Derrickonia Pineconeus

Intimate Spaces, Homes, Other Thoughts

2012-02-18T01:46:00.006-05:00

by Viktor Pivovarov

W.C. Williams: “Though the eye / turns inward, the mind / has spread its embrace—in / a wind that / roughs the stiff petals—”

Dreaming. Daydreaming. Obscurity: My mind often harmoniously quakes at the thought of disappearing, re-appearing, in our own “intimate spaces” “the cosmos” of our physical spaces, the most intimate comfort zones like a house, an apartment; one’s “home.” I think that my photography has a comfort zone of its own, beyond the “audience” “viewer” “voyeur” “escapist” &c. It isn’t necessary for anyone to “understand” my photographs, as long as they are understood by me. (The same can be said for Poetics.) “Meaning” often gets lost amidst the “Act.” Should one attempt to Understand something solely by imagining that one has created it? The reader, as Wallace Stevens once framed, always reads poetry with one’s nerves. How correct he was to state that reading a poem should be an experience, like experiencing an act. Photography can be echoed in the same light. This brings me to the idea of how certain people only go places when something is on one’s mind, but in truth, “we” (the individual) are always at “some place,” whether physically or psychologically, and the daydreamer has no choice. I wrote a poem that is similar; the past, present, future (or the possibility of imagining the future, leaving it open for questioning) that (abstract or not) is a memory where I still ‘reside’ at in my mind, that goes like this:

Your face boiled

like a bright diamond

when we parted

with innocent weeping;

the glow, flaming

to a zenith.

Behind our heads,

each our own golden sky,

as strong as naked rejoicing.

You & I,

the glass of the window;

our Past,

once a sweet & gentle vision

that became our Future,

terrible & invisible,

wolves of our own domains.

And so, between us,

what we all relate:

The Villain of Parting,

nearly unearthly, on one leg

it limped,

do you not remember?

The physical appearance of an Imagination would be either catastrophic or enchanting.

Poems evoke various associations, hence reading a memory. Letters, words, sentences: the invisible spaces upon a page? Our “souls” and “spirits” are invisible. ‘We’ essentially live in a “shell,” which is our Body, which in essence is our “house.” Mary Oliver says that whatever a house is to the heart and a body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit. She concludes, “Think how often our dreams take place inside the houses of our imaginations!” The Physical, our bodies, are the only ‘truths’ of our existence to other human beings. The spirit, which is The Real Person, is invisible (the physical being temporal and the unseen being invisible). In the Hebrew, “house” בַּיִת refers to both the “dwelling habitation,” “shelter or abode of animals,” or an “abode of light and darkness” translates as what we refer to in a Physical sense. The same term, however, applied figuratively as “bodies,” and metaphorically as “inwards” (Inward Dwelling of the Holy Spirit). In Matthew 12:25, Jesus Christ said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or HOUSE divided against itself shall not stand…” If, as Mary Oliver says, our dreams take place inside the houses (more than one, in her view) of our imaginations, then if we, The Real Person (the spirit/soul) lives inside of our “house” (Body), then we, as Invisible Eternal creations, have houses within a house, which could therefore be consolidated down to “rooms.” Each room, our imaginations and memories exist; a combination like that of gail-force winds within the psyche’, dispersed as “floods of thought.” I sit and ‘probe’ the depths of my mind, “going in” as deeply as possible, yet what, if anything, brings forth the first memory that I ‘see’ and recall? The memory, as ungovernable, existing in its own fury. How poised, at times, is the Mind!

Jung used a multi-storied house as an analogy for the human psyche: “We have to describe and to explain a building, the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure.” As Alton Conley notes: “Painted with a broad brush, this image opens our imagination to both the complexities of the human mind and the potentially rich associations of houses.”

In another essay Jung credits a dream, containing an image of a house, with one of his important psychoanalytic discoveries: “One [dream] in particular was important to me, for it led me for the first time to the concept of the collective unconscious . . . This was the dream. I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories. It was my house.” Our houses, in the physical sense, are as Conley again notes, “the protected environments that we dream in, and through our dreams find evidence of ourselves.” Bachelard said that “all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home,” where the imagination “comfort[s] itself with the illusion of protection.”

In another section from Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, this is a perfect example of my own emotions/thoughts about former childhood homes:

“If we have retained an element of dream in our memories, if we have gone beyond merely assembling exact recollections, bit by bit the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out the shadow. We do nothing to reorganize it; with intimacy it recovers its entity, in the mellowness and imprecision of the inner life. It is as though something fluid had collected our memories and we ourselves were dissolved in this fluid of the past. Rilke, who experienced this intimacy of fusion, speaks of the fusion of being with the lost house: ‘I never saw this strange dwelling again. Indeed, as I see it now, the way it appeared to my child's eye, it is not a building, but is quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connect the two rooms, but is conserved in me in fragmentary form. Thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me, the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonious slowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiral movement, in the darkness of which we advanced like the blood in our veins.’”

The Body σῶμα (“soma”), again, is our “house” that we, as spirit beings, live in. The Physical. In Matthew 6:22, Christ says, “The light of the BODY is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” The eye-gates are important in what we ‘let in’ our bodies, which gets down into the spirit, which produces fruits, depending on what one has allowed to enter one’s eye-gates. The ear-gate has the same effect. Edmond Jabes once said that, at times, an individual is reduced to the ear and the eye, like one sitting in a theater watching a film. Or, “Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.” In a rebuttal, I say that the individual cannot be reduced to the ear and the eye, if one understands that The Real Person is living inside of a body (“house”), therefore to “reduce” an Individual would be to reduce Creation, which therefore would reduce God, the Ultimate Maestro.

Barthes: “I may know better a photograph I remember, than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum. Ultimately—or at the limit—in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,' Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.'”

I think that the photographer should have a brain in each eye.

Deserving looks:

*

I heard the sleet outside of the window, and then a poem came:

Sleet falling, ticking

like a clock

on the crispy leaves.

Jean Echenoz: “A bird goes by . . . I follow it. This enables me to go wherever I like in the narrative.”

In a dream, the front door was rotting away (metamorphing/slowly disappearing?). The bottom half was all but gone, save for a few soft spots that clung by a thread. The door was large and had “insides.” I was looking through the door and could see the outside. I felt very worried. Thoughts of locking the door at night came rapidly. Even though the door would be locked at night, someone could easily reach upward and unlock the door, or easily break through and enter. I stood in front of the door, gazing at the door for a long period of time; many thoughts rushing through my head. Worried thoughts. The light on the outside was bright. I thought to myself that the door needed to be replaced. As I looked closer, I noticed that on the inside of the door at the bottom, there were many books perfectly placed, side-by-side, in similar fashion as they would be positioned on a shelf in a library.

In another dream, I was standing in a murderously bright white hospital, a fusillade of blinking whiteness, and in a specific room was an unspecified 3,000 year-old man, on his “death bed,” the final furrow. I was hovering around the room, as if like a guardian angel, floating/walking around the room and all about the hallways and spaces of the hospital, but all with no individuality of movement.

The eye/s in our dreams are like retinal circuses. Always the feeling of pre-sensations, pre-awareness, pre-knowingness--being told what is and what isn’t before coming to a conclusion, but running into them, truths, contradictions, a circular horizon, a feeling of unfeeling, but beyond feeling. The metaphor that “the body doesn’t do what the mind tells it to do” (this reference, often to an ageing body) is often what occurs in a dream, and at times vice-versa.

by Viktor Pivovarov

Senses and Nerve-endings

2012-02-02T21:48:00.005-05:00

Victor Oliva, The Absinthe Drinker, 1890, Cafe' Slavia in Prague

Nothing to say, or avoiding inaccuracy? —Brancusi: “I am far from myself, I am no longer a part of my own person. I am within the essence of things themselves” —is what I think that some people think that I am thinking when Silence beats to its own drum, rather than beating around the bush, as if Silence took its little coins and left. Loyalty. My friend, L.M., says that I am quite the Loyalist, perhaps one of the most loyal persons he has ever known, and for this I am very thankful. Some subjects are too rosy to overlook, words just “slipping out,” but often times as deceiving as Appearance. Silence: an apple-core for your thoughts? And...?

Gass: “‘And’ is produced initially with an open mouth, the breath flowing out, but then that breath is driven up against the roof, toward the nose, even invading it before the sound is stoppered by the tongue against the teeth.”

Pondering the Whiteness of a Wall, I think then of someone coming along and painting the wall, and then that bright white wall feels disguised; now, a mask of color, a masquerade of emptiness inside the mask with air-holes to breathe through, save for those that have been termite-inated, all within the inner ear of the wall. And the heartbeat of a home? Those that reside within the walls or the walls themselves? Technically speaking, the walls. Sentimentally, or perhaps living within walls of a home and “keeping it alive” takes at least one human being? An apartment has many hearts; the connection is like that of a gathering of nerves, a consistent beating (a lack of privacy?). The Old goes on, without invention, indeed, the same heartbeat being carved by naturesque enveloping or the whiteness of walls. The whiteness of walls not strong enough to hold color? yet strong enough to weaken families?

Philip Whalen: “A poem is a picture or graph of the mind moving” or: “A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) exactly as wide as these lines”

I often feel shrouded in a mutilated layer of shadows, like undiscovered speech traveling through a drain-pipe. It sounds brutal, but the so-called “best parts” are hardly considered. WINTER, why are you not sporting what you regularly attract? Unseasonably mild winter, as if saying, “So long,” but it's all in the teaser, in the drain-pipe? (being silent is an active verb), and soon, how I long for a colder-than-normal winter season, where a sky and snow are all aglow in a self-generated winter light like some astral body, immobile in the broad scope of the gaping universe. Swoon of snow appearing like dreams behind the eyelids, maneuvers, sweepers appearing, frozen: inside and out; frosted glass in access parading across the visuals, across the brain, dazzling with its chilled vibrancy.

From THE FIFTH NEED OF A MAN, writes J.R. Platt (written in 1960):

The needs of man, if life is to survive, are usually said to be four: air, water, food, and, in the severe climates, protection. But it is becoming clear today that the human organism has another absolute necessity. It is one that has not been emphasized in the past, for we have not often been entirely deprived of it or compelled to appreciate the subtle and numerous ways in which it contributes to our well-being. This fifth need is the need for novelty—the need, throughout our waking life, for continuous variety in the external stimulation of our eyes, ears, organs, and all our nervous network.

In a general way it has always been known that men need change. Put a man in a box and he goes crazy. But recent laboratory experiments on sensory deprivation has nevertheless been rather startling in their revelation of just how this happens.

Volunteers with softly bandaged heads and hands were put in isolation rooms or were floated in warm swimming pools were they could touch nothing and could only see dimness and hear only a low hum. It was not a vacation, as some might think! The men used for the experiments found they lost the sense of time, could not remember things or concentrate, had wild hallucinations, and finally, could never add or subtract. These were healthy, normal men, comfortable, and with no alcohol or drugs, yet they saw little yellow demons marching across the desert carrying enormous sacks. If the loudspeaker in the room finally asked a question or made a statement, it was the happiest of sounds. Yes, of course, two and two make seven, if the loudspeaker thought so. There was deeper truth in that, touching all philosophy.

After a few days of this every one of the man came staggering out, having thought about nothing they had planned to think about, unable to answer simple questions, and refusing to go back at any price. Stir crazy. And four hours after the bandages were removed, the walls seemed to weave in and out. Dreams were strange and it was days before perception and problem-solving returned to normal.

These experiments seem to prove, if proof is needed, that our bodies are not made to operate in a vacuum. Our brains organize, and exist in order to organize, a great variety of incoming sensory messages every waking second, and can become not only emotionally upset but seriously deranged if these messages cease or even if they cease to be new. The fifth need of man is the need for what can be called--in a mathematical sense—“information,” for a continuous, novel, unpredictable, nonredundant, and surprising flow of stimuli. I do not mean just a series of flickering lights or a madman’s chatter. This might be infinitely surprising but it would not interest us for long. Our sense impressions obviously must be organized into meaningful patterns if they are to bring us much information. But the most important pattern of all is the pattern of change.

In many ways the demand for novelty is like the demand for food. There can be a level of starvation and a level of gluttony. At the jail level, men wolf down their bread or soup, but they sometimes sacrifice even a little of that for a glimpse of the sky or a crumb of gossip. At higher and more normal levels of information flow, the need is relaxed and we can afford discrimination and rich creative enjoyment, becoming gourmets of mental fare. It is no accident that we speak of intellectual preferences as “taste.” And, as with food, we may also overload our networks with stimulation until we get mental bellyaches and can absorb no more.

But to call this a need for information—Is this not just dressing up the obvious in fashionable pedantry? Information theory, so-called, has been developed during the past decade from work in the mathematics of communication by Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and others; and the term has taken on the technical overtones which it does not have in common usage. Yet even in this sense, information as Warren Weaver defines it, is “a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message. . . . Thus greater freedom of choice, greater uncertainty, greater information go hand in hand.” The ideas of novelty and of intelligible information are bound up, and it is surprising what a bright light the motion of our need for them throws into many strange corners of human behavior. It brings out the nature of boredom, and of humor, of gambling and of learning, of our aesthetic judgments and of creative behavior in art and music, and of the driving force behind social revolutions.

Take aesthetic criticism. My colleague Professor Leonard Meyer of the Department of Music at the University of Chicago has recently a book entitled Emotion and Meaning in Music, in which he puts forward the theory that music or any other symbolic art may have two kinds of “meaning” for the hearer or the observer. One is its denotative meaning, where the music refers to some experience outside itself, either by obvious imitation or by accepted convention. The Domestic Symphony amuses us because of its household noises, and minor keys are thought to be poignant in the Western world because we sing sad songs to them. But formal music is dominated by an inherent meaning—that is, by a meaning which is a purely musical one; and this is what his theory is concerned with.

We all know that we can and do enjoy certain sequences of quite abstract sounds, patterns of pulsations of the air that are almost devoid of human content. What makes them enjoyable? Meyer says that when we listen to music “We are, in a sense, constantly expecting. Under certain conditions, we expect change, under others continuity, and under still others repetition; until finally, we expect the conclusion of the piece. Thus in a very general way expectation is always ahead of the music, creating a background of diffuse tension against which particularly delays articulate the affective curve and create meaning. Formal expectation is constantly active on several architectonic levels as a sort of generalized aesthetic tension which is shaped and particularized in the course of listening.”

Meyer suggests that the inherent musical meaning, the emotional as well as the intellectual satisfaction, lies just in this expectation and in the composer’s manipulation of our tensions, by turns subtly thwarted or subtly satisfied as the music develops.

The sense of freshness, apparently, with old and new objects? (as Coleridge once said).

Victory.

by Rogelio Manzo

Beyond the Brocken spectre: thoughts, jots, dots.

2012-01-13T18:35:00.006-05:00

Ern Malley, by Sidney Nolan

I have learned, over plenty of useful and non-useful time (time is time is time, no?), that my uncle views certain images—particularly photographs—as How-did-the-artist-do-it? rather than as a “document” or “moment in time”—being it is what it is, the stoppage of time itself, like a fragment of a memory, or the fullest memory frozen in the mind, &c. My uncle is a brilliant, creative individual, of whom I admire in more ways than I could ever express, but it beckons to be expressed in more ways than a tongue could flap in the mouth during hot weather; for granted, he has always been a father-figure to me, a best friend. Dare I critique him? This is not of the sort, but a simple explanation of a Thought; an emotional kind of thing, where the matrix of my ponderance at this hour flows deeply, drifts far out into some humming mountain, the world’s caterer, a kind of Carpathian Mountains beauty (+ we began reading Dracula together during the Christmas holidays, all the way through chapter VI, so I must make it known, this connection to the Carpathian lands). This thought, mind you, should be thought of as nothing more than a statement, for the lack of a better term. My uncle has always had a knack for visually expressing himself, which stems back to his elementary school days. Upon seeing an abstract painting once, he said, “I thought of the painting as a sequence of ‘movements’,” and then a comment or two about the sounds of music, particularly space music, he states that he ‘sees things’ (like the idea of “hovering over a name”), in a sense akin to a lava lamp (thinking upon the rhine of surrealism—a mind so full of energy it seeps from the ears, the tongue full of silence, null and patient). As Baudelaire once reverberated: “The arts aspire, if not to complement one another, at least to lend one another new energies”—! Emily Dickinson: “Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.” My uncle and I jump around from subject to subject, even about sounds. He says, “We should write a book on Sound Theory.” Speaking in such thoughts as Cage’s theories, I add: “Each sound, no matter what it is, the loudest or the most minute, is a song in itself.”

I stumped my toe earlier and realized that it’s winter—unable to feel the pain is like being alive in a different body. Instilling something much brighter—it seems to never cease (James 1:8: “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”) “Blank, like a name left blank.”

Richard Wurmbrand On Atheism: In prison, the political officer asked me harshly, “How long will you continue to keep your stupid religion?” I said to him, “I have seen innumerable atheists regretting on their deathbeds that they have been godless; they called on Christ. Can you imagine that a Christian could regret, when death is near, that he has been a Christian and call on Marx or Lenin to rescue him from his faith?” The officer laughed, “A clever answer.” I continued, “When an engineer has built a bridge, the fact that a cat can pass over the bridge is no proof that the bridge is good. A train must pass over it to prove its strength. The fact that you can be an atheist when everything goes well does not prove the truth of atheism. It does not hold up in moments of great crisis.” I used Lenin’s books to prove to him that, even after becoming prime minister of the Soviet Union, Lenin himself prayed when things went wrong.

Rilke: “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.”

Walking outside: that means that I’m literally the weather”?
“under

Take pictures, love people. Take pictures, love people. Love people, take pictures. Love people, love people. Take pictures, take pictures. Films, films, films.

What I love about certain things is not about what they consist of, but instead what they are lacking.

A child crying because of strange weather? It’s like trying to ignore a giant.

George Stanley: “Writing — to see what turns up, or to keep going.” “Now the words tell of something so obvious / as to see the air in front of you / but not to have known it was something / to see.”

After reading Henri Michaux’s MISERABLE MIRACLE, the French poet/artist’s first book about his experimentation with Mescaline, a powerful hallucinogenic drug that has an “elongating propensity,” it’s easily one of more fascinating reads that I’ve ever encountered (right up there, with say, texts by Edmond Jabès—whether I disagree with some of them or not matters in the least). It’s a curious thought that, if the devastation of Michaux’s wife’s death after accidentally setting her nightgown on fire had not of happened, if his experimentation would have even began. Andre Gide said, “Michaux excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things.” This rings true. Quotes like “a shiver in the workshop of the brain” describes it well, but one quote that sticks in mind is Michaux’s “language center” interacting with a knife that turns into a “thousand knives” and then:

Suddenly a thousand knives, suddenly a thousand dazzling scythes of light, scythes set in flashes of lightning, enormous, made to cut down whole forests, start furiously splitting space open from top to bottom with gigantic strokes, miraculously swift strokes, which I am forced to accompany internally...

