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Renoir and Mallarmé

At what point would dialogue with a particular person feel like sharp grammatical errors? And typically “error” is often equated with philosophical disquisition, but few monsters know of this. Take Stan Brakhage: “Primarily I write to exhaust language on a given subject, to drive the mind beyond words, so that I can begin, and begin again and again where words-leave-off, veer their references into vision, each verbal connective synapse, to effect that my mind’s eye have full sway so that I can commence my work . . . (also, Theodor Adorno: “What changes in people, what becomes alien to the point of unrecognizability and returns as in a musical repeat, are the images into which we transpose them. Proust knows that there are no human beings in themselves beyond this world of images; that the individual is an abstraction...”). Growing up as a relatively isolated child, I was immersed in films a lot (as well as being made-up as early as 8 years old [not much has changed]), which I think has something to do with my “style”; I feel emotionally unsettled by many things. Once you find out ‘who you are’ as a photographer, stay with it. But, never limit yourself. Anti-art wasn’t, and isn’t, Dadaism, of course not, because true Anti-art is limiting oneself.

Overall, the ego devours itself. The body attached to this ego is cut off, like an umbilical cord, and disregarded. (thirudan pidipattavudan thiru thiru ena muzithaan — “This sentence describes how a thief, when caught, would look and express his mood in his eyes.”)


from Maurice Blanchot: the refusal of philosophy By Gerald L. Bruns:

Imagine language not as a system for framing representations, nor as a native tongue, nor the expressiveness of a spirit--possibly it not even a vocabulary of any sort but is only something disclosed in writing: for example, the alphabet, but also the page on which letters appear. These letters of the alphabet are foundational: Mallarmé thinks of them as the origin of language. Language at all events is in some sense internal to the space of writing itself.

What appears on the page is not something that was merely invisible otherwise and is now suddenly summoned to show itself; that is, there is no sense to be made of a language existing independently of the alphabet. In fact, concepts of the visible and the invisible have only an uncertain application here, where writing is external to phenomena. In a certain sense writing is outside the whole idea of something appearing. Writing is incommensurable with revelation of any sort; writing is on the side of disappearance. This is, so to speak, Mallarmé’s Copernican revolution.

Mallarmé introduces the concept of ecriture into poetics, without however making l’ecriture the term of art it will later become. Poetry is the site or space of ecriture, where ecriture is more event than mark. It is the blank page on which nothing is to be seen, the white space that occurs as such in the appearance of letters. Poetry is made of letters, but only in virtue of the spaces between or around them. Mallarmé came to think of poetry as typographical composition, a total book, a book which is not anything except itself: paper, ink, leaves folded and bound together, letters of the alphabet sounding and resounding musically or of themselves according to every possible combination and permutation of relations. The space of poetry is outside anything we would recognize as semantic space. It is not so much a space that contains as one that disperses, the way Un coup de des disperses its letters. It is surface rather than volume. This does not mean that poetry is meaningless, only that meaning, for example naming something, is no longer anything productive.

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Lawrence Durrell: “If you write bad French you end up with bad French. Whereas in English you can make any number of grammatical errors and still retain control, so that mistakes (whether or not they are deliberate) turn into gems. Take Conrad: his mistakes had such a beauty about them that the English ended by imitating them. A French poet needs a lot more temerity before he sets about destroying the grammar. When Rimbaud writes ‘Je est un autre’ he is deliberately attempting to break down logical structure; as a result he is thought of as a phenomenon.”

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This ditty, written months ago: It is open sesame season in my heart. What lures these bobbers from my inward nexus, solar plexus plucked out, the weight of concrete, root canal of utter unintuition? What of this harrowing shriek that flourishes? My heart wearing its soldier’s garb moves forth with boldness, though plops into the mud & listens to bullets that do not pardon with wholly unprecedented interruption, that of which averts so awful a catastrophe. But at a juncture like the present, how can I not find ludicrous the actions of which give me the knee? I have been swept off of my speech, listening in monochrome, thinking in golden locks. Our fairytale began with pressure to the coal of initiation; a diamond had appeared, eyes as wide as Czech factory workers. There were instances where I could have slept inside of your touch, a snore beneath the forefinger, my neck on the car seat, half asleep, but you were asleep all along even when awake. I knew not of these abcesses within your mind. Nothing startles my bones any longer, green-brown weepy tendrils curling & creeping. Upmost-pouting dimples the cheeks, beaver beaks & cleats of athletes. How do you feel, dear reader; is this nothing more than a bore to the pores of your flesh or your freshly-worn iris (inside of you, a storm)? An Understudy turned potential Poem? Strange how one loses love, or perhaps never had love from the start. I dive into an unclear pool. I rise up above the waters, flying out as a dove that prowls the imperative air of tomorrow. I have made room for the undertow. Perhaps I could have delicately touched your cuticles & begged you to remain as my dear friend? Incomprehensible hoedowns, meltdowns, a tear slowed down before touching cheeks. So long, all of our sheer glances. So long, so long, so long.

per japs a pan

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Iceħand

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m or ph e us

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computer monitaur

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o RANGE


Gettin’ all vishhhual.


