Octopus, Graham Sutherland
Often I feel like a walnut tree
on some beautiful street
And my ink is staining the sidewalk.
. . . and how perfect, I thought! As René Char once said: “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions”. . . and writing is often like another limb; taking time to physically write or type what your heart speaks onto a canvas of white. Vila-Matas once wrote: “it suddenly occurred to me that in fact more than ninety-nine per cent of humanity prefer . . . not to write.” (Also, appropriate: Mark Twain: “When the nub was sprung, the assemblage let go with a horse-laugh.”) Picchio, [on not writing]: “Experimental laziness. Post-human sloth. Time out for beastliness.” M. Duras: “To write is also not to speak . . . It is to howl noiselessly.” And, delightfully, Baudelaire: “the real hero is he who keeps himself amused.” (with writing, perhaps?)
The other morning, standing in the backyard, wondering what eyes distressed my existence as I statuesqued my best vertical distinction (“My nervous relax as I tell it.”), while a dog (Sadie is her name) barked her lungs out into the unseasonably warm February air, a black Nymphalis antiopa (mourning cloak [often confused with “morning” so is said]) presented its presence to my delectable retinas, and I thought: the completest sentence of all is a butterfly flying past one's ears, so close that one's ear-follicles are played like musical-keys by the Flying Blur-Flutter's mere wing-flaps (silk handkerchiefs thrown into the sky, carried with the breeze). Thoreau would have/must have swelled with the intensest admiration as I--no solemnity nor a sad composure--I thank Yahweh for these treasures. Speaking of mourning, or morning, I was begot during the morning hours.
*
Richard of Saint-Victor: “The outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible.”
Where O Where to find a speech therapist for the eyes! When seeing eyes in distress, in a fit of tragic annihilating-charging, it's as if I could pull pieces of whalebone from the individual's retinas. Ah, on two sides of the same glass, aiming a gesture at me, unawares, or aware all-the-while? We often take the choicest bits with a less-than-promising theme. It is the way certain critics hand out their Death Notices. Over-look the homespun hippie garb. One with one's icy reception, like our grim state of the union.
Thinking long summer thoughts.
Overheard: “. . . a firefighter that couldn't keep fighting because of tightness of chest. Depletion.” I picture how one must picture another; solidifications of which to uncrack codes--entire maps pulled by sudden force of looming gestures, like how (ick!) Marx said the automobile is the opium of the people: no, nah, no! the opium of the people are the people themselves.
*
Nervous energy only exists for artists; a momentous breakthrough. Lend me your ears: a respiration to snatch Purpose from the trolley wheels of my point-blank mistaken facts--for murmurs of suggestion. I see ears not opened; open mouths undergoing other chords; the fretting, the tongue, like a shutter, like winter jackets flapping in a warm tree. The other evening, in a book store, an elderly couple sat in the cafe, snatched by their daily coffee, so she said. I overheard them speaking of (or seemed to be, at first) Norwegian composers. I spoke with a sudden influx, a jumbled reflection: “Did you say that he's [referring to her husband] Norwegian?” We talked and talked: my desire to listen and learn from those 80 and 82 year-old mouths still remains with me: little details of departure.
A day after the lunar eclipse of December 12, 2010, I wrote: Clouds obscured the moon last night. I missed the eclipse that was said to be the first time since the Salem Witch Trials did this dark eyelid blink upon the moon in December. I stood under the sky, briefly, like some beast of the field stopping to listen to a despairing howl across the distance, looking up with Concordes flying out of my eyes; felt wrong-headed and without inspiration. For how often the moon has been brutalized in the sight of humanity's folly; how often has a halo given the curiosity of Man's embrace; how often Man has demanded the spread of moon-worship and insinuating its “powers” and “energy.” Grandiose, sensual, mystical: what better to see the moon hid behind thick clouds on the day it had gained worldwide attention! In another place, the moon blushed, naked in a clear sky, looking for a celestial grotto to slip into, hiding in the eternal blackness of the background, as it did four-hundred years earlier, as suspicion inhabited the English lands.
A Play without dramatis personae is like wind without wear.
