many names
has the taking-away
many venoms
many names
yet it's the norms
spins our wheels awry
many names
has the taking-away
2045.
"Fall. My favorite empire." --@NeinQuarterly
Saturday, September 23, 2023
How Not to Become a Ghost en el Desierto.
"After Monty Python’s Flying Circus ended, Graham Chapman worked with an up-and-coming young writer named Douglas Adams on a new sketch comedy show for the BBC. It was called Out of the Trees, and it bombed. Only one episode was made, and that aired only once, on January 10, 1976.
Once the Beeb gave up on Out of the Trees, they did to it what they did to so many other programs of that era: they erased it. They wiped the master tapes so they could be re-used. Out of the Trees went into the history books as lost media.
That changed nearly 30 years later, when Chapman's partner, David Sherlock, approached Dick Fiddy, an archivist at London's National Film Theatre. Sherlock revealed that Chapman had in fact recorded a copy of Out of the Trees onto videotape from his home TV the one and only time it aired.
But there was a problem. That air date was in 1976, before VHS or Betamax became global videocassette standards. Chapman had recorded the show on one of the very earliest home videotape formats -- Philips' 'Video Cassette Recording' (VCR), which had reached the market in 1972. The rise of Beta and VHS had, however, led Philips to abandon its VCR format. The last compatible players had been made in 1979. By the mid-2000s, they were impossible to find. Sherlock had been left with an historic tape, and no machine to play it on.
Fiddy says it took two years to build a compatible player, but eventually it was done. And that is why you can watch the one and only episode of Out of the Trees ever produced on YouTube today.
Is it any good? Ehhh, not really. It's not Chapman or Adams' best work, that's for certain. But it's a good example of what the future will hold for lots of cultural artifacts, if we're not careful."
--@jalefkowit@octodon.social via mark saltveit
"In the Autumn mountains
the colored leaves are falling.
If I could hold them back
I could still see her."
--Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (Rexroth)
Here in the mountains
of Autumn the rufous leaves
have started to fall.
If i could only hold them
back--i could see her again.
(mine)
critu cmana .i
farlu fa le pezli poi
skari .i ganai
mi fanta la'edi'u
gi cabna viska ko'a
(Autumn mountains. Falling are the leaves that have color. If i prevent it, i now see her.)
"April Mortality
Rebellion shook an ancient dust,
And bones bleached dry of rottenness
Said: Heart, be bitter still, nor trust
The earth, the sky in their bright dress.
Heart, heart, dost thou break to know
This anguish thou wilt bear alone?
We sang of it an age ago,
And traced it dimly upon stone.
With all the drifting race of men
Thou also art begot to mourn
That she is crucified again,
The lonely Beauty yet unborn.
And if thou dreamest to have won
Some touch of her in permanence,
'Tis the old cheating of the sun,
The intricate lovely play of sense.
Be bitter still, remember how
Four petals, when a little breath
Of wind made stir the pear-tree bough,
Blew delicately down to death."
--Léonie Adams
"Coyote and the Origin of Death
In the beginning of this world, there was no such thing as death. Everybody continued to live until there were so many people that the earth had no room for any more. The chiefs held a council to determine what to do. One man rose and said he thought it would be a good plan to have the people die and be gone for a little while, and then return. As soon as he sat down, Coyote jumped up and said he thought people ought to die forever. He pointed out that this little world is not large enough to hold all of the people, and that if the people who died came back to life, there would not be food enough for all.
All the other men objected. They said that they did not want their friends and relatives to die and be gone forever, for then they would grieve and worry and there would be no happiness in the world. Everyone except Coyote decided to have people die and be gone for a little while, and then come back to life again. The medicine men built a large grass house facing the east. When they had completed it, they called the men of the tribe together and told them that people who died would be restored to life in the medicine house. The chief medicine man explained that they would sing a song calling the spirit of the dead to the grass house. When the spirit came, they would restore it to life.
All the people were glad, because they were anxious for the dead to come and live with them again. When the first man died, the medicine men assembled in the grass house and sang. In about ten days a whirlwind blew from the west and circled about the grass house. Coyote saw it, and as the whirlwind was about to enter the house, he closed the door. The spirit of the whirlwind, finding the door closed, whirled on by. In this way Coyote made death eternal, and from that time on, people grieved over their dead and were unhappy. Now whenever anyone meets a whirlwind or hears the wind whistle, he says: 'Someone is wandering about.' Ever since Coyote closed the door, the spirits of the dead have wandered over the earth trying to find some place to go, until at last they discovered the road to the spirit land.
