Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

Silver spear in the side of the fish, becomes a side dish.

Thelonious Monk, “Ruby, My Dear” plays.

She put my camera in her bag with her camera for a moment, and they became good friends. Camera, my dear. My dear, camera.

Xenakis’s “Bohor” (afterwards, thinking, I have GOT to find a way to hear this again: “To have great music we must commission it. To commission great music we must have great commissioners” also filling the sense [O! O’hara!]) is racketing me away; well, only in dazzling supplements. Also: “The collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as totality, is a new sonic event.”

My youth, renewed like the eagles (I had always pondered this verse (my uncle having told me the depthly-meaning years before, but having splayed with forgottenness, I had offered to remember many times)), and Sir Thomas Browne came to the rescue again: David saith, (Psalm 103. 5.) that his youth is renewed like the Eagles. Now the Eagles, as Saint Austin observes on that place, when with age the upper bill is so over-grown, that they cannot feed, they use by beating their Bill against a rock, to break off the excrescence, and so by feeding to recover their strength and youth again.

Youthful streets, sighing reliefs, and I ponder Newman and Woodward. An affair to remember? Really? Well, otay: “We were married finally - of all strange places - a hotel in Las Vegas which gave us the bridal suite, the wedding cake, and most of the wedding guests, some of whom I haven’t seen again since that day,” recalls Joanne. “When the preacher had finished the ceremony, instead of kissing one another, we surprised our best man by simply falling into one another’s arms with a sigh of relief.” (...) “Certainly we’re different,” says Joanne; “that’s what keeps a marriage alive, plus the fact that I adore him. Just that. But think how boring a marriage would be if we were the same.” Ah, Woodward; once an ingénue, a sea-she.

I realized yesterday that I say “I’m sorry” a lot, when in fact it is perhaps more like feeling sympathetic for situations that make me feel at a loss for words, or maybe more like attempting to make one feel at ease, comfortable. I feel compulsively-conjumbled at times, but in the best way possible. My heart changed places with my brain, but I still feel the same. My treasure is not of this world, in fields or vineyards, nor in markets or luxury stores. I will follow the road with thorn and barefeet, for at the end is a whirlwind of greater Becoming.

I have let go of the echo in my mind, because it is no longer accessible. The powerful trigger of nostalgic development manifests itself over time, in a way that shapes our imaginary ruins. Sentimental lament. Mental mint. What is ever authentic? The unrevealed? Does the spectator ever come to a resting point? Three-dimensional spaces are life. Why bother overwhelming oneself with questioning such beautiful etchings when they just need to be left alone? Such is the case with humanity. “Genre” of one’s tastes can be transgressed between rhythms and melodies. If only one would give “chance” to things, rather than quickly diminishing their “value” with notions and assumptions. I would like to be where things are only happening within my comfort level, like maybe playing both sides of the chess board, or sitting cross-legged in the kitchen floor when the cats are lapping water from their bowls. Mediterranean mouths.

Running for the hills, but joyously. (Nevermind the man below. Too much coffee juicing the senses.)

Teorema

Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham

“(...) Cunningham’s work taught on how to practice a kind of selective inattention, necessitated by the competing and often irreconcilable claims being made on one’s sensorium. Often, it was impossible to “take it all in.” To make everything fit, to make it cohere: that way lay madness. Only a conspiracy theorist out of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 would even attempt it. Pynchon wrote about “the true paranoid, for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself.” And in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Pynchon would write about the other side of the perceptual coin, the state of “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” The alternative to both was solipsism: a crowding out, a turning inward, a refusal to confront complexity and simultaneity. The dandy, by contrast, is someone who pulls back without turning inward. To Moira Roth, the dandy’s “unshakable determination not to be moved” (or in her words, his “indifference”) is apolitical---or worse. But the jarring events of 1968 convinced me that the dandy’s detachment could become an essential ingredient of radical politics.

