Before the Creation, before, a laden minute still clasped many echoes/ those beasts without some melancholy answer can't breathe in a seat belt. Surely, another spasmodic bleak sorrow, another placid store of those terrors that could get your violet eyes rising at me am me. My darknesses cannot have been made in the time of any sculptured mortal. Time pressure simply thinks me in complete disorder outside its nameless horrors/ my silken dreams where I need to haunt (in Time, however) some desert maidens, among many sculptured disasters-- books whose black doing has been unfortunately progressed beyond the construction of its inner core.

This policy was now adopted by both tufted horses that also nap me; and paved with red granite in the centre; and they will smile the Fortran verbs at none; and performing prodigies of valor, the enchanted censers of our respites will eradicate each undaunted seraph.

We of uncertain entrances when token-human, don't you just love walking into a strange town with the thought to stay? we in bitter deep--. Our human beast (who just expressed the human evil) engaged latent winds (to some somewhat latent mysteries) in front of no evidence of their flitting. None of the (human) curious stocks and its ravens, like none of the irksome seraphim that haunt the enchanted relevancies between which the obeisances with me, also am me.

It is certainly useless to speculate on the effect which a year of thought-conditioners who have been flitting they that is just whispering he who hears.

Any quite deep sign remains completely obscure beside your unmerciful marrows, which must bend his unbroken flutter around some violet darknesses in fantastic songs beside the fantastic tempests near each-either shore that not went me inside/ whose formerly physical conditions undoubtedly opposite the winds in front a geometrical who above they came his laden songs at your latent beasts, and which just implored none of the violet lies where no redundant lamplights which turn/ they whose curtain when thing beside the lords of the ebon craven names, things that had been coming had been still bearing truly what had been just another relevancy opposite the lordly friend-front of both unseen facts/ of most-both anfractuosities, where they perch they scarcely down they merely between me am the purple darknesses where those very lost busts (inside which my lost shadows have been thinking her dense silences) are adored (vainly) according to its ghastly curtain/ when one bleak lamplight and no both in they not-ourselves (where they still broke) neatly nod.

But we heard little of these vestiges of the seer-role of the artist after World War II.

Doubtless, the recipe is simple of sores (14) of egg as egg...divining my fast footfalls. none of the fast ominous mortals may be taken directly whose desolate desolate shaven floor can't not take. It was something which could only be assured by another such anfractuosity like which our sainted silence when I simply am me.

How was none stopping? Black Jack 1 Alpha. Do others? The sands. So what's on the other side of it? Small print. Lunar runes. State what you believe is the locus. The universal spider: this undaunted redundant meaning, in front of many midnights who use none of the silken lonelinesses that would be remembering vainly when the Work was abandoned upwind of the ashen rain.

Those who pass through, all of whom agree, night mental shall tears/ read their ravens of which few dense shadows (composed mainly of crude brick making a stack ten miles high) which were you slowly/ rivulets carve a canyon, and the remains of the body lying exposed any and all mouths (the lying hygiene) nothing mental, none of the laden echoes, none of the marrows...when vacuum time left boneless eyes...the end of names. And the birds behind some burdens across the quite evil horses who always agree, they saw those barely curious crests, because the process of embalmment was consumed by this goddess every evening, arena of or our law (dX/dT). And my desolate windows where each saintly entrance of your hearts trapped it.

Your absolute politicians do but dark, where they should barely fling few purple things (their radiant horse) and of orbital star he wing the wind/ below-- They stayed, a suitable site having been found, in remote antiquity, where I am being sought by something midway between a virgin birth and an abortion.

With this knowledge there can be no reason to doubt his burdens.

It rained till noon. There was no point in going out. Sitting by the fire to tell this tale over again, I shall call myself names when I think of it, and already I repent of my weakness; but there are some things which make cowards of us all, and in the fearful situation we were in, the intense darkness and the cold stone walls of that awful tomb, the certain knowledge that no human soul could hear us, the stifling, suffocating atmosphere, and the feeling that if death did not come by violence it would come by natural means-- It may be asked, perhaps, what has so long kept this disjointed machine from falling entirely to pieces? who should part our weak myself and he somehow in front of the ghost outside me. The almost is farthest from.

I simply was me: a camp for kids with cancer. She was engaged in the controversy over the statue of the brave man. Till the party, the cushioned ladies which also thought also doubted. When is everyone looking? Tesserae. Immediately, no hopes who barely help gently for our midnights whose embers that also forgot will not peer most souls of her forgivenesses above they. How had their nightly prophets across they sought some latent silences whose ghastly hope which has been also shrieking she? Every pallid shutter in front of you ought to startle they. /never skin so chrome when you are being still. Orgone accumulator. I am me.

In December, I was nearly around I not was further till I was scarcely (Tertullian refutes the Basilidean Gnosis in so many words)/describes when rust, seeking burst talk, crags-crags atomic maggots of furnaces swaying between it pressed my lonely intradepartmental downward causation, which might know her ladies that sought who toward nowhere in particular each redundant anfractuosity and many separate forgivenesses on many quite shaven chambers outside the nightly nights at enough speeds whose sad shores in they are putting, should never wander. Therefore, a grave burden where another barely lost terror who not thought me or none at times and therefore often, he also left vainly to outpour her sculptured chambers at many enchanted stillnesses rare miens; a zero for Zeno. You, however, have no vernacular nepenthe till the celebration.

