Confiance (l926) by Marguerite Burnat-ProvinsA peculiar set of experiences from 2004 engulfed me. One evening I walked into my uncle’s room and, not long afterwards, noticed that he was wearing a light green handkerchief around his left wrist. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and just thought it was my uncle “just being my uncle,” and so I didn’t ask. However, each time I would visit, he would always have this light green handkerchief around his left wrist, so of course I could not help but to wonder why, and so I asked, “I’ve noticed the handkerchief around your wrist there; what for?" and he responded, “...because my wrist has been talking to me.” I said, “...what does it say?” and he said, “...it just talks to me.” And I said, “Oh, okay. [pause] So, what exactly are some of the things that your wrist tells you?” and he said, “Oh, you know, it just talks to me often, and so I put the handkerchief over it to keep it quiet.” He wore the handkerchief for a few weeks as I recalled, and then one day I noticed that he had taken it off.
Walked this landscape, wondering if it were an old coffee ground, this blues, this jazz, in my ear,—where is the banana peel? Or perhaps this was a nudist camp, or a famous rock ‘n’ boogey jam-blast, fire of pearl bright white guitar, the bandleader was perhaps a woman that tossed trash cans everywhere. Let me speak where I am speaking co-composingly, as if a layer of dew where in my throat, rainstorms are ahead, mutual metric and pallid sky, some days more simple than others—where’s the magician? The only true weapon-of-mass-destruction is hatred; from that one can build into it what one pleases. Delicate ruins, we walked on eggshells, just knowing that this may have been the final time that we saw one another—no need for handshakes and high fives; we’re now wasps on windowpanes, sunshine brass-burn, merging ballad of clear vinyl throat-sweat.
All I want for Christmas is a yellow submarine for two.
This Could Be A Thought or A Story:
Weather channel music, or supercharged background music, reminds me of being in a grocery store and hearing grocery store jazz playing, and that can be a phrase or a term, but the music always tends to excel at making me feel uniquely engaged nearly more-so than a developing crunchy groove with a touch of big beat. Earlier the cat was lying on a pile of dirty clothes in the hallway, the tungsten light spread from the living room grew more bright as I walked towards the living room and entered into the kitchen where water had been strewn on the floor via one of the cats that has a fascination with moving water and so she flicks it out of the water bowl and onto the floor. So long! I think to myself after pouring more water into the bowl. I feel compelled to speak a type of Asian, but I don’t know any of the languages. If you think surrealism is touching over this story, or thought, then this story, or thought, must come to an apparent end very soon. I was excited to begin writing about the misconceptions of self-taught strange people, but these themes brought me towards other flaps in the subject at the front of my lobes. Music isn’t the topic, nor is anything else. Crime is on the rise. I want to stand near a Chartres rose window and plunge deep into thought, or story, of course. Voltaire’s “Candide” raises questions, wounds the mind; I love romantic stories, but this seems to have a monstrous wrath. My ‘wit’ must be lacking, but alas I will not be stripped of dignity. Some things bend out of the way of Touch. I took off my glasses today to specifically touch the thin skin of my eyelids (when closed, light plays on the backs of them). Some people either have ¼ cup of delight or it is completely full. I mowed the lawn today. I wore a surgeon’s mask to keep my nasal passages and esophagus relieved. The last time I mowed this heaping grass, the next-door-neighbor Richard, who has a shiny bald head and a thick grey goatee, was in his front yard smoking a cigarette and looking around at the sky, then back down at the ground, a toke or two, inhale, exhale, and then back up at the trees, then looking over at me, then a quick wave my way while holding his arm in the air as high as it would rise. His other arm was hanging down. I waved back, enjoying this moment of social sustenance.
Like an oater outfoxing a railroad, I’ve outfoxed the frustrated fowler. Sometimes nature's chorus is only that which points to the phenomenon of a voice. I’ve learned, in art, that if it comes to a point where it feels correct, then walk away. Wrote this a few weeks ago, one late night:
I am looking out of a window & tipping the candle sideways. I have examined closely a blue-ring octopus, but tonight is no different than any other night: the moon’s pretty face espionage is a matrix or a perseverance of some irreversible eclipse that I am reporting soul-abroad, & my guardian angel discusses with me the mixed-media of daylight-skies, God’s eternal “premiere” never losing its edge. The sun, tomorrow, will be my rope-and-pulley tendon, a beautiful voice, or perhaps some Indonesian Bamboo Orchestra. I hear a motorcycle engine in the distance, the night’s funeral blues, with vivid eyelids (in my estimation)—the moon, now barely visible. I spin a nest of paper towel shreds around my fingers, this is a similar concept for a flying lotus, except that I stand still like mechanical behemoths. My wings are alive with you. A soft wind, a gradual force from somewhere & whatever was behind me seemed like a mouth. Most people tend to ‘look’ for the best. Well, I ‘expect’ the best. If no one ever comes to understand why I do these things, and if no one comes to want to understand them, then that is perfectly fine, for as long as I am happy, and as long as I am creating art, along with God’s supreme companionship, this is all that I will ever need. Most of the time, certain artists begin to rely on an audience to satisfy their desire for creating their art, versus creating art for their own enjoyment. It is when “status” and “ego” and “selfish desire” gets in the way is when things can go from “fun” to downright “unenjoyable,” for why should we concern ourselves with what others think?