“Cunningham’s performances provided a special place, a “manipulation-free zone” in which you could begin to reclaim control over your own sensorium. Consider the relationship between movement and sound in a Cunningham dance. In order for the movement to remain independent of the sound, it was necessary for Cunningham’s dancers to perform a remarkable feat of selective concentration. (…) If some of Cunningham’s works were exercises in sensory overload, others were studies in silence. The sound scores for a number of dances were set at the very lowest threshold of auditory perception. Cage, for example, claimed he could never hear any of Gordon Mumma’s contribution to “Landrover” (1972).

Sensory overload and silence; bone crushing energy and perceptual clarity: the two complimentary poles of Cunningham performance in the late 1960s and early 1970s...”

Oswald Von Wolkenstein

I am uncertain as to why this blog has become like a Force Majeure; lacka-whatever-sical, and almost random spurts of journal-writing, but let me say, my halo has fallen over my eyes, and now it looks like Geordi La Forge’s prosthetic Visor. My camera has an inflammation on its trigger. I keep saying, “in due time, friend, in due time.” Permanent winking, like Wolkenstein.

Today, rain pours, licks the sores of the earth, the core of the earth, rebirth? Floating in the air like a Robin Hood-arrow. Pull me, shake me, as flexible as bone-marrow. And I think of Lorine Niedecker: “True bravery is / shown by performing / without witness what / one might be capable / of doing before all the / world.” I just discovered that there is a mental hospital about 10 miles down the road from me. If only it were abandoned.

I miss her. Sometimes in the forest I make crucial discoveries, like the Wright Brothers and their novel wind tunnel. Wind-tension diminishes, yet seems angular. Passionate attachments, like a Spanish dancer, like how the “mood” was changing in 1889 Paris, depictions of gaiety. Clouds drift in front of the sun, “None of these things are fool-proof.” Color outside, Monet-smears, Renoir must have been struck by gusts, blind aeronautical wind-cells. If only I could train myself to fly. I am knitting scenarios and I miss you already; my heart often suffers (clear framework) with different temperaments these days. Awkward stance, inward telescope of memory, whiplike flagellum. What would be a mind that could reach the speed of sound? Samuel Johnson: “there is nothing too little for so little a creature as man.”

I saw the half-clear sky spill rain. I miss her. My wrists are sighing. Felt something shoot up my arm; might’ve been a “shot" star. Might’ve-not’ve-been. Flowers cling to one another on cloudy days, the television still blaring John Wayne galloping on his horse on a dusty road, prefaced by nothing, pre-faced, the tip of the swallowed tongue closer to the whisper, or the rugged esophagus of the smoker’s pistil. An ant bit me, but I didn’t mind it so much. Grandma: “Scoop it out, but not heaping.” Plausible gunk.

Inquiries for photography submissions to: High Museum of Art, The Opal Gallery, Jackson Fine Art, Nexus Contemporary Art Center. Drew blanks, drew blanks on the walls of emails, drew snails walking in trails, faster than cheetahs. I wrote lyrics to a song a while back to the tune that is inside of my head, and it goes a little something like this:

There’s a man up the road, well he told me one day
how he was once in Vietnam, wishes the heat would stay away.
I walked on by, gave him a warm goodbye,
He gave me a crazy look, I smiled but shoulda cried,
'cause some people are grumpy no matter how hard you try,
like hearing ominous thunder but only seeing blue skies.
I told him I was Derrick, maybe I would seem him around,
he just yelled for his dog to come back safe and sound!
Well, I kept on walking, sweat running down my brow
No one is a stranger to me, but I often wonder how.
It must run in the family, but I really don’t know,
he had a good point about the heat, though, bring on the snow.

Waylayed into “way late.” Once, I was told, “I love it when you sit like that." “Like that" was with my right leg crossed over my left. Sometimes people can be shockingly-surprising.

I bet Shakespeare had a gimpy leg. His “Miranda” was likely based on a real-life pulchritudinous charmer that did the deed. While L. and I were in the grocery store (she calls it “the market”), I pointed out that the text on a particular bottle of whateveritmayhavebeentodrink resembled Russian writing. She then said, “Well, you’d know; you’re the smart one.” Embarrassing. I often wonder if she saw my reaction, the goofiness of my appearance, and I am well aware that this blog is public, so if you read this L., then first, “Hi!” and second, “So, did you?” (I remember everything you said).