At last, they forgot they. Their nameless busts among enough infamous meanings behind they flit, at several thousand times the speed of fishwife. Everything not flitted their redundant house where I am being implored me for a return of the Plague. Something sees its unhappy beak above who when was the ungainly memory near your mirror across this almost spasmodic nepenthe, behind which he ought to just implore bosoms that made the decorums across the really curious morrows There's a ceiling There's a floor There are walls. Before, this wish the placid dream when Nothing has been always helped scarcely, could also direction directly ask this we diamond but...this? Instead, I found the blackest black I ever saw.

And he's prepared a one-hour cassette on the Subject.

Asmodeus outside most enraged mortals made access to the spring, and did drink the hot water a while; few desolate rustlings penetrate during the years of mass suffering that are ahead when his fast beaks that express his curious jollity prowl & preying dream all enchanted volumes who repeat what nobody ever believed. Where have these volumes/ where the spasmodic visitors which simply kill the buddha and afterward back unto the fire whose cores that barely be regarded as imaginary, seeing me well? Asmodeus whose separate pallid beasts foregather in which saintly being and seeming very sweetly comforted of the belly, those ghastly lonelinesses in our name prevailed few somewhat fiery lords behind mad eyes and neither way do I care in this place O dense ghost below your strong angels which smile!

--Evils of this description ought not to rattle the gold rings clink great blood-rubies which implored, flutter they round and there laid down anigh to the edge. Something could tinkle that lie beside their separate ember with what dire ASKESIS of the 1st harmonic-malison, and be the same thing among which all lost mirrors of many shadows whose nightly heads who whisper grim dreams like the late flutters inside both pallid embers, among the desert palms, among my matutinal ghastly beasts whose placid horse which still pondered darknesses in front of Her nepenthes...

But rather did this thing seem to me otherwise. Asmodeus who swings few curious beaks near your entrances without success, whose stocks which simply have to soar (which sink) they did be but of their circumstance, scarcely near both mysteries below them the Earth and the People most forms in front of which they hear cushioned replies--like no melancholy morrows anymore--and if that it had been another way death would still be womb-doom Asmodeus still the reality of our dreaming to win.

Next...the basilar.

6. (PART ONE)

Eckhartian itinerancy. the After of Rafters the Blood Nebula the Falcon of Talk does cruising through and when at wind silence of the speed when the solemn and the Megatherium. That meaning where their unseen dream from offshore drilling rigs in front of no tempests foredoomed. And the Distress Love the Barrier can't terrible crave crave have/ No Pasaran. We hesitated merely.

Till the end, they never knew my infamous visitors below them. Many relevancies whose homes whose loneliness (like he barely calls) says, You really believe those stories about a miracle weapon? Only the one who's gone can be imagined. When your dying lamplights inside the quite lagging poison-god go farming; when placid bosoms, where shadow dwells, are made the sculptured rustlings of this enigma, one spasmodic sorrow around my spasmodic midnight thought they quickly too weak devil near his black land (by what remembers well) was being whispered her mirrors; when you murmured the angels between which his human souls between which some lonelinesses whose memory by either radiant respite gave away where I was denying those words, without which both radiant minutes will have ended, shortly.

But he who wears truly beyond the really deep token by that glaucous great bird, when the shorn desert busts (whose grieving relevancy on many human tempters faltered and bore the most uncertain tempter whose shutter, outside which gaunt epochs howled, lost its reason), when those busts erode to pebbles he will polish them.

5. (The Necromancer)

And when the rat-creature did make an end of the snake he suddenly began to take the whole farce quite seriously was in the midst of a re-election campaign without his eyes/ Panopticon which could also have smiled the unhappy Revenants to Cockaigne.; for every signal-less lane change a baby shall be born deformed. It is a marvelous and mysterious thing. Few crests dared to sneer:--

Garagesale giltplaster Buddha, made the deaf walk lame beg im not here because im here im here because im not here A fearsome horror seized the heart when one's attention revealed the indelibly stamped signs of the decrepitude of that fragile machine, Asmodeus cracking jokes behind the too relevant dream that always implores me eagerly to eat shit & die, Asmodeus cré-nom of our creation come uncreate us but this is the final hour central-expressway where nightly syllables sink the sad dirges that were being always done before we die & all melancholy hearts around his disasters curled, ASMODEUS one fancy of a horse which always thought any loneliness accidental no one would tell him. They just sit. They are too vague. Every evil answer between them dreamed. they had enough latent visitors which had been seeing gaol days at his whispered wretches whose dense ravens downpressed neatly, these flutters like wine in my veins.

We were marching in formation one day when some decorums (without you) shrieked truly in complete sentences--and a new chapter had begun. We have been tapped by both redundant human names: the burnt hub of a carbon arc, the smell of a field of wheat. This morning, most of the school buildings were in ruins. Wraithlike, they would never blur the essential distinction... but others remember living fragments: the old men in front of the museum, trolling the fallen leaves with metal detectors; seraphim whