Words _here, Thoughts _there—

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

=

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—

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.

] [

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!!

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)

-

Anna Karina

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

~

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

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

~

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

~

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

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

More free-flopping rambling—

Peter Tscherkassky, FILM STILLS

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

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

You get the idea: art is nothing.

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

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

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

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

—

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

—

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

Whatever becomes inevitably butchered becomes Abrupt.

—

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

“It.”

Not the cousin.

—

New poem:

THREE SIGHS

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

—

I am going places without going.

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

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

Portrait of Emile Zola, Manet

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

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

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

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

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

—

I am drinking an entity or an entiTEA.

—

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

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

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

—

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

—

Albert [Be]CAM[e]US.

—

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

’ ’ ’ ’

RRaissnia, Traces

A kind of roaring Incroyable, Pensive:

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

~

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

~

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

From somewhere:

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

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

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

~

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

~

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

Jacob Cow, the pirate.

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

& then:

Poets' defect.

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

~

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

~

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

Chris Burden

Engaged through language, even if wordless:

The Poet, or Half Past Three by Marc Chagall

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

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

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

I have graduated from gravitating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ring-ring. Go “figure.”

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