Nothing settles your food like a Miles Davis tune, preferrably from “Kind of Blue.” Choo-choo.

Well, thass my “entry,” goo’bye.

Cortazar

Thoughts like a drive-in movie, tickle-rambles, &c.

Edvard Munch, Self Portrait with Skeleton Arm

Frazzle’d today, shiny shoes no where to be found, all my love is hidden deep within, could anyone break through the frozen grounds? Would anyone want to? I ask myself things often; how strange to possess certain thoughts, a flood of memory like a rain-pour down-pour, then the frogs levitate elsewhere, then the worms are washed up, and dry up in the next sunlight.

Thinking of Sir Thomas Browne, portionables of Vulgar Errors:

“But the longevity of that piece, which hath so long escaped the
common fate, and the providence of that Spirit, which ever waketh
over it, may at last discourage such attempts; and if not make
doubtful its Mortality, at least indubitably declare; this is a stone
too big for Saturns mouth, and a bit indeed Oblivion cannot swallow.”

– or, “every breath you take, every move you make...” Do not watch me, just make me more Intense. Bellyful of clocks. If there were nothing, we would all be portrait-only photographers. Would we not? Nay?

What about Vulgar Eros, instead? What is nameless? The-thing-that-is-unseen? Irrational. Poignancy in a pogo-stick when the little child jumps, watch out below when springing upon the diving board, no fluffy water below for the flesh. I tried to be different, like an aardvark, sappy bark, crying trees, crying breeze, cat-scratch-fleas. I felt your love like politicking for more love like hippies. Eat the babysauce, baby, let us hold one another at the carnival, I have found you to be like a bird, and my mouth opens, no words can be spoken, you're a rosebreasted grosbeak.

(check the clouds, and you will see a ‘Y’ or ‘Yes’ –- to hold on to the bridge railing. Multiply your ______)

If I had musical talent, I would be a musician. So, since I do not, I write lyrics with the music in my mind, hoping that I could eventually explain the music to someone, while I sing the lyrics. So, since I have no musical talent, although I have an ear for it in a strange kind of way, I write poems instead. O, bright metallurgy-mind!

What of “further illustrations”? Of “Meteors therein”? Stuck in my head, a galaxy, she said, “You seem to have so many cities in your head,” and why do these things make me feel embarrassed? Trying not to put on the “supernatural spectacles,” trying not too hard, trying to be a moon over a night-ocean, moonlight shimmer, inventing inventions, but only as rhymes, as poems. The season is changing, I felt it today –- went outside to grab coffee, choco-chip-KOOKie; surprised by the cool breeze, happily, I should say. I’m ready to be frigid; I’m thinking of frigid, thinking of Browne again:

“But Ice is water congealed by the frigidity of the air, whereby it acquireth
no new form, but rather a consistence or determination of its diffluency,
and amitteth not its essence, but condition of fluidity. Neither doth
there any thing properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity; for
the determination of quick-silver is properly fixation, that of milk
coagulation, and that of oyl and unctious bodies, only incrassation;
And therefore Aristotle makes a trial of the fertility of humane seed, from
the experiment of congelation; for that (saith he) which is not watery and
improlifical will not conglaciate; which perhaps must not be taken strictly,
but in the germ and spirited particles: for Eggs I observe will freeze,
in the albuginous part thereof. And upon this ground Paracelsus in his
Archidoxis, extracteth the magistery of wine; after four moneths
digestion in horse-dung, exposing it unto the extremity of cold; whereby the
aqueous parts will freeze, but the Spirit retire and be found congealed
in the Center.”

Language lights up the sky; no “Ethiopian blackness,” “does anybody really know where we really gonna go” says Verve-leader, I know where I’m going. Panic, picnic. Empathy is seeing through the wounds. Kindness is seeing through a body, looking into the shell as if with x-ray vision, always finding goodness in everyone. Blossoming like an anamita spore. For.

