Vilhelm Hammershøi

Musical Oblongata --

Painting by Ilya Repin

The surface of the earth is musical; I noticed this earlier when a painterly woman that was sitting on a bench wearing red high heels looked back at me, or maybe that was my beating heart that erupted into the surface of the earth—a tiny earthquake. I will keep telling myself this, keep shaking hands with miracles. Ponderings: “Chess is a game of understanding, and not of memory.” Brings to mind “STOP RACKING YOUR BRAINS // nobody reads poetry nowadays // it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad” (Nicanor Parra). This is almost as silly (a most delicately-horrible term to use in this case, perhaps) as Hitler’s madness in thinking that he was a Christian. There is a delay in our heroic contendors, Andante by Shostakovich, anti-monumental sounds. Today, could’ve danced with Yogini, pressed into the wool of my sweater, tethered into “excuse me, like to dance?”-contemplation. Freeze Frame. “Potential” freezes. Out of sight, your love (“whom do you speak of?” , never to return to the surface. My pea

-ce, hints of relics, “I’d like to touch it first.” Thumb and index fingers together, afterwards. Walking through a hallway, the light indicated surveillance equipment. Some days I feel like I am shrinking to the size of a keyhole. Thinking of many-colored centuries. My camera laughed at me today. It said: “I would like to become what I was created to do, but my DNA is in knots. Why do you grin like that?”

While discussing my photographic experimentation to V. a few weeks ago, she listened intently, but my theatrical-tongue is always in knots whenever I speak to people, uncertain if they actually care to know, or if they are merely humoring me, and maybe this is mental-math for over-observation, but she sd, “Derrick, have you ever thought of modeling?” Moi: “Oh, please! . . . I hope you are just humoring me. The only modeling I do is with claythings and Play-doh and whatever else I can bend.”

Found this: “You can cut the bread off their sandwich, write critical appreciations and walk their mother’s dog and they’re still gonna treat you like “the hired help.” ” Not sure where. It’s like going through battle and the only thing left is an axe-handle. (Yi-Fu Tuan: “Strange to think that the question “Who am I?” can be answered by a landscape.” )

The word for echo is Pockadunkquaywayle. O, pitter-patter!—

(“[4] It was unusual for the woods to be so distant from the shore, and there was quite an echo from them, but when I was shouting in order to awake it, the Indian reminded me that I should scare the moose, which he was looking out for, and which we all wanted to see. The word for echo was Pockadunkquaywayle.” [from The Maine Woods, by Henry Thoreau, 1864])

There is a “poofy” bush somewhere out there that looks like a damaged sandwich. I met a girl named Abby the other day at Starbucks. We spoke of many things. She has been searching for a trench coat. She said: “I’ve been looking for a trench coat. Something extremely obnoxious.”

A thought arose last night: Vegetarians have beef with beef.

Night, oh, covers me, seemingly circumvently.

Two Newer Photos, Two Older Photos:

B}a}c}k}b}o}n}e:

Picasso, Bust (1970) [This, yes, how I feel sometimes.]

I feel as though I could slip through the cracks of people as they look at me looking at them walking by. The bottom of dirty feet, like oily seas. How would I look in the fog? Something whispering: Come and find out.

(from?) The Kφpfe (a bit mysterious to me, but nonetheless, very interesting):

The saving effect of writing always resides in the secret of language . . . In eliminating the unutterable of language, in making it pure like a crystal, one obtains a truly neuter and sober style of writing . . . This style and writing, neuter and at the same time highly political, aim to lead to what is refused to speech . . . The intense orientation of speech in the nucleus of the most profound silence results alone in the effect.

Jealousy is such a vile, rotten thing. Ruins so many things. Including the mind. It does not take much to be happy for someone. “Puff of Word” (Nobukazu Takemura) telling me all that I need to know. Very Verily, Verily-very, some days Oh I feel like an ornament. I find it remarkable, or not (remarkably-sad?), that people “experiment” with “friendliness.” It could be compared to portable rain.

