common predicaments and scenarios for portraiture, but are apparently created to express the anatomy of anti-theatricality and forced conceptualism for the sole purpose of showcasing the photographic-like surrealism of anatomical allegiances to the body, without sinister or morbid implications that are often affixed to such creations. Nonetheless, these are immersed in candy for the eyes.)


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