At The Drive-In

Portrait of Marten Looten

Portrait of Marten Looten, by Rembrandt, 1632

Letter from Rembrandt to Marten Looten (who is holding the letter, obviously):

Marten Looten—XVII, January 1632

“Lonely for me was Amsterdam; your company, friendship just gave me unforgettable peace created from an endless respect.” (He signed it “RHL”)

In regards to the letter, there were countless theories about it and its significance and meaning. Apparently a Dutch physician had deciphered the words on the letter by a chemical-optical process, the nature of which he steadfastly refused to divulge. The “Marten Looten” and the date are perfectly legible in the painting. The “RHL” of course stands for Rembrandt’s actual name, Rembrandt Harmensz Lugdunensis, which is also legible. But the text, four lines in the painting, remains gibberish even under the strongest magnifying glass.

Rembrandt, Self-portrait

Painting by Charles Burchfield

I love the way Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel sampled a whining, panting dog in his composition, “Szenario.” The whole piece is quite curious, feeling as if I am on the verge of an explosion, but unable to go any further. I imagine that there are portals hiding in certain clouds, like Super Mario suddenly ‘bumping’ into something. Making something out of nothing. My lips are sealed, like frozen waterfalls. Time closes the lids on everthing; how you act within it all is what most matters. If a frozen waterfall is, indeed, frozen, wouldn’t it then be logical to call it “waterstill”? In the ‘60’s and ‘70’s (guesstimations for the ‘60’s, however; going by the words of former player, Joe Simpson), players would place cabbage leaves in their hats to keep them cool during the sweltering summer.

Where is the gentle floor for the hard-nosed drunk? Choices, reflecting a landscape of revolutionary-dishonesty. Mr. Bukowski, if the world had failed you, then your poems failed you, too. You relied on writing your miseries within your misery while your eyes were like a good pair of death. Some people search for vile rumors -- of stench-filled rancidness to plead with them, to show sympathy for them. Ambition, Chaplin-like, severs them, shakes them to the very core like a brain haemorrhage. The sting of a fracture roars like an earthquake. Gestures of landscapes. And to think that you, Buk, were always loved, like the earth gulping down heavenly rain. To this very day, people still relate to you; caricatures of you; as drunk as you, as filthy as you, as hungry as you, as loved as you. The biggest illusion of all is in the world, like how a flower will bloom to die.

A poet’s tongue is curved, words fill, overflow, what to reach for, what to take, the entire mouth like a river dam, flooded, these skinnable whispers. The poet’s tongue, yes, it is folded in multi-patterns, fish-patterns, silvery-sparkles in the sea-light, waves awaken, tropical storms, like a heartbeat, and if you say that you are not, you really are, and with shouts, with imbalance comes a friendly-wisping to come out with.

This, written after meeting Lesley Kerr on a warm summer day:

“We met for the first time / at The Hanging Couch, / and for as many miles apart as / it seemed to have traveled there, / I felt that there had always been a connection somewhere, like / roots hidden, like the up-gulp / of the plants that are jubilantly / erect from the ground. Whatever is / hidden is always followed with / more expectation of what exists; / with what keeps something energized, / mobilized, nothing at a rectangle, or / a wrecked-angle, or the shapelessness of words. Yes, at The Hanging Couch, / I was hanging all over your words. / I had actually thought of that / before we even met, as I sat there / on the sidewalk in front of the / beautiful antique shop, awaiting / for your arrival, as nervous as a / new-born puppy.”

Later, wrote:

“I guess if someone were really into me / I’d hear from ‘em like the wind through trees.”

Wrote this on Facebook once: “Greediness is a form of anti-happiness, and selfishness is a root that makes many things rot away. Sharing is such a great gift, and produces many great fruits along the way, truly. I always give things to people with the expectation of never getting it back, and that goes for borrowing, as well. It is quite amazing how you gain more from giving than you do from the want-want-want, me-me-me bug.”

A Lady With A Squirrel and A Starling,
by Hans Holbein the Younger (1526-28)