Words become other words; colors like green are really red, and other colors by name aren’t their true identities, etc. “An enemy of colors? No longer colors at all. Yet they are not really absent either.” He describes certain visions as a “fussilade of colors.” Beautiful, makes me think of a blinking rainbow directly in front of your face. The mention of “whiteness” often is interesting too. One quote: “A whiteness appears, a whiteness to blind you, dazzling, like molten metal pouring out of a Bessemer converter.” Also: “Absolute white. White whiter than all whiteness. White of the advent of white.” White “riddling the eyeball.” Michaux writes also of being “hollowed out”—the “sensation of a fissure.” One quote that I found beautiful, “I hide my head in my scarf in order to know, to recognize my surroundings.”

Artistic, beautiful, poetic and comical (but that’s likely because I’m easily amused).

I always feel like every photograph I make is like a film still, always leading to something else...

Some things are so beautiful that their presence alone could make me disappear from the face of the globe. One look, and slowly the invisible metamorphosis begins. Another look and I’m blinking out of view. One final look, and I’m the ‘real’ Invisible Man...

Solar plexus flaring up, as if on the wings of a meteor...

Autoportrait au large con dégagé, by Ibrahim Shahda

Cropinua Sundiacti

2011-12-20T01:46:00.001-05:00

painting by Pavel Tchelitchew

Fremder: “More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.”

Gaston Bachelard: “The poetic image exists apart from causality.” ‘…the increased intimacy of a house when it is besieged by winter’. . . Bachelard also says that “all corners are haunted.” Are there corners in nature? “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” (Rilke).

I have come to learn that there is a genuine truth in certain voices, whether it is someone speaking to you about a particular subject, or a stranger saying Hello, or someone singing a song from their heart, like Adele, but when someone doesn’t have a genuinity about them, it makes me curious as to their intent. Their walls are built before speaking; their voices are shattered by a lack of compassion; a voice becomes a mere sound, only a sound, habitual, to reflect their sense of hubris that makes me think of fungus growing from out of no where, in a strange place, and discovering that there had been a kind of secret depth in that place all-along, like unseen dew drops, mocking the naked eye. The initial unseen subject disguising, in a sense, what was to come, until the physical dimension revealed the invisible build-up. The invisible, eternal; the physical, temporal. From there, faith becomes profitable. Faith that most people are indeed full of love.

Aeschylus: “It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.”

Robert Kelly: “A word comes to mind. I write it down and see what happens. When you do this every day for 50 years, you learn how to wait.”

Are you warm? said the winter ground to the hibernating animals. No answer. No sound, except those of the crisp rustling leaves.

Stan Brakhage: “‘Polis is’ said Charles Olson, having found the archeological root of the word-end (thus beginning) of, say, ‘metropolis,’ etc. 'Police is a clear etymological derivative of ‘polis.’” ... The Police, then, are the public eyes; and they are, thus, expected to be Specialists of that ability-to-respond which most of the rest of the society has lost all Metro sense-of.” [Ha, too bad Stan didn’t live to see what's going on in this day-and-age.]

I read a quote wrong, and from that sprouted a new thing. I love it when this occurs. This is what came out of it: “I've bruised the carpet again,” but that wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was, “I’m bruising the walls,” but I realized that bruising the carpet sounded much better, since carpet is designed for pressing. The word “bruising” came out of skimming over “brushing” too quickly. Am I the only one who thinks of random questions? For instance, a question like the following came to mind just this morning: “After Francesca Woodman committed suicide, who took in her cat?” Her parents? A friend? Did the cat know--at the moment Francesca’s body pulverized the ground, death’s shadows surrounding the scene--that she had died that very moment? One would be surprised at what animals know; how, in some strange way, their emotions are attached to ours, like unending veins, nerves, brain stems. My uncle tells a story about his sister (my aunt, of course) who was living in Germany with her then husband who was stationed in Berlin back in the ’80s. Their dog wasn’t taken with them to Germany, so it was left for various family members to take care of while they were away. While my aunt was in the hospital, about to have the baby, my uncle said that one late night, as their dog stayed in his room that night (and most every night), he was awoken by the dog’s sudden, random howling. Turns out, the EXACT time that the dog started howling was when my aunt was giving birth in a hospital, some 4600 miles away.

The self, lost in selves, distracted,
leaving a piece of the Unreal You
with someone that sees the Real.

painting by Pavel Tchelitchew

2011-10-24T19:56:00.006-04:00

Eduard Wiiralt, Heads, 1926

There are times when I am all over the place in my mind that I just can’t stay put for long, without being distracted by other thoughts that thrill me, thrilling me to the point of moving on from one beautiful thing to another. It’s as if at times I were transfigured, turning into a ricochet, and in the oneness of my body I remain as one, but in the vast openness of the expanding universe of my mind, I am in several different places at once.

Robert Louis Stevenson: “...any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly favored, that we can pass a few hours agreeably.”

Conrad Aiken: “sharply we flower in this foul farewell”

In response to Gary Snyder's “How Poetry Comes To Me” (“It comes blundering over the / Boulders at night, it stays / Frightened outside the / Range of my campfire / I go to meet it at the / Edge of the light”), my own thoughts on How Photography Comes To Me:

It comes blundering over the horizon in shadowy angling, every possible light to trap, as if numbered like a limited edition. Some days, I go to it, and like a stumbling child attempting to walk, to mimic those enormous imposing adults, I find a new spark in the dark, slain again by the shutter-eye’s blink, as if to tease the scene, compressing it into time, like freshly compacted clay in the hands of the sculptor.

Cecil Taylor: “each note . . . a continent, a world in itself.”

Pound: “In the light of light is the virtù.”

*

A poem, a farewell, to a former love:

THE GREEN LAWN OF THE COURTHOUSE SQUARE

As our hands were shaking near raw
in mythological in-action as we held one another
on the bright green lawn of a courthouse square

in the cool, pouring rain (behind that mocking sky:
a big blue empty sea), we both knew
that we had been taken to the furthermost limits;

mutual separation was my heart’s near doom—
an atrocity of the dismemberment of my loins
that resembled scraps of metal across an

inflamed, asphyxiated landscape. Our anatomies
had already begun to pre-drown the earth with our
longings, like nature’s decay—not ignorant

of our names nor our human shapes—that signified
limpness in our precious limbs like broken trophies.
Some time, many days later, I re-visited that once

poignant locale—still as poignant as before—on the
green lawn of the courthouse square. I stood within
that enterprise where our bodies had been fastened,

soaking up the remnants, preserving what
still confirms a memory, as if like pressed leaves
upon my heart; our voices now like faint whispers

speaking underneath a wilted rose.

*

Poem:

     the slow transition
of you & me

O, Leak to my lips
into my lips

Sun like flaming corn
School buses to the groins
of the air
        Public school
systems
are like a McDonald’s
to the shin    stomach wanting
to cry again
much to the consumer's chagrin

FLESH     the old music
makes me want to weep
in a car
         riding with attendees
for betrayed blues
as if one were crying one’s eyes away
in a bar

those that dig for gold
that gold-dig without shame
that want me to talk with them
about their problems
for what gain?

*

Written after my cat obtained an eye injury, which broke my heart, entirely:

Weight comes, falls away from the body. What pains you like a combination of explosions in the belly, daubed nuclear, clear hearing of weeping at night, as joy comes in the morning. Faith daubs away darkness, Light peeling away the chaos without wry eye, joy feels like toys in the hands of children—furry kittens with dreams of capturing the sputtering fly. Innocence of animals like lightning put on alert, stops to behold the light within me that is brighter than the sun. I cannot question why I was reverse-engineeredby Yahweh—how my eyes of a once MISunderstanding were enlightened, were decoded with a precision of eye-lash thin seconds to accept the falling scales from my eyes, like corrective lenses covering me.(Good news: Cat's eye healed!)

*

The breath of the future is knowing that the next morning a bird will sing, as if birds open their mouths to inhale sunrays to get that much closer to God, the tender place of the chest within.

Or: Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky (Emily Dickinson).

From Curiosities of Literature (1807): “Why should we not erect an asylum for venerable genius, as we do for the brave and the helpless part of our citizens? It might be inscribed a Hospital for Incurables!”

Mark Storey: “No wonder Southey could laugh when, having written fifty stanzas about the forthcoming royal wedding, he heard that the engagement had been called off.”

Jack Spicer: “Let me chop apart / With my bare hands / This blurred forest.”

Sometimes cameras make me nervous. I feel overwhelmed, like an insect in a glass jar, frozen, expecting nothing. In photography, does a moment in time become an image, or is the image already there, dangling like a prize, to be taken? This should be a one sentence answer. Maybe I should be playing a piccolo, everyone’s noses are like Pinnochio’s, no? Not everyone, but many. Gwendolyn MacEwen once wrote: “...for this cold impersonal dawn was for me another kind of darkness, a new and secret form of night.” There's something quite poetic about hearing a train off in the distance, particularly during the night hours. It’s like audible film-noir, leaving a mental fragrance.

Eduard Wiiralt, ca. 1926–34, from the private collection of Juhani Komulainen,
part of a 2009 exhibit

Fragments & Buxus

2011-03-14T17:07:00.016-04:00

HIM, Fred Tomaselli

W.H. Auden: “words have no words for words that are not true.”

E. Jabes: “In the middle of words is the void through which they escape.”

How painful my heart ticks itself through every desolate road I’ve crossed. Heart, you beat through my chest with the esteem of a locomotive.

The word for “spirit” in Hebrew is the same as the word “wind.” Lovely.

I always imagine myself in various places, in various periods of time, in various weather patterns, and just the other evening I imagined myself at night filling a water gun full of honey and aiming it towards the moon, already yellow on the horizon (“a yellow skull”). An overwrought imagination as if from the Middle Ages. A ghost that complains of being unburied. Mozart plucking prayers from the air, sculpting them into unquiet constructions. A reason to feel human: textures of twists, silent potency, balderdash—a midcentury shape of a large scale; “the secret of modern life fore-shadowed” (Gautier) or the opposite in essence: the way “Lady of Shalott” was “half-sick of shadows”—cataracts counter-acted, running down the cheeks of the once blind woman. Re-birth’d; no sound, no screaming. A new birth where I’m born into fabric on a Nympheus print or Melilla in indigo blue and silvery gold texture. Feeling out-of-place, abnormal “in a vintage sort of way” or like a tiger shark let loose in a swimming pool full of party-seals. What, say, is easier on the eyes than keeping them closed?

I must be in the silent minority. No effete snobs or superlicious sophisticates here! I admit to viewing “House Wives of Orange County” for a brief (painful) spell—felt like watching a Kodak commercial—felt like soaking one’s hands in dirty dish water: all of these little men running around in gray golfing attire with perky, big-breasted (silicone?) wives doing the Electric Slide through their extravagant kitchens with overly-cozy connotations. Ah, a silent minority, like winter’s white-plaster mirror; “what artists call a French gray.” A French gray eats away the evening, like serving spareribs to a pack of wolves; monstrous like disappointed husbands and wives.

There is no such as “nothingness” (outside of space/universe, granted, for the Universe, collectively, is a Something. Our minds, like the universe, expanding). Nothingness derives from man-made philosophies. Everything is a Something. Perhaps it is simply that doubt, fear, etc. gives a means for the “idea” of nothingness? like the atheist that feels that life has little meaning and zero value? or, the idea that we are merely existing only “in the now” “in the present” and that human beings are mere flesh and bones and that, ultimately, we are to simply perish as our Complete Finality? If be the case, however, then the purpose of life is essentially insignificant and we are simply ‘being’ as, well, Beings. There are quite a-many in various communities that would have believe that the earth and humanity are the result of time, chance and energy. This, of course, means that God does not exist as a personal, infinite being. This also means that nothing is significant or absolute. If this were true, there would be no meaning to life! There would instead be only accidental mechanical functions. We were not accidents of “physical laws” but instead we were created.

(n)arrow

A poem:

Squeeze the shadow—let it crouch near you.
We’re all just moving pictures passing along;
perhaps the way a child looks at a ferris wheel.
I'm a water-colored merry-go-round: my ribs,
the nexus of another breath.

(n)arrow

It’s safe to say that Sherlock Holmes was never trained to be an observant and thorough as he is—never trained to find needles in haystacks, for seemingly, Sherlock Holmes is the haystack! He simply picks ‘n’ chooses as they come, at ease; what better way to attack the developments than to observe the unordinary in the ordinary and vice-versa?

Knut Hamsun: “. . . truth telling is unselfish inwardness.” All of these people tell you what people are ‘not’ rather than informing you what they ‘are’ or can ‘become.’ “So tall and quiet like a king.”

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Interesting ditty here:

“If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, ‘Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him a right to the use of her house—for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.’ It would be still more absurd to say this if I had the bars installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got in only because the defect of the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or falls in. Again, suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not—despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won’t do—for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home with a (reliable!) army.”

--from “Western philosophy: an anthology” by John Cottingham.

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Oh, darling, you're such a lamb.” “Hello, sweet duchess.” One often confuses the life of a man with his art. Everyone seems to look alike when you don’t know them. You can never tell what private tragedies people have experienced, but when people start throwing salt over their left shoulder, I have to start wondering.

No inanimate object can have a personality, so is said; but, we look at a house and say that it's cheerful, gloomy, melancholy, &c. but what we're really doing is simply describing our own reactions. The human mind has been compared to the atom bomb, whose two elements, when kept apart, are perfectly harmless. So it is with the human mind.

Interesting to note that Stamps use a blend of corn dextrin (gummy substance extracted from starch) and water. It is designed to last longer on commemorative stamps. On “regular stamps” however a blend of polyvinyl acetate emulsion and dextrin are used—also added: a bit of propylene glycol, used to reduce paper curl. Interestingly, polyvinyl acetate used for stamp adhesive is the basic ingredient for bubble gum. Brilliant.

Reb Alsem: “We live out the dream of creation, which is God’s dream. In the evening our own dreams snuggle down into it like sparrows in their nest.”

Reb Hames: “Birds of night, my dreams, explore the immense dream of the sleeping universe.”

Reb Hames: “Words are inside breath, as the earth is inside time.”

Is it true that every woman wants to be seen in that “certain light”? Why are “manly pursuits” misconceptioned as hunting, gambling and electronic-tinged? Does Kitty Bennet really swoon at the color red? What of Henry Miller’s “Rousseaustic withdrawel from the American Dream” which he referred to as “The Air-conditioned Nightmare”? Do newspapers really lie? Radios? Are the streets the only thing that “howls with truth”? Why did everyone go gaga over military men in Jane Austen’s books? What are you willing to admit? Can a mind ‘room’ anywhere in blue? Are you eating dinners based on the colors of famous sports teams? Would you write about Majorca if you lived close-by? Do you have a small chair-fetish? Are you a moment event beyond muted punch? Is minimalism a flat elevation of charity? Wipe your hands on your pants? Your minimal hands? Your pants, dirty in light? Does light . . . overwhelm itself? Does light . . . shed tears over photographic Dark Rooms? Does the hefty circle of a bird’s eye make you think of Quaker-calm? Does are you what of?

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Corita Kent: “Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries.”

The awkward silence irritated him (me?), but somehow glittered in his chest (mine?); a fever that expressed itself like wordlessness of paintings. “Bone-tired.” The mirror looking back at me; what do I reflect? Perhaps it seems me jumping from place-to-place like an Egyptian jerboa? I have realized that it would see happiness in my external composition. Indeed. The basic difficulty with certain people is that they don’t know how to cultivate their happiness. Happiness is a habit. It’s freedom! And I feel more free than a feminist raving about short hair; how long hair symbolizes, according to some, “a delicate Alice-in-Wonderland thing that undercuts the image of a strong human being.” How silly. Peace of mind! I wear it well. If one pierces “Mystery” all that flies suddenly, momentarily, becomes airless craters. Mystery possesses the unique ability to heal its wounds. There are times at night I feel swept away from the world—from all of the anger and forced liberation and disease and war and revolutionary irrationalists. There are instances, however, during the day when I am a “passion flower”; a “scarlet runner”; bright “forsythia” and “yellow jasmine.” The world, crumbling, falling like dolmens, and it seems as though animals are, at times, daydreaming about a way to escape the man-made machinery; they look directly through us while the strokes of the clock writhes into the next “second.”

(n)arrow

“The evil that men does lives after them,

The good is oft interred in their bones.”

--Shakespeare, JULIUS CAESAR

ACT III, SCENE 2, LL. 80-81

Distance, the greatest place to center oneself? “The ladder urges us beyond ourselves. Hence its importance. But in a void, where do we place it?” Answer: Beyond ourselves. Perhaps it is true that we must “wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us.” Doxa? Have you really wondered why Mickey Mouse has four fingers? For a very good reason, I should say! It is like “the creation of another imagination”—sound without borders.(Damasio: “The body-minded brain.”) . . .

An image biting to see the patterns; this is both organized words—they reflect between gardens as company. Center, frisked like a bomb. I is auditorium; the pandemonium at the podium in the great heart’s flurry. I, He, of hints? Is He this sea-invented pun? I created a slow-motion for my shadow to witness it lag behind in empathy. Gradually, light shattered it back up-to-speed.

(n)arrow

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (one of Russia’s most beloved poets) once said: “In Russia a poet is more than a poet.” Well, in America a poet is an Incomplete Completion. Poets with voices in the sky; a yielded wealth “could literally be walked on”—no poet is every truly “underground.” Poets only go “underground” when buried. A “grave” condition? What are these words on a journalistic-“blog” but a shipwrecked Sub-Zero? Underwater baptism of text; this page, this paragraph, like an ocean of bluestone; poems marbled to the ocean floor. Look for gold at the bottom; you will only discover . . . words . . . words in wont . . . or an opened book; unfinished yet “finished”; decrepit at first glance from the foamy surf, but onward it rises and rises for the jewel of reaching where Identity eludes us. A voice. You lose it to a whisper, like a ship sailing pas a well-lit lighthouse; a voice heard in a seagull’s throat. Listen. We are drained into the seas; dark are their maps. The seas inhale, laugh outloud at Man’s attempts to reach the bottom of the deepest summits. If I were poems, you would sink into every word like a speculation. Parallel’d hexagrams glisten with foreknowledge. I swell in the winds of your every breath.

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from “Lavish Absence”: “In ‘Mirror and Scarf,’ one of my favorite chapters in The Book of Yukel, the closeness of sound in the two title words, miroir and mouchoir, sparks a breathtaking meditation on the face as reflection rather than flesh. In English, it is less convincing that “Mardohai Simhon claimed the scarf he wore around his neck was a mirror” until, at Simhon’s death, a large scar is discovered under the scarf. Reflection always comes back to a wound. It both has its origin, in a wound and circles it’s like a scarf-mirror.”

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Kathe Kollwitz self portrait (1898) reminds me of This.

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Reb Alphandery: “Our dreams extend us.” Are we, therefore, extended by the remembrance of a dream? or, are we extended every time that we wake from sleep? I suppose Sleep, itself, is a kind of extension; a necessary extension, just as the electrolytes in our foods are necessary extensions for keeping our hearts beating.

Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is beyond brilliant, like the hyper-metamorphosis of a blister beetle.

