“Bela Lugosi’s Dead” EP (1979) on blue vinyl...putting
it on cassette now so i can listen at work.

'The Mind of the Father said that all things should be cut
into Three...' --Chaldaean Oracles, quoted by Proclus

I imagine a world where, instead of bilateral symmetry, all
lifeforms are triform; animals have 3, 6, or 9 legs. Three
genders: he, she, se which are yang, yin, & balance. Any
two can mate but it takes all three kinds to procreate.

"The Sk [Sâmkhyakârikâs of Ishvarakrâna] and the Ys
[Yogasûtras of Patanjali] present a clear-cut doctrine, by
which all three gunas are inherent in every phenomenon
and cause the differences between them by the ever varying
proportions in which they enter into each. This theory is
known as gunaparinâma..." --Early Samkhya, E H
Johnson (1937)

Their nature causes them to instinctly analyze things into
triads, just as ours creates dualistic philosophies. And where
there is no third term, their minds perceive a blank, which
they call the DORD.
------------------------------------------------------- `

    NOTHING MEANS NOTHING

This morning i understood.
Or this afternoon.
A fly cast its shadow
on the gray wooden floor,
its wings a translucent one
a semi-shade.
Not that, not this--
cried the sage in the marketplace.
He wasn't playing
a sophist's game
with that Asian sun
nor did he seek to stifle
our questions like you'd swat a fly.
Invisible wings
(not this, not that)
were fluttering, and the half-tones changed shape.

When i saw her again today
so briefly,
i understood.

I once heard a coach say, "A good player has to be three
things: Host-ile, Ag-ile, and Mo-bile"... That's not so bad
for an artist either.

Level Red pollution watch today. Breathe shallow. Be grateful
for all that dinosaur grease we just killed 10,000 people for.
We've got enough now for Level Red the rest of our lives,
probably--& a little beyond.

On a lighter note, how 'bout that Chante? --I'm just
glad she wasn't rich. Then she would've walked
free & made Texans look even worse than they
already do. But hey! authorities just arrested a couple in
Brownsville for strangling & decapitating their three toddlers!
The circus isn't over yet, not by a long shot!! Stay tooned.

    "Song for a Red Pollution Sunday"

Children's book prize handed out
   By the Second Lady
Says a voice on NPR
   Melodious & weighty
While Iraqis' burning eyes
Stare at where the worn G.I.'s
   Count ammo in the shady

Children must be brought up right
   Spare them toxic reading
Feed them with the will to fight
   For Bible, flag, & breeding
One day soon will bring the call
Ship 'em off to stand & fall
   And in the sand lie bleeding

06 29 03

Better get working on that novel.

"...his proudest creation: The Six-Day Week. By making each day
twenty-eight hours long, he got in eighteen hours' work and ten
hours' sleep. ...in common-week terms he got up four hours later
every successive day. Of course there were inconveniences."
--Rock Brynner, The Ballad of Habit and Accident (1980)
[As i recall, Feynman used to be on a 26-hr schedule.]

Disillusionment: another illusion. That you're safe...

"It isn't enough to push a pram across the Andes." --V S Naipaul

The basis for the myth of objectivity may be that dissociation
experienced in shock: a homemade heroin daze...

The body as image creates dissociation. Rather,
the body as movement, potential energy, transformative possi-
bilities. Because gesture is at once a sign and expression
of feeling; unambiguous except in isolation, infallible knowledge
and the standard of honesty. --This was before acting
became the basis of normalcy, of course. Now we don't feel into
the existence of others, we try to imagine what we look like in
their eyes. And we blind ourselves to our own gestures as a
result. We lose our expressiveness...

"You know, I don't even like chess, but it is my
living." --grandmaster Lev Alburt in 10/84 Chess Life & Review

"For the vast majority of languages, prose has formed
in the hands of bilinguals." --Punya Sloka Ray

Writing is like wood carving. For, being an evolved matrix,
language has a grain (usage) which resists the artist's
unfettered intentions. Whereas in painting, the only resistance
is mental (preconceptions).

Metaphors to a cat: who pricks up her ears at hearing an
electronic sound--among others she paid no attention to--which
happened to resemble the kind of sound a cat might make.
   Art began with being fooled.

Most of our talk isn't communication, it's reacting. Volleyball.
The topic changes: the ball goes all over the court. You can't let
it stay in one spot too long. It might look like you were going to
run away and steal it.
   Communication: a crime against Democracy.

Not our talking but the work we do together is our
singing. We sing playing volleyball. And the song better not get
too good. Or the ball might drop. --What i have been calling Politics,
is kind of like a matter of arguing--while still singing--what's the
next song; what key it should be in. Contesting scales, degrees of
dissonance. Duelling banjos. --For the last thing we care about, is
doing our work the best we can. (You're Weird.) I always put down
the volleyball game, but (almost without realizing it) i play it and
sometimes play it well. Instead of changing the game i mostly
want to choose those i play it with. --All this synchronizing of
talk, matching vocabularies, it's like, so much practice in case we ever
had a use for it, but we never do, the group remains a team of indiff-
erent singers (and adrenaline addicts) which strenuously resist any
suggestion that you drop the ball but stay here together--as
if you were to say, Everybody get out of their clothes. (Harder even
than that...skin?) --No revelations we can allow, besides ones we've
had time to perfect and verify in media-speak...

"If professors are ever in the vanguard, it will be at a very distant
date." --Sara Teasdale

How many are now joining the New Right, not from conviction,
but for the pleasure of knowing the bully is now on their side?
This is the result of our schooling. This is what could have been
seen a hundred years ago by anyone. Why shouldn't civil
liberties disappear here? America is simply the country that
shouted "Freedom!" till the word went blank.

'It may be that people who do nothing but fall in love are more
serious and holier than those who sacrifice their love and their
hearts to an idea.' --letters of Van Gogh

   "Large Trade Surplus"

Give these eyes to someone who can stand them.

'Great events are perhaps so only for small minds. For more
attentive minds, it is the unnoticed, continual events that
count.' --Valéry

   "DROPS OF TEARS

Give me
Even the temperature of wool clothes that covered a manekin.
The lady came from a foreign country, they say.
She is an eternal nymph
Because of being a myth.

Let's not throw away
Even polytheism,
Nor knowledge.
And
Oh, transcendence of today's midnight!

My breathing.
My song.
Oh, the gentle salt
Of tears!

Let's go in the midnight.
Young painters! Let's go in the midnight.
Impossible images
In the darkness, in the darkness,
In the darkness.
Please stop to check
Whether they really exist
With patience, indeed!

The lady came from a foreign country, they say,
Because of the myth of her brain.
Please make up me
Even with the black dusty colour
That spoiled a manekin!"

--Un Go
[Anyone besides me think this one smells like flarf?]

Jungian Note. To Rational (primary: Thinking or Feeling) types
the world seems to be irrevocably divided along the Irrational
axis (Sensation=Body, vs. Intuition=Spirit), just as to Irrational
types (primary: Intuition or Sensing) the world is divided into
Accident (=Thinking; the Arbitrary) and Order (=Feeling; the
Necessary). These dilemmas remain mutually incomprehensible
insofar as to the other type, those poles are both so strong and
real that they seem on the same plane of existence, a shifting
balance or sliding polarity, that's "obviously" no contradiction.
Reconciling those opposites is childishly simple (as Objective/Sub-
jective has always been for me, not even a deep mystery, a shallow
riddle) and so much perplexity & paradox along their axis is nonsense
or pointless semantic obsession... The corresponding spiritualizing
paths, or processes of discrimination, are askesis and psycho-
analysis. For the other type they don't work & are so much charl-
atanry. Because what they are struggles to clarify and define, to the
alternate types, is like night and day. (And after the separation,
come the corresponding joining processes, Healing and Understan-
ding. --Which is the major work of these type-dominants.)

Unsaying lies begins the possibility of saying truth.
Yes, in casual contacts we mistake which are the lies we no
longer separately believe, as if then that gives us something
in common--but the two of us have not yet unsaid
them together.

Much more important than our eyes' image is our skins'
image of each other. And this may be the substance of
our reality--or lack of it.

I turned on NPR & they were talking to Milton Babbitt. Cool! I
love that early electronic music, what i call Stone Age
Computer Jam. It was real mad-scientist stuff back in
the early 60's...room-sized computers! Hollerith cards! And
lots & lots of switchboard wires!

An obscure DeLillo: Amazons by "Cleo Birdwell" (1980) was
apparently written when he was changing publishers, & his name is not
on the book; a bit warmer & more humorous than he allowed himself
in be in other works of that time, it purports to be the autobio of "the
first woman to play hockey for the NHL" & it can sometimes be found
in the sports section at Half Price. I read somewhere when the book
came out, he actually hired an actress to impersonate Cleo for the
book release parties...