Experimental friendliness? Children do not perform these feats, or attempt to do so. The secret of true, genuine lovablity exists within the combined virtues derived from this mutual pattern of exchange. Every human being retains a childlike core in our natures. We are consistently searching for substitutes to replace the good parents of our infancy in our dealings with other human beings throughout our lives. (reminds me of “The man seemed young”). We will find these substitutes in many different entities, including employers, associates (those that help provide us with our “livelihood”); in a wife or husband who gives us love, comfort and protection; in heroic leaders who inspire us with courage and faith (at least, some of them). And, then, we find them in patient teachers and in companionable (and genuinely caring) friendships; those ones that lift us out of ignorance and loneliness through their sympathetic understanding of our needs (or when there is something in the air, blacker than Daffy Duck!).

In knots. Knotted. In knots. (Q: So there’s no knot equivalent of negative numbers? A: No, there’s not. But it’s more accurate to think in terms of reciprocals: If you take the number 2, then its reciprocal is 1/2, and if you multiply 2 and 1/2 together, you get 1. The knot equivalent of 1 is the trivial knot, or what is also called the “unknot.” But you can never cancel out any knot and get back to the unknot by adding it to another knot. There is no such thing as knot reciprocals.)

I remember the tears in her eyes; the kind that wouldn’t fall, just filled and filled until the eyes were completely pooled. I can often better understand the meaning of a stare.

The colassal jungle of a stare, like Holbein. Trading places with the surf.

Thomas Cromwell Holbein, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532-33

Photographs by Sophie Calle

Trusty Wiki: “Sophie Calle (born 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle’s work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.”

More Here, Here, Here.

Strolls: the bones of my arms, waving, in the sunlight:

Such a glorious day. Bought film, took a stroll through the forest, felt like an eloquent phantom amidst the sunlight, bedecked by the endless charms of nature. Two yellow butterflies followed me around the entire time (as I predicted would occur). While in the forest, came across an enormous mushroom, lying on its side, was catching the light in a glimmer of gold; so many words polishing my esophagus.

Yesterday, spoke with a 60-year old-ish woman. In the late sixtees, she said that she once stood on a street corner looking at all of the hippies parading around. I asked if she were a hippy, and she said (laughing), “I was too busy having babies!” She said, “I stood there, thinking, My goodness, what in THE WORLD is going on?! But then, about ten years later, I was yoohoo’ing all over the place, just like one of them!”

Breezy-blowing wind through trees, through the window with which comprehension increases. Feeling Oscar “Wilde” and wowed today. I sometimes feel the urge to apologize to certain people for who I am, for what I am interested in, and it is like the essence of something contained within itself, and the only way to find out what it is is by becoming what it isn’t, therefore contradicting its contradictions and finding out what is sacred and less commonplace. A revolt in a whisper.

In my “spam email” inbox, the sponsored links are providing me with Spam recipe links.

Squeezed like a squid.

(Note to self: The texture of this day, like flaunting fruit towards a hungry mouth.) Cannot remember who, but this flips me: “Sometimes I misread people’s behavior if I’m having a bad day or feeling vulnerable and then later am gratified to find my vision was distorted or skewed.”

Back to my stroll: Sometimes my careless attempts have glimpses of truth intertwined in them in a way that makes photography seem like some “abominable satisfaction,” and some would see it selfish to find that one wants to “invent” the future, but the future is already existing; we are just consistently creeping towards it, second by second (some people, as I have noticed, live in inappreciable moments of time) with nary underbrushes of thought (like how, when venturing about the HOT October 8th road with my camera earlier this afternoon, I found myself commanding the attention of everything surrounding me, in ways that perhaps would have not been the case were it not for my Object d’art. It is like certain listening skills, certain lacks and gains, and the eyes “search out” something to photograph; intense observation, like Christopher Colombus in his prime, the “fat” of the land like a goldmine (gold-mind) to those explorers)—and I have a love-affair with nature each day, like some John Keats and Fanny Brawne sunshine (Keats to Brawne: “My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet - You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist: and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more - the pain would be too great - My Love is selfish - I cannot breathe without you.”—and I, Derrick Tyson [Patty once said to me in late 2007: “You should start using D.H. Tyson like D.H. Lawrence” . . . how flatteringly-embarrassing, I thought—I think of our emails, how lengthy and divine they often were, how expressively-poetic, how she printed them all out, had our stacked-correspondence in one enormous box—wondering what became of it, if she still has it all]) cannot breathe without nature (poetically, and lyrically and, well . . . literally).