About the deerfly: “all species are annoying to man.”

Film about Francesca Woodman Here.

Looking at photos looking back at me thinking that photos think that I, too, am a photo. Photographs are wrinkles in time. When our eyes look upon them, we smooth out their wrinkles. Separating the infinite from. As with material objects, lusts, etc. being one’s “god,” I suppose Edmond Jabes’s “god” was The Book, or books in general perhaps. A shutter-cap widens the camera’s eye. Man created the camera’s eye. God created man’s eye.

The other evening, while my stomach’s geography rumbled like a thousand bison over the land, with limited I strolled into a local dollar store to purchase a bottle of Acetaminophen. I looked around for a moment, noticing as always that another holiday had come early, forced onto civilization; commercialism’s angry beast snarling and drooling at the mouth. Easter quickly approaching—“I wonder if I could locate candy for fifty cents?”—A young blonde no more than twenty looked at me twice, greeted me, as she unraveled floral flowers from boxes. I walked down an aisle looking for the medicine section, as so, drifting past a man talking on a cell phone who I heard say as I walked by: “So the flu actually comes from a bug?” I proceeded to search out the proper aisle, hearing friction between a Guardian and a mentally-challenged child, confining myself to the poignant cries. A petite red-headed woman smiled at me, only glazing over my aura briefly, obviously too engrossed to shop or think of the lovely conversation she had perhaps recently had which scuttled her balloon, as if perhaps patching up a relationship before it hit rock-bottom; for, granted, who dare deserves to be sent to be without supper? Cryptic possibilities have always laminated my mental epilogue; my undissolvable interest in stretching the tendon of every moment, edifying my curiosities, steeped in near absolution.

(n)arrow

A poem I wrote recently:

As spring peeks out its blossomed snout

And winters goes dashing about,

The warmth above unfreezes the doves

And the flowers erupt in a shout!

If I want a house warming gift, I’ll just let the windows up in the dog-days of summer.

The best part of waking up . . . is breath in my lungs.

Field Guides, Fred Tomaselli  

(photo collage,  gouache, acrylic, and resin on wood)

Like Statues With Aching Joints

2011-03-02T14:24:00.017-05:00

Octopus, Graham Sutherland

                                                       As words separate, I draw close
                                                                          as words draw near, I fall apart.

                                                                                                      --Murat Nemet-Nejat

Some time ago, my heart boiling over with some unspeakable ringing; a tolling of which no words could describe, this tiny poem erupted from me:

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

2010-11-18T18:27:00.023-05:00

Embrace by Shawn Yu

Just hide me in the antimacassar of a painting, an image. We all have a little Kerouac in us. Feed me naturesque falafel. Khorosho. 

My concepts are vertical, like darkness in retreat. Today may be a pun on French words, fraught with great deeds. If I could have entered the palace of Louis XVI my “fleshless lips of air” would have greeted me like a lit match held underneath one’s feet. Brahms-hums, a kind of rain in my ear—every room is the same: reaching for perfection within four walls, without man-made accompaniments. 

A room is full of hidden speech, edible; some of them full of negative energy where one must coax angst out of anger, fleeing from mysterious kinships as this. Empty meditation without impersonal consciousness is a room full of cactuses. In this hidden chamber I caress my books, my papers, my confused mass & run aloof from barking uninviting indestinguishableness. Uninvited people, seeing one’s eyes arrive into view, like great marbled floor patterns, peristaltic shock. During the Festival, I walked through chronic swarms of people; I observed these flourishing crowds, like ravenous ant-eating kleptomaniacs, unlatched like broken doors, fatigue in this sight, fatigue in this dirty mess like a mudhole. I look on, perpetually smiling in ample folds, like an unfilled shape evolving.

A poem: 

Doubling every person’s Functioning,
to stretch, surround, the upper & lower
jaws, gums, upper & lowers lips, vocal
chords, gullets, esophaguses, eyeballs,
hearing & not hearing, sound waves,
brightness, perfume, cologne, scents
to behold. Is this flowing, flowering,
forming, growing, scorning, slowing
or separating, shaking, stretching,
surrounding, broadening, clearing? 

*

A thought isn’t always a poem, is it? This arose into my ear-follicles, my onrushing mind, just the other evening: 

The net has too many holes, gills of undending exhaustion. We’re like the whale, a shark’s chipped tooth, bronze altars of sunsetting sky. Our lungs like stained-glass—a trumpet snarling like a frustrated cat, like a sudden ‘clapping’ of speechlessness. 

Sometimes the printer comes on by itself. What is going through those wires? Electric groupuscules with a Hee-Haw. The same jumpy-reaction like the ice in the cup sounding off without warning. The sounds of two cats eating out of the same plate: Now that is a true symphonic masterpiece. Naturesque Mozarts. 

“Took” for what it’s worth. Like the photograph of Obama in 2008  reading “The Post American World” by Fareed Zakaria. What does that tell you? President Obama is a realistic version of Bowser Koopa. Nancy Pelosi should be the spokeswoman for All-Things-Plastic. 

O, nature, how you fill me to the very brim. Yahweh, over-flooding me with blessings. When I am in the forest, I feel as if there’s stark visual fields of concentrated surveillance all-around me—the eyes of trees, animals; the ground clutching at every position. Cell phones should not exist in forests; if only they could send shortwave recordings in spy-form into the ether, a la The Conet Project, then perhaps we could code our thoughts to one another via moving clouds, or a sunray or two; all would be sure instinct. I just carve messages on trees, instead. 

If the moon’s pupil opened a bit wider, the sun would gasp with rapt attention & reverse every memory, every photo, so that all light & life would become an absolute anfractuous shadow sunken into the infinite mire upon the pressed lips of the universe.

Poem written several weeks ago: 

I just want to reach up 
and smear the moon 
in every direction 
so that the entire sky 
would resemble 
a popcorn ceiling.

*

Brilliance of Creationism—stars literally “singing” to us at one time, via Dr. Carl Baugh:

 According to the observation of radioastrophysicists, stars, by radio wave context, are ‘singing’ to us. Stars throughout the universe are emitting radio wave energy. These stars emitting radio wave energy, but that there is music on those radio waves of energy. Not only is music emitted, but the music being emitted is in a major key. The music being emitted from these stars is harmonious. NASA compared the music being emitted from these star sources to the instruments of an orchestral creation. It seems that everywhere we look, creation is orchestrated. Recently, with some special plasma ionized research units, NASA found that Neptune and some of the other planets in our solar system emit a signal which sounds like whistling, as if it were whistling a tune. First of all, there was a firmament of water above the earth in crystalline form. Crystals take on very special characteristics. When energized with a current of electromagnetic energy, crystals amplify long radio waves. Each morning before the Flood, as the earth turned toward the sun, when the angle was just right, the energized radio waves reaching the earth through the universe were amplified by the crystalline firmament canopy. Each morning before the Flood the radio wave signals from these stars, or ‘music,’ could be heard on Earth. Light energy does something to the human body and to all life forms, even if it cannot be seen. In the early hours of the morning, as the fiber optic nature of this crystalline canopy above the earth was transferring light from the sunny side of the globe, it would have very gently enhanced that light. If an individual were asleep, and could not see the light, as the light were enhanced that individual would begin to stir, for the light would be received in the biologic mechanism of his body. Light would gently induce the individual awake. The crystalline water in the firmament canopy before the Flood would filter out the harmful shortwave radiation. The canopy would permit the long waves of energy to go right through it. In fact, the long waves of energy would not only be able to pass through the canopy, but would be enhanced, or amplified by it. While the individual sleeping before the Flood was gently induced awake by the light, about dawn he would also have been greeted by the amplified sound of the radio wave energy being emitted by the stars. NASA had found that there are bursts of energy from these sources, but there would also be sustains, crescendos, diminshes, and terminations. There would be new music every day.

* 

Interesting links to articles (particularly that relates to eschatology and the bizarrities of our government), photographers, artists, etc.: 

FEMA camps confirmed

Scientists  hope to record our dreams

Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority to Kill Americans Outside Combat Zones

 Obama says that we must embrace globalism and the emerging one world economy

Obama confirms his faith in the One World Religion   

Soros advises Obama to use forceful measures to override the will of the people

Al  Qaeda Leader Dined At The Pentagon Just Months After 9/11  

Placing the Quran in church pews now 

Paintings by Michaell Sowa

Index of The Poems of Georg Trakl

Artisticness from Laura Clark

Photographs by Charles Grogg 

Paintings by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis

America is Becoming a Police State: Senate Passes Bill S 510 
(considered “The most dangerous bill in United States history”) 
to control what you eat! what you can grow in your own yard!)


Obama on the cover of the November 23 issue of Newsweek magazine 
depicted as the Hindu god, Shiva the Destroyer, doing the  “dance of death”


*

What begins the love nest, 
                              strict demands for imagination... 
Most all governments do not have functioning brains... 
                              Our minds as finite as the universe; a dreamlike sketch... 
All of these smart bombs from idiocy = morbid lies...
                              They want you to dive into waterless swimming pools... 
...Mouths like the beat of horse hooves, and as Conrad once wrote: 
                              a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. 

Do not write a book, let the book write you. 

Tremendous amounts of Eager, vast and uninterrupted. There is a language on the soles of our feet of all of the places we’ve ventured; if you just walk around, dance around, stumble around on a white sheet, many words will suddenly appear as if out of no where.

The Myth of Depth by Mark Tansey

(Subject:  Jackson Pollock walking on water; deals with the idea of depth in  painting. Greenberg thought depth was an illusion; the flat surface is  what Formalism was all about. So what might look like depth here is only  an illusion according to Greenberg is shown in the boat lecturing on  the nature of flatness and gesturing toward Pollock ... More Here.) 

The quieter tone, like a disrupted denouement:

2010-10-24T18:34:00.008-04:00

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 Vincente’s 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.)

Paintings by George Tooker

2010-10-20T20:37:00.001-04:00

Paintings by Valeriy Skrypka

2010-10-20T01:16:00.001-04:00

Small Fractions of Space

2010-10-08T20:06:00.003-04:00

Stephen Alcorn's  Relief-Block Print 

of  Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1984)

We all, or most of us, live in a small fraction of space, and within this space only a small fraction of individuals will ever be a part of our space, or our experiences.

Thinking of trapeze artists lately, ran across this: Madame Saqui: “I myself have witnessed the delicate crossings of Sharif Magomiedoff several times: he places the tip of his wife’s foot on his forehead and walks along the wire while keeping her balanced. To be a wire walker in its profoundest sense means to leave the wire behind you, to discover the cables that have been strung even higher and, step by step, to reach the Magic Wire of Immobility, the Wire that belongs to the Masters of the World. The earth itself rests on it.”

Cat-scratch deepest red on the chest like the color of a sky that HG Wells would explain as if some secret pang in the imagination. Illustrative brooding. I’m a galloping hoof where no trail should be entrailed. I could quote everything you have said to me going back years & years & years—how prone I am to loving you, without a reason to, but just to. Have to. Want to. Need to.

What would it be like to see the axiom of my tongue-garlands, you ask? It is like FWIFTNEFS of scents!—a bloomout; a regional route with fertile iron-ring of lispy lint in a dry pocket, a sprocket in the chimney of my glancing outward at the browning grass, as if vapours had choked the life out of it, & with a sigh of sorrow I have realized that Jeopardy has–gasp!–dropped its Bible category! like a groom neglecting the bride.

I miss you like “They don't sell vegetables in this place anymore” & across spacious breadths interjects a reminder, a memory clung, the weary way that a picture might hint.

How many people are drinking cranberry juice right now. A red truck just drove down the street, turned into a driveway.

I fear that if I do not read a poem with my tongue that my fingers will get lonely & my mouth will seal shut. Being beside the point; ferociously inanimate.

I want to see Day behave like Night for a time. I want to see the sun react like the moon. I just dropped a blue M&M onto my lap, stuck between the legs. Melty blush of blue. I want the moon to be this blue.

There is a “change in the air.” Ethereal sunlight kisses my arm & I turn away. Leaves turn their seasonal shy-renderings. “They were green just yesterday & now they are bright yellow.” I preserve a respectful silence as I stand, observing, listening as if I were expecting a pin-drop, or waiting for all of nature to burst into a melodic chorus. Listen closely. Flagrant fragrances, their voices. I spin dreamily, slowly with joy, engendered. Who’s watching? They will think my actions are uncalled-for. Let them. Let them endeavor to devour my love.

In the distance, a lawnmower revvs up hoarsely. My eyes avert. I yearn for juice. The red truck backs out, drives away & out of sight.

Later, I walked through a neighborhood. I noticed that, not only are neighborhoods so silent these days, but so are the homes. The wind blew breezily. I picked up a crumpled yellow advertisement in the yard of a house that is for sale. I tossed it back where it came from. This abandoned house still had its curtains in the windows, and it felt as though someone was watching me through the living room window. I kept walking. There was a woman that was, I’d say, seventy yards behind me in the distance, walking her dog, which was creating a stir within portions of the neighborhood. Dogs barked and barked up a storm. Certain trees were ‘sticking out’ like a voice in the middle of a dark crowd.

Colson Whitehead: “Just when you get settled, a breeze or hooligan ruins things.”—ignore the snore of ignorance and you'll fall asleep. Is that what makes boredom so appealing? John Vincent said, “The poem ends in a knot that cannot be untied.” Yep. Especially if it's a noose.

I have two siblings & a father whom all hope for my misfortune, with envy, bitterness & rage. The may say: “Let the lobster boil in the silver pot! Let him falter & be thrown about the streets!” Tragic, but on the contrary, quite true. In-cahoots these Hoots, tooting their anguish, gnawing like assassins. Only the wicked would feel the quiver of these outstretched bows, but my vessel can never be anchored. These hornets with devil-horns flying above my head as if with helium-sucked vocals. I forgive with love, to love to forgive, to pay no attention to a suffered wrong. What’s for dinner? Oh. That’s okay. I never acquired a taste for seafood.

*

Another thought, a moment years ago, came to mind:

I was a passenger in Katie’s reddish car as we drove down Highway 19 North on a warm, sunny afternoon. The sky was of deepest blue & clear, save for a vapor trail or two. We were both amused at where we would end up; the idea of toasting to no place, to no where, to ride until all of the fuel was kaput. Then what? I thought to myself. Maybe, just maybe, we would hitchhike back home, or be discovered by a pale, bald man wearing all black who would invite us into his eerie mansion in some undisclosed area of the forest. The entities would likely attempt to back-body-drop us & a one-legged butler with the equilibrium of a whirlpool would attempt to turn us into stunt kites. Anyhow, my mind was doing tornado flips as Katie laughed & talked to me as if I were twenty yards away from her. Is this what mental illness feels like when a nurse or doctor keeps jabbering? Re-thinking our plans, we decided to return home. She turned the car around & began panicking with the apparent impulsive decision to either confuse me or possess me into anger. Suddenly, in a fit of ills, Katie stops the car, pulls over to the side of the road, switches off the ignition, gets out & begins walking down the highway. All without a sound. I sat there like a fixed unalterable thing. I was convinced that this were not like some “luminous after-dinner atmosphere” & that I better go after her, especially considering a rusted, ragged clunker, by this time had stopped near to ask if she needed a lift. Later, as I drove her home, all explanation had evaporated. By that time, the sky was overcast like clouded glass.

*

Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante defunte” beclouds me extravagantly.

Syllable general lunatic.

From Shakespeare:

Iago:
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:
But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!

*

The offspring of linguistics; everything is made of quotes nowadays.

Pull out the heart, let it beat as a drum beats, wearing it on your sleeve. The cardiologist vanishes. An external alternating voltage powerful enough to produce a thunderstorm in the sky of the mind. I only believe in ideas when I came make them become a reality. Even then, I question this reality: flicked away into the ashtray of an accidental canvas. Let us try something else, shall we?

*

THREE PROSE POEMS (or just “Thoughts”):

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ON EARTH is spoken into existence by Almighty God & not by brainwashed corporate sponsors. Nor aliens. (Stephen Hawking is alienistic.) A hawk mistaken for an unidentified flying bird. What is there left to understand? Mental-demolition. The human cell, more complex than New York City at rush hour. That is a real page-turner! There are sixteen framed images of senior citizens on the wall someplace in Middleville, Ontario. I see this kind of thing in dreams or in nursing homes. Why am I wry? I see myself in each frame on the wall like a near-conclusive film. I see my father in each frame on the wall & I see my mother as the wall, holding us all tightly, but with a menacing appearance, the way a submarine longs to be a jet, coughing out air—me, six years old, a bathtubful of Army men & foliage. Wintery cragged ice, as if in Norway. The result of staying in the tub too long. Derbyshire is where I should be, as cold as ever, standing beside a woman in a pink sweater, a flower-patterned dress & carnation ballerina flats. I could be the plump girl standing hesitantly beside her, wearing a beige skirt with squintedly-nervous eyes, as if annoyed. Double-eared audible-spear. I ask my headphones to listen closely to me. Anyhow, I am very male. Sheepskin fur & all. Do soldiers always “keep the peace”? Male or machine, female or machine. Machine or machine to machine. Overpopulated Renaissance. Some girls swim with their Barbie dolls. They lay them out to ‘sun’ with their private parts covered. Here, gravity denies us, kisses the sky, the mind as ruinous as graffiti walls—des Grands Ensembles—toilet-set tongue, near-absent, or near Absence. I ache like a chef in New Orleans, with bodiless architecture, as if oil were classified edible, now as neon black as a politician’s gaping mouth.

MAGNETIC ELEMENTS in this room, staged, but real, pain-staking inking of pressure, like an elder, bent over, unable to revv up the chainsaw, so he kicks it, breaks his foot & thus we enter foolishness, even as youth is a rare treat, a wasted summer watching 18-wheelers drive by carrying goods or flattened vehicles. On an overgrown path (like Leoš Janáček) I rise to see a little child sitting on a train next to a window, his head down, a palm against the pane. The sunlight is as conscious as an armed MOD; a zebra hiding in a wooden crate. United States flags seem to hang in every window of Plumber shops in Texas. Each night I dance amidst the light of the utility pole as if I were a comic strip. I hold my ribcage in place, mouth open under the moon, waiting for a planet to make off with my energy, set up a tent in my backyard & gaze back at where it once resided.

TEMPTRESS FASHION advertisement in the background where two attractive women stand side-by-side both wearing skimpy Patriotic attire. They smile, clinging to one another, as if to define “plastic.” Down the street, a broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man with tattooed arms, a thick, dark black Fu Manchu, wearing a Grim Reaper t-shirt, looks like “Mister Bad News.” Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Fight” gushes into my ears. What is more unique, a stream of silver fish or a photostream of half-naked women? Overture of too-many-questions. No time to answer prolifically.