Who says Evil never dies? (But the rumors that it was caused by
a certain notable Supreme Court ruling are entirely unsubstantiated.)

Zainab blogs.

I used to use boring postcards because they were cheap. Now
they're cool & i can't afford them anymore.

  "In Praise of Saddam Hussein

A blatherskite named Michael Weiner
Savagely vilified cleaner
   Departures than his
   From normalcy--whizz
On his noose if you'd boost his demeanor."

--Victor Vermis
[Note: V.V. informs me that this limerick has been created as
part of a group blog-protest, & no offense is meant to the
scat & auto-erotic asphyxiation communities by seeming to
associate them with a rightwing bigot. We hope you will
understand.]

The idea of time is our consolation for losing the moments
we fail to pay attention to. We say: it's got to go some-
where.

Note on street protests (1984). The streets are no longer
where anybody is, only a way to get to somewhere
else. Not even a place, since pedestrians themselves don't
think in terms of walking, but just like carless drivers. Thus
whatever happens in the streets, is nowhere, can be
nothing. The streets are where you ignore whatever
isn't in your immediate path....As a consequence, there is
no public forum for all the public (only, separate groups
arranged by explicit distinctions and for particular times)
and no sense of awareness as the people. Television
usurps these regions with its artificial homogeneity and
compulsive irrelevance and most of all its totally bogus,
arbitrary authority. Besides that, there's subculture organs
of media which define narrow and narrower points of
view, till one can no longer communicate with any other
except through the empty hieroglyphs of mass imagery--
through advertizing slogans--and nothing but the crudest
emotions (adrenaline on, adrenaline off)...for subtlety
you have to use some specialized argot: a hobby, a job, a
cult, or an addiction.
Postscript 2003. One may now ask: is the Internet
a place? Or is it, perhaps, our nostalgia for a common place,
made manifest?

When i busy myself with postproduction (and caring about what
happens to my work) it's like the island castaway taking his
message-bottle between his teeth & wanting to swim it across
the ocean...There can be no one it's aimed for...
Yet it goes.

"Alas, the penis is such a ridiculous petitioner. It is so unreliable,
though everything depends on it--the world is balanced on it like
a ball on a seal's nose. It is so easily teased, insulted, betrayed,
abandoned; yet it must pretend to be invulnerable, a weapon
which confers magical powers..." --William Gass, reviewing Henry
Miller [--substitute: the Single Discrete Auctorial Voice of the
Poet]

Ozick on Helen Keller.

"The face of Osama bin Laden morphed into that of Saddam Hussein."
Senator Byrd strikes again!

"Why I'm Not Ashamed to be an American: My America vs. the Empire
By BILL KAUFFMAN

In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, John Fogerty of the terrific (if weather-mad) band Creedence Clearwater Revival recalled "feeling this shame just sweep over me...I was terribly ashamed of our country."

He needn't have been, as he soon realized. For Richard Nixon was "not my country. He's those guys--over in Washington. First thing I thought about was the Grand Canyon and my friends and neighbors--and the people all across the country. The people in power aren't my country any more than a bunch of gangsters are my country."

Nor is the Fortunate Son in his fortified bunker on Pennsylvania Avenue my country--or your country, either, unless you are as thin and insubstantial as one of those vapid wraiths hissing of empire on CNN or MSNBC or any of the other alphabetical collisions in our corporate-media soup.

There are two Americas: the televised America, known and hated by the world, and the rest of us. The former is a factitious creation whose strange gods include "Sex and the City," accentless TV anchorpeople, Dick Cheney, Rosie O'Donnell, "Friends," and the Department of Homeland Security. It is real enough--cross it and you'll learn more than you want to know about weapons of mass destruction--but it has no heart, no soul, no connection to the thousand and one real Americas that produced Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint Dorothy Day and the Mighty Casey who has struck out.

I am of the other America, the unseen America, the America undreamt of by the foreigners who hate my country without knowing a single thing about it. Ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and drunkards who made their places live.

We are the America that suffers in wartime: we do the dying, the paying of taxes, we supply the million unfortunate sons (and now daughters) who are sent hither and yon in what amounts to a vast government uprooting of the populace. Militarism and empire are the enemies of small-town America, not only because some native sons come home in bodybags but also for the desolating fact that many never come home at all. They are scattered to the winds, sent out--by force or enticement of state--in the great American diaspora, never to return to the places that gave them nurture.

War kills the provinces. It drains them of cultural life as surely as it takes the lives of 18-year-old boys. Almost every healthy, vigorous cultural current of the 1930s, from the flowering of Iowa poetry to North Dakota cornhusking tournaments to the renaissance of Upstate New York fiction, was terminated by U.S. entry into the Second World War. Vietnam, like any drawn-out war or occupation, disrupted normal courtship patterns on the homefront: the difference between republic and empire might be restated as the difference between taking the girl next door to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and paying a Saigon whore in chocolate bars and the Yankee dollar.

Empire focuses our attention on matters distant and remote, affairs to which we are mere spectators. You can care about your backyard or Baghdad; you can't tend to both. Under empire, Madonna replaces our mothers, imperial fantasies straight out of Henry Luce's LIFE erase our lower-case lives, and the wolf at the door is named Blitzer. Only he's not at our door--our doors are too insignificant for such a ravening creature--but on the idiot boxes that broadcast without cease the propaganda of the regime. Facile contemners of President Bush deride him as a "Texas cowboy." If only he were. Alas, President of the World Bush is a deracinated preppie, an Andover yell leader who blamed his first defeat for public office, in a 1978 congressional race, on "provincialism." It seems that the real cowboys were unimpressed by a naughty boarding-school cheerleader who was unable to pronounce correctly the name of the largest city in the district. Young Bush's helpmate, Vice President Cheney of Haliburton, is a man so placeless that once he humbly determined himself to be the most qualified running mate Mr. Bush might have, he had to hop a plane to Wyoming and become an instant citizen of the Equality State so as to avoid violating the pettifogging constitutional clause that effectively prevents President and Vice President from being residents of the same state. Bush and Cheney have no similar constitutional scruples when it comes to honoring Article 1, Section 8 of that forgotten document, which reserves to Congress the right to declare war, but then such hairsplitting is for epicene liberals, not big draft-dodging he-men like George and Dick.

So no, I do not feel "ashamed" of my country, for America, as John Fogerty understood, is not Bush or Cheney or Lieberman or Kerry but my friends, my neighbors, and yes, the Grand Canyon, too. Even better, it is the little canyon and the rude stream and Tom Sawyer's cave and all those places whose names we know, whose myths we have memorized, and whose existence remains quite beyond the ken of the Department of Homeland Security.

Will Rogers, an American of the old school, once said, "America has a great habit of always talking about protecting American Interests in some foreign country. Protect 'em here at Home! There is more American Interests right here than anywhere."

The Men in Grey who rule the televised America won't protect American interests because they have no interest in America. It's up to us provincials. What's it gonna be, fellow hicks: serve the empire or preserve the street where you live?"

(via CounterPunch)

   "NEAR THE ARMISTICE LINE

Mountains had steep valleys;
Why are the two dim flags of different colours standing
On the submits of Mt Têbêg with majestic ranges?

Mountains and the river stretched into distant views.
In the valleys where the dear mother-tongue encircled
Is viewed a watch-box of strange alien soldiers.

Both with bloody eye-balls
In the village where terrors quietly screened by walls,
The river was flowing with abysses.

Only there were inevitable compromises between lines and lines,
Yet they were not obstacles set up in reality.
In front of passionate eyeballs and decorated joy,
Sun-flowers stretched along the luxurious rails of the sun
Even in this area where controversial warnings brooded.

From the day when the gun-smoke flamed there dimly,
And the roaring of guns resounded in my tiny heart,
The spot was really an alien space to me.

The line was an unexpected demarcation,
Called a boundary line; the area of indignation,
Where the human history challenges against me."

--Yong-tê Gwôn

Nowadays a "generation" is (1984) about 5 years: as defined
by the minimum age difference necessary to render the music
of one stratum unintelligible to another. I'm not kidding:
this is a matter of languages, for those who have no need or
knowledge of formal English. To be young and without a music
...who could endure it? who has tried to? The best of us learn
several, like polyglots, and achieve a degree of cosmopolitan
skepticism about genres--but to do without any, that is a poss-
ibility which demarcates the real desperados from the poseurs...
without music, you create more consciousness continually,
though it might seldom achieve self-awareness; you make up names
for the things you feel and otherwise might only have correlated
to groups or songs. I don't say: Silence. It takes maybe years of
music withdrawal to merely conceive of Silence, I'm beginning to
realize. At first you hear the static of your momentarily disconnected
channel......And this goes for images as much as for music; moreso,
because we trace out images where we don't think of music (we then
are just impatient to be listening to it)--our whole culture is a kind
of semi-collectivized, semi-personalized hallucination stream--i try
to imagine having my eyes replaced with radar, or infrared...to
see.