Coyote ran away and never came back, for when he saw what he had done, he was afraid. Ever after that, he has run from one place to another, always looking back first over one shoulder and then over the other to see if anyone is pursuing him. And ever since then he has been starving, for no one will give him anything to eat."
--From a tale reported by George A. Dorsey in 1905
Killing in the Name. (wait--THIS IS a fake. how "2023" can you get?
"It was a clear but moonless night; the dark blue canopy spangled with myriad stars—grandeur, peace, and purity above; squalor, worry, and profanity below. Fit basis for many an ancient system of Theology— unscientific, if you will, but by no means contemptible." --Joseph Furphy, Such is Life (1903)
"the sound of water
through a curtain of willow –
isn’t this how love begins
first an opening and then
the spilling over"
--Lynne Rees in Tanka Splendor 2006
Friday, September 22, 2023
passage in the night
someone else's cancerdeath
carry on so blithe
equiponderated нет
mazard with a coronet
wait with the drapes drawn
sunrise & the things to do
dance of a jackdaw
gewgaws scattered on the dune
equiponderated нет
"If you cannot talk outside of the stereotyped dishonesties of the crowd consensus, then do not talk at all. There aren't nearly enough silent people in the world. But will not talking at all leave an empty place where that talk might have been? Indeed it will. Grow onions in that empty place then, but do not fill it with crowd chatter." --Aurelia
High in Pakistan's Indus Valley.
"Humans are magic creatures, with something very much the matter with them." --Aurelia
"chiseled
into the cedar bark
lovers’ initials
have leveled more trees
than most lumberjacks care to"
--R G Rader
this contested normalcy
tidepool amid storm surge
vouchsafes no continuance
only that some part of the map
still corresponds in rough outline
one checker at Aldi's
"Better buckle up then as it sounds like a wild ride is in store." (via @LadyLiminal1)
" 'Why do you have to kill either of us?'
'It's an imperative,' the person said. 'It is a pleasure-pain paradox imperative. Girl. you just do not understand people. You don't understand what makes them go. Killing is really the only fun.'
'No, it isn't fun,' she insisted wearily. 'It's something else.' She made a sign, and Marshal-Julio and a couple of his assistants seized the person.
'Oh, what a dirty trick!' the person wailed. 'We might have expected something better from someone like you. It's a breach of faith for you to retaliate.'
'We'll take him and shake some answers out of him,' Marshal-Julio said.
'No you won't,' Aurelia smiled. 'Only reasonable people have answers.' " --Aurelia
"Aurelia is herself a poem, but she misunderstands the necessity of poetry. So do I misunderstand it. For when it is necessary, then it is already defeated. And yet it is a necessity always. It must be a luxurious and unneeded outpouring, and yet it is more important than many of the crying necessities of the world. Even blank or incomplete, even though it is inartistic or unstrung, poetry is a triumph over the flat daytime. And however it is come by, it must be given out freely." --Aurelia
talking to oneself
is not advised
until you're really out of it & safe
talking to oneself
as the bright cinders sift
& phantasms of despair exude
talking to oneself
is not advised
from what we cannot hold
the stars are made*
portents one should heed
from what we cannot hold
or never had,
raised stones amid
from what we cannot hold
the stars are made
"This world does not have a 'dark companion' because this world is a 'dark companion.' You are standing on an anti-earth and denying that there is an anti earth. That is folly for you.
Your world does have a 'bright primary,' and you people on this world are so dim-eyed that you will not allow yourselves either to see or to believe in that bright, primary planet.
Yes, the planet under our feet here is a 'dark companion.' It is the donkey-counterpart world of a horse world, it is the goat world to a sheep world, it is a left-handed world to a right-handed world. Oh, it is!" --Aurelia
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* W S Merwin
"Besides, a joke that good deserves to be told more than once."
"I do not believe that every time we light a light we must also light a darkness for balance." --Aurelia
"It was better received, by far, than anything else I’d ever written."
equinox
squeegee purchase
gizmo angst
bone axis psalm
aquatic
Thursday, September 21, 2023
In Aurelia, Lafferty says at first that the Shining World is "three hundred million to three hundred and sixty million kilometers" away; but actually "it's about one hundred and sixty-five thousand times as distant..." which would make it 5.2 to 6.3 light years. The only two stars in that range are Barnard's Star & Luhman 16. The latter object (two brown dwarves), however, were only discovered in 2013, or more than thirty years after the book was published. Seeing as how the former has had not one, not two, but three ghost planets to date, i think that makes it the Laffertiest of Laffertian stars. Izdubar before i heard.
Poem.