Michel Henricot, Narcisse (2006)

2010-09-03T15:48:00.005-04:00

 Charcoal by Carole Brémaud

SELF-PORTRAIT: expressing more directly, a theory, partly in a dream, in the Light of Asia Minor,
appears plausible. Virgil must have remembered stirring unreality, as I view the starry skylight thru
a partial window view, like a black-faced partygoer. Too much sanction-talk, Mexico’s bleeding. Me to Art: Let's establish a nuclear consortium, just call me Comedy and Tragedy. Cut this room into me, out of me, send the searchlight to check for uranium in my basement; you’ll only find Irony, iron and peculiar paradoxes. You won’t find a Lens Culture with retro demographics. But, you might.

Sometimes you just want to break the law of gravity, or liquidate the eggs at breakfast, after realizing that you have got it all backwards. Every thing that you can imagine, is incorrect, falsified, incomplete. I realized earlier that gravity is nothing more than theory, & I proved it by jumping off of a skyscraper, while my gimp-legged assistant, whoever that may be, raged like a Demotivator; rage of which was so achingly horrendous that it sounded as if he had hammered his thumb, or the kind of rage where one thinks twice before facing a powerfully destructive political & media machine, or fighting an impersonal war with a water gun, or what Van Gogh felt that he was to himself. The flask is full. I have learned to fly. People don't believe me but it was difficult for people to believe that Tiger Woods would cheat on his wife too. Often the subtext of anything is like switching the lights on in a dark room & learning that things have been misplaced, or re-arranged, & suddenly, at that moment, you think of Einstein’s theory . . . how there is no limit to human stupidity.

John Webster: “Beaufort: When I studied there, I had so fantastical a brain, that like a Phelphare, frighted in winter by a Birding-piece, I could settle no where; here and there a little of every several Art, and away.”

I’ve kept this iridescent beetle out of the sunlight for too long. It’s time that I place it back into the sunlight, let it shimmer in my emerald eyes, let the night fold a rainbow into a pillow, let me sleep through the color-spectrum as if awake with new instinct. Speaking of: Rachmaninoff, lying on his psychiatrist’s couch, as the doctor repeated, “You are a great composer; you will write a wonderful piano concerto. You are a great composer...” over and over until the chronically-depressed Serge decided he was ready to try composing again.

My tongue is stuck in my lungs, what is left to say, like a president—I feel sorry for Less, especially when More has more. To the wise: these words are not enough.

Fibbed ribs
adlib-drip
of the snipped
faucet where
the cat switches
on the hot water
in the bathtub

The other evening, watched a child squirm its way out of trouble (the way a garbage truck squeaks its way out of a cul-de-sac) by pouting and whining.

An unfinished story that I wrote some moons ago:

The yellow emporer was worshipped by all of the village, until everyone saw him get slain in a war film with American-style exploration. Thus, the yellow emporer was not worshipped any longer, but he felt like a lone hero or a lone ranger & he remained at home as a hermit the remainder of his days, lingering as a shadow of his former self that he felt was a bitter blow to all of the world.

*

Miserable ice next to a furnace. Miserable water within a sewer. Miserable sewer-stench not as miserable as the person catching whiffs of it. Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”

We meet surprised outside of a home like the habitat of a killer-beehive right outside the door, like the disappearance of a breakaway, we are like a major country without bicycle repairs. We are the eye-fatigue in a practice crash, everything reminds me of you and must we salute a crowd or shall we talk with our eyes? I am getting further and further away from the accents of tongues. Deliberate mystery like modern thinking more obsessed with the virtual world. A rare masterpiece is in the novel, evolves into a lazy animal. Unspoken rules depend on value, maybe citing the mountains; blood spewing from their historic penetrations.

Being a Christian is not a belief in a certain type of moral thinking or morality; it is not living according to a certain type of ethical behavior; nor is it following a particular religious group or philosophy. A Christian is one who has received from the Father a revelation of who Christ is and has received His Life into their spirit.

Every living Jew is evidence that the God of the Bible exists and that He keeps His Word.

Words don't allow me to sleep as I would if I didn't keep connecting them within this galaxy of my brain, the heart more-so filled with it.

A poem:

The Object of Flattery
assumes a figurative sense—

the feeling of fabric, let’s say,
on one’s naked body in a cold,

dark room (goosebumps and
moonlight) illicitly thought of

as ‘proper’ to be without another
body represented, so that the

Thought turns around an ample
amount of sufficient ideas,

which therefore suggests a disguise,
in pun, to the room in which

the fabric rests upon the body
of one whole living kinship;

pincushions of an active sense
of imagination; the brain, like

a bee’s entrance into a nest,
the blade of a tongue, a suddenness

of a decision as if pondering which
aromatic soap to “try” next.

Aromatic money-spending
spanking the globe. I once wore

clocks, or watches, until I realized
that I only need a watch

to watch me at night while I sleep,
ticking me into a dream, tics

in the fluttery chest,—the idea that
a watch is worn as if to suggest

that one has just come from the outside.

*

It is all a coin-flip concept, to reject another person's insistence that a flyswatter flies through the air like a flying saucer, or that a cookie mustn't be eaten. I had Chinese food yesterday. I sank through the grub like the Titanic. A hurricane is heading towards the direction of the wreckage. “I don't see why they don't try to pull it up.” Softened metal underneath oceans. A bitter city buried there, stones of emptiness. Earlier, a small lizard with a gray upper-half and iridescent tail slipped my eye, bye-bye, underneath a narrow crevice of the porch. Somewhere on a rowdy beach, Bach’s Air on a G String plays wildly.

Avant-garde music, the sounds of certain pianists playing their instruments as if with torn ACLs. I'm iconographically identifying the re-found senses of my ever-silken childhood. Three blind mice, three blind mice...

*

Edmond Jabes: “WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.”

The first line of Kafka’s diary: “The bystanders stiffen when the train goes past.” My heart loosens with this quote.

Laura Carter said, “[I’m] waiting for the City of Atlanta to self-implode.” I responded: Thinking of Hejinian: “the way things went along, as characteristic and definitive as a person’s gait or way of drinking from a cup, the termination of which is what death brings about”—I think every city is bound for self-implosion. Even Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood had a discerning target on it! Every city should crumble in hindsight; granted, most of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas are becoming ghost-town-like; The World Bank yanks the money in places that are disaster-prone. Enormous mansions over there are empty, houses that long for an ego or three. Ice the size of Bermuda breaking off into these oceans. People should begin taking swimming lessons if they cannot swim. Atlanta, and every other city, will soon have limited repertoires.

There was a lot of weirdness happening in the year that I was born, 1982. A dog exploded in the film, The Thing, Seven people died in Chicago from poisoned Tylenol, Ingrid Bergman & Henry Fonda died, although that is not as weird as one may think. The first artificial heart transplant took place. The Clash released “Rock the Casbah,” nuclear issues & world peace were still being discussed by the United Nations General Assembly, yet, mostly importantly, I was born & here I am waving goodbye at the years gone by, like a flutterbye sky in my eye.

Dr. Suess: “Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age.”

My left arm is definitely not right.

Fuyuko Matsui, Eternal Almighty Medicine for Perfect Happiness

Like a clumsy piano, so does thought glow:

2010-08-22T00:21:00.010-04:00

My thin aired room, by Yamamoto Kansuke (more Here)

Often times, feeling as if people’re only speaking to me as if to be expecting mistakes within my speech, which thus makes me slightly anxious. “For the record,” if there be a record in the flash of my bubbling, or bubble’d, existence: On 9-11, I likely had a meal of the following: chicken-and-rice, green beans, meatloaf and buttered biscuits. Everyone seemed to appear like blanks, like tossed salads of the world existing as humanity, and at the post office that morning, I sent out a package, of which I’m uncertain to who/m, or of what it consisted of.

Nimble tame humor, let the doubt remain too violent for the cut of a thumb, papercut proportioned orphan’d stoppage of gravity. I seek to speak what in detail what is maintained as awkward. Frog-leaped the fence too pretty for apartment complex neighborhood folks to enliven themselves at my falling duration. Mental-mensurations, leg asleep again, hair matted down, tickle it back to normalcy.

It’s never a boring day. I deflect things outward like Debbie Gibson who got lost in someone’s eyes,
except that when I get lost I cling to the sustained unindividuated mechanical tardies of distracted thumping. I think the cage is rattling. Shortcuts in the evening. Stitch out the isolated. My slender sleep is needed before a retrospective returns, becomes a Postman & delivers another strange repeated crashing.

The next soap opera could perhaps be called, “As The World Bank Turns, So Does Your Money.”—I’m rethinking the validity of democracy when a great deal of the populace appears abysmally ignorant about this horrendous president. Democracy is based on the concept of an informed citizenry making rational judgements about elections. If the citizenry is not well-informed, “democracy” is no more than a popularity contest and an advertising campaign.

*

Stop time, stop the image just before it congeals to the film-strip, just stop everything. We’re shinier than any sunshine state, lumped all in it.

*

“There was an error in this gadget”—where’s the Inspector?—because, quite frankly, on that long departed note, I’ve been overly-pondering the peculiarities surrounding that of the Roald Dahl-hosted 1961 fantasy/science-fiction television series, “Way Out,” which was a program that was way ahead of its time and was seminal for the early development of horror and science fiction on television. A recent dvd has come out titled, “Way Out DVD TV Roald Dahl Lost Episodes” which features, so they say, the “only 5 episodes known to exist.” I find this to be a pale mistake, particularly in relation to the “lost” part of it—nothing is as lost as a lost puppy, perhaps, but in this scenario, I cannot come to find that there are truly any “lost episodes” of Way Out (there were only 14 episodes altogether, so that would mean that 9 of them are floating about in the ether?—or so they’ll have one believe, perhaps), and here is why:

The Paley Center for Media (located in NY and LA) have the episodes “in full,” as I learned several years ago, and CBS owns the copyrights to the shows, so it’s rather baffling to me why they’ve not released all of the spine-tingling episodes as a set of collector’s dvds, especially considering the fact that there’re fans out there, in abundances, that’re keeping their twinkly little fingers crossed that they do, indeed, release them at some point or another. With that said, the topic came up the other night when I was on the telephone with my dear uncle; I searched and found this particular “lost dvd” and was quite delighted to see that it was available. However, confusion mounted.

If the dvd is advertising the 5 episodes as “lost episodes,” then how does that explain the Paley Center for Media having all of the episodes? If they were “lost,” one would merely think that NO ONE would have them anywhere, period. Yet this dvd comes out and states that there are “lost episodes”? Perhaps it’s just me? or does it seem fishy, dishy, wishy, squishy?

This is what the dvd says:

“In 1961, There was a science fiction anthology that aired on Friday Nights right before The Twilight Zone. Way Out was hosted by Roald Dahl and offered bizarre plays with twist endings. Only 14 episodes were broadcast" And THEN: “This dvd features the only 5 episodes known to exist.”

If those are “the only 5 episodes known to exist,” then how does that explain the Paley Center for Media for having them? Perhaps it merely means that those 5 episodes are the only episodes that have been ‘leaked’ onto a particular video format? I cannot think of anything otherwise that would be a rebuttal towards this reasoning, so until I find out differently, I suppose I may have to get this 5-episode dvd anyhow to at least view what I can while the gettin’`s goin’ good.

The supposed “lost episodes” on the dvd are the following:

Death Wish—#9 (aired 6/9/61)
Dissolve To Black—#8 (aired 6/2/61)
I Heard You Calling Me—#5 (aired 5/5/61)
The Croaker—#6 (aired 5/12/61)
William & Mary—#1 (aired 3/31/61)

*

Thomas Carlyle: “See deeply enough, and you see musically.” Or: See deeply enough and you will suddenly obtain X-ray vision.

Thomas De Witt Talmage: “Help me explain a tear. A chemist will tell you that it is made up of salt and lime and other component parts; but he misses the chief ingredients-the acid of a soured life, the viperine sting of a bitter memory, the fragments of a broken heart. I will tell you what a tear is: it is agony in solution.” ‘But I suggest to you that there is more to tears than sadness, sorrow, regret, and pain. Tears can be a release from stress and anxiety, a vent for frustration, a safety valve for overpowering emotions. Tears can be the most sincere expression of compassion and love. And just as raindrops wash the smoke, smog, and impurities from the atmosphere, so tears can wash away the stains of bitterness and disappointment from our souls.’

Name your next male cat, Catullus.

Catullus: “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred. Then, when we have made up many thousands, we will confuse our counting, that we may not know the reckoning, nor any malicious person blight them with evil eye, when he knows that our kisses are so many.”

Samuel Adams: “A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”

*

Every breath you take is connected to an email account.

The opening of Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” sounds much like Robert Fripp’s “Remorse of Conscience.”—observance #178, or probably not.

When Hector Berlioz learned that his fiance’, Marie-Felicite-Denise Moke, intended to marry another gent, Berlioz planned on surprising her at a party. The idea was to dress up as a nun to get in. A great idea turned sour, however, when he left his disguise in the carriage.

Gave up the ghost’s sleight-of-hand. A convex mirror & eyesight, what of this mystique, this genuine gladness, my two ears confess more than a tongue! A torque. A dialogical indirect idea, as if Thought were three-dimensional. Why does one assume that a particular event is nothing more than a rare coincidence? Some of the best things are broken, battered, a coffin lid, don’t translate with a closed mind. Like greed, accuracy is a presence, mere thoughts. Humanly intimate spaces, an improvisatory necessity, yoked each day together for bulk of roomy accidental motion. Y’know, Facebook is a Tragedy. Emerson said that perception has a destiny. My ‘status’ is never up-to-date. Each second is a sampler, a sudden moment never stripped of emotion like two battering rams’ horns clashing like two angry strangers meeting at a phone booth late one night, impatient & fragile.

The wind is picking up picking
up leaves tossing them
around the thunder is beating
on the sky again
lightning is its theater
the computer hums & hums
like an electric heater

by Gordon Matta-Clark

2010-07-07T16:28:00.003-04:00

Confiance (l926) by Marguerite Burnat-Provins

A peculiar set of experiences from 2004 engulfed me. One evening I walked into my uncle’s room and, not long afterwards, noticed that he was wearing a light green handkerchief around his left wrist. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and just thought it was my uncle “just being my uncle,” and so I didn’t ask. However, each time I would visit, he would always have this light green handkerchief around his left wrist, so of course I could not help but to wonder why, and so I asked, “I’ve noticed the handkerchief around your wrist there; what for?" and he responded, “...because my wrist has been talking to me.” I said, “...what does it say?” and he said, “...it just talks to me.” And I said, “Oh, okay. [pause] So, what exactly are some of the things that your wrist tells you?” and he said, “Oh, you know, it just talks to me often, and so I put the handkerchief over it to keep it quiet.” He wore the handkerchief for a few weeks as I recalled, and then one day I noticed that he had taken it off.

Walked this landscape, wondering if it were an old coffee ground, this blues, this jazz, in my ear,—where is the banana peel? Or perhaps this was a nudist camp, or a famous rock ‘n’ boogey jam-blast, fire of pearl bright white guitar, the bandleader was perhaps a woman that tossed trash cans everywhere. Let me speak where I am speaking co-composingly, as if a layer of dew where in my throat, rainstorms are ahead, mutual metric and pallid sky, some days more simple than others—where’s the magician? The only true weapon-of-mass-destruction is hatred; from that one can build into it what one pleases. Delicate ruins, we walked on eggshells, just knowing that this may have been the final time that we saw one another—no need for handshakes and high fives; we’re now wasps on windowpanes, sunshine brass-burn, merging ballad of clear vinyl throat-sweat.

All I want for Christmas is a yellow submarine for two.

This Could Be A Thought or A Story:

Weather channel music, or supercharged background music, reminds me of being in a grocery store and hearing grocery store jazz playing, and that can be a phrase or a term, but the music always tends to excel at making me feel uniquely engaged nearly more-so than a developing crunchy groove with a touch of big beat. Earlier the cat was lying on a pile of dirty clothes in the hallway, the tungsten light spread from the living room grew more bright as I walked towards the living room and entered into the kitchen where water had been strewn on the floor via one of the cats that has a fascination with moving water and so she flicks it out of the water bowl and onto the floor. So long! I think to myself after pouring more water into the bowl. I feel compelled to speak a type of Asian, but I don’t know any of the languages. If you think surrealism is touching over this story, or thought, then this story, or thought, must come to an apparent end very soon. I was excited to begin writing about the misconceptions of self-taught strange people, but these themes brought me towards other flaps in the subject at the front of my lobes. Music isn’t the topic, nor is anything else. Crime is on the rise. I want to stand near a Chartres rose window and plunge deep into thought, or story, of course. Voltaire’s “Candide” raises questions, wounds the mind; I love romantic stories, but this seems to have a monstrous wrath. My ‘wit’ must be lacking, but alas I will not be stripped of dignity. Some things bend out of the way of Touch. I took off my glasses today to specifically touch the thin skin of my eyelids (when closed, light plays on the backs of them). Some people either have ¼ cup of delight or it is completely full. I mowed the lawn today. I wore a surgeon’s mask to keep my nasal passages and esophagus relieved. The last time I mowed this heaping grass, the next-door-neighbor Richard, who has a shiny bald head and a thick grey goatee, was in his front yard smoking a cigarette and looking around at the sky, then back down at the ground, a toke or two, inhale, exhale, and then back up at the trees, then looking over at me, then a quick wave my way while holding his arm in the air as high as it would rise. His other arm was hanging down. I waved back, enjoying this moment of social sustenance.

Like an oater outfoxing a railroad, I’ve outfoxed the frustrated fowler. Sometimes nature's chorus is only that which points to the phenomenon of a voice. I’ve learned, in art, that if it comes to a point where it feels correct, then walk away. Wrote this a few weeks ago, one late night:

I am looking out of a window & tipping the candle sideways. I have examined closely a blue-ring octopus, but tonight is no different than any other night: the moon’s pretty face espionage is a matrix or a perseverance of some irreversible eclipse that I am reporting soul-abroad, & my guardian angel discusses with me the mixed-media of daylight-skies, God’s eternal “premiere” never losing its edge. The sun, tomorrow, will be my rope-and-pulley tendon, a beautiful voice, or perhaps some Indonesian Bamboo Orchestra. I hear a motorcycle engine in the distance, the night’s funeral blues, with vivid eyelids (in my estimation)—the moon, now barely visible. I spin a nest of paper towel shreds around my fingers, this is a similar concept for a flying lotus, except that I stand still like mechanical behemoths. My wings are alive with you. A soft wind, a gradual force from somewhere & whatever was behind me seemed like a mouth. Most people tend to ‘look’ for the best. Well, I ‘expect’ the best. If no one ever comes to understand why I do these things, and if no one comes to want to understand them, then that is perfectly fine, for as long as I am happy, and as long as I am creating art, along with God’s supreme companionship, this is all that I will ever need. Most of the time, certain artists begin to rely on an audience to satisfy their desire for creating their art, versus creating art for their own enjoyment. It is when “status” and “ego” and “selfish desire” gets in the way is when things can go from “fun” to downright “unenjoyable,” for why should we concern ourselves with what others think?

Imagery is never really “complete” after a photograph has been made.

Hiccup at the end of everything, except one thing—

Interviewer: You didn’t go to art school, did you?