"As a space, the present has been oversold." -- William Gass

Insomnia is the first distance; and all distances--are degrees
of insomnia. Tinctures. Ink.

It's not enough to dedicate myself to the future that should
have been...

Loving without being loved is a miracle of levitation--a horrible miracle.

Revenge. Murphy's Laws: a revenge that didn't work. The motives
of revenge and of excellence are the same; only with one, transcen-
dence is an evasion (the need for confrontation) & the other it's
the solution. Thus the pressure of society against individuals
produces crime and art. We cannot know what an art without
society would be like.

"The poet struggles to keep his words from saying something,
although, like the carrot, they want to go to seed." --Gass

Long Bets--a great idea, but you have to have money behind your
prediction. Which sucks--how many prophets are also successful
capitalists? You can have my prediction for free: The Chinese will
colonize the Moon.

There's no "litmus test for poetry", of course, but i always think
of that anecdote from classical antiquity wherein someone hears
a poem, & asks that it be repeated over & over, "so I won't die
without having memorized that poem". --In an age of mechanical
reproduction, one can devise a hierarchy: poems you'd buy the
book for new...poems you'd check out the book from a library to
xox...maybe even: poems you'd copy out by hand (i remember
typing out all the Rubaiyat for myself, once upon a time). Nowadays
you more often see this passion in song collectors. And
such. --Would you buy that poem on eBay?

"As darkness is mined and transported from place to place
like marble, so the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it
from its inertia..." --Gravity's Rainbow

I can still shock people by telling what i really believe,
that our Utopia isn't 50 years off, but more like 500 or
5000 (or 50,000)--is it not peculiar, how our daily conduct
hinges on eschatology?

   "DO. BUT DO."

Gray of mock
is dirt shoved over
the still active coals
and i walk without thinking
of where
but
i find myself ever
returning to fire and desire
Mock--
key's in the lock.
Lemmings are running
and i have some duty
that drags me along
In spite of my knowledge
i can't quite resign
from this place and my race
for leaving
is also
desire

11 10 84

I learn more about America from a long bus trip than from
years of living in one place.

Our image of violence is that it escapes causality whereas
it actually relinquishes our only freedom from causality--detachment.

"Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot." --Ulysses

'The real vertigo is the absence of madness.' --Cioran, The Fall into
Time (1960, tr R Howard)

'After a long intimacy with doubt, you come to a particular form of pride:
you do not believe that you are more gifted than others, you merely
believe you are less naïve.' --ibid

"Snow warred on the El's world in the blank snow" --Lowell

Seven Eleven,
yard workers stop in early;
i get my paper.

Both checkers try their Spanish:
one Indian, one Anglo.

Even Marilyn Manson is scared of Otep. (Is this
like Henry Kissinger saying Rumsfeld scares him?--which he did.)

When Hal Clement devised his planet Mesklin after the discovered wobble
at the star 61 Cygni* indicated one that size might exist, he chose for novelistic
purposes to make it a solid body--larger than Jupiter--instead of (as he doubtless
knew) the gas giant it probably had to be. I want to write about an imaginary
satellite of the 70 Virginis planet, only at the nearer inaccurate distance it was
first described to be, even though it is my own disproof that such a temperate
world can be there. THIS--is my PoMo twist. But for all the rest, i want to follow
scientific probability exactly.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
*which is now also a band & an object of Bible-Code bloviation.

A good article on the history of propaganda in America. (via Metafilter)

I used to be interested in micronations like CyberYugoslavia; & thought oneday they might
replace real nations.

It's kind of an emblematic situation: Gioia at the NEA (while it
yet lasts--), & off in the hills, like a Ho Chi Minh of Cyberspace:
Silliman's Blog. Pope & Anti-Pope (oh, i thot Marjorie Perloff
was the LangPope?). --Naah (though it would be nice to be at
least a LangCardinal, i admit--). Blogs are more like the old literary
salons, except you can't see who's in your living room & the
refreshments are strictly metaphorical. We aren't so much busy
drawing up canons & lists of ex(non)communicates, as trying
each to map our own bewilderment. Blogging is poetry waged
by other means. I respect anyone who's read something i
haven't. Nevertheless...when Swinburne died, the young
Yeats is reported to have cried out, "Now I am King of the Cats!"
Robert Lowell, for whatever good it does him now, was King of
the Cats. I rather think today's King of the Cats is going to turn
out to be someone we've never heard of, probably off on the
fringes of the English-speaking world right now; & i don't
mean myself (although as a joke, i plan to try Yeats's line &
a sky-kick when Cohen dies--& i hope that's not anytime soon).
I only mean to figure in that late 20c anthology: among the 10
million minor poets.

"...The broken glass in the corner,
even though you cut your foot upon it,
seems only a moment of confused sunlight
in a room without windows." --William Virgil Davis

"...and at dawn
The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn." --Robert Lowell

"The apothecaries have Books of Gold, whose leaves, being opened, are so
light that they are subject to be shaken with the least breath; yet, rightly
handled, they serve both ornament and use." --Thomas Campion

'So thick the confusion,
Even the cowards were brave.' --Archilochos, fragm 281, tr Guy Davenport

"An ambiguous situation arises when poems are read for reasons other than
those for which they were written..." --Laura Riding, 1938 preface

"Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth."--William Blake

“PEASANT

     His Prayer To The Powers Of This World

All those years that you ate and changed
And grew under my picture
You saw nothing
It was only when I began to appear
That you said I must vanish

What could I do I thought things were real
Cruel and wise
And came and went in their names
I thought I would wait I was shrewder but you
Were dealing in something else

You were always embarassed by what fed you
And made distances faster
Than you destroyed them
It bewitched my dreams
Like magazines I took out with the sheep
That helped to empty the hours
I tried to despise you for what you did not
Need to be able to do
If I could do it
Maybe I could have done without you

My contempt for you
You named ignorance and my admiration for you
Servility
When they were among the few things we had in common
Your trash and your poses were what I most appreciated
Just as you did

And the way you were free
Of me
But I fought in your wars
The way you could decide that things were not
And they died
The way you had reasons
Good enough for your time

When God was dying you bought him out
As you were in a position to do
Coming in the pale car through the mud and fresh dung
Unable to find the place though you had been there
Once at least before
Like the doctor
Without a moment to lose
I was somewhere
In the bargain

I was used to standing in the shade of the sky
A survivor
I had nothing you
Could use

I am taking my hands
Into the cleft wood assembled
In dry corners of abandoned barns
Beams being saved
For nothing broken doors pieces of carts
Other shadows have gone in there and
Wait
On hewn feet I follow the hopes of the owls
For a time I will
Drift down from the tool scars in a fine dust
Noticeably before rain in summer
And at the time of the first thaws
And at the sound of your frequent explosions
And when the roofs
Fall it will be a long while
Since anyone could still believe in me
Any more than if I were one of the
Immortals

It was you
That made the future
It was yours to take away
I see
Oh thousand gods
Only you are real
It is my shame that you did not
Make me
I am bringing up my children to be you”

W S Merwin, The Lice (1967)

   ”A Colloid of Gas & Plasma”

1.
  In the days of huge cars
Our unprotected eyes
Could see fathoms of miracles
And all the great teachers

2.
  When all the skalds scolded
This king a dwarf among dwarves

3.
  They thought, surely it will burn off now
But the fog only thickened

Here comes the silverfish solo

4 13 01

   ”Spontaneous Remission”

A small foreign car exploded. The next day the problems began.
The earth stood quite still under my feet. And in my head the
revolution began in earnest. I got up to watch the sun rise, but I
had to end up spinning the ship. Will I stop? No. Will it be painful?
Yes. What should I want instead. You tell me nothing. The same
old jokes. The back of my head is the front of my head. Have you
no ambiition? Expires on birth date. How many minds have you
lost? 2 crutches embrace. Why so much protection? You see how
you’ve been brainwashed. This is not a planet. & the universe is a
most infinite place/ that you won’t, you can’t possibly span. The
accident was a godsend. I never did care for you anyway it was only
a symbol it was always myself that I loved. The walls are still holding.
There’s vomit all over the walls. Leaving it to you to prove & refine it.
The dancers whirl, blur before my eyes, fade quite out. Who ever
reads the Leader’s book to its end?