Pynchon: “when the recurrent momentum of things / completes itself nothing has an ending”

Sunset-snuffe’d in a swooping dash. Day-by-day, night-by-night, the “green earthen pots” of the open-breasted sky is a highway towards new plants, vines, dew-filled fillings. I am compounded, but for what? God is always near; inside, inside, inside of me; ‘God-shaped’ spot within me, filled, filled, filled. The future, in arrear; a contrast of the unshapable thought. Don’t sleep on your organs. Don’t leave your organs sitting in the hallway later. Nevermind urgency, uninterrupted configurative affectionate confection. Tonight I realized that the white beard of Ed Baker looks much better than Santa’s ever will; modern-day Tolstoy. We’re all walking around as one enormous data-thing for a Data-based world that is bent on data’ing us (“dating”) ‘til we are controlled completely, and definite indications are “in store” as we speak. A ‘Global Bank Tax’ in 2011? Looking more and more likely, sending us towards a one-world political/economical government. The Bible predicted that this would occur 2,000 years ago, and lookie, lookie!

from The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature by Wyndham Lewis:

Miss Stein announces her time-doctrine in character, as it were. She gives you an ‘explanation,’ and illustrations, side by side; but the explanation is done in the same way as the examples that follow it. A further ‘explanation’ would be required of the ‘explanation,’ and so on. And in that little, perhaps unregarded, fact, we have, I believe, one of the clues to this writer’s mind. It tells us that her mind is a sham, to some extent.

In doing her explanation of her compositions in the same manner as her compositions (examples of which she gives), she is definitely making-believe that it is impossible for her to write in any other way. She is making a claim, in fact, that suggest a lack of candour on her part; and she is making it with an air of exaggerated candour. Supposing that the following line represented a
typical composition of yours :—

FugfuggFFF-fewg:fugfug-Fug-fugue-ffffffuuuuuuG

Supposing, having become celebrated for that, you responded to a desire on the part of the public to know what you were driving at. Then the public would be justified in estimating your sincerity of a higher order if you sat down and tried to ‘explain’ according to the canons of plain speech (no doubt employed by you in ordering your dinner, or telling the neighbouring newsagent to send you the Herald, Tribune, or Daily Express every morning), your verbal experiments, than if you affected to be unable to use that kind of speech at all.

We must all have a narrator, no? The shrubs illuminate the actions which take place in the garden. Mirroring ones soul. More ammo than Rambo. Figures, we are, figured, it figures, combined like sand, combined to fabricate glass, combined to distort categorical commonplace. I stand before you, as uncommon as senses, my nose itches, I am unstable like a somnambulist who is uninterruptible beyond report, a treatise, a prospectus for the imbecile that perhaps unspools himself from struggling to assume the worst. Combinatory figures, gap-mouth’d—pleasure & relict, the gainly italic. A complete Nothing is always in motion. An arched orchard within.

“What had my face to offer / but reflexes of earth . . .” is, I believe, what Hilda Dolittle once wrote, but I could be mistaken.

Overheard: “Hey, is that beard your first?”

The other night, my uncle said: “You know ... if I were to flip my heel upside-down and sit it on top of my head, I would look like Frankenstein, because it’s rather flat.” Later, while taking photographs of himself with a cell phone (while still on the phone with me, of course), he said: “...all I need is a mirror ... but perhaps that'll change my mind about photographing myself.”

I always think of ‘x’ as an attachment to outer space. No other letter comes close to making me feel this way. Odd obstructions of immovability—it’s like having a gravity deficiency. Perhaps I just need to be launched through space to obtain a lighter “structure”? Chasing disappearance; moving to the right of the room when the room is to your left. Like Maurice Blanchot: “Keep watch over absent meaning” . . . just like that.

It is almost as if Picasso created peacocks. I’ve said this before, in a poem. It’s worth repeating, worth rementioning, worth re-re-re-everything’ing. Like Wittgenstein: “When one does not force oneself to express the inexpressible, nothing is lost and the inexpressible is contained inexpressibly in that which is expressed.”

There is the Poe-esque notion that if you have the right theory, then the masterpieces will appear automatically. The theoretical body, a mixture of postmodern fantasies, canceling the strange symmetries or form & destiny are shown the atrocity of violation & the grotesque. While observations tend to replace schemata interpretations, less has been said about erotic acts inside the body (mind). God cannot be “tamed” no more than a natural metamorphosis. All text functions as a schematized replica of emancipatory gesture. Robotomies. Perhaps there’s wedding rice still stuck in certain people’s ears after all these years.

Imagine every photograph morphing into zombies and eating as many cameras as possible.

My throat is like a vocabulary airport: words going to and fro.

Adolph Loos by Oskar Kokoschka

Spouting against the ceiling—ambivalence:

Portrait of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok by Konstantin Andreevic Somov

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

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

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

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

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

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

the image
gazes back at us—

an unremitting
visual experience.

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

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

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

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

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

William Carlos Williams: ‘Nothing is beyond poetry’

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

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

VARIOUS ARTISTS:

Stephen Raw

Sára Saudková

Diane Fenster

Joachim Knill

Laurie Lipton

Elliot Erwitt

Keith Carter

Sissel Myklebust

Czech and Slovak Staged Photographs

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

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

Sth.—

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

Steindruck von Walter Gramatté