Francis Bacon: No, thank God. I would have been taught all of those techniques that I don’t want to know. I want to find my own technique, because if you’re trying to do something that is rather different and new, you can’t use the old techniques which have already been used. You make your own technique.

Interviewer: So, how did you learn? How did you learn to make your own technique doing it?

Francis Bacon: Trial and error. I just, um . . . trying to do it. That’s all.

Yes, that’s all. “Butter me better,” said the bread. What’re people really expecting? The Interviewer perhaps pauses and then says, “Behind the rubble is a loaf of bread pondered by a group of children.” I say, “Mental Titanic.” Eating your thoughts will keep you full. But, only temporary. Do not be deceived, like how Fu Manchu never had a mustache.

Thomas Disch: “Distance seduces the rational mind, just as closeness seduces the irrational.” Or, “...to the whales, with their slow metabolisms, humans appear speeded-up...jerky, spastic, desperately flapping.” (Susanne Antonetta)—Lack of responding to a disaster is reminiscent of a weapon. Kaufmann once said, “Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without reason are mad.”

Many are puffier than Puffendorf, playing Hangman, we’re all hanging in the balance. Something at sea, where the fig bends, meaning Meaning memory, aid, daybreak—real-life beings, begins, spiritual alchemy. O my, I sipped the last swig of coffee, granules at the bottom, I had them between my teeth. Gnats sting the tongue when bitten into (accidentally, of course—they can enter the mouth when running); tongue-spark soars air of plane descended behind me (a memory) as I shot hoops in my neighborhood as a teenager, in retrospect, possible autobiographical criteria. Retina. Needed a place to hide. Nothing was so quiet, youth of the ageless ones, now my bearded face itches & the wind blows wilder than before & the window seems to have a heartbeat. I learned today that stars are considered angels in symbolism, today I dissolved where memory left off, leaping over my own initials. My heart is in this, like an ornament that hangs on a tree where you look at yourself, using it as a mirror, hovering in that space, it speaks clearly, like a deep-seeded vowel with an attosecond, to collect pictures and cry, the energy in a tear can smear even the most Solitaire like the interior of an abandoned castle.

This is all “spoken word” without the “movement”—what a photograph is. Just keep your ears open.

*

There is nothing more vicious than the commonly expressed desire of parents in merely moderate circumstances to give their children what are ordinarily spoken of as “opportunities.” “We wish our daughters to have every opportunity—the best opportunities,” they say, meaning an equal chance with richer girls of qualifying themselves for attracting wealthy men and of placing themselves in their way. In reality opportunities for what?—of being utterly miserable for the rest of their lives unless they marry out of their own class.—Arthur Train (from “The Goldfish”)

*

Closeness of anonymity, being recognized as if from passages of Ovid. Sit down with me, in-between this theatre, let’s distance ourselves like pyramids, let us remind ourselves who we are, who we are not, what we will become—the spinner & the web. I am a generous shift in the mapping of forests. The first volume of my rhetoric offers no sounds but travels through the physical phrase of meter, rhythm, rhyme, or answering &/or erasing falsitruths (a ‘sic’ in every narrative). Take care of yourself, dear poet, they are calling poetry a science with buckled knees, we swing our swords like musketeers. My diary is breathing its last word. In a nutshell, I am lifted by absence. Word-trafficking for a new vocal dictionary where language is pre-ordered before history is history. Is not. Beaches erode. Before we speak again, we must negotiate a plan, eggroll-wrapped, tasty but perhaps with a drawn-out rant, a “bumping” speaker, a Rapidshare. I enter out of the entrance into the night where feminism is everywhere. I have mistaken my hands for Memory. You’re right behind my eyelids when I close them, electrifyingly.

Ah, touché, touché, touché.

Chaïm Soutine, l918 Self-Portrait

Reflections & Riffs

2010-05-21T22:39:00.003-04:00

Portrait of Modest Mussorgsky, by Ilya Repin
(painted in the hospital from March 2–5, 1881,
only a few days before the composer’s death)

“Moment by moment things arise and pass away. Moment by moment we encounter what is not self.”

Every ‘tale’ has a remarkable forecast—natural reactions of wonder. Mathematical thickness of some instantaneous trickery and we’re often back to square one, we silly quacks! I draw a breath from misty mornings, gaining velocities are the splendid sighs of nature’s first light—to all, perhaps? yes, o yes, we but shiver and fall away, like some brilliant arch of continuous unmoving. But “life goes on” and every vapor in the wind merges into resolved conversational endings. In this life, everything ends, except for God. On the heels of this verse comes yet another thought: How to convey images between the mental and the physical. An example of this may be thought of as the words on the pages inside of books as hollow piping, where thought had once existed. Words merely acting as decor. That would be the Physical. The Mental is the subterranean—a reflection of self, or experience, like the reflective eyes of nocturnal creatures.

“I did not start out as a photographer but, instead, as a writer....this fact has inspired and colored many of my concepts.” (Laughlin, The Personal Eye 14)

My perception of the world, like an orb, exists within the Theatre of The Sensational Visual Transmitter. Bending paths of lightning on Circumference’s infinity. O, speak to me through this thunderstorm, react with the lightning; I am mounted on your deck, I will confirm your words through the thunder.

Wallace Stevens: “...gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the winter branch.”

Opening my e-‘male’ every morning as I wake, often tossing myself into a Ring a Ring o’ Roses. “For a limited time only.” My balance is fattened with the agenda of an architect. I need a storage case for multiple explanations. Seeing the light of my face in your face’s light; the oscillation between song, between the mind, the way it hesitates. One moment I am editing pictures, and then the next moment I am looking out of the window, remembering the bird that landed on the window after all of that silence, and was chirping at a high pitch; a naturely flute--clung to this wowscape, scrape me out of these walls, paint me into the song of the bird. Moment succeeds moment and each is complete in itself. Valéry: “Animals, who do nothing uselessly, refuse to comtemplate death.” Perfect.

Speaking of animals. One must consider the “strange company” of the eccentric Lord Bridgewater (known as Francis Egerton), who astonished Paris by giving dinner parties for dogs—the dogs were the guests, dressed as men and women. He was a supporter of natural theology. The French were not surprised by any means that the milord living in Paris was unusually fond of animals, as they, somehow, expected such bizarre conduct of an Englishman. However, they raised their eyebrows quite frequently in the case of Mr. Egerton when they heard that he gave dinner parties for dogs dressed in the height of fashion, even down to fancy miniature shoes! Strangely, Mr. Egerton kept partridges and pigeons with clipped wings in his garden to shoot because of his failing eyesight. Strangely, this odd nobleman was an extremely learned scholar (gotta love the self-education!—Ray Bradbury: “I never went to college. I went to the library”), a connoisseur and patron of the arts, and a fellow of the Royal Society. He was the donor of the important Egerton Manuscripts to the British Museum. However, this was the eccentric who wore each pair of his shoes only once and then had them arranged in rows so that he could measure the passing of time. And to return a book he had borrowed, he would send a sumptuous carriage attended by four liveried footmen. He never married, and with his death in 1829, the title became extinct.

Francis Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater

-

2010-03-19T02:11:00.004-04:00

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.

*

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.”

*

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

::

Iceħand

::

m or ph e us

::

computer monitaur

::

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

Spouting against the ceiling—ambivalence:

2010-03-02T20:33:00.006-05:00

Portrait of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok by Konstantin Andreevic Somov

I cut up the air to see if I can find a word-pocket hiding somewhere. Flare for the dogmatic.

Even a riddle has a chimney pot. Girouettes, narrators of the environment. I am trying to improve. My feet ache. She circulates around me like a violent bipolar animal, what am I the bat, unblinded by blank stares, squared air in the enemy’s fair lair, what am I the bait. Her voice trumpets the air to seeming madness. My tongue is stuck in my lungs, what is left to say, like a president—a thick specific ocean like Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo or just his face alone, an opera, an oreo, a vampire-fang. When you are budding through, I peel my face back and reveal a non-fictional tirade; face of bossy sculpture, too new to be haunted. You remind me of the perfect companion for a molded lobster salad with tuna sashimi. The sun is shining brightly on the right side of my face through the window. Everything we say replaces sound. I feel more enhanced than a rigorous horizon. Perhaps I am like the Marquis de Puysegar who, in 1784, had been mesmerized by Victor, a young shepherd who fell into a deep sleeping trance. “I wonder why he did not convulse and contort” he must have wondered.

Backtrack: five years ago: I stood on Ponce de Leon staring at pigeons. I looked at them, imagining what they would feed from if everyone’s crumbs disappeared. If only this soil could speak! It just spoke. I am an alien leaking privacy. I have become persuaded, your dotted-lines should be painted. I have become the anatomy of the Pre/post practice of being notoriously open to manipulation. My patriotism is filigreed. It is like making vines into sling-shots. The next scene is a tremble. The camera moves in on the expressionless United States Military; the same with the United States Government, why capitalize it, why does breakfast make a good memory—why can’t they just eat their words, remembering to flush the mushroom-cloud down our throats. Fair fox-skin betwixt the mighty wind of their drawn machines, known as bait—a.k.a.: saults & helmet-like shapes upon the faceless. The camera moves in on what the system feeds from. Emotion of wild boars, daggers & Con-Air ruts, grunts, reforming the past, bringing to life feeble lives, stirrups, unarmed targets. We could hear a sound at the depths of every hollow heart singing through the treetops of every household, as common as harmonious instruments. I could pocket the arctic, spread eagle & become as nearly obsolete as a screen-saver.

Th’other evenin’: “Who dresses you?" she asked. “Me” I responded. (laughter)— “I love your glasses, your frames, oh, I just love your glasses.” The sun is in my eyes, even at night. Dexter Gordon’s “Willow Weep For Me” plays in my ears & I become like a flower because flowers never die—they weep themselves to sleep after a time, then return later. “Thank you for listening to me . . . & to be so young, too” she said, with a puzzled yet fascinated look upon her composition. Her daughters hold in angst & anger towards this woman; I tried not to blink too much, held back tears, as she told me that her children do not speak to her. “Their father is great in their eyes” she said, “. . . he can do no wrong, but they would stand here & tell you that I was a good mother.” She put emphasis on “was.” Her ex-husband had merry-go-rounds of women, always calling the house—she divorced him. Later, I overheard a little girl: “Don’t speak to the mannequin! Don’t speak to the dirty mannequin!”—How oddly-fitting.

—

Alice Notley: “each poet’s poetry is, or should be, its own world; you cross borders, you get to know it, you read it being there, not bringing a lot of baggage from outside it, and it works. Poetry’s supposed to be lived in, not assessed.”

—

Thought: when ‘writing’ became ‘typing’ but still called ‘writing.’ “I wrote you a letter via email.” “I wrote you a letter on the computer and printed it out.” “Write me an email, okay?” “Will you write me?” “Write me a text message.” No, no, no.

the image
gazes back at us—

an unremitting
visual experience.

We’re all taxi drivers by nature, jumping in a burst of beetle, stripped by it all, to opt for something tried-and-true, tired & blue, to say that the world was just what we had talked around; arm-to-arm, the scent of bread crust in the air—to make an impression without feeling uncomfortable. Is not this what we are really after? Pronto. Ready? Mars is so close. You, not so close. Blessed are the door-to-door. I feel sorry for Less, especially when More has more. To the wise: these words are not enough.

—

What does a poet have to be
aware of? Desire of love
began with the first heart
-beat. I switch to decaf
to see if I could slow it down
ju
s
t l
ik
e t
h
is
but Speed returns
immediately following
the deciphering.

—

From now on I will report, you decide. If you are going to stone me, stone me in Estonia. Do not lose faith in insignificance of expression. Despair leads to forecasting. This is about you & your brain, not he or her. This is about alveolar consonants that unlock listening from the standpoint of exasperation, or the breakfast that will be eaten in the morning with your gray-speckled or silver-haired mother, unable to get a word in.

Possible “vraisemblances”: The stepsisters did not ever realize that Cinderella had a Masters Degree in Psychology. King Lear was square; a professional entertainer, perhaps a spin doctor. Four-inch gash. Pietro Metastasio secretly influenced Led Zepp to reunite. Poetry-boosters for everyone. Frankenstein reading Gertrude Stein with a bottle of red sea wine and a serious case of mental-decline. Dandy and fine as candy.—What can you obtain from nothing? a set of wings where dreams flush out the scenes in your poetic reality. My reality has a hook. I am clipped to the end of your postscript. My adam’s apple contemplates Adam’s apple this Eve-ning. Just call my butt a wise“crack”—

Forget three wishes, Obama listens and receives a million kisses from those that dismiss us as rotten fishes. The ‘rights’ of the terrorists may as well come with fine china and expensive dishes; they’re carelessly individuous and hungry and finding us delicious. Chomp-chomp-chomp.

William Carlos Williams: ‘Nothing is beyond poetry’

Slaughtered nerves and my long scrawny self, my face staring at this monitor as if words are pores snuggled to my cheeks or our enthralled electric bodies filled by finger’d letters, abusing literature, or re-using it, or none of the above . . . mere wading through texts as if digesting Aunt Jemima. You always say something better; buttery kissing-chords of soul-speech, where do you starve the most? Appetite for minimized convenience. Reading words is like listening to whispers. I yammer all over the place, to crack . . . to disappear. I should stay silent, let these words, these thoughts, fish for me in their fury.

O'Hara: "if ² / you are going to put your life into / poetry, make sure you stay low, walk slow, / and lay the fly right along the velocity // changes." --I think that the same could be sd for Art, as well—.

VARIOUS ARTISTS:

Stephen Raw

Sára Saudková

Diane Fenster

Joachim Knill

Laurie Lipton

Elliot Erwitt

Keith Carter

Sissel Myklebust

Czech and Slovak Staged Photographs

To think that every space is a possible photograph not yet captured by the vacuum of a camera, and then to realize that every space is already a photograph that has been captured by the camera of the mind.

I have the stretch-munchies, sloppy with change, crippled money, lettuce and all.

Sth.—

ííTparticu-lär; wordarchitecture shouldn’ t be so beautiful.

Steindruck von Walter Gramatté

Tossed Amongst Branchless Trees:

2010-02-11T14:59:00.014-05:00

Beckmann, Self-portrait with red scarf, 1917

Errorists join me! We will start “Mal-Quota”—an organization for error extremists. Eclectic eccentrics, I think of small-town peoples. From The eclectic magazine of foreign literature, science, and art, Volume 33 by Harry Houdini Collection (Library of Congress), John Davis Batch: “Oh wavering and new-fangled multitude!” he continues. “Is it not a wonder to consider the inconstant mutability of this uncertain worH! The common people always desiring alterations and novelties of things for the strangeness of the case; which often turneth them to small profit and commodity . . . What hath succeeded all wise men doth know, and the common sort of them hath felt. Therefore, to grudge or wonder at it surely were but fohy; to study a redress, I see noi how it can be holpen, for the inclination and natural disposition of Englishmen is and hath always been to desire alteration of officers.” Then, “How perennial is the English character!”

Music eats. Music eats me. I have been eaten by music. Erik Satie must’ve sat a lot; Phil Jackson sitting on a “rising chair” on the sidelines—this type of sitting? In Satie’s Memoirs of An Amnesiac, he explains, in strange detail, his “working habits” (jeu d’esprit) titled, THE MUSICIAN’S DAY:

“An artist must organize his life. / Here is the exact timetable of my daily activities: / Get up: 7:18 A.M.; be inspired 10:23 to 11:47 A.M. I take / lunch at 12:11 P.M. and / leave the table at 12:14 P.M. / Healthy horse-riding, out in the grounds: 1:19 to 2:53 P.M. / More inspiration: 3:12 to 4:07 P.M. / Various activities (fencing, reflection, / immobility, visits, / contemplation, swimming, etc. . . .) 4:21 to 6:47 P.M. / Dinner is served at 7:16 and ends at 7:20 P.M. Then comes / symphonic readings, out loud: 8:09 to 9:59 P.M. / I go to bed regularly at 10:37 P.M. Once a week (on Tues- / days) I wake up with a start at 3:19 A.M. / I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, scraped bones; fat / from dead animals; veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in / white water; fruit mold, rice, turnips; camphorated black / puddings, things like pasta, cheese (white), cotton salad / and certain fish (without skins). / I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with fuchsia juice. / I have a good appetite, but never talk while eating, for fear / of strangling myself. / I breathe carefully (a little at a time). I very rarely dance. / When I walk, I hold my sides and look rigidly behind me. / Serious in appearance, if I laugh it is not on purpose. I / always apologize it nicely. / My sleep is / deep, but I keep one eye open. My bed is / round, with a hole cut out to let my head through. Once / every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another. / I have long subscribed to a fashion magazine. I wear a / white bonnet, white stockings and white waistcoat. / My doctor has always told me to smoke. Part of his advice / runs: ‘Smoke away, my dear chap. If you don’t someone / else will.’”

All of this coming from the great minimalist. Minimalism, like Beauty, is only “skin deep.”

Relying on government is like relying on technology. Dishonest computers & ill-filled oil spills, wizened, wiseless & blown to wherewithal. I find more reliability in a sewing machine, the bubblegum that I pop that echoes stickily in a hallway, a spiral-bound notebook full of scribbles, a fading flashlight, a split rubberband, John Lee Hooker's post-war blues, &c.

The Whole comes apart in a possible progress. I want to dine in due time without thinking of eating rhymes as a food source for good times, in the meantime, Sviatoslav Richter plays the piano, sounding so fine. Don DeLillo: “My voice isn’t part of my body. It’s what comes out of my body when I speak. It’s the air which by some miracle we are able to shape into the sounds we wish to make.” Just like that.

—

I would have probably laughed at Mahler had he screamed at me like he would his musicians. I would’ve kept playing the tune; he would’ve needed me, he would have missed me had he kicked me out of the symphony.

I’m a comma that is hooked next to your imposing punctuation. My vowels hide behind tonsil towels, like bowels hiding behind hours.

—

From The Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fmvell Buxton:

“One of my neighbours is a very ill-tempered man; he tries to vex me, and has built a great place for swine close to my walk. So, when I go out, I hear, first grunt, grunt, squeak, squeak; but this does me no harm. I am always in good humour. Sometimes to amuse myself I give a beggar a guinea. He thinks it is a mistake, and for fear I should find it out, off he runs as hard as he can. I advise you to give a beggar a guinea sometimes, it is very amusing. The daughters are very pleasing. The second son is a mighty hunter, and his father lets him buy any horses he likes. He lately applied to the Emperor of Morocco for a first-rate Arab horse. The Emperor sent him a magnificent one; but he died as he landed in England. The poor youth said very feelingly, that was the greatest misfortune he ever had suffered; and I felt strong sympathy with him. I forgot to say, that soon after Mr. Rothschild came to England, Bonaparte invaded Germany. ‘The Prince of Hesse Cassel,’ said Rothschild, ‘gave my father his money; there was no time to be lost; he sent it to me. I had 600,000/. arrive unexpectedly by the post; and I put it to such good use, that the Prince made me a present of all his wine and his linen.’”