Truth is, I have stop being so lazy with art, but “moods” are like moon-phases; I feel gagged on questionings and objectivism, but in a serene way; nothing violent. Felicia said to me after I told her that I am happy and content with my life: “How do you know that you are this way?” I said: “I just know. One just knows.” She said: “But, if you have never known the differences with sharing happiness with someone, how do you know that you are fully happy?” and I responded: “I have known the differences, which is the reason why, and how, I know. I know what to expect, what not to expect . . .”

I tend to stay silent for the most part—murmuring to myself, almost forcefully—always standing transfixed.

Back to photography: Recently, I am loving nature photography (why does that sound so . . . strange to say?). “Nature photography”—what is the nature of that phrase? Sounds so barbarious in a way, and I thought, “Every picture that I take is . . . a self-portrait. It has to be.” I ponder to-and-fro, restlessly, at times, the unavoidable noise in my mind clankering around, giving me speech-candy to taste on. Why should I apologize for my ways? This would be absurd. I was perhaps mentally-heavier as a child. Photography is dangerous in the right proportions—a wide semi-circle, a gap here and there, an empty space (fill-in-the-blank). Helps to make good friends, good conversations, but I cannot conceal what I don’t have, like some unbearable weight oppressed to one’s breast—a glance back in the dusk of day, before disappearing completely.

Revolving words. Thoughts. It is time to eat! (I’m staggering forward).

Sun Yat Sen Garden

THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF TRADE:

The Entomologist

Hattier

Laboureur

Fireworks Tradesman

Larmessier Habit de Meunier

A list of flops and flips, daily thoughts, other things

By Lucy Skaer

Today, had an ear-conversation w/ a deaf fellow; initial glances, outer words spoken, he clung to himself, thinking that he was merely ignoring me, until I learned of his disability in which he let me know by slightly-shouting and pointing at his ear. Moments such as this make me feel more appreciative with a kind of overwhelming industrial power, feeling more blessed than ever. My mind keeps rushing around all over the place like angry Christmas shoppers. Watched a group of women speaking in a foreign language—babies squealing like little piglets (one of them dressed in pink)—feeling so foreign like Alvin Curran’s “Wonder Bread”—feeling so foreign in certain places (she once said to me: “It is like we’re foreigners in this city”—we’d been in a certain city, unknown and wide-eyed with comprehension in our highest interest).

A particular man (seemingly unhappy; looks as if he probably snores) told me about his problems, how his son passed away—the german shepherd would stay in his room, would inform his son of when the alarm would go off for time to arise, but one morning the alarm went off, the dog was even suspicious this day, and his son never arose. He said, “I thought he may have just did not get up—being lazy—but he never did. I went upstairs, turned him over, his face had already turned blue.” His wife, passed away not long ago, as well, and he said, “I don’t know why, either. It’s crazy. Certain people in the hospital are NUTS, man; I think there is a cult going on in there. I knew someone that knew of certain nurses that would laugh at the way people were dying.” He went on, “To this day, I don’t know how she died. I didn’t have an autopsy done on her.” He had just had an operation, had been out of work for four months, had three to go, but they want him to come in to work now. “The ends of my fingers are really numb...” Later, he said, “...and I just had my truck fixed up, and now I’m looking for pots and pans, because my old ones are worn out. Everything is so cheap these days, and isn’t worth a crap. I hate glass tops on my pots and pans; they have to be metal.” The only thing left is he and his dog. He was grumpy, unhappy, foul-mouthed, and had a stick-it-to-you type of attitude, which, I thought, may be the primary reason for all of the problems and disappointments. I tend to always hold my tongue in these instances and just listen . . . and just, glisten. Grumbling, unhappy people? Be kind to them.