"I do not know which is the most urgent, that you should repent of your fiscal outrages, or your aesthetic, or your intellectual, or your practical, or your moral." --Aurelia
"More persons have been hated and killed for having awkward mannerisms than for any other thing." --Aurelia
the dufflebag that holds my not yet written
works, unclenched its teeth & let one fall
today; i tossed it over the windowsill,
& wait in silence till the thing's forgotten.
How much more satisfying is a blog
that you can post the instant it is done!
--Never have to vie with this age's spawn
of noises calculated to the therblig.
ɢʀᴜᴍʙʟᴇʀ now .02 Ξ
𝐅𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐥𝐲🌈ᴵᴺᵀᴱᴳᴿᴬᵀᴵᴼᴺ.
advancement in the pseudo-plot
or play of signs or grin of tulpa
line unbroken coffee leads
in contrast to the headlines frenzied
5 AM a strange loop
bridge across an abyss raised
smirk clenched in Narcissus' pool
the near invisible leaves me bruised
i lug more air-snow in a pail
fifteen feet of pure white smoke
Silent episode of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING.
"It is so subtle to write things that have no meaning." --@icomptonburnett
Digger the raccoon playing with the floatie ball.
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
monkeys clasping eyes
so as not to see
purchase a dram of ease
monkeys clasping eyes
deeper plunged in ooze
sorrowful whirlwinds sow
monkeys clasping eyes
so as not to see
we don't talk about Paxton
he's a clown but he's one of the gang
a barefaced clumsy thief
to re-elect him beggars belief
we don't talk about Paxton
check your pockets when he's gone
"Written in Miles' Poets of the Century
I saw the youthful singers of my day
To sound of lutes and lyres in morning hours
Trampling with eager feet the teeming flowers,
Bound for Fame's temple upon Music's way:
A happy band, a folk of holiday:
But some lay down and slept among the bowers;
Some turned aside to fanes of alien Powers;
Some Death took by the hand and led away.
Now gathering twilight clouds the land with grey,
Yet, where last light is lit, last pilgrims go,
Outlined in gliding shade by dying glow,
And fain with weary fortitude essay
The last ascent. The end is hid, but they
Who follow on my step shall surely know."
--Richard Garnett
Cat burns several of his nine lives at once. (via @auntbeast)
"We have no use for the music of the spheres. Ours is the music of the prolate ellypsoidals." --Aurelia
feels 🖌️
⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜.
" 'Because we have broken all the major compulsions,' the man said, worrying his words a little bit, 'so we must be chained to the minor compulsions. We cannot be free completely, or we would violate the freedom-slavery dialectic; and we can progress only by dialectics. We have freed ourselves from the slavery of fact, so now we must bind ourselves to the slavery of fetish. There's no other way.' " --Aurelia
Affordable Sunday Surgery [II].
transfixed feeding the cheap SLOTS
i lived for more than LUCRE
in earshot of the OCEAN
plastic stack of half-dried TRAYS
a connoisseur of nonSENSE
scorns to field this ALIBI
barrenness more than LUNAR
in the slow guitar INTRO
tapestry for a BARON
depicts without IRONY
"was it your hand
that held my own so tenderly
in dream last night
just so the chrysanthemums
hold traces of summer rain"
--Marjorie A Buettner in Tanka Splendor 2003
"Shen Yun was a Baader-Meinhof object: once I saw it, I started to see it everywhere."
"...'By the way, what is this world? I will just read its name that you have written here. -Ah, nothing. Say, does invisible ink on every world use a banana-oil base? When will it come clear? When will I be able to read it?' 'When you leave this world, Aurelia,' the consulting doctor said. '...When you have left this world, then you will be able to read its name. You can't know where you are, but you can know where you have been."' " --R A Lafferty, Aurelia
Fate.
"...let a vague pity blur the formal roses."
--Judith Wright
"The Fox’s Lover
The howling air blows snow into your footprints,
four-toed, leading from my door.
Everything you touched tonight is cold again.
Every time, I plan to be prepared.
Night to day; the sleeping side
of a cycle; no great pain. Every time,
I'm screaming along with the wind.
We do not know where you are,
the wind and I,
nor when you will return.
I set out, each morning, for you.
Trinkets to attract your playful spirit:
acorns carved into dice, hare-skulls,
glass like ice dyed sunset-color,
broken traps. For the animal
who cannot be caught unless it wills it.
White fox, I would hold you to me,
weigh us down and let the snow-mountain cover us.
Let the wide-footed bears pad overtop,
crushing snow into static blue ice.
In the dark, if I am careful -
if I set the trinkets just so,
if I do not light a candle
or open my eyes -,
your weight is like a man's.