One fine day, I had a strange thought, which arose upon my so suddenly amidst a cold, wintry day. I envisioned my mother wearing a wimple (secured) in the seventeenth century before I was conceived. In like manner, I envisioned my father as Philip IV on horseback (see Velasquez's painting); two figures and a “still life,” achieving an impression of reality, like Velasquez's bodegóns--an atmosphere of Seville, or like The Cook from 1618 where a woman, holding an egg in her left hand and a wooden spoon in her right, looks at the young boy who appears to be letting her words “go in one ear and out the other.” I imagined her head turning to her left, staring at me with those piercing eyes, smiling; her left arm rising and thus throwing that egg out of the painting and into my face; shell-cracklings, white yellow, oozing down my nose and overflowing over my lips. I would obviously choose not to wipe it away. I would merely stare superbly, as if a painting could fill one with calumny, like a lightning bolt that blows fuses. I envisioned my mother wearing a series of tapestries after my birth (my father still on horseback); my mother, Juliet-like, rushing across a field of flowers to take in the decor of their detail, their aromatic roundup. Under her eyes, a tearful florist; a trickle. After having snapped out of this vision, re-appearing back to Reality, I had thought of how “some people try new things because they're new” and how one shall say, “I don't! I just think about them first.” And do all mothers die only briefly? My mother enjoys cleaning house; dislikes loud voices behind her in a restaurant; enjoys hearing the harmonies of an all-boys' choir'; enjoys shades of blue; dislikes cooking and being read to; likes board games and Search-a-Word puzzles; wants to visit Denver; will not fly on an airplane; holds hot French fries out of the windows or in front of the air-conditioner vent to "cool them off.” Perhaps this text now become too modern? As you are reading this, whomever you are, what are you surrounded by? Are you surrounding by pizza and corporate coffee? O, I share your woes and your loves. “It comes with being alive.” I share your disillusionments or departures. Can you unravel the mysteries of the Anonymous? Is your father wearing an Inverness cape? Is light flowing from his face? Is your mother in a blue-funk phase? Does she enjoy Mississippi Pecan Pie and Chocolate cheesecake? The fact of the matter is this . . . The splattered egg that clogged my face entered also into my eyes . . .“in one ear and out the other.” Strong. Strong as an old-age addiction of taking things apart and then putting them back together again. A scene from a film yet created: Spin Meisters dip their hands into grab-bags, pull out wretched tar. One thing that I must do is dye a cow purple. I wouldn't walk a mile for a camel, but I'd ride camels for miles like a Magi.
Consider Cuban corruption: If one is caught with an unlicensed rifle, you are liable to be executed.
“What is the point-of-view of the enemy?”
A mountain spider that catches nothing in its web. My roundabout examination of the night, earlier, was like a torn chink in another dimension. To be able to hear from beginning to end.
Ear
beyond ear. Eye
beyond eye.
Joining G-d in the Eternal Absolute.
*
I remember how her face was the final bloom that I seemingly exhaled from. Replica of a remote place. We were meadow mice in some unimaginable pathway, in serene meadows intertangled between showers of petals, struck from mountain flowers (pink orange yellow every color you name it). And then one day it all became squeezed and dissolved; wholly flung like pine needles lying thick and strange on a stretch as far as one's eyes allow. Our dry arroyo (chalk scrawls) that once were oceans oceans Oceans on top of oceans. Now, winds howl through open space. She became quite an unfamiliar scorpion; curled tail of foul malice, poisoning the soil of our golden walk. A mass emptiness possessed me. A rattle of stones from morning earth. My heart, thrust through the cold starlight of space.
*
When the music plays loudly--the only sounds around--I oft feel shrouded in whispers. What could lift sand and ask who started the first fire? What were their names? Bone by bone, skull by skull, I do not seek an answer. The indefinable is a hollow, wild energy. Unless, of course, one is James Mason, or a deer nuzzling a fawn on a fresh mountain slope. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter anyhow. Anyhow, when the cat looks suspiciously into the open air as if it has heard something, seen something that I would not right away, I immediately think someone is breaking in, or has already broken in. The cat walks away. Will she die first? I hope that this music satisfies the burglar's ears. I am not paranoid, nor am I a worrisome person, but I am only human, yes, and often I am a grinding pebble in my humanly torrent. I wait in silence for a sign. I go and scan the domain. I open the door and watch as my icy breath floats through the noble winds of a wintry midnight.
*
LIGHT. Before my birth, I could have reached out to touch the light. Tiny veriest shadows illuminate truths if one understands the tempos of light. In the womb by "chemical chance" or "anti-chance"? The Euphrates River is drying up. Drying, twisting, tightening, like a twist-grip throttle upon the globe, increasing. Prophesied stability grows. Visibility wetting the lips of the Future's posture. I was in my mother's womb. Yahweh breathed me into existence. I sit here in silence. In awe. Words dissipate before arriving to my tongue.
Standing Figure, Graham Sutherland
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