Something about the seashore, as a child, was like a “seasnore.” Anyhow, thoughts from work: this October-warmth feels like a tease; soon the freeze will chapmark every ground—one’s tongue, like a weapon, shall never prosper. Attitudes-aplenty around every surrounding ground, like gulping on rotten things, pulp of life unappreciated, so tragic, so dewy and “fooey”—chewy loosened teeth, corroded buildings taunt—Lesley once sent me photographs of the wounds on her legs—“I think of you in all types of weather,” she says, and last night the thunder woke me up with a dash, thoughts like “need to unplug the juice to the computer”—never got up, drifted dreamily, unremembered—woke up in a pool of language.

I stick to myself, taking that literally, as if my body were velcro on one side—a kind of yin and yang, or not really. A curious trail of something positioning itself around me?

People putting their trust in planets is silly, as if planets will somehow have some cosmic effect on one’s energy and life. It’s like trying to set in screws and wheels towards something that is unapplicable.

Sarah Mclachlan’s music depresses me, not to mention people’s toilet-mouths, the kind that go “kerplunk” and needing “fixing.” Maybe,

just maybe, I should have been a clock builder, making time go slower (reminding me of a particular “The Prisoner” episode, Patrick McGoohan-style). Imagining living outside of time, like God (soon to come).

Making “no bones about it.” Making muscles be about “it.” A wireless fantasy, like some Ussachevsky composition. Ah, then there is Luc Ferrari. Musique concrete delights. He once described his work as being like “electroacoustic nature photographs.” Ooo. I often thought, often pondered, thinking and wishing how I could've seen Arthur Rubenstein play Chopin. Time, time, it never, never settles, it never settles but it constantly changes, re-arranges, and projects itself all around like dust particles. I realized not long ago that the reason why I love avant-garde/concrete music so in-depthly is because it represents, for the most part, what is going on in my mind.

I chew gum when I am nervous. I also shake my right leg uncontrollably if I am sitting down while nervous. “Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.” Guy Debord (was bored?).

Robin sd: “You know, you remind me of my son’s friend." I sd: “Do I?” She sd: “Y-yeah, you, you do, and I know that I have told you this before, but you totally do.” I sd: “Ah, well that’s okay...” She sd: “You look like one of those hip ... hipster-type guys.” I laughed, sd: “Do I? In what way?" She sd: “Oh, you just do ... my son’s friend is kind of the same way. The glasses, everything.”

When I was 13, I was really into ninjas, and one year dressed up as one for Halloween (but I ran from people—My ninja-ness was like a soaking rag). Some people do not understand poets because poetry does not exist inside of them. It tries to enter into them, but it just exits, flees quickly. It has to be “wanted.” Recently ran across (or it ran to me?) Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwan. This, from 1987 from Afterwards, titled “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear”:

Let me make this perfectly clear.
I have never written anything because it is a Poem.
This is a mistake you always make about me,
A dangerous mistake. I promise you
I am not writing this because it is a Poem.

You suspect this is a posture or an act
I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.

You actually think I care if this
Poem gets off the ground or not. Well
I don't care if this poem gets off the ground or not
And neither should you.
All I have every cared about
And all you should ever care about
Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
Is is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing.

How delightful.

The U.S. dollar isn't so “almighty” anymore. Congress cannot stop the death of the American dollar because congress doesn’t control its destiny. “Every peregrine has a toothlike projection on each side of its upper mandible that enables it to dislocate the vertebrae at the base of its victim’s cranium.” This, like a perfected-metaphor for our government; certain politicians are like frollicky peregrines.

No apparent notice in such tsk-tsking!

Sleepy. Looked in the mirror earlier, noticed that my head looks like Sinead O’Connor’s. “Nothing Compares” (or compared, in this case) to this evening’s light. I will most likely repeat this tomorrow.