--from Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds (1984)

'At first, players started speculating that there was
a really bad bug in the game code,' player Tim Wheating
said. 'Then we realized that somehow an insane god had
taken control of our world and was out to kill us all.'
(via Rebecca Blood)

Here's a word we need: fascimentalism. (Ariana Huffington
calls it "Operation Avoid 41's Fate".)

Does anybody remember The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax?

And how about that Paint by Numbers revival??

Another key to Mallarmé.

Bjork as Mona Lisa or, what else is Photoshop for?

Parataxis on the level of the sentence. I
remember how happy i was when The New Sentence
came out. I'd published my cut-up novel Mysteries
From Forgotten Worlds a few years earlier, using
an identical technique (inspired by Tender Buttons
as much as anything), & it seemed to validate my process
(just as Ashbery did, though i never got his kind of
reviews--i think "a tangled, maddening snarl of words"
was about the best [Factsheet Five] i received). This
book i first wrote as a 2000-page scifi novel, based
on automatic writing & a ramifying, unresolving plot,
& let it lie fallow for several years until Xerox Sutra
(later Xexoxial Endarchy) asked me if i had anything
else, after Carnivorous Equations 2. I said i
did, but it needed some work. So i sat down & read the
whole thing, & copied out all the sentences i still
liked. Then i typed them up, cut them into strips,
& spend several weeks arranging them to my satisfaction.
This text i retyped into specially measured forms
to be photographically enlarged page by page with
room for the graphics i borrowed &/or modified
out of my immense-at-that-time image repository.
The results was published as an illustrated book
which is still, i think, their best-selling book ever.
(Not that that means a lot in the small press universe.)

   "I GO THE DISTANCE

Here in this area
Where speed and time intersect each other
I see a single line of distance,
Crooked in whitish colour.

I go round repeatedly circling
The distance, embracing myself in it,
Located neither in a distant place
Nor in the near place as seems to be.

As numberless steps preceded
Far in the front,
As if not knowing the distance of terminals,
I also go and am ceaselessly going,
Entrusting those numberless steps,
That will follow me,
With the entangled steps of mine,
As if they were my will.
While the stars set down and the dawn breaks
I go with the wind blowing.

The distance wriggles in my bosom
As if it were a rope.
My rusted breast,
Leaning against the wriggling distance,
Goes round repeatedly circling.

If the speed is tired,
Painful steps are also drawn up,
And the steps drawn up make distance;
At last over my bosom without sound
The distance, as it does,
Goes not quickly or not slowly,
Goes repeatedly and go circling.

The single of whitish distance,
The one where I can not return though wished,
The one where I have to go though not wished,
Go I circling.
Embracing myself
I go repeatedly."

Mu-hag Han

Unrhymed songs*, from "Judy Blue Eyes Suite" (is that it? by Crosby
Stills Nash) to Sinéad O'Connor & Ani Difranco... I think it would really
benefit songwriters if they just gave up on rhyming for awhile unless
they're actually accomplished formal poets. Beter still, a moratorium
on lyrics altogether.

I remember when my friend Melissa H---- told me she was laying off the
Beat thing & going to try Cowboy Poetry for awhile. Of course i looked at her like she was nuts, but is it all that terrible to want to join a
thriving movement with plenty of enthusiastic readers? They have big get
togethers every year out West (Nevada?); & if serious critics ignore them
completely, so much the better. Me, i will always boost Robert Service
(a dead poet that people still ask for at my bookstore--& not for school); though
i think in a way he was the last real Cowboy Poet & everyone today is sort
of PoMo- or Neo-... But what is there to keep a genuine talent from arising
in such a milieu?

"I understand completely. The rage isn't easy to control. But sometimes the rage is overtaken by the fear. Not the fear of terrorists -- the fear of my government and of my fellow Americans. The fear of people who believe the world is 6,000 years old and believe that Satan is a real being that is loose on this earth. The fear of people, and a country, that have become delusional and have the power to do great harm. The fear of people that believe their own lies. The fear of people who see all who are not like them as evil and who must be destroyed. For I am not like them, not like them at all. I represent their worst nightmares. I do not believe in their god, I do not follow their hive mind, I do not swallow their lies. Worst of all -- I think for myself.

Why do I keep doing this blog? Why do I keep bringing back reports of the destruction of things that I hold so dear? Why do I feel like I am watching the largest wreck I have ever seen and I can't stop looking? I guess there is part of me that just has to know. I guess that, if you like history, watching the biggest history in your lifetime makes it real hard to tear your gaze away. I guess that I want to know when it will no longer be safe for me to remain in the country of my birth.

Is there hope? I honestly don't know. The fear, hatred, and utter ignorance of the world that these people have is a disease that is spreading and I don't think that it is curable. Can they be contained? I fear that it may be too late. It's not just a matter of defeating Bush. It's so much deeper than that. It's a mass hysteria and it seems to be inpenetrable by truth or reason or caring or love or forgiveness.

The only way I can keep some sanity in my blogging is to contrast this destruction with acts of creativity. By inserting examples of the things that are created by people who are passionate about the world around and within, who are open to the wonders that this world offers. I keep my sanity by bringing back things by people who have a fucking clue as to what a metaphor is. I bring back things by people who want to live and want their children, their children's children, and all those that follow to be able to live and discover all that is beautiful and wonderful because there will still be beautiful and wonderful things left to discover." --Gordon Coale, in answer to Why
I Stopped Blogging (via Wood_s Lot)

------------------------------------------------------------
(*Addendum. The Roches, The Smiths...)

    GHAZAL

the black hand of fortune black hand of glory
under desert skies despise the land of glory

soldiers they bring the next big thing regardless
none of them wants to earn this brand of glory

and dying out there it's clear what they've accomplished
and i from afar am charred with the command of glory

6 20 03

"A Lion That Will Fly with His Face Backward


As we are given it, a dog-eared business. Pause while I stop to speak
with the dogs. For soon they will be old, and learning nothing. They
will be mine, and very tired. Such is the cul-de-sac. Should we rise to
view some meteors fall, our nature in the dark is common and elusive. A
newsprint we hunt for its hide. In the morning you can’t have opinions
about the stars. They should not have shot themselves another
direction, and neither should the paragraph struggle to eclipse the
paragraph. Still we give chase, the dogs bay, the lion’s face is very
beautiful, with holes cut out for the eyes."

—Stephanie Young (via Lime Tree)

Listening to: spooky Chamber Music by Vasks.

  ”Watching ‘Vertigo’ at a Time of National Crisis”

where did our country go
when we weren’t looking
how is it so
where did our country go
who changed the show

claws into wings are hooking

where did our country go
when we weren’t looking

6-19-03

“What pain does at the physical level, fear takes up on the
metaphysical.” --Ligotti

I don't love any book enough to be a one-book person. In a
world of howling monotheists, i feel this a fault. 'Against their
vinegar' i have 'two smooth oils'...

The Secret Museum of Mankind. (I've even made paintings from it.)

Somebody gave me a funny coin the other day, that would've been a nickel
if nickels had Arabic lettering. Now i've figured it out--10 dirham from the
United Arab Emirates.

An Orthodox Jewish slam poet. (via Moorish Girl)

I was gonna say, i can't mention Cintra Wilson without also linking
to Dallas's very own Paul T Riddell--but it seems his old site hpoo dot
com has been taken over by corporate Blue Meanies, so you'll just
have to fish out individual essays from the great electronic ocean.
Trust me, it's worth it...

No, i didn't know that today was World Refugee Day, either.

I'm in a Rube Goldberg machine, pushing the ball
that rolls down an incline to set off a spring,
& pulling the lever that opens a gate for the greyhound
that catches a rabbit; & at the same time i am trying
to weave a rope for a ladder to escape out the window
of my prison that is only open one day a year, & also
in the process of composing an anthem to the saucer
gods who are not going to come & rescue me in time
anyway.

Bird call audio files.

In a letter that Sulfur published i once argued that Ashbery was no sort of
Surrealist, but a great nonsense poet...

After reading Tuva or Bust! about the physicist Feynman's obsession with
the philatelic but obscure & short-lived Asian country of Tannu Tuva, i briefly
joined the Friends of Tuva. I never actually contemplated going there,
but the CD of Tuvan music i bought remains one of the more significant musical
discoveries of my life.

Listening to: Katell Keining.

The joke to which "The Lesser False Vampire Bat" might
be the punch line-- What's furry & flies & has a milk
moustache?

