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
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