(found): N40570321072

Thoughts, like Bombs

He meant: “H” as in “Hello” (No “Hello” Bombs)

Today, the mist of rain began with cold-flux of wind, arising from the “great white north”; ice-spots collide in my blood, dancing birds dance no longer, hide in their nests, the seasons are like shifting sands, but they linger, lasting throughout the elongated days; white and brown (collect ideas, never frail, like loosened leaves), my elbows ache when I bend to write about the oncoming winter, but the swift, delicate, pillowy-heart of mine sighs with the deepest relief as winter approaches calmly to collect me up into its luxurio

-us air. “Us air.” We are the air. Walking lungs, walking in gaping spaces. O such relief from warmth (crystal clear skies and the sunshine feels “treated” somehow, with change like a bouquet of spice dancing upon our skin. Each day passes, winter greeting dinnerware of clouds and windsongs. My fingers pinken, as do my ears, my cheeks, my my, my, my. Such sweet validity. The end-of-day sunset, like damask stripes of coordinating patterns. I sd: “You think I’m weird, don’t you?” and Ashley A. sd (with her wonderful Californian accent):

“No, I don’t think you’re weird. You’re just different.” Feeling overly-modest, always. At work, thought of cyborg technology, thought of how knowledge “grows” like biology if one keeps an open-mind, if one listens. I have learned that listening to someone that is much older can really deepen the canyons of the mind. Anyhow, if I had a nickel for every rude look I have received from someone, I would be rolling in mountains of mula, or mula-meadows, something like a hulahoop, my veins flow quicker when the ticker of the clock gets nearer to the “freedom” destination. Dry throat and a tongue as stale

as hour-chewed bubblegum (the color pink! again! come to mind). I feel surrounded by women in the nursing field, raised within estrogen, with our without it, and when I think of poetry, I think of women, like how felines always remind me of females (even male cats are feminine-like). Winter is boiling autumn in its fiesty pot. An old man was staring at me today in Applebee’s. I saw another man at the bar frictionize his hands together before grabbing a hold of his enormously-large glass of foaming beer. I tend to . . . feel . . . in-between . . . emotions this day;

expectations and hopes that tend to exceed my own barriers, but of which clngs to my heart and mind (not like some offthewall love story, like Keats or Chopin-like love, but a kind of exploding of the solar-plexus; my brain sitting atop an enormous “stake” as Vlad The Impaler snickers from below while eating his supper), but thinking of how blessed I am to be so top-sided at times; perhaps unintentionally lopsided. My heart flutters for my dear Lord, flooded smorgasbord, flurry of boredom at work, or lackthereof. And then comes

THE ECHO

O

O

o

o

.

John Wieners: “When the echo falls / one will dismiss it. / When it calls again, / one will miss / it, falling in love with the present, / while one is able of it. / When the shadows enlarge, will one / enter it, or stay where / he is now. What will one do, how” . . . The mind, often like an echo, is in a state of trepidation from the slightest noise (like the slamming of a cabinent or a door), and skin, what is flesh, what is skin? What is it but odd typeset, long sequences of earthly-dust, eruptions of knuckles and fingertips . . . smaller patches of “showy” vesicles “containing a white serum, burning” . . . burning worse than anti-illuminati symbolism; something of a libido. The Gaping Mind. The soiled roots are expanding.

The Army National Guard: “We can read your minds.” (Spam-mail).

“Abandoning bravery.”

Received Flickrmail today. He sd: “I like your work because it Speaks. I don’t like your work because of what it is saying.” Hm, so if what the images are saying creates dislikes, then what are the images speaking that creates likeness? The images expel speaking, but they are saying two different things to him, I suppose. Well, as long as they do not sound like Pee Wee Herman playing in a Fun House, then all is a warm fireplace.

I used to think that it was I that made the ocean blue, but it was all because of you. I don’t need light for sight, because I have eyes within. An appendage of the fantastic. The waves take each breath we take, hides them in oysters. This, the true manifestion of pearls. “...and they say everybody steals somebody’s heart away.” This is quite true, except that sometimes they only take a small portion, while leaving the remains gasping in solitude and bafflement.