Imagine righteous indignation to be an addictive,
debilitating drug--made from mashed up baby kittens.
Would we still love it then? Dubya loves it, Osama
digs it, protesters get high on it, & the troops in
the desert eat it up--it's the coin of the realm, the
denim everyone wants to wear: veil of the twin desires
of greed & punishment--greed, to take from the Other
in order to make your Self bigger, & punishment--to
reduce the Other to nothingness as much as possible,
so as not to be troubled by resemblances.

Forms of the desire to be just. Putting some
back when you have too much. Admitting you are wrong.
Listening, against the impulse to blurt out contra-
diction. Alms giving. Seeing yourself in others,
particularly those who seem very different. Giving up
the wish to seek honors or take credit. To not care
about winning or losing. To let someone in ahead of you.
To rescue something forgotten, lost, or wasted. To
show mercy; even to those in the wrong. To not do
everything you could do, no matter how good it would
make you feel. To be content with partial solutions,
slow results, & achievements that you will never see
the outcome of.

   ”LANISTA

Behold the afternoon sun, how slowly it withdraws from the sand,
  those darker stains within the shadows, though they
  have been covered and covered again, growing darker
  still,
Behold the stone tiers, how empty now,
Behold this day, merely a day, but rumored it may be the last on which
  these simple games, our great sports are ever held--

I, Arius, trainer of the best, matched in my youth against the best,
And against them all,
The swordsmen of every province, the netmen, even the beasts--

Knowing no mother or father save this arena, and no other life,
Twenty-eight killed (more than fifty palms), four times spared
  (once by the Emperor, saved by the people thrice),
Sometimes still seeing my portrait on the lamps, the vases, the
  matrons’ gems
(In addition to the jeweled chains, the helmets, purses, and other
  favors once given me),
And my name, that I have heard in song--

And knowing as well a certain midnight of the spirit that comes to all,
  when each, in his cell, must be chained against self-
  destruction,
Only to be scourged on the very next day, by whips and red-hot irons,
  to the dangerous fight--

Yet now I hear, with wonder. that none of this has been of any avail,
These combats have had no meaning and are in fact nothing, less than
  nothing at all--

As though the fight between the women and the dwarfs had been for
  nothing,
And the combat between the crippled and the blind. had that no point?
Is it not good that the race shall ever behold itself with pride and disgust,
  horror and fright?--

So they say this may be the last of our little games--

Well,
We shall see.”

Kenneth Fearing, op cit

"They recognize the difficulty of the task," Rumsfeld said. "You got to remember that if
Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215
murders a month. There's going to be violence in a big city." Rumsfeld noted that Baghdad
has nearly six million residents. (via This Modern World)

"Part of mortality’s significance is that wars end." --Eileen Tabios (via Silliman's Blog)

Visual bands so seldom live up to the music they promise. ("The Voluptuous
Horror of Karen Black" is a good example. The lead singer wears only scare-
makeup & green body paint.) Sometimes i indulge in a favorite fantasy, where
Kiss was the Rolling Stones, & the Residents were the the Beatles...

Molly Ivins reviews The Clinton Wars.

Cheer up.

Few encounters have been as momentous for me as the encounter with Japanese aesthetics. Behind the alluring facade of haiku, kimono, & cherry tree, lies a conceptual system quite at variance with our own & one which, after being understood, leaves you forever dissatisfied with the shoddiness of thought that has gone into Western canons of beauty. We seem to have never quite gotten beyond Aristotle & Longinus; & all the prolix theories of the 20c put together cannot help bridge the chasm between advanced art & everyday life, whereas in Heian Kyoto we find a worldview that culminates its most spiritual expression in pouring a cup of tea for friends & in shaping the letters of a note to a loved one. No wonder once the blinkers were taken off, the horse ran wild--we had no essential connection with either our past or our countrymen, & the best religious impulse most artists ever came up with was to blow it all off as irredeemably bogus.

Just take this one idea: that every thing born in time carries the imperfections like a fingerprint of the forces that went into creating it. Is this not a definition of “style” that transcends both imitation & originality? And isn’t it time we gave up all those sticky dualities, half-acquired with the very words, half-effaced by the fumblefingers that snatched them? If all that is left to Western Art is the political mind-set of team sports (& what else does all this talk of “movements” amount to?), then it is high time as well to have done with games; time indeed to remember what we are here for.

Not enslaved; stupefied with the distractions. We could throw off these overlords any
time we wanted to. And oneday we'll realize this, & like the Soviet Empire, our own
house of cards will cease to exist as such. But everyone will be here. Only a stupidity
will have actually perished.

Think of it as a kind of national Gastric Bypass Surgery: all the food goes into someone
else's stomach.

"If one considers so-called "intelligence" as part of defense, approximately two-thirds of the American tax dollar goes to the generals. That naturally leaves very little for anything else, which is why the U.S., in terms of infrastructure and general well-being, is the Banana Republic of the industrialized nations, with 25% of its children living in poverty, the worst education system, the worst mass transit, no socialized medicine, the highest rates of illiteracy and infant mortality and teenage pregnancy, homeless millions, and small cities that look as though they've just been through the plague." --Eliot Weinberger

Listening to: Revolver.

It's the luck of a lifetime if once you are shown the whole
breadth and depth of your fear. For any act of will merely
suppresses it. It goes automatic and the will is an imposture.
When you become aware of, instead of symbolifying, your
fear, what is real in your character remains, and the rest
falls away, leaving very little perhaps--a child of six, or
three (but in any case it seems negligible next to the
infinite--)...and you can then start to build, not a tower
toward heaven, but a house to live in. To realize you are
finite and perishable, comes not from having said it a
thousand times, but from having been--briefly--perished
and infinite... The zero that begins a life of measure.

"It has been said that Pater composed his best sentences,
without any relation to the context, and then inserted them
where they would be most effective." --Thomas Wright,
Life of Pater (1907)

"And now that a half million people have read me, what
does it mean? About two dozen people are all I really
count as understanding admirers. It was worth winning
them perhaps. Perhaps." --Henry Miller to Lawrence Durrell

"He [Porphyry] firmly believed in oracles, but took the
Pythagorean view that the true gods required only the
sacrifice of the heart, and that the demons alone longed
for the smoke of blood." --Raby, op cit

H'm! My poem in 100 Poets... is being translated into Croatian.
Cool!

Got my CD back from Ache Records. They said it was the "most interesting
demo we've ever received", "but"... At least they did send it back. The
last label i tried, didn't even do that.

"...to fishle the ladwigs out of his lugwags, like a skittering kitty
skattering hayels..." Happy Bloomsday!

"Few people, for instance, realize that a time may easily
come when we shall see the great outburst of science in
the nineteenth century as something quite as splendid, brief,
unique, and ultimately abandoned, as the outburst of Art
at the Renascence." --G K Chesterton, Dickens

"If Hart Crane could have become a communist, he'd
be alive today. He would probably be to North America
what Neruda is to South." --Bill Knott (in the 60's)

"O Time, thou hast played strange tricks with us! and we
bless the stars that made us a novelist, and permit us now
to retaliate." --E Bulwer Lytton, Paul Clifford

In the salvation racket, politics is despair of psychology,
and psychology is despair of politics. To unite these perhaps
it is necessary to eschew salvation...

A wrong reason: doing this or that, just in case it might
have results. (I don't gamble my money, how much less
should i gamble my time.) Or--so as to avoid the feeling of
having missed my chance. (Most of these are named
"prize"--to win me over.) For example--first i reason out that
art careers have no meaning today. Then i go ahead and plan
shows: just in case i can have an art career. I call it an "experi-
ment" but is it not an experiment in hypocrisy...?

"Unfortunately Plautus did what was natural and easy, and he
had no successors. Ennius did what was unnatural and hard,
and he set a fashion from which poetry did not fully recover
until twelve centuries had passed." --F A Wright, Love Poems of Johannes Secundus

"He [Gottschalk] is a significant witness to the history of the
Latin lyric, for his example proves that whenever the personal
conditions were present which were propitious to the expression
of intimate feeling there was a possibility of lyrical poetry. In
this sense the lyric has no continuous history." --F J E Raby,
A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages(1934)

'St Francis of Assisi...founded an Order which quickly began to
participate in murder and massacre almost immediately after it
was formed.' --Simone Weil

It's alright to laugh at Shazia Mirza. (via Metafilter)

One of our last great used bookstores in town is closing down (sob!).
I picked up Mr Weston's Good Wine, a book of poems by Kenneth
Fearing...& a collectible Lyn Lifshin chapbook.

   ”The Barren Grave

Butterflies scattered like Arabian numerals.
The march of printing types like sharp knives.

One day----
Marte standing by seashore sings with crows.

The scenery spreads its hands at the moment.
The pupils of ivory!
The eyes, eyes of crows sitting on the cross.