Such texts, whoa’d and slow’d down. “Sl-sl-slow down!” Certain texts make me feel coo-coo-cuckoo'd by the companion of fretting. My throat had a miscarriage! Words are stuck! My tongue has steeped, apparently kneaded like claygunk. Recently, I wrote a poem titled, “Love Stakes Me”:

Within the shadows of my mind, there,
with marching feet & chanting rhyme,
are the long-legged haunts of Loves fled
in extraordinary melodies of time, an air

unfastened by memory’s reeling—drenched
& restless like noisy quarrels clenched.
I pause, unlike hours, flattering love’s despair
with a grateful heart; my mind’s vocalist defined.

Influenced by W.B. Yeats, I wrote this in solitude while (I think) eating sandwiches. Also, at the same time (not influenced by Yeats), I overly-pondered:

I sit here
& ponder

a better poem,
a better

dream for a better
poem.

The ants that are
crawling

upon the white wall
in front of me

near the hole
in the wall

near the door
knob’s lock;

They are the poem;
this poem.

This-this-this is not
a poem.

I thought: “axed you a question while I waxed poetic sessions, no answers and no confessions.” Hmm, why am I starving? “I just ate.” The other day, a seventy-five year old man spoke to me of what they called he sd The Old Army. He was a partaker of it. He sd that back then they could kick you In the g. maximus & get away with it. Back then they owned you completely. I thought later that it was perhaps like a shadow following the body & now the times have changed. Times are changing like posters on walls. Idols & icons torn away. Replaced with newer ones before & after the quinceaños. Smoking-gun evidence. Military-disarray & fruit punch laws. Thus the body at this point leaving its shadow behind or it is the shadow leaving its body behind? Either way it springs for safety & drips like oil, like secrets unfolding in a diary entry & then there was a conversation of a conversation about anger: He sd, What is the point of getting angry? Getting mad is much worse than the problem.

Lately, I have felt shifted away from all humanity. The sounds of my Arctic, a silent monster, a roaming of unity, an attraction of latitude, perhaps. I have to experience the excitement of a dynamic landscape: the flora, the fauna, the heart and what is not there; a Plato ratio.

Brunelleschi would have awe’d over the architectural domes in my heart.

The camera continues to try and maintain supremacy. I cut it off worse than a one-liner or a two-timer. Constabel: “I always sit till I see some living thing; because if such appears, it is sure to be appropriate to the place.” Inappropriateness would have certainly been to merely shut one’s eyes and imagine living things? The sense in this? Nearly absurd. Beautifully. It could be like a “folk saying.”

؟؟؟؟؟

Adamitically Frumpled.

The photographer Walker Evans, in a 1974 Polaroid portrait shot by John Benson

Stanzes/Stances

2010-02-07T14:21:00.006-05:00

Head of Dr. Bauer (Kopf Dr. Bauer) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Hieronymus sd that the face is the mirror of the mind, and the eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart. “Whenever we see someone we like, our pupils grow larger. It is almost as if our eyes are trying to see as much of this person as possible. This is an involuntary and uncontrollable physiological response.” My tongue is an Aesop fable. Life, to some, is deemed Shack. My life gives the whole expanse under heaven. We all appear in orange vests. We prevent anything from becoming a scene. A clepsydra ticks in my ear after taking a shower. As a hint, I drown backwardness into full growth like an object that is cast in plaster. The “forward march” of the ground is created like an armature that was not intended for arms. Michael McClure’s answer to the question, “What is the role of the poet in our society?”: “The same as any other artist – to maintain the thoroughfares, to maintain the pathways of the imagination in a society that would close down the pathways of the imagination. We all find social functions, also. We’ll be environmentally inclined, or biologically inclined, or socially committed. But what we do as artists is to maintain free pathways for the imagination.”Worth to note, too, is Paul Merchant: “Poetry gives most pleasure / when only generally / & not perfectly understood.” I should also say, who needs a Poetic License? just take all documents to your local meat grinder and nibble nicely on your money where the Latin texts are and dip your feet where the shark-fin rubs beneath your soles. Lay the foundation so that the eye can sustain the error and paralyze the air, like to fillet today or to mar tomorrow.

I study hands in paintings and watch film after film. I shake in a muted lovejoy picking out the flutters from my heart, releasing them as dovesongs, plough-soils of the soul, watching them as they return again like boomerangs, diving back into the familiar pooling air of my symphonic chest. Earlier, I observed the front part of the ant’s body that was stuck in a small sticky liquid. It tugged and tugged, pulled and pulled; attempting to escape the trap. It was unsuccessful. Eventually the ant pulled itself apart, completely in half, the lower-half of the body, lethargic; the upper-half still moving. I softly blowed on it, sadly, and the antennas moved wildly.

One lives in such an environment, perhaps in the modern world versus the classical traditions of the past, where we do not let the right lobe of the brain know what the left lobe thinketh. The truth is, Americans are terrified. Terrified on the inside, being that we are more afraid of ourselves than ever before. The galloping corruption produced by a meaningless routine of production, distribution, and consumption, as well as governmental crackdowns and finger-wagging has all but become the overall perspective, but it looks as though the wheel has begun to shift ever so slightly. Earlier: Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, sonnets and sunsets . . . re-arranged certain words in Shakespeare's Sonnet 33 to make it this: Full glorious morning with patient eye, kissing with heavenly alchemy of celestial face.

Where is the snowfall, like an important guest that never arrives. We are horse, we are animal, we are simple yet our words have physiological effects when the tongue taps into language, buries itself deep into bodies, the way a small child could be anywhere, the way dry balconies crumble unexpectedly, and I contemplate where you go when you cry, and I contemplate everything like why titles were given to seas and oceans. Love must be filled slowly over time, and not like the steadfast-flutterings of a bird, or fancying one’s limbs of Greek dances in a drunken pub full of chimps that feel that they have the answer to every question. Coadjutoring mouths, encounters with time like weathered barns, the way fireflies rise from the thick grass. We are all sparks upon yearly-stints, or stilts, as if it is a farce to have pre-registered bodies, the way attention is given to spaces between legs; the lack of moral gifting. Hold back the wall, reprint my utterance, summery-steam rising from roads, that kind of utterance, faint whiff of breathable words, everyone within their nests, this is life, stabilized through meditation, flappable herrings in the river, the echoing of psychedelia. I am a needy bird. Is this a proper feeling? Your tiny legs, the spurs in your throat make my bones feel perplexed--muscles attached boil like soapsuds. Your language has me “free falling.” I peer out into the world, everyone scrambling as if this were the French Revolution, as if Hitler had been spotted, found, was still alive at 110 years old, his fingers rotting, but his eyes still fiery, his throat clucking like a wild rooster, and the spot where his moustache once was, now hollowed out. I am steaming like a boat on your river. Putting aside these thoughts would be like being surrounding by Nothingness, existing in private hands. Club soda and fine fabrics. Leave birthdays alone. Overlap me with hearty tracing.

*

June Wayne (once known as the “Joan of Art”) says that “artists make art and women make babies, but the use of the word CREATE to describe both processes is confusing.”

*

Rumi: “We are out of our cages with our wings spread, yet we do not lift off.” I just glided back to earth and proved this quote wrong.

Supine Spine.

A kind of bomb diggidy.

If “death’s shadow is white,” what is darker than that?

*

Kurt Schwitters: “A door may happen to fall shut, but this is not by chance. It is a conscious experience of the door, the door, the door, the door.”

*

Jabès: “To fall silent in turn, with the / hope of dissolving in to it.”

*

I remember the way the curtains fell on your arm, the way a sugar cube could have been spoiled in a cloud of water. The cup is empty now. You snapped it like a Snapple, a snapping turtle. You drank it wildly as if needing stamina to remain.

I live temperately in the meagre parse of a back and forth elsewhere. Ah, we twentieth century children, the New Futurists, nevermind the robots. I just want to make Nothing light up my cauldron, or the piano through which complexity develops its tired codes of musical heartbeats in the gassed or glassy chest. This is a self-interview. No poem ever totalizes what I want to express. Tiresomeness, this is poetry, reductions & counter-critical inward-dissipances that whiffs at every blazing fastball, sounds like a cobbled-togetherness of generous lips; bypassed, not seen at all. Now that my Language is abstract, must I write memoirs at such a youthful age? Buzz-kill analysis & observation, as if I need sheer longevity to secure wisdom. What is spookier than writers, than sharpening a pencil, than the way one's adam's apple looks when one is humming a beat. If only this beard could bend. My head often swims in a kind of silver perch; my nostrils stroke my breath like impatience at a traffic light. My mind plays back every detail of every second of my existence, often simultaneously; makes my face itch.

Hocus focus. Foxus on e`ry word, blank and you well misc it. The way I miss my head in the morning when I do not look in the mirror. I only brush my teeth with light these days, your light, the corridors of youth. Who has conceived the ingenious idea of calling here from Florida, California, Connecticut and Los Angeles? Even the wind must find a way to reconnect with itself after the birds have pushed it astray. Birds text one another from nests in trees; their song is vibrant, more brilliant than ours. I walk outside with you in thought, where I hold you in my mind, where you follow me wherever I go, where I repeat your name, our conversations. It is the way certain plants make you chirp certain words. Your face is in my horizon. There is a building off in the distance, a red flag waves in the wind. Your face is a blue sea upon my mountainous land. I see you in the tiny white waves that foam. Your face is in the green lawn, an energetic fawn. Your face is in the maps of the world, in the veins of every field and yet am I merely a fantasy walking robotically amidst your expanding mind? The light on walls in ethereal stripes tries my patience. The way things look in dreams.

*

Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, 1817): “genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous under-current of feeling; it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement.”

*

E. Pound: “A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things . . .”

*

What are people willing to do that is out of their Comfort Zone? Surveillance of the heart, always: there must always be a form of control. Interruption is needed to take photographs. A polyrythmic pamphlet, a pedigree of combos. Do not ever force yourself into apprehension and regret over simplicity and force of diction. Turn your whole subsequent existence into a vast tangled harvest of Imbalanced Consideration where theory, terminology, inclusions, aversions and illusions and nonsense and portability of resistance and detail (inobscure or not) are accurately furnished. Do not do these things merely to receive feedback, however, but more-so in being able to specify the unspecifiable; to be able to stick the straw into the supervisional mind to detect Rarified mentalities of calculations, thoughts, ponderances, where elliptical (illusional, perhaps: detailed or undetailed) meaninglessness (if you can focus on it) becomes an alteration of the senses. Allow energy to be transferred via reception of the new self-portrait. Instinct plays a role in animal life, yet has a penchant for abstraction within humanity. If it can be grasped, does that mean it is false? If what cannot be false is permanently real, being that it remains sustained in thought, is there an abyss where truth gives way to void? Where is the escape hatch? A burden in the accidental womb that feeds the unintentional fetus? This presentation is not for comparing male and female, nor is this a presentation at all. I simply value communication with myself. The Why of a writing session is sometimes obscure to itself.

Just say whatever needs to be said.

‘q’ <— a letter with horns.

Margarita Bofiliou, Mixed Technique

THINK of the ending FIRST

2010-01-27T15:04:00.005-05:00

The Poet Max Herrmann by George Grosz

I always think of the ending first, and then the beginning last; a gap in the tooth Of. After a while, thought becomes like star-fossils. The Talmud: “We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.” I have learned not to alienate myself from learning, because the exclusions of the precisions of Interest is a downfall, particularly when one ponders a type of false, complex “fate” that is within disassociation. Everything is as distinct as some historic diary.

Thought goes through the skull; the ears tingle. Foucault: “People know what they do, most people even know why they do what they do, but what they don’t know is what they do does.” With the admission of an unfriendly United States, the rights of the rebels are apparently to aid the pirates on every sea. Distance and time appear to have eyes that are inexpressibly horrible. Conspicuous amongst a glossy radiance, the worst advantage is the thriving, stirring, energetic body that pretends to run errands for “the better of our nation.” The power of charm, the power of foolery, stations itself.

—

Trochilick motions. The way a bird flies by the window, seeing it with the peripheral.

—

As for Word against Desire? My soul touches upon nerves and I am inward at present as much as my life draws a curtain across from it, as fast as principal points that come to pass, that are for the every day of which to be trusted. Every day to have what is most astonishing, a subject in the world so eloquent, to sharpen misery in this life can be avoided; to remind you of specimens, of singularity, of the light that other previous opinions said as much that was odd and childish, but a notion to spring out of the way of thinking in which one will see nothing that one has not placed, or weighed, in ones own light. The exact invisible friction from balance will have gravitation like a stranger’s nose with equal confidence in all places concerning it. Now to add: if any thing differed from description, this is the perfect beauty; sweet air of the heavens!—what splendid vibrations in regions of the heart! The brain being little more than a whisper, like looking into pupils, to come to immediate contact, to be quieted more suddenly.

Observed: A woman wearing a pink hoodie walks a brown dog around the neighborhood. An elderly man gets out of a silver car that had parked down the street, closing the door slowly, his hand staying in the same position for a few moments without moving a blazing muscle as if listening intently, or thinking about the times when his girly-girl girlfriend would blow sweet everything's to him from out of the reflecting window. Where is she now. I think of the joists in his frail joints, time not giving a diddly-squat as he walked up the green hill with a woman that was wearing purple pants reminding me of manzanita trees.

Hatred shrinks everything. Or blows it up to the size of a pinhole, that enormously-tiny. The heart, when aching, turns flips in the chest, the stomach reacts by mimicking; the mind tries to comprehend the visual of these movements but there are no visuals nor words available for such emotions.

Came across this wondrous poem by Mazen Kerbaj, titled, DON’T FEED THE ARTIST:

What is an artist’s status in society? Is he a half-god, a parasite, an
exhibitionist or a circus freak?

What kind of relation does he have to his viewers and non-viewers?
Do his pictures need to be seen for them to exist?

Is creating a work of art like a boxing fight? Who emerges the winner? Who
is the judge? What is the ring?

At an exhibition, is it the artist or the work of art exhibiting
himself/herself/itself the most? To whom are they exhibiting themselves?
When and where does an exhibition begin? And when does it end?

Far from answering such questions, Mazen Kerbaj tries at least to ask them.
For ten days he will shut himself inside a glass cage (exhibiting himself)
to work. As soon as any picture is finished, it will be hung on the walls of
the cage, allowing the viewers to follow step-by-step the evolution of the
exhibit.
On the final evening (during the preview/taking down) the exhibition can
finally begin, and finish.

—

Susan Christie sung something like, “His life’s like cotton-candy and an illusion not much there.” Paraphrasing the paraphrasables. The color chocolate enhances concentration. History is more than a “record.” Is History behind itself?

As if saying “if you know what I mean” changes the entire meaning of a sentence.

I love to look at young people and imagine how they will look when they are old.

—

Law streams out to strive for steadiness, we touch it without temperature in the body. 98.6 degrees, like a corresponding instrument of the soul. Why do my wings tuck themselves out of view? What is outside of How? Do not move! You are being watched! You will be on CNN. You will be a flare from a bomb. You will be universally-driven to a Brand New Fundamental Tomorrow. Today is clicking itself away, like the scratching-sound on the window late at night; you grab the gun, you wait, you observe more than waiting.

When I Think, it is like parrot-chatter. I enter from the side of a building which is really the front. Looks are deceiving. I am smothered in your Llanguage, your Lloveliness, propelled and inflated like a triumphant hippo, starry old skies always remain, clawed out the black of the sky, left it flashing with bright white, like the power of childhood, and then childhood, like a bolt, dissolves into another universe, seemingly reinforced by the other universes surrounding us. Life, shadowed by memory, the terrain of, indeed, the multiplied cosmos.

Should I encounter a house to adopt or to adapt, to resemble or to collect the seeds of the scene and scatter them into The Now? Chicken-clawed out of everything, raised my hand, you slap at it. Operate into me, drift into me like a fog, between our words which are femtoseconds apart rather than attoseconds. It’s not a language we speak when we speak.

The sleeping giant sleeps merely to dream of being as basic as Matter. Who were the sleeping giant’s parents? He may never know the answer to that question, or it is a secret; but no secret to me, because I know, but I will never tell. No matter what you think of or what answer you expel, it will be incorrect, incorrect, incorrect. Errorerrorerror. Wider than pupils, bright in Bright.

—

The “tide” of The Beach Boys is being calmed by Michael Jackson's “moon” walking. Was.

—

Goethe: “Unless the eye contained the substance of the sun how could we ever look on the light?”

—

Wordsworth: “. . .In my thoughts, There was a darkness, call it solitude / Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes / Of hourly objects, images of trees; / Of sea or sky, no colours of green field; / But huge and mighty Forms.”

—

Often times certain art burns me up worse than a pyrotechnician’s miscue. A possible tornado came through during my early childhood; the way I held the guitar, what snatched me away from history? I became an alien to this world, collecting strange devices out of pure curiosity, I was phenomenally distracted, immersed in unclear boundaries, floating in ambiguous space with incomprehensible questions tugging at my throat. I typically answer myself with a soft, whispering voice and often the words are unknown, partially inaudible like dream-speech. Abstract words are stunningly truthful and they make me sleepy.

Dreams dripping from my ears. I don not find great moods, they find me, and then I examine their possibilities and bend them into my own reality. Who is tracking our Internet activities? The poet and the poet’s poet’s friend’s dog. Ginsberg once remarked that there is no Beat Generation, that it was all a journalistic hex.

Whatever it takes to levitate. I won the coin toss, but you can go first.

I am too Numerical for a Tongue.

The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg (1839): [From Here: “Spitzweg depicts a writer living out the familiar image of the starving artist in wretched conditions in a small room in an attic. The painting contains many significant images. The poet writes while huddling under his bedcovers and wearing a tattered coat and nightcap. The writer has been burning some of his own work – most likely volumes I and II since volumes III and IV remain in bundles on the floor. The fire in the room has obviously gone out since the poet rests his hat on the cold stovepipe and no live coals are visible in the stove. Indeed this cold stove is the darkest part of the picture and symbolizes the writer’s sorry state of affairs.”]

—

2010-01-06T22:27:00.004-05:00

The Burden by Hernan Bas

My heart is like obelisks. My poems are getting tinier and tinier like 21st century gadgets. Some people tend to have Daltonism during the Christmas season; infrared bubbles popping in the brain. People often equate blanks as being something naughty. “Why hide it?” they may think or say. Response: It is not hidden; it has just lost a little esteem. Blinking out & in & in & out. I wrote a poem today. It is called, I Wrote A Poem Today. The contents: “I wrote / a poem / today.” The audicity! The neeerrrve. I erupt through nerves, spin-out like tires, grease-spot on bluejeans, like dreaming in color: green skies, blue grass. Not the music. But, the music too. “Bohor” by Xenakis. Listen to that while writing. This is the perfect utensil for accompaniment when writing, this kind of music. Examples are fewer than found when one pants over observing too closely. Patti Smith looks as though she’d have bad breath. I am sorry, Patti. I am just a wild horse, running until I become a surmise of one’s ponderable iris. I crack myself up. Someone pick up the pieces.