“If I were a swan / I’d be gone”

The man who really was Jekyll and Hyde --

DOUBLE TROUBLE!: Deacon Brodie with the
dice and cards that lead to his downfall

William Brodie was a well-respected man in Edinburg in the mid-18 c., and he shone as a model of “civil sobriety” in a straitlaced-type city. He was the son of a prosperous cabin-maker and was a deacon of the masons’ guild, as well as a city councillor (featherless fellow, perhaps, but well-gestured, distinguished and meant a great deal to the “big wigs” in the area). However, Mr. Brodie was also the model of one of English literature’s most horrifying characters, Robert Louis Stevenson’s schizophrenic scientic, Dr. Jekyll. For Brodie, like the gentle doctor, had a secret life behind his mask of virtue. By day, he was a businessman, but by the time the night-gulp crushed itself into the aura like stepping on dark-purple grapes, he was a mighty gambler (perhaps irritably?) and a vicious thief (very irritably). Bizarrely-enough, these “self-involved” secrets were unknown by anyone, not even known by his two mistresses (who had given birth to his five children). In fact, they did not even know about each other (not exactly Dostoievskyan!).

William Brodie was 27 years old when he turned to crime. In August of 1768 he made copies of the keys to a city bank and robbed it of 800 pounds (about $4,000). But as he went on to burgle scores of buildings over the following 18 years, no hint of suspicion from anyone ever fell upon him.

__________________

Getaway and Capture
__________________

The beginning of the end, however, came in 1786, when he joined forces with three petty thieves. Together, this thieving-conglomeration planned Brodie’s most daring “raid.” The head of the Scottish Customs and Excise. The gang was surprised by an employee, and even though Brodie escaped the chaos, one of the thieves, John Brown, turned king’s evidence to escape deportation for other crimes he had committed in England.

Brodie fled to Amsterdam, hoping to escape to America. But on the eve of his departure, the police caught up with him. Brodie was extradited and put on trial in Edinburgh. The evidence was damning; the police found the proof of his double identity: false keys, pistols, and a burglar’s black suit (reminding me of a particular Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode). Brodie was condemned to death, but on the night before his execution, he wired his clothes all MacGyver-like from neck-to-ankle to lessen the jerk of the rope and lodged a silver tube in his throat to cheat the noose. Unfortunately for him, neither trick worked. On October 1, 1788, he died on the Edinburgh gallows.

Nearly a century later, R.L. Stevenson and William Henley wrote a play based on Brodie’s exploits, which was titled Deacon Brodie, or The Double Life. The play was first produced at the Prince’s Theatre in London in 1884. In the play, the burglar explains the freedom he finds in his nocturnal life of crime. Two years later, Stevenson turned the theme into The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which of course was his memorable short story about the darker side of mankind. In the story, Dr. Jekyll discovers, through experiments with a drug (and in the book, Stevenson provided the concoction [recipe] for what he was drinking), that “man is not truly one, but truly two,” and describes how “I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man.” He goes on to explain the fascination with the experiment:

If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.

In this way, Stevenson explained the way in which the evil inherent in man took its hold on the good Deacon Brodie.

Deacon Brodie’s Tavern, Edinburgh

The Curious Cures of Dr. Graham

Natural public speaker: Dr. James Graham lecturing
from a podium, to a crowd of ladies and gentlemen.

In 1781, childless London couples were invited to cure their unfortunate state by spending a night together in the Celestial Bed (for fees up to £500). The proprieter of this remarkable device was Dr. John Graham, who was an Edinburgh, Scotland physician, who had created a fashionable cult of cures by magnetism and electricity.

His bizarre treatments became the rage of fashionable London, and he opened a Temple of Health in the Royal Terrace of the Adelphi. There, attended by Negro servants, he administered special baths, sat his gullible patients on “magnetic thrones,” or gave them mild shocks in an electric chair.

At the Temple of Health, his chief assistant was none other than the beautiful Emma Hart, who later became Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson’s mistress. Dressed in scanty robes, she entertained the patients as “The Rosy Goddess of Health.”