The smell of smoke flowing from towns,
And the cross road where flags of different colours
Fluttering like the last intention.
----Here I suddenly stopped my steps.

Yes.
The devil is nothing but a handsome dresser.
The graves of Emperor Winter
Enjoys the eternal sleep as an iceberg.
But I am suffering unexpectedly from a habit of drawing out a faded map from my pocket.

I fold a newspaper, the smell of ink.
  -----The landing of a typhoon
   Is at ten o’clock tomorrow morning!

The back-view of an insurance man coming out of the church,
The back feature of a black cat.
On the cross-road in the afternoon
A disabled funeral car is standing like a butterfly.”

--Bong-nê Yi

   ”THE GIRL OF THE SEA

In the black pupils of Zông-og
Float the sorrows of the sea dyed by the chandelier.

She thinks of the night streets of Sidney.
She recollects the leased grounds of foreigner’s in Shanghai.

Putting on a Bohemian hat
I visit the night-streets where Zông-og was produced.

The inheritance of the dark blue sea.
The girl who can not keep her home in one place.

The old sickness of Zông-og
Is not recovered because of her distant heart’s core.

From her skin
One smells the strait.
I wish to live always in the primitive strait.

And putting on a Bohemian hat,
I visit the night street where Zông-og was produced.”

--Byông-hwa Zo

“The destination of my silence I know not.” --Cza-yong Gim

“...And crown with weeds our pride of towers,
    And warm our marble through with sun,
And break our pavements through with flowers...”
      --Alice Meynell

Listening to: Jelly Roll Morton.

HENLEY TRANSLATES VILLON:

"VILLON'S STRAIGHT TIP TO ALL CROSS COVES

Suppose you screeve? or go cheap-jack?
Of fake the broads? or fig a nag?
Or thimble-rig? or knap a yack?
Or pitch a snide? or smash a rag?
Suppose you duff? or nose and lag?
Or get the straight and land your pot?
How do you melt the multy swag?
Boose and the blowens cop the lot.

Fiddle, or fence, or mace, or crack,
Or moskeneer, or flash the drag;
Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack,
Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag;
Bonnet, or tout, or mump and gag,
Rattle the tats, or mark the spot.
You cannot break a single stag:
Boose and the blowens cop the lot.

Suppose you try a different tack,
And on the square you flash your flag?
At penny-a-lining make your whack?
Or with the mummers mug and drag?
For nix, for nix the dibs you bag,
At any graft, no matter what!
Your merry goblins soon stravag.
Boose and the blowens cop the lot.

It's up the spout and Charlie Wag
With wipes and tickers and whatnot.
Until the squeezer nips your scrag,
Boose and the blowens cop the lot."
[These are all real words.]


I sent this to the New Yorker (I think it's supposed to be
some sort of protest):

"Sparrow"

Preying urge infinitely realizes, to retrospective
Gloating transformation unbrokenly hesitates influx,
Floating mystic desolately copulates, of definitive
Praying rage amusedly ruminates box.
A white-breasted nuthatch nests in my
Urethra, and begins to sing.

"I understand what the politician meant who said of the Texas House
of Representatives, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see
their constituents." --Bill Moyers

"I swear, the blogo isn't a sphere. It's a fucking Moebius cube." --Doc Searls

Can be worn ironically or nonironically. (via Prentiss)

"The Czech writer, former dissident and now former president Vaclav Havel
once said to me that there are three kinds of English: "There's the kind of
English that Czechs speak to Spaniards and Italians speak to Russians.
Here, you understand 100 per cent. American English - you get about 50
per cent. Then there's English English, of which you understand nothing."

Oxford cafe English is generally of the first or second categories. It's what is
now called Elf - which, in case you're wondering, is not the language of the
Elves invented by Oxford's own J R R Tolkien, but English as Lingua Franca."
--Timothy Garton Ash (via ALDaily)

In case you weren't paying attention, there are now ten planets in our
solar system. The new one is Quaoar. On the whole,
it's not as interesting as Cruithne.

I come to discover there is a "Lesser False Vampire Bat". I'm still working
on the joke that that is the punch line to.

I happened to be at a new record store & listened to a great newcompilation,
"Euro Lounge". It sounded to me like all sorts of bands, in Italy & France &
North Africa, had been listening to Combustible Edison. --Not to the original
sources so much, i think. And it made me realize all over again, how the most
interesting developments nowadays, are happening not at the "center", but the
"periphery"...

'As I watch the moon
Shining on pain's myriad paths,
I know I am not
Alone involved in Autumn.' --Oe no Chisato (tr Rexroth)

This has always been one of my favorite tankas.
My Lojban version:

   MI GE ZGANA LE
LUNRA GUSNI BE SO'I
   XRANI DARGU GI
JIJNU LE CRITU MORNA
BE GE MI GI NABO MI

--which literally reads: 'I observe the lunar
illuminer of many harming roads, & intuit an
autumn pattern of me & not-me.'

I became dissatisfied with Rexroth's flouting
of the traditional 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern,
so i rewrote it as:

   As i see the moon
Tracing all the manifold
   Highways & footpaths
Of pain, i know i am not
Alone involved in Autumn.

An animated map of Alexander the Great's conquests.

Compulsiveness as a remedy for apathy. Despair as
a remedy for compulsiveness. If you could just watch
you might call it a circus.

Only the makers know that they only make metaphors.

Really, it's too much to expect people to crave growth
who don't even crave good bread.

"His thoughts are so much higher than his state,
That, like a mountain hanging o'er a hut,
They chill and darken it." --Beddoes

I'm so glad i finally have a link for ostranenie [thanx, Ron]. (Although this
is the received form, from poking around in a Russian dictionary
i believe the proper transliteration is otstranenie.) How's
that different from "MAKE IT NEW"--? I think it shifts the emphasis
from novelty of technique to novelty of perception... BTW, what i love
about these Korean translations i've been posting, & also about Ovid
Neal, is the fact that they contain things no ordinary poet in English
would think of leaving. They'd fix it. But as they are, there is what i like
to think of as a final opacity to them now. And this--if it's not too
grandiose--reminds me of why the mystics talk about the Void as if it
were a positive thing, & not an indication of our mortal inability to com-
prehend. It's "darkness visible"--& requires ostranenie even to indicate.

As soon as conversation leaves the immediate context,
and lives of the speakers, it becomes radically falsified,
and as if we no longer talk together, but clash in our mono-
logs that are really directed against the television-drone
in our heads--and all too often, too, this happens even
as we are trying to talk about each other, and ourselves.
Or if one of us has managed to cleave to a system, that
system really exists in order to interpret the chaos of
television, not the lesser disorder of human lives--which
require no such Procrustean orderings (in rooted times
fanaticism has a different cause: attachment) to make
a little bit of sense. I cannot, though, cross out all my
poems that merely reply to noise. It would leave me with
almost nothing. But i can watch myself for this falseness: in
real time.

Practices when the self is opaque, must be different
from when the self is transparent. Improvisation becomes
unreliable; mindfulness, transitory. Then rituals and other
dualisms are useful and necessary. I rely too much on
my self-image of transparency: and so incur the violence of
the invisible while pretending to sight.

“ ‘The general conception of unconscious mental process
was conceivable (in post-Cartesian Europe) around
1700, topical around 1800, and fashionable
around 1870-1880.’ “ --Whyte, The Unconscious
Before Freud, quoted in Koestler, The Act of Creation
(1964)

Intoxication: that slave’s democracy...

Art is the only place where being infinitely distracted can
pass for productivity.

   ”POETS OF NO HOLOCAUST”

  It hurts me to hear them
  they are so fearless
  and so much at home in this world.
  Sad when their plans fall through
  or a toy dies;
  i swear at every poetry reading
  i won’t reach their age without my own blue number.

It is enormous in scope but no enormity (injustice): how?
--Gravity the weakest of all forces. Is a universal relation
but not the sum of all the relations in the universe (their
common denominator, rather). I say: in this world things
do not fall in a straight line, everything is very very slightly
twisted (Coriolis force)--and all we do must include
a compensation. I don’t have to stop the earth from rotating
just to put things where i want them. Only a small compen-
sation is needed...

‘Lying to oneself results from a vital necessity, when one
has not resolved to die.’ --Simone Weil, Notebooks

The world of textures is infinite, but the world of response to
textures is very limited.

Overheard:

"Word: Did you hear t.A.T.u.'s version of "How Soon Is Now?"

Morissey: Yes, it was magnificent. Absolutely. Again, I don't know much about them.

Word: They are teenage Russian lesbians.

Morissey: Well, aren't we all?"