Crushed into thought, cranium leaks wordage. The new-old year must mean that I am now old enough to walk around the edge of the swimming pool. The poo is ajar in your backyard when the dog “messes in the yard.” “Someone in town has a crush on you”—x2—repeated in the scent of spam. The conception of the no proof of a great mind is a man’s attempt to realize his great design is planted in mindbursts, underneath a thought, to be glanced into a haunt. Who would promise not to float seedily around popular space and countenance? One must wisely determine illustrationby living examples, as if with manual arms, like the sleight hand of a juggler. Investigated anatomical views, without study, without doctrination, will form logical groundwork, like steel, with the eye of a gyrfalcon, on an arctic coast, through one’s window-panes, beyond the glass, beyond the circumference of idealogy. The rain pours, floods as if assassinly, nature is always dressed properly like a brilliant mathematician. My gentlemany exercise possesses a greater force, not ever hinting, but like how an athlete will take the field as if the field were a ballroom.

I used to learn magic tricks when I was a teenager, and I would often perform them for various people, primarily family, just to see what their reactions would be. Even when I made mistakes, it was interesting the variety of reactions. This may be one reason why I find “trickery” and “surrealism” so interesting in all artistic aspects. It tends to leave one astounded, mystified and "wondering.” I, myself, like to feel that way, so in conceptual photography I try and focus on what I can do to at least create a “mysterious moment.”

—

Jim Shepard: “The water nearest the ice seemed disturbingly calm.”

—

Nature, like art, often takes me to greater heights, as “fresh and unexpected” as a formal parterre garden of boxwood and lavender in front of a mystical cottage. Instant atmosphere.

—

Terry Gilliam: “Later, when I started university, I discovered great films by Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini (...) I became obsessed by all those foreign directors to such an extent that American films seemed rubbish. Actually, I didn’t want to see any more American films. Those films drove me crazy.”

—

Sven Nykvist did things with a camera that no one will ever match. It is better to think of a poem than to write it down. “Hold that thought.” Literally holding it, like you would a freshly-picked flower. Noticing how every trend seemingly initiates (ignites) from genderly-tender blends that begin with celebrity-awe, the television’s eye duping the “common views” of citizens like an incomplete map that “searches” for the right hands, the gods and goddesses of the world being worshipped like academics.

The other day, I clamoured around a book store; every male squinting, their eyebrows like horizons, miniature Baracks—every female seemingly wearing vintage brown boots; their pants tucked into them. Each leg screaming: “We need a revival!” Heaven is cleared out. Observation is like learning words that are hidden. Instance is steered, Trompe-l’œil, all of these familiar scenes. Reserved progymnasmatas. Pure ekphrasis. Overtoned muteness, sleight-of-sight, the sky sheilded by grey.

Certain shames like holiday shopping prowlers, or why there is not more snow in that snowglobe sitting on the microwave next to opened packs of salt and pepper. The real question is how to block out these shames (shams) like reaching for a reflection, not to blink within the discipline of the mind.

—

From Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: “My livid past still lingered about me, but faintly, like the roar inside a seashell, and my longing for it was a dull arrhythmic spasm, or murmur, in the meat of my functioning heart.”

—

Richard Hugo said that if you are really strange that you are always in enemy territory, and that your constant concern is survival. I say that if you are really strange you do not acknowlege it, because you do not know, like how a schizophrenic doesn’t know that he or she is a schizophrenic. I also wonder who the “wise man” was that told Mr. Hugo to never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.

Words of wisdom: Don’t ever clock your clock.

Jabès once said that the book of resemblances remains to be written. My response: Just paste a mirror to every page.

Or, would this be considered a “mania”? Like,

...What we are to understand in this matter of metamorphosis into wolves is that there is an illness doctors call lupine mania...

—from Cervantes’s The Toils of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617)

The light at this hour exuviates a kind of exhaustless equanimity.

Go on and dive into my equilibrium. Feel that spasmodic whirlpool. I have dug through every room searching for certain parts of me—seemingly in vogue—vague leaps of faith. My brain has begun to develop a patina.

When I woke this morning, I was devoted to neutrals. I walked out of the bathroom devoted to painstaking productions of memory. Punched up with turquoise.

I found the shoeboxful of high school letters from girls that apparently found me interesting. I opened a few, read them, realized that these girls just needed a head to speak to. Wall space for paintings. I wondered if my face was still at the forefront of their Mind’s eye like their faces are in mine, or if the wicker of time has become the finest history. This is what it is to keep diaries and memoirs; some of them like the brutal front of a bloodthirsty guttersnipe. Familiarity is half-understood like the ant. Restraint and Balance, pack-rat Dynasties, agglutinated by the ethereal ribbed glass lanterns that flicker in the soul, artificial flavor added to memory. I placed the letters back into the box, back into the closet.

What I love about certain things is not about what they consist of, but instead what they are lacking.

Self-portrait by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich

Words _here, Thoughts _there—

2009-12-20T01:03:00.006-05:00

Self-portrait, Original woodcut, 1919. by Conrad Felixmüller (The rare pencil-signed impression annotated in pencil by the artist “Holzschnitt” (lower left), “Selbsbildnis” (center), and signed “C. Felixmüller / 1920” lower right. One of Felixmüller’s most iconic selfportraits from the start of his involvement with what would become the Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity movement).

Imagining particulars expanding to the limit of my eye. The way fog “holds” light; beams of core-void reactivities. Lozenge under tongue, I am the lozenge under Tungsten this night (light on the face like sp’s Conrad Felixmüller) like a still life and every time I sit here, whether incidental, or consequential, there is always a purpose for misleading the eye, as if to temporarily censor, to add spirits, to squeeze the citrus from my heart, a brewery for taste. I am a well-conditioned landscape illusion, an ambient species, bypassing all mental states. Out of the window, cloudcover-low. If the fog gets any lower, heaven will become a halo over my head.

Rae Armantrout: “...if to traverse / is to envelop, / I am held / and sung to sleep.”

What to peel, what not to peel. Peel off your past, do not let it linger, or do not linger upon it, as if it is there to be cooled, as if it burns your hands as much as it burns your aching heart. Viktor Shklovsky: “Without difficulty there is no circus.” It is all in the mind. Difficulty. Not the flesh like frenzied freezes, blizzard-wind, dialogue of arm-hair rising, the orb of a dying man’s grin. What else is there, but aspirations, asphyxiations, feelings of capacity, all in the mind.

The heart is always the revivalist. What is sown is what is reaped.

I sit here doodling on a pad, even less deconstructing than cultivating what I am saying whereas the past may have never asked. The future attuned by Buzz generated like Queen Mary greeted by fawning. Finding oneself free-floating. Hubbub and endearingly-unexpected choruses like huge grins. This is Nowhere; it belongs to a creator, soundproofed. The majority of the sunset refuses to categorize a source of confusion behind these beautiful, puffy clouds.

Observation:— People are suspicious about contrasting dismay (nothing engenders failure but fewer immediate painted chests dangle with time, and more and more I become like the animals, finding out how they love). A woman said to her husband, “Wait a minute, Carl” after looking over the reciept with a disgusted look.

John Ashbery: “The balloon pops, the attention / Turns dully away.”

Hulme: “Literature a method of sudden arrangement of commonplaces. The suddenness makes us forget the commonplace.”

Observation:— LeBron James has the chin of Nicolaus Copernicus.
Observation:— The mirror is an encyclopedia. No fat, no filler, all fun.

—

My uncle recently informed me that he has made a film titled, LITTLE GIRL IN THE RED SWEATER. I cannot wait to see this. Overheard a little girl complaining to her mother about cramping. Her mother responds, “Oh, we’re about to go, baby, we’re about to leave.”

Clarity is fogged, we become decibel’d Us’s, the intrigue of panspectrocism. The end of classical music will never be! “Mash out” the back pain.

Caitlin W. has sent me wonderful observations in recent mailings, one of which deals with Chik-fil-a’s cow advertisements. She said: “...if a cow is smart enough to write, why wouldn’t it know how to spell? Why must we assume that they were only partially educated? I do understand the poor penmanship, because I don’t think I would write too well with hooves.” Fabulous! . . . which reminds me of something that I had written a while back in regards to something about hooves: How long their pointed hooves have / furthered my loyal admiration of visions for quests, / conclusion always hiding behind calculation. / Animals, I mean, this is what I always mean. / Animals we are, keep an eye out. / Light turns steadily, lolls, I follow / at a slow pace; backwash of evening / sifts into my skin, the coming grinçant.

A book is open in front of me about the innocent amusements of Anouilh, theater and dreams, preferences and elementary attempts at documentation. The only way to see the eye chart is to squint like an animal would, bewildered. The snow in the north perhaps still stamped to my soles, thinking of how many acres I have walked, like miles of flight hidden beneath birds’ wings and inbetween their feet, mathematics of exploration.

Not a moment ever goes by where I do not feel like I am emerging, gripping each twilight as if it were to become obsolete, sitting near the fireplace of the alphabet.

—

Sarah Riggs: “I wanted to write in- / to your heart but the chambers are closed.”

—

These days the drain in the bathtub has intensely-clogged. Whenever I take a shower, the water eventually climbs up to my ankles. Soon after, I listen to the minimal sounds that the slow dripping of the faucet creates into the water, and the drones of the slow drain that strains and aches, thinking of recording it. I never do. I observe the ripples of the water as each drop pings (reminiscent of the opening of Pink Floyd’s Echoes), and I think of placing my finger into the water as if to feel the ripples (like sonar) but . . . I never do. Instead I just keep watching, mesmerized.

Observation (several days ago): — a man trying on a black fedora that features a skull and crossbones stitched on the front. He holds himself steady as he places it upon his head. He walks away with a smirk on his face, the fedora still perched upon his head, now tilted to the left.

G K Chesterton: “Those who worship the intellect never use it; as you can see by the things they say about it. Hence there has arisen a confusion about intellect and intellectualism; and, as the supreme expression of that confusion, something that is called in many countries the Intelligentsia . . . It is found in practice to consist of clubs and coteries of people talking mostly about books and pictures, but especially new books and new pictures . . . The first fact to record about it is that what Carlyle said of the world is very specially true of the intellectual world—that it is mostly fools. Indeed, it has a curious attraction for complete fools, as a warm fire has for cats.”

Pell-mell’d Bungee-smear. Vrooooooom.

Liu Li Tun Migration by Rong Rong

=

2009-12-07T01:06:00.008-05:00

Jan Mankes, Self-portrait, 1911

I mentally shrug my shoulders a lot.

. . .

The television is echoing, or is The Echo. Verdi Cries playing softly. Tonight, the air is quiet. The yard is one enormous text-well, should I jump into it, I think I should, and this means that I can bring another shirt to change in, or maybe I will wear a wig and will not doubt that this is really how to forget where you are for a moment. Restoring moods. Snapping out of it, a fantasy. Sadness ensues when I hear insults from people’s mouths, slandering others, themselves even, and nature. Those “unsightly leaves” . . . really? I apologize for them. I stepped on a group of crunchy brown leaves the other day and then apologized to them afterwards. This triggers chain-reactions for discussions in areas and subjects, when things are true, without _____ and _______. Nevermind. Just turn a blind eye.

Some people’s faces say, “Just let me feel disappointed.” Big smiles, fake smiles, smirks, grins like a villain. Pair of fragile eyes, a fragile voice, like Karen Peris from the Innocence Mission. That kind of “soft.” What needs ruthless interpretations? Unfittable dentures? Indisputable facts are disputable if you want to dive clear into controversy; the embrace of realistic acting, but poorly demarcated. My new favorite carniverous plant is the Utricularia parthenopipes. Some people should only rely on their mouths to eat and nothing else. A mouth that speaks foulness in the foul air, makes the head tight, uncontrolling words veer, crash, burn. The result of such deeds?

I spoke with a 59 year-old woman the other day that said that she was once a hippy. She told me a story: “I remember going to Canada once with a group of friends, really nothing but a bunch of herders [laughing], had long hair down to my waist, head bands, beads everywhere, and was the only one that really resembled a hippy. So, as we were about to cross the border, the security guards checked me first because they thought that I was a druggie! I wasn’t, of course, but I couldn’t blame them for checking! But then I realized that I was the only one that they had checked!”

A mouth that has never been kissed is like a seed that has never been watered. Does a seed “expect” precipitation? My eyes move to the rhythm of the beat.

~

Some critics, as I have noticed, are like filthy tides washed with pollution on the shore; the “time, cause and effect” go unparalleled, and the sea anemones are like great encounters with kindred spirits. You cannot contradict a fingerprint. Our bodies are traced, are “given” to us, rapt with rhythm like a train. Groucho Marx: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” I am furthering my activity of Observation [from an evening several days ago]: There is a man walking down the street wearing a bright yellow jacket on a cold, grey day, pops out at me. Large banana-thing walking with a purpose; cell-phone in hand (naturally), Big Bird-ish. This is like one enormous quantity without a plot, but isn’t everything a plot? Memoirs of thought; eluding the written journal and settling for the computer’s wordpad. Another man riding on a leaf-blowing machine, bundled up so much that he looks like a ninja. What can match the voice of a beautifully-written letter? Waking in a sweat.

People always say, “I’m trying to make a difference in the world; trying to change something for the better.” But, are you really? People want to have control of the things of this world, to make a difference, to change things, but how can this be the case when one cannot even change oneself? The only true thing that we have control over is ourselves. This is the most important thing.

~

Elizabeth Treadwell: “the philosophical potion of / the basic understood experimental” . . . and my fave: “how long ago a girl has been / cut out of the advertisement”

~

When I get to be an older man, perhaps in my sixtees, I am most likely to resemble Loren Eiseley.

There should be less hope put into statues and public figures. The statue begins to decay. The internet is chewable. Focus on abstractions; those that do not break the enchantments, like dangling fluconazole over a mushroom. Be a guiding light, be ironic but honorable, be yourself. Be the ellipsis. My next project will consist of gluing sand onto a tiny white canvas. I shall call it a photograph and let it be . . . something to be carried beyond. Each Adagio that I hear is like a great roaring glow within my heart; permalinked and glossy; fingered up, reprint me as I peel off the walls of this room, certainly the plumbing should be viewable, like hidden beauty, like a bright horse disappearing into a sunset. Inexplicit feelings, always. My face shades the entire sidewalk. This is how it was one afternoon as I walked along, the sun above my head seemingly slipping words into my skull through an invisible tube made out of wormhole residue. The clouds, grey, thick as a Slavic accent. The upward tongue; imagine the cowlick. This is the sun, behind the overcast, or a deleted scene from a dream.

(“There is ambition, there is pride, there you find self-seeking, and often, again, it is a question of mere constitutional numbness, of torpor; there are beings who have no urges.”)—Some people are soured beneath breath and the knotted-heart unravels, leaving trails of fallen stars; a wounded elixir. Natural born fact Jack. Right smack dab. If I could merely squeeze the horizon together, forced to a tunnel, would this be where Method begins? Or is this purely Imagination of habit, calenders remaining calm? Somehow, bringing to mind selections from Rimbaud's Alchimie du verbe:

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the naïve rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

I got used to elementary hallucination: I could very precisely see a mosque instead of a factory, a drum corps of angels, horse carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters and mysteries; a vaudeville’s title filled me with awe.

Play it again, Sam.

. . .

Once more, I flee.

Painting by Rosson Crow

Diluted in scattered thought—

2009-11-30T23:23:00.004-05:00

Romare Bearden’s collage “Pittsburgh Memory” (1964).

I s’ppose I will not prate along too much (not I!), but the other evening while engaged drastically in lyrical-eyeings of the public-mannerisms of people (feeling more strange than Hiroshima Day), I scribbled this down on a small piece of paper: Odd diadem, memorable bloaks without cloaks—Walking down the street, “no additional action required”—The “looks” on people’s faces, expecting a response after someone has already explained the answer to them—The sky could be my entire mass this day, sweaters of clouds and bulging hand-veins and pinky-toe spider-bites—I need a shower, I want to get out of this place, vendors of floating, of disappearing without an “act.” —“If life is one long delicious process” why are there so many rotten eggs and apples that try and spoil it for the ones that know better? What is Knowing Better? What silly questions. Must keep myself entertained. The plastic surgeon in the film Dark Passage says to Bogie as he prepares to get plastic surgery: “I’ll make you look as if you’ve lived.”

—

Frank O'Hara: “These aren’t tears anyway, just eye gunk”

—

Driving down the highway, like a lost puppy, ding-dinging of concentration, this evening, saw the full moon hovering, realized that the moon is always “full.” A kind of calm comeuppance. Munching like Edvard Munch.

Attempting to explain a dream to someone is like trying to explain color to a blind person.

And here is a thought: Gather all the dead poets’ living relatives, speak with them spookily in favor of misbegotten realism. In one guise or another. Gather the poets’ relics, their out-of-leaping zombie-possibles (imagining Verlander as white (?) as John Kasper)—there is no city of comparable size to the poet’s heart, his swollen crest, universe-wide, panorama-vastness, everywhere in motion, to be aped in thinking or raped of thought, blood excited by words, boils, language tearing through me like the power of hydraulic rams’ horns. In this sleepy town I sleep, while the candle-makers are fiery, while a middle-aged couple walks their dog around the neighborhood on a repetitive loop, while Hollywood intoxicates with their paddle-engined films—the baker, the butcher, the lawyer, the doctor, the street artist, the pawnbroker, the middle-man all fashion in their giddy states while I sleep, asleep beyond normal standards, awoken to the wondering lights and ghostly music of this poetry within, scratched out in waxed grooves, prism inscriptions like an interrupted séance.

My neck grows tighter than jodhpurs! Who’s pulling on my vines, this fertilized garden of my uncomfortable Morticia Addams-like snippets of flower-buds? This day, each day, to appreciate the vital revelations of these magnificent proportions, multitudes of meticulous attention given to grandiose dimensions, as intense as an angry man’s drive, like a little Irish steam packet rocking forcefully amidst grey air in a wild sea, driving the continents flippo. I admit that I have forgotten that this was any text at all. This, a mere sketch, diluted in scattered thought.

There is no such thing as “a long day” (like, “Oh, it’s going to be such a long day!”). Every day has the same time as it did yesterday and the day before that, and will be that way tomorrow and days after that. Eerie and Surprising go airbourne, which makes me wistful, feeling like a tidal flow, and “All there is to do now is scream.” Fred Astaire, Red Skelton? Someone.

My attitude is this: I will leave a note for anyone in a guest room, just as I will leave my fragrance upon the air or a smile upon a stranger. Spoke with a woman that once met The Herman Hermits. She had signed up to win a chance to meet the band, and lo and behold, she won. “They were quite nice.”

Just love what you do and it may love you back, depending on the box of chocolates, and the window’s eyes, like the widow’s eyes, stalks the country-side, or the city’s sidewalks, all of the other buildings and avenues and street corners, perhaps the green meadows, brown fields, industrial gunk. The window may also see the angry shapes, the foreheads and upturned mouths. This is the moment where the philosopher should stay wholly silent as if there were dimensions to change, as if there were seasons to “holding one’s tongue” (not the horses), and the horses gallop like the stillness of seamstresses that stress silence in their concentrative strokes. I am alone this night, and every tiny subtle noise sounds overexaggerated, rocket-blasts, over-animate. Mind of surround-sound. Bendable balloons. Vocabulary pulled from my throat. Binocular-vision, dream slit open, peculiar extremities, love-it-or-loathe-it-type smithereens.