Of all of Graham’s equipment, the Celestial Bed was the most splendidly-gorgeous. An ornate couch standing on eight brass pillars, it owed its curative powers, he said in his advertisements, to “about 15 cwt of compound magnets . . . continually pouring forth in an everlasting circle.”

The treatment does not appear to have worked, for he was obliged to return to Edinburgh, where he was sent to prison as a lunatic.

Dr. James Graham’s “Celestial Bed”

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)

Gustav III of Sweden (coffee . . . poison?)

Gustav III of Sweden

Gustav III of Sweden believed that coffee was poison, and to prove his theory, he sentenced a murderer to drink coffee every day. To provide comparison, another murderer was pardoned on condition that he drink tea every day. Two doctors were appointed to supervise the experiment and see who died first. The doctors were the first to die. Then the King was murdered in 1792. Finally, . . .after many years, one of the criminals died, at the age of 83. He was the tea drinker.

Gustav III of Sweden

Grazings, pigments, mutterings, . . . going downstream:

What would you do for a book of “nothing”? Most would do just that, nothing. And I may do nothing, too, but certainly I would be doing something by merely thinking about doing that nothing. “Nothing” is not necessarily a blank space. Some people find dirt to be highly unimportant in their daily lives, but when one thinks more about that dirt, one realizes that it is vastly important. The term “nothing” is always “something.” Before one can think of nothing, one has to know the difference between nothing and something, and that’s a simple formula, really, because ‘something’ can be anything, whether it is an ‘act’, a ‘thought’, an ‘object’, &c. What is more intimate within the Nothing’s nucleus? Nothing can be easily ignored, and it (whatever it may be) shouldn’t be ignored, because like shadows, there is always a light somewhere to create that shadow, and with a Nothing, there will always be a Something, and vice-versa. We cannot go through life with our eyes opened and never visually see “nothing.” It’s also quite impossible to think of “nothing,” too. One will think of the word, but with words are images, and a Nothing will always be linked to a Something. Something that is blank may appear to be nothing, but within that blank there is a Something in which that Nothing is canvas’d upon. It’s similar to when you call someone and you may ask them, “what are you doing?” and they respond with “nothing.”

Shoveling down Golden Grahams, why am I not a sentence-seeker? I write letters, as if by memory, with memories, to those that are perhaps overly-satisfied with detail. Detail, like kitchen remnants left after moving, accidental crumb-droppings on Granny's table, her eyes check, same continuum, bloquees of loopy speech; reiterations. What else but the sunlight-screech in summertime, peach-orange light, prolonged, falling on the flower-pot full of light green Hedera helix in an eternal instance, thick as the beard of Ives, could strike a chord with cordial reminders of a future love? Air released, like in a flattening tire. I often sigh when I wake in the morning, but not out of hardships or struggles or pains, but something of tenderness, often humorous, a “know,” a satisfaction, of what is to come. A Brahms allegretto in the evening. Flip-flops are still on my feet, like turf, rough terrain ruining the knees of athletes, I crawl around this place like a caterpillar. Scribbling verse. Sounds of string quartets. Sounds of what will be.

Saturday morning wake, where is vacation, other than cold sheets, daydreaming all night, pleasant smiles, I love old folks. I love picnics but only when there are ants present. I feed them, they are happy, makes me happy, happier. There is a beach on the moon. I hit my head on the wall while walking down the steps today. Felt like a statue for a moment. Elagabalus The Horrible-headsplit for a minute, it did not last long, though. As delicate as pushing a baby carriage, I want to go far away, never wagering, bewildered, unsheltered. I saw your face in my mirror. My coffee cup is empty. I have hung a grape-vine on the edge of the cup. I had beanie-weanies today for the first time in at least a decade-plus. How does one that is unable to read or write music explain to musicians how the music sounds in one’s head? By humming it? Making sounds with one's tongue and lips and mouth where certain parts would be within the piece? There is an entire symphony in my head, wanting release, and I can only ponder if I have just subconsciously re-created---like a cut-up---pieces of music (over very long periods of time) and re-arranged them, or is this something completely foreign, or perhaps unique?