I have one of my car radio buttons on the local Mexican Rock station. I can't
understand much of the words, but i like this alternative universe of post-U2
where Grunge never happened... Here's a guide i found to genres. One of these days i'll do some serious research, but for now i'm just a tourist.


You need an Evil Clown Generator (& no, this has nothing to do with the
Republicans). (via Boingboing)

Cintra Wilson in Salon (all the columns). She's not Dorothy Parker,
but this isn't the Roaring Twenties, either.

A Russian rapper.

...As soon as i utterly accepted this weakness, this aimlessness, as my
permanent condition--it began to change.

I am as incredulous of those who eschew (poetic) technique, as one
who has laboriously fashioned a pistol in prison out of scraps, when
told by another prisoner it is possible to walk through walls.

'Somehow I too must discover the smallest basic element, the cell of
my art, the tangible medium of presentation for everything...
Does the handiwork lie perhaps in the language itself, in a better
recognition of its inner life and will, its development and past?...
Does it lie in some specific study, in the more exact knowledge of
a matter?... Or does it lie in a certain well-inherited and well-increased
culture? ...But with me it is different; toward everything inherited I
have to be hostile... My continually renewed attempts to begin a
definite course of study broke down pitifully; for exterior reasons,
and because of the strange feeling that always surprised me during
it: as if I were having to come back from an inborn knowledge by a
wearisome road that again led to it by many windings.' --letters of
Rilke

"...I don't write anymore
I just sit looking at the wastebasket
with this alert intelligent look on my face." --Bill Knott

"You choose to lose reason before losing face" --Al Stewart

"However, if you are unskilled in the subtle transformative
processes of language, it is best not to write down your ugly thoughts."
--Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady's Man (1978)

I don't want to take anything from you, i just want you to
unclench your fists.

    'A BUTTERFLY AND AN OPEN SPACE

A butterfly, on the last submit
Of the dizzy way of taxing,
Forgetting the direction of dashing,
Looks down the broken pieces of blood-stained body.

On the empty open space without a drop of water
That would moisten a small heart brazed as a machine,
It was only the crystal light of the sea
That screened the eye-sight of the butterfly--

As if by a seashore of vacuum, between the silent graves,
In the season moving with the white tail of a gasping Z airplane--
Driven by the tide of phosphorus surging up like flames,
The white butterfly now silently flutters its weary wings.

On the whitish spot of future,
Does a beautiful territory wait there?
On a marked spot of the bluish runway
Does a flowery hope bloom there?

The old site from which
Already God and miracle
Ascended to Heaven--
The white butterfly toward a last terminal
Tries once again to challenge against its own myth.'

--Gyu-dong Gim, op cit

"Most tangible of all the gods that be,
O Santa Claus..." --the Hoosier Poet

Imagination = "as-if":
   Images = as-if sensations (usually visual)
   Story = as-if meanings (grasped intuitively)
      story connects images,
      images punctuate story.
Hierarchy of Images: Word (static). Moving. Changing. Changing rate of
   movement. (&c)
Hierarchy of Stories: Gesture (anecdote). Linear plot with protagonist
   (picaresque). Growth of a character (Bildungsroman).
   Simultaneous changing of several characters (19c "novel").
   Stream of consciousness. "History".
(Other kinds of imagination:
   emotional: as-if feeling this (empathy)
   intellectual: as-if true (speculation)
Their hierarchies...from a mood to a lifetime; from a statement to a system.

"Feeling requires an education through faith..." --James Hillman

"Napoleon...created Europe, which is neither a political or a geographical
entity. Europe--and this is why England has never thought of herself as
a part of Europe--is simply the area dominated by the ideals of French
literature." --Auden, intro to The Romantic Poets anth.

Sex with a stranger: watching a movie in a foreign language. Even if you
catch the drift, from moment to moment it makes no sense.

'The very worst fact is that clichés will fill up every empty spot in a role,
which is not already solid with living feeling.' --Constantin Stanislavski,
An Actor Prepares (1936; tr E R Hapgood)

Lost in the woods at a state park, i have had the experience of glimpsing
(as an ambiguous clearing) the right path, across perhaps a stream ravine...
& my relation to a sense of purpose now is, as one who has never known
what a clear trail is, & more & more is given those glimpses (--such
that even my art can seem at times an impediment, or part of my blind
turnings). But certainly no "path" i have heard of, resembles this one, either.

Listening to: early Joan Baez on Vanguard, the original vinyl.

Sherman Alexie on Salon.com:

"We need a tough-ass Democrat coming out on national security. In fact, the Republicans haven't been very tough on domestic security; they've been cutting budgets. I've been writing imaginary campaign ads about the failure of this administration to protect us. Here are two:

FADE IN ON:

A middle-aged homeless man standing at a freeway on-ramp. He holds a sign that reads: "Vietnam War Veteran, Please Help Me!"

(another)

VOICE-OVER: In 2003, George W. Bush cut the budget for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs by nearly $30 billion over the next 10 years.

Cut to a younger homeless man standing outside a supermarket. He holds a sign: "Desert Storm Veteran: Will Work for Food."

VOICE-OVER: In 2003, George W. Bush ordered the Veterans Administration to stop providing information about veterans' healthcare benefits on its Web site.

Cut to a video of a husband and wife working on their home computer. As they navigate the V.A. site, they are led through a maze of indecipherable info.

She: But, Henry, you served in Korea. They promised to take care of you.

He: I just don't understand what they're trying to say to me.

Close on the computer screen as Henry pulls down the menu and shuts off the computer. It goes black.

Then dissolve up to a shot of George W. Bush jogging with his Secret Service agents. Bush looks fit and handsome.

VOICE-OVER: In November 2004, please remember that the war doesn't end when our soldiers come home.

FADE TO BLACK

FADE IN ON:

A title card that asks the question: "Do You Feel Safe?"

Cut to news video of George W. Bush pledging to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive."

Slam cut to wanted poster of Osama with caption: "Whereabouts Unknown."

Cut to news video of George W. Bush pledging to get Saddam Hussein "dead or alive."

Slam cut to wanted poster of Saddam with caption: "Whereabouts Unknown."

Cut to news video of George W. Bush promising to protect the security of the American people.

Slam cut montage of sports arenas, national monuments, dams and nuclear power plants as we repeatedly hear in voice-over George W.'s broken promises to find Osama and Saddam, and his pledge to protect the U.S. They all blend together in a cacophony of noise and image and bright lights.

Cut to the title card that reads: "Do You Feel Safe?"

Cut to a news video montage of the many times that Bush has told us that the U.S. hasn't found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but that we're going to find them very soon, we promise, very soon, we promise, very soon, we promise. Very soon.

FADE TO BLACK "

A virtual shrine to Freyja. (via Metafilter)

Interesting discussion on Josh Corey's blog about the poetics of "aperture"
& the poetics of "closure". (Although my first thought is, you can't write a poem without both.) I'll just
call "closure" the Mullah stance, & "aperture" the Dervish; & observe that (since i am not a dualist) as a
dervish you can spin clockwise or counterclockwise--. (The rest of the allegory is up to you.)

Another star that figures in my personal mythology is Lalande 21185.
I found it mentioned in a book i read as a kid, as possibly having planets; immediately
i wrote a story set on one of those imaginary planets. It still slips into my poetry from
time to time, mainly as a way of referencing previous works in which i've used it. I
always see the planet as cloud-enveloped, foggy & misty, something like the old
idea of Venus...but populated by giant snails.

Lebensraum - the joy with which one Texan passes
another. (There's no such thing as impermissible L. Even if
you have to run up on the shoulder, you're still entitled
to your L. Dubya can't be said to have gained Victory, but no
one can take from him his L.)

Availibilism as the contrary of consumer semiotics. I didn't buy
these shoes because they were black & white checked. I
bought them because they were the only fit in my price
range at the DAV.

Eternnesse - "Global Warming" & its consequences. This
should be as indispensible to all near-future scifi as rocket ships
& ray guns. That incredible sunken Manhattan that begins "A.I."
(forget the crappy ending--): it will happen. Fasten your
seatbelts. There's nothing we can do about it now.

Blog is to polder (webpage) as wurley (temporary
shelter) is to wilban (permanent dwelling). People change
their webpages like moving the furniture around in their living
room. Weblogs change like pitching the tent in a different spot
every night.

T S Eliot is the perfect poet emotionally for 18 yr olds, but you have
to be at least 40 to appreciate the weariness of Baudelaire. (Ditto
Dostoevsky & Tolstoy, perhaps, respectively.)