Your skin, silky and shivering,
a woman's. You are no dumb beast
when your tongue rakes winter lightning
across me, nor when you hold me after,
warm against the air.
Later, I rise -
the nights are long here - and tend
the fire back to wakefulness.
I offer you the dark morning's
eggs, the salt fish.
You have padded to my feet,
you and your shock of white fur,
all dog again. In this form,
something blue-white shines
under your fur, like a snowbound sky.
I ruffle your ears, as if touching you
so lightly could pull that heart
and that light into my hand.
You tell me, with that rough and pointed
tongue: I am beautiful.
I am clever, to have captured a fox.
Watching that light in you,
I almost believe it: I am warm,
safe here with one who loves me;
this snow banked cottage is a circle
of enchanted grace. Everything white
and shining.
Will you stay? No.
Never.
Howling with the wind, I fall backwards
into powdered white. Watch the uncaring sky,
its green and rosy flickering lines,
until all tears have frozen
and my eyes close.
I am safe here in my fur-lined coat,
warm enough to sleep out the cold.
Scarf piling wool on my face,
I breathe warmly and deeply.
I dream:
My heart is scrubbed with blue-white frost,
glowing and clean. You did not bring it here.
You led me, mirrorlike, in fox-print circles
back to the soul that already
looked like yours.
I am beautiful, clever,
warm and safe and loved in this white world,
whether or not it is said
by a trickster's shining tongue.
There is no need to wait in the weeping wind.
In the morning, I set out your trinkets again."
--Ada Hoffmann
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
"Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath."
"constant wind
the icicles more curved
with each drip"
--an'ya
"When a lighted candle is placed inside a hollowed-out pumpkin, the pumpkin will know it." --R A Lafferty
"I hate the slow apocalypse." --@saintsoftness
1.
eclipse-dust & cloistered
clown's needle · succeeding
disappointments · Dantesque
ado traiks the lakebed
flooded with wraith roadkill
2.
switch lanes for less lurching
& lynch resting Grinchface
snarl-riddled cerulean
ran on a ghost planet
under devout oatmeal
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
Monday, September 18, 2023
"The Time Beneath
In the premortuary tomb
Of ancient time--
Who does not lie there,
A mummy not yet born?
Who does not lie there,
Who lives?
Except mock-creatures in wild numbers
The upper air usurping
While the great dead still sleep?
But when the great dead at last live,
What are those deep worlds then?
When beauty rises from the blackened queens
And the lachrymatory vessels sparkle
With tears from unbound eyes
That grieve sinmcerely how they lay
Long closed?
They are the pit of future then,
Where cautious souls that never risked name
Lie down in ghastly triumph of will
And dream of grandeur never lost
To the ancient test of death."
--Laura (Riding) Jackson
“It is closing-time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.”
― Cyril Connolly, 1950
Just some photos from my nightly forest walks.
"On all hands one is obsessed by a representation of social life which, while differing considerably from one class to another, is always made up of mysteries, occult qualities, myths, idols and monsters; each one thinks that power resides mysteriously in one of the classes to which he has no access, because hardly anybody understands that it resides nowhere, so that the dominant feeling everywhere is that dizzy fear which is always brought about by loss of contact with reality." --Weil, "Sketch of Contemporary Social Life"
closing time
in the gardens of the West
bored snail in the interim
closing time
as i heft another tome
as i sift through reams of waste
closing time
in the gardens of the West
this is not the muse
this is a call for justice
hunched deep in the secret maze
this is not the muse
one among many memos
no one knows whose the jest is
this is not the muse
this is a call for justice
Who's wearing the dunce cap now?
"Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well." --Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
SS-2.
"Thou hast a thousand names,
A thousand silent arts of injuring..."
--Mooney's Hosidius Geta
"HYMN (Palindrome)
We dye
no hymn
in words.
Drab bards drown
in my honeydew."
--@Anthony_Etherin
Vivid memories of an uncertain past.
1.
turmeric
hum · fringed smokescreen
ferries trowel
wistful scuttle
shrift culver
2.
steeply lost
from the main game
in bought time
windshield snapshots
can't capture
more than tumbling
karst handouts
the mall empty
came to see
steeply lost
from the main game
in bought time
3.
Jupiter or Venus
my porchlight shadow
stop sign down the street
picks up the brake lights' momentary glow
"There is a certain element of the detective novel in the Mallarméan enigma: an empty salon, a vase, a dark sea--what crime, what enormous misadventure is indicated by these clues?" --Alain Badiou, Being and Event (tr O Feltham, 2005)