Exoskeletal wireless interface with the mind of a dolphin.

Jinxonyou.

] [

2009-11-22T21:07:00.004-05:00

Léon Spilliaert: Also Here, Here and Here.

O, what space to begin this, what “peyzing” anew, this beating-heart-obstreperousness, to take the sting out of what extends into my aching heart, to be thought of as left to be Considered, like the “bearded Syrian” or like newly-erected monuments, these moments of breaking off a possible friendship because it is all for the better, after-images of heartache, of being able to touch someone with words, with how one lives their life, passionate loyalty, the naivety of certain ones, sweetness touched with tinges of rebellious folly (God testing me, realizing now what Ecclesiastes 7:26 means: “And I found that [of all sinful follies none has been so ruinous in seducing one away from God as idolatrous women] more bitter than death is the woman whose heart is snares and nets and whose hands are bands. Whoever pleases God shall escape from her, but the sinner shall be taken by her”), of honey-sweet speech, intentions becoming known within the eyes of the mind and heart rather than of the flesh.

To be an Another. An “another” of itself, to “is,” to write isn't about the juice of things, what route would be naked if I could veer naked in its path, or what obstacle should be self-appointed; subjectivism is subject to deceleration. Mass empties itself of our “space,” gravity's syllabry increases, vanishes, we fall upward with glee, bits of rapture, like some dime-a-dozen crime in the city. To talk Force. To froth out fact, like my grandmother’s hands when stirring cake-batter in a large bowl. All limitations are off, thus the poem is confused. I am walking my memory, like one would a dog; unabridged and without questions. Nothing to be contained within any possible answer.

~

Susan Howe: “Prefaces are usually afterimages.”

~

Interesting how certain individuals do not like to wave back after I have waved at them. People are overly-paranoid these days, afraid to wave back, afraid to say hello or goodbye, all within the neighborhood. I think that some people are shocked to realize that someone has waved at them, merely because it is something that does not occur a lot these days, so they do not wave back for fear of breaking through the smog of this era. I have read to my skin. I have to read to my skin. I have red skin after showering. Yesterday, tomorrow has no secret for today, yesterday. Feeble direction, my heart is an owl's nest, empty in the night, emptying myself when it is quiet, and in the daytime I am bubbling at the surface. My lips are seeking expression, discarded words left straining within the s-plexus, earth-freshy flocks of land animals. I am left a-buzzing, unfitted, but living on. Never still enough to hear it. Nothing is ever still. Go learn to see this gurgling, round and round the Go suggests that the mass is elevated into gloriousness. Everything is cheap and useless when I compare it with God.

I feel hyper-anonymous and hyper-isolated at times when I am walking around in public. There are things that often leave a certain quiet in my eyes. The voice of my poems do not have my voice. There is no exit, and there is no entrance. Hearing someone talking very fast, at first sounding no more than a repeated sigh, until you tune in closely and you can hear their voice so intensely that you can hear their cranium cracking. All of these blank walls. They eat me up. These blank spaces leaving me blank, so I fill them with words to describe it, like Sound that “has no legs to stand on.” Hemingway: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something before he does not know it then, there is a hole in the story.” I love visiting random chat-rooms to see all of the butchered text there. Things like, “i allready give up somkeing” and “is he smoking smothing bad?”

~

Huxley: I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world - a poor thing but my own - which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself.

[Also . . . “Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.”]

~

Starve the vehicles, not the individuals.

~

Miro Sazdic-Löwstedt: I love you, means nothing / Use your imagination and tell what you think about me.

I could stretch your melancholic-weeping into a joy-lit Agnus Dei choir of voices, via Penderecki. News! I . . . Nothing I can hear. I doubt if you could pick them up from here anyway. Delicate lace curtains floating like ghosts at the window . . . “What a nice hand you write!”

The clock is deceiving me, like some dim neon aura on the city streets that is filtered by an array of cigarette smoke in the night-air. When I see a dying flower, or dead flower, I just want to wrap it up in bandages and cup it like a loved one. Stuck on it, worse than L. Richie. Pouring rain while listening to John Cage. J. Latta: “Belly-big moon. If Heraclitus claims the sun’s width is that of a human foot, the half-moon tonight’s exactly the hemispheroidal size of a “carrying” woman’s belly . . . ”

People saying “I like the crop” or “nice crop” (&c.) when a photograph hasn’t been cropped at all, but instead merely composed a particular way.

Doodlebugs.

Launching o f f.

Just like this, words launch from my tongue, angelic, wingful and Full.
Or: It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s ALIVE!!

2009-11-12T22:47:00.009-05:00

Isidore Isou

Rimbaud [As translated by Paul Schmidt, and published in 1976 by Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row, the poem reads, in part]: “I invented colors for the vowels! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. - I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator. I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

I had been pondering women in surrealism in new ways recently, without conventional wisdom. Those like Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, Nancy Cunard, Nelly Kaplan, Joyce Mansour, Meret Oppenheim, Valentine Penrose, Gisèle Prassinos and Kay Sage. Their surrealitude is not a stone, as some would have suggested at one time.

I just cannot get into the television shows of this generation. After having been exposed at such a young age to the classics (thanks to my uncle), I simply find that the shows of Now-ness are rather weak for me, in many facets. Amazing how I tend to be “living in the past” when I was not even born at the times that these classics were being aired. I feel like the caucasian-version of Harry Belafonte.

Blunders within people’s speech, their actions, their unhappiness. Brings to mind the development of monumental art, of law, of commerce, of agriculture in late B.C. (southern Gaul, to be more precise, perhaps, of which had attained a high level of agriculture). There has always been a kind of Tension in every civilization, the rise and fall of Kingdoms, &c. and when the harmony with the Greeks gave way to violence (to the Gauls, of course), the Gauls, obviously aware of their power, felt too restricted by the barriers the Greeks placed between them and the Mediterranean (the great avenue to wealth in the ancient world). Greek warships commanded the mouths of the Rhone and Greek coastal fortresses denied the Gauls the good harbors. Fighting broke out (naturally) about 200 B.C. and continued for eighty years. In the end, neither the Gauls nor Greeks won, however. In 125 B.C., when Marseilles was under heavy attack, the Greeks requested aid from Rome. The Romans crushed the Gauls in a hard war that lasted four years, but when it was all said and done, they didn't leave. The rich hinterlands of Marseilles became the Provinicia Romania. Anyhow, a classic episode in conquest was taking place, but few could have suspected that the Greeks, as one historian put it, made “the most stupid blunder in history” by inviting the Romans into their territory. Even when the legions advanced northward under Caesar and conquered the rest of Gaul (between 58 and 51 B.C.) it must have seemed, as slaves and booty (ha) accumulated in the Provincia, that the Romans wished only the welfare of the Greeks. But, as civil war began in Italy in 49 B.C., Marseilles made a FATAL blunder: it sided with Pompey against Julius Caesar. A siege and two defeats at sea brought Marseilles to its knees. Caesar then went in and created plenty more wrecking and wreaking of havoc.

But, in any event, a sudden spark of thought leading to other historical measures, guides me backward again. The point?

Grumpy, selfish, avaricious people climb tier by tier up their mountain of misery.

There. Distilled adolescence—obsequious onslaught, slugged by light, or a slug in light. One that is cut off from a life of human sympathies. “The kelet have an especial fondness for the human liver.” I have been and I have Been. The internal experience is stripped down and raw. The external is a sort of practical personification.

—

My room has an odd assortment of mementos and objects. Hemingway used to keep track of his daily progress, so as to not kid himself, he said.

—

Non-healthy minds for the holidays. As plain as sere as barren rockpiles. I am case sensitive like a password, wild quadrupeds. Spectators spy out the eye, the way a mother was/is a voyager. I am my own festival. The art of noticing. Grateful breaths of air. I will suggest it in the next preface (wherever or whenever that may be). My heartache, like destroying a bee’s nest. Afterwards, a swarm. Or, the antbed, stepped on, “no problem” they say, and begin rebuilding, remodeling immediately.

—

“Poetry is neither tempest nor tornado. It is a majestic and fertile river.” —Isidore Ducasse . . . “The deepest river makes the least noise.” —Jean du Vergier de Hauranne.

My sister had been laughing at the television while eating Zaxby’s. In my reflection, I look for my voice. Undeterred transformation, predominance, wrinkled-bending. In every human being’s heart: a lure of wonder: the unfailing childlike appetite of what is next, flexibility of the knee. Suspected “shortage” of error: love, friendship, crosswords. The deepest songs of the heart. What they sing, ha, marked with flame, whirled on high, cinders to shrivel the strain!

—

Does the early bird always get the worm?

This feeling of nervous jacketflaps within the stomach, a compulsion of margins, these dictatorships in the workplace, these unappreciative forces colliding, feeling like I could be rooted out of time, no calender to expel the equinox. I need to be in a place filled with lovers and sunshine, without rancid partiality and drops of melancholic sighs, all expounded in blue Picassos, no love, no compassion, always psychologically-knee’d like a soccer player, rebels running around like James Mason in Odd Man Out—and this is what I am: the odd man out, this hyper-anonymousness when walking around in public, altered by the jittery waves of condensed cramps of the Big Wig’s voice. I could bow like a Knight, but receive sword-piercings into the shoulders, no gentle taps, no generous technique. I feel like Dallapiccola who, after hearing Debussy, stopped composing, to give this influence ample time to sink in, except that I feel de-composed, wrapped up and threaded into the angry spider’s web, beaming eyes, targeted with interlocking eyes, two volcanoes flaming outward at my composition! Must I flee? Blow the roof off of this data-burning tidal wave. I would leave behind another carving of my space, to rollercoaster upward, craving no return, to soar like the lack of a plot, bursting through the ball-and-chain with strategies and new lessons.

Thankfully I now have the upper-hand.

Littré: “Man is an unstable compound.” Sports players that put their hands to their ears after they have made some amazingly-awesome play, always reminds me of Hulk Hogan. What is within the emergence from the prehistory of daily life? (attitude matches his wardrobe / uglier than sin.—Mos Def).

~

Then, this overwhelming greatness:

Manifesto of Lettrist Poetry by Isidore Isou, 1942: MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY: A Commonplaces about Words

Pathetic I: The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us. All delirium is expansive. All impulses escape stereotyping.

Still I: An intimate experience maintains curious specifics.

Pathetic II: Discharges are transmitted by notions. What a difference between our fluctuations and the brutality of words. Transitions always arise between feeling and speech.

Still II: The word is the first stereotype.

Pathetic III: What a difference between the organism and the sources. Notions - what an inherited dictionary. Tarzan learns in his father's book to call tigers cats. Naming the Unknown by the Forever.

Still III: The translated word does not express.

Pathetic IV: The rigidity of forms impedes their transmission. These words are so heavy that the flow fails to carry them. Temperaments die before arriving at the goal (firing blanks). No word is capable of carrying the impulses one wants to send with it.

Still IV: WORDS allow psychic alterations to disappear. Speech resists effervescence. Notions require expansion to equivalent formulas. WORDS Fracture our rhythm by their Assassinate sensitivity, mechanism, Thoughtlessly uniform fossilization, tortured inspiration, stability Twist tensions and aging Reveal poetic exaltations as useless. Create politeness. Invent diplomats. Promote the use of analogies. Substitute for true emissions.

Pathetic V: If one economizes on the riches of the soul, one dries up the left-over along with the words.

Still V: Prevent the flow from molding itself on the cosmos. Form species in sentiments. WORDS Destroy sinuosities. Result from the need to determine things. Help the elderly remember by forcing the young to forget.

Pathetic VI: Every victory of the young has been a victory over words. Every victory over words has been a fresh, young victory.

Still VI: Summarize without knowing how to receive. It is the tyranny of the simple over the long-winded. WORDS Discern too concretely to leave room for the mind. Forget the true measures of expression: suggestions. Let infrarealities disappear. Sift without restoring.

Pathetic VII: One learns words as one learns good manners. Without words and manners it is impossible to appear in society. It is by making progress in words that one makes progress socially.

Still VII: Kill fleeting evocations. Slow down short-cuts and approximations. SPEECH Is always vice-versa for not being identical. Eliminates solitary individuals who would like to rejoin society. Forces men who would like to say “Otherwise” to say “Thus.” Introduces stuttering.

Pathetic VIII: The carpentry of the word built to last forever obliges men to construct according to patterns, like children. There is no appreciation of value in a word. Still VIII: Words are the great levellers.

Pathetic IX: Notions limit opening onto depths by merely standing ajar.
Still IX: Words are family garments. Poets enlarge words every year. Words already have been mended so much they are in stitches.

Pathetic X: People think it is impossible to break words.
Still X: Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be popularized. Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear.

Pathetic XI: Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack of a concrete form.
Still XI: Feelings demand living space. How remarkable the poet’s disheartened absorption in words. Things and nothings to communicate become daily more imperious.

Pathetic XI: Efforts at destruction witness to the need to rebuild.

Still XII: How long will people hold out in the shrunken domain of words?

Pathetic XIII: The poet suffers indirectly: Words remain the work of the poet, his existence, his job.

Destruction of WORDS for LETTERS

ISIDORE ISOU . . . Believes in the potential elevation beyond WORDS; wants the development of transmissions where nothing is lost in the process; offers a verb equal to a shock. By the overload of expansion the forms leap up by themselves.
ISIDORE ISOU . . . Begins the destruction of words for letters.
ISIDORE ISOU . . . Wants letters to pull in among themselves all desires.
ISIDORE ISOU . . . Makes people stop using foregone conclusions, words.
ISIDORE ISOU . . . Shows another way out between WORDS and RENUNCIATION: LETTERS. He will create emotions against language, for the pleasure of the tongue. It consists of teaching that letters have a destination other than words.
ISOU . . . Will unmake words into their letters. Each poet will integrate everything into Everything . . . Everything must be revealed by letters. POETRY CAN NO LONGER BE REMADE.
ISIDORE ISOU IS STARTING A NEW VEIN OF LYRICISM. Anyone who can not leave words behind can stay back with them!

The Order of Letters

This does not mean destroying words for other words. Nor forging notions to specify their nuances. Nor mixing terms to make them hold more meaning. But it does mean TAKING ALL LETTERS AS A WHOLE; UNFOLDING BEFORE DAZZLED SPECTATORS MARVELS CREATED FROM LETTERS (DEBRIS FROM THE DESTRUCTION); CREATING AN ARCHITECTURE OF LETTRIC RHYTHMS; ACCUMULATING FLUCTUATING LETTERS IN A PRECISE FRAME; ELABORATING SPLENDIDLY THE CUSTOMARY COOING; COAGULATING THE CRUMBS OF LETTERS FOR A REAL MEAL; RESUSCITATING THE JUMBLE IN A DENSER ORDER; MAKING UNDERSTANDABLE AND TANGIBLE THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE AND VAGUE; CONCRETIZING SILENCE; WRITING THE NOTHINGNESS. It is the role of the poet to advance toward subversive sources. the obligation of the poet to advance in the black and burdened depths of the unknown; the craft of the poet to open one more treasure-room door for the common man. There will be a poet's message in new signs. The ordering of letters is called: LETTERISM. It is not a poetic school, but a solitary attitude. AT THIS MOMENT: LETTERISM = ISIDORE ISOU. Isou is awaiting his successors in poetry! (Do they already exist somewhere, ready to burst forth into history through books?) EXCUSES FOR WORDS INTRODUCED INTO LITERATURE . . . There are things which are existent only in the strength of their name . . . there are others which exist, but lacking a name are unacknowledged. Every idea needs a calling card to make itself known. Ideas are known by the name of their creator. It is more objective to name them after themselves. LETTERISM IS AN IDEA THAT WILL BE LAMENTED BY ITS REPUTATION Letterics is a material that can always be demonstrated. Letterics seeds already existing: NONSENSE WORDS; WORDS WITH HIDDEN MEANINGS IN THEIR LETTERS; ONOMATOPOEIAS. If this material existed before, it didn't have a name to recognize it by. Letterics works will be those made entirely out of this element, but with suitable rules and genres! The word exists and has the right to perpetuate itself. ISOU IS CALLING ATTENTION TO ITS EXISTENCE. It is up to the Letterist to develop Letterism. Letterism is offering a DIFFERENT poetry. LETTERISM imposes a NEW POETRY. THE LETTERIC AVALANCHE IS ANNOUNCED.

|. . . , . . . , . . .|

In that kind of ocean.

Fleeing like E.T.

Frantisek Kupka, The Yellow Scale (1907)

-

2009-11-05T16:17:00.006-05:00

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—

2009-11-03T18:18:00.005-05:00

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:

2009-10-25T21:09:00.007-04:00

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:

2009-10-22T19:53:00.009-04:00

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:

2009-10-20T17:55:00.010-04:00

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

2009-10-19T17:13:00.004-04:00

Musical Oblongata --

2009-10-16T23:14:00.007-04:00

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.

Two Newer Photos, Two Older Photos:

2009-10-14T23:58:00.014-04:00

Derrickonia Pineconeus

Intimate Spaces, Homes, Other Thoughts

Senses and Nerve-endings

Beyond the Brocken spectre: thoughts, jots, dots.

Cropinua Sundiacti

Eduard Wiiralt, Heads, 1926

Eduard Wiiralt, ca. 1926–34, from the private collection of Juhani Komulainen, part of a 2009 exhibit

Fragments & Buxus

--from “Western philosophy: an anthology” by John Cottingham.

Like Statues With Aching Joints

As words separate, I draw close as words draw near, I fall apart. --Murat Nemet-Nejat

Some time ago, my heart boiling over with some unspeakable ringing; a tolling of which no words could describe, this tiny poem erupted from me:

Often I feel like a walnut tree on some beautiful streetAnd my ink is staining the sidewalk.

*

Richard of Saint-Victor: “The outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible.”

Thinking long summer thoughts.

*

A Play without dramatis personae is like wind without wear.

The quieter tone, like a disrupted denouement:

Paintings by George Tooker

Paintings by Valeriy Skrypka

Small Fractions of Space

Like a clumsy piano, so does thought glow:

Reflections & Riffs

-

Spouting against the ceiling—ambivalence:

Tossed Amongst Branchless Trees:

Stanzes/Stances

THINK of the ending FIRST

—

Words _here, Thoughts _there—

=

Diluted in scattered thought—

] [

-

More free-flopping rambling—

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

A kind of roaring Incroyable, Pensive:

Engaged through language, even if wordless:

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Musical Oblongata --

Two Newer Photos, Two Older Photos:

Eduard Wiiralt, ca. 1926–34, from the private collection of Juhani Komulainen,
part of a 2009 exhibit

As words separate, I draw close
as words draw near, I fall apart.

--Murat Nemet-Nejat

Often I feel like a walnut tree
on some beautiful street
And my ink is staining the sidewalk.