Imagery is never really “complete” after a photograph has been made.
Hiccup at the end of everything, except one thing—
Interviewer: You didn’t go to art school, did you?
Francis Bacon: No, thank God. I would have been taught all of those techniques that I don’t want to know. I want to find my own technique, because if you’re trying to do something that is rather different and new, you can’t use the old techniques which have already been used. You make your own technique.
Interviewer: So, how did you learn? How did you learn to make your own technique doing it?
Francis Bacon: Trial and error. I just, um . . . trying to do it. That’s all.
Yes, that’s all. “Butter me better,” said the bread. What’re people really expecting? The Interviewer perhaps pauses and then says, “Behind the rubble is a loaf of bread pondered by a group of children.” I say, “Mental Titanic.” Eating your thoughts will keep you full. But, only temporary. Do not be deceived, like how Fu Manchu never had a mustache.
Thomas Disch: “Distance seduces the rational mind, just as closeness seduces the irrational.” Or, “...to the whales, with their slow metabolisms, humans appear speeded-up...jerky, spastic, desperately flapping.” (Susanne Antonetta)—Lack of responding to a disaster is reminiscent of a weapon. Kaufmann once said, “Reason without intuitions is blind; intuitions without reason are mad.”
Many are puffier than Puffendorf, playing Hangman, we’re all hanging in the balance. Something at sea, where the fig bends, meaning Meaning memory, aid, daybreak—real-life beings, begins, spiritual alchemy. O my, I sipped the last swig of coffee, granules at the bottom, I had them between my teeth. Gnats sting the tongue when bitten into (accidentally, of course—they can enter the mouth when running); tongue-spark soars air of plane descended behind me (a memory) as I shot hoops in my neighborhood as a teenager, in retrospect, possible autobiographical criteria. Retina. Needed a place to hide. Nothing was so quiet, youth of the ageless ones, now my bearded face itches & the wind blows wilder than before & the window seems to have a heartbeat. I learned today that stars are considered angels in symbolism, today I dissolved where memory left off, leaping over my own initials. My heart is in this, like an ornament that hangs on a tree where you look at yourself, using it as a mirror, hovering in that space, it speaks clearly, like a deep-seeded vowel with an attosecond, to collect pictures and cry, the energy in a tear can smear even the most Solitaire like the interior of an abandoned castle.
This is all “spoken word” without the “movement”—what a photograph is. Just keep your ears open.
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There is nothing more vicious than the commonly expressed desire of parents in merely moderate circumstances to give their children what are ordinarily spoken of as “opportunities.” “We wish our daughters to have every opportunity—the best opportunities,” they say, meaning an equal chance with richer girls of qualifying themselves for attracting wealthy men and of placing themselves in their way. In reality opportunities for what?—of being utterly miserable for the rest of their lives unless they marry out of their own class.—Arthur Train (from “The Goldfish”)
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Closeness of anonymity, being recognized as if from passages of Ovid. Sit down with me, in-between this theatre, let’s distance ourselves like pyramids, let us remind ourselves who we are, who we are not, what we will become—the spinner & the web. I am a generous shift in the mapping of forests. The first volume of my rhetoric offers no sounds but travels through the physical phrase of meter, rhythm, rhyme, or answering &/or erasing falsitruths (a ‘sic’ in every narrative). Take care of yourself, dear poet, they are calling poetry a science with buckled knees, we swing our swords like musketeers. My diary is breathing its last word. In a nutshell, I am lifted by absence. Word-trafficking for a new vocal dictionary where language is pre-ordered before history is history. Is not. Beaches erode. Before we speak again, we must negotiate a plan, eggroll-wrapped, tasty but perhaps with a drawn-out rant, a “bumping” speaker, a Rapidshare. I enter out of the entrance into the night where feminism is everywhere. I have mistaken my hands for Memory. You’re right behind my eyelids when I close them, electrifyingly.
Ah, touché, touché, touché.