For the weak, force is "power" --or if not force, intransigence.
For the strong, power is: the willingness to learn, to co-operate,
to become involved, to admit vulnerability...but to a significant degree,
these things don't "work" against either force or intransigence. Then
one must resort to superior cleverness. One is not yet strong
enough if unwilling to admit the limits of (even true) power--to admit
that this is not a moral world in which good intentions are acts in
themselves, but a place where guile is often a necessary defense--as
some of the old fairy tales imply (pre-Humanist)... Just as a person
who won't put on a coat & hat in winter is trying to create an impossible
endurance--out of another kind of intransigence. And so is
total truthfulness; wanting to help everyone you meet; caring
about all pain, sickness & injustice in the world (the "world"
doesn't exist--to human measures); & expecting yourself to make the
best use of love, every time. Let me call that the most difficult art,
till i respect at last the subtleties i so much want to rush past the
learning of; let me find in these stupid miscommunications a reason
for my studying, ever more deeply, the ways of the human heart--that
will never be probed with a flashlight.

'You think i'm a control-freak,' i wanted to say, 'but my life-work's a
study of the uses & conditions for self-surrender.' --Isn't that, though,
much the same thing?

It might help to put things in perspective to realize that, although
the amount of work done by a capable group is many times greater
than the work of its isolate members, that too is insufficient
for the need of this age. So the choice comes down to: do what
you can by yourself & with a few others, or waste your time (completely)
trying to assemble a group suitable for your personal aims...

I have explanations for everything & solutions for nothing.

Overcast sky, no clouds--then the clouds move & i have stars
again: as if that sight alone were a moral imperative. To grow
tall enough to reach them? But no, i'm more like those lungfish whose
gills had become pretty useless...moved by a lack, more than a vision.
So why talk about "change" to another lungfish? --Hypochondria!

Mallarmé: Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx

Her chaste nails so highly dedicating their onyx,
  Anguish, this midnight torchbearer, saves
  many an evening's reverie burned with the phoenix
  otherwise bound for no crematory vase.
On the sideboards, in the empty parlor: ptyxless,
  gewgaw-banned resounding banality
  for the Boss is gone to dip tears from the Styx,
  only that--and Nothing will thus be honored...
Near the northerly vacant casement, gilt
  convulses as per perhaps the setting
  from unicorns bucking fire against an elf;
  she, late nude of the mirror, however,
  into the vacuum by those edges held
  abides among twinklings presently the Seven.

Listening to: Pizzicato Five.

There's times when i'm the worst instrument for my
curiosity.

    "Alphabet City"

What do the spiders say,
Bela of the consummate composure?
A SHOWER WILL REMOVE MUCH,
BUT PART OF YOUR DEEDS

CLINGS FOREVER;
IS DEEPER THAN SKIN;
WALKS AHEAD OF YOU
WITH A SWARTHY LAMP.

IT'S BEST
TO ALLOW FOR CORIOLIS
IF YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE
COMMAND OF DISTANCE.

1987

Thought--is the permanence of archetypal images similar
to the logical evolution through arbitrary rules of the chess
openings? --Such that some pretty bizarre positions get accepted
as standard, because they once were played in a game & turned
out to be the best moves for both sides?

   "The Milestone by the Rabbit-Burrow (on Yell'ham Hill)

In my loamy nook
As I dig my hole
I observe men look
At a stone, and sigh
As they pass it by
To some far goal.

Something it says
To their glancing eyes
That must distress
The frail and lame,
And the strong of frame
Gladden or surprise.

Do signs on its face
Declare how far
Feet have to trace
Before they gain
Some blest champaign
Where no gins are?"

--Hardy

I go through my days with this abstract distress, yet no less
palpable for being based on events far from my direct
experience. It is like, i say, a child in a small town who finds
out his dad is a serial killer, --& his father is the chief of
police. No, rather, it's like i was ten years a paraplegic, only
to discover fire ants have built a nest in my left foot...

Don't you just love those heist movies where they spend $10 million in
high-tech weaponry in order to rip off $1 million in diamonds or what-
ever? Isn't that just like the US military...? Or a homeowner who, in
order to debug the house, sets off a bug bomb that coats every
surface with poison that they'll spend the next year absorbing through
their skin with every thing they touch?

Listening to: Natacha Atlas.

   Cast iron owls, heads turned;
unintell'gibility
   of their double gaze.
Earth & Moon as seen from Mars:
one peaceful, one living seems.

Another soldier-blogger in Iraq. (via Metafilter)

Song of Innocence, Song of Experience. How much sadder & more profound
is the late version of Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow" on her live at
Carnegie Hall record; & i feel almost the same about Stevie Nicks's "Rhiannon"
as sung at the televised reunion concert awhile back. Perhaps with the ageing
of the Baby Boomers, music will lose its fixation on the highschool age bracket...

I may have reference to this again in future blog-entries, but for now i will just
state without argument my doctrine of moments of choosing which is,
humans don't have free will except at long intervals & for brief moments, & they
mostly let them go by; but for that time, it is possible to make a more free or
a less free choice, with ramifying consequences thereafter. Thus, it is wisdom
to develop sensitivity toward such moments, & to learn what to do with them
when they are here. My favorite picture of this is a haiku by Gary Snyder:

  "After weeks of watching the roof leak
      I fixed it tonight
  by moving a single board"

[Why did it take weeks? Answer that, & you will be
on the way to making the Next Big Breakthrough...]

"Bush's attempt to revive the Age of Empire would be as comical
as Don Quixote's effort to revive the Age of Chivalry, were he
not so much more heavily armed than the don."

Listening to: Coleman Hawkins.

   'A STRANGE SIGHT

The sea-bream, died frozen in a frigirator,
While waiting the sensual night-feast,
Now perspires.

The record whirling round at the banquet,
Being impatient of ennui
Does shriek.

The white bone,
Looking at Mr. Rat,
Numbles incantation.'

--Yun-su Ham, op cit

    "Counterfeit

The wall of faces reverie
When seen quells guilted mind--
From fathers angered vision
To dilate and minus

The eternal bird fathoms
And folds its brown gauze
With talons from its own--
Discovered...

Intended--but from self destroyed
The fatal error combines
And as condition creates
Effulgences

The aqua vein bones in marble
Whose arcane presence boasts
Beauty--the armless dancer
Unable to hoop or swoon
To lulling chirp
Finds break
Flees to cold place
Both less than cave to crook
Telling mimer as ultimate--
Speaking salvific as caused"

--Ovid Neal III, op cit

"However strongly one may be disinclined to do so, I think one
must accept the disturbing and disconcerting fact that it is
possible to write very great poetry about illusions." --J B Leishman,
introduction to Rilke's Later Poems

“Reading Milton is like dining off gold plate in a company of
kings; very splendid; very ceremonious, and not a little appalling.”
--Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp (1863)

“The gods disappeared and in their place were left the rituals.
...The orthodox Hindu does not believe in gods, the unorthodox
believe in them.” --Vivekananda

Baudelaire: Au lecteur

Delusion, indulgence, greed and pettiness
Engross our minds and mortify our bodies,
And we keep overfed our fond pet pity
As winos host their vermin--with their own flesh.

Our faults are fierce, our resolutions craven:
We pray and bray and play we're gonna change
All the jolly way to the old sty-haven
As if the wish would wash away our stains.

On our daydreams' pillow squats Nick Trismegist
Who continually lulls a blurry rapt attention...
And the ore of our potential for intention
Is all dissolved by that cool alchemist.

He's the mover in our puppetdom!
Our choicest toys are those by which we're trapped;
Each day towards the Pit we take a step
Smiling still, through vapors dark and noisome.

Just like a congressman who sucks and smacks
A hooker's misappropriated nipples,
We snatch in passing some illegal thrills
Like dumpster oranges we must squeeze to the max.

Jammed, like a city of maggots at rush hour,
A million mad impulses honk in our brains;
From everything we touch, inhale, or consume,
Ineffable cancer seeps, in spite of our powers.

If switchblade, bomb, gun, Tylenol or rape
Has copped no Nielsen share of our obsessions
It's that, inside our cage of cheap possessions,
As yet we haven't wanted to escape.

With these familiar jackals, panthers, fleas,
Vultures, scorpions, cobras and baboons
All yowling, howling, growling, around the room
Where our waste loves remain, that's never cleaned,

One of them's most dirty, dour and cruel!
Though he doesn't scream too much, nor flails about,
He'd turn the earth into a parking lot
Or just as casually call the missiles kill.

--BOREDOM. Through the tears of unblinking eyes
He looks out for his suicide, and chain-smokes.
You recognize this connoisseur of jokes,
Eh? Like me, you'll swallow no more lies...?

8 15 77/5 31 83 (publ in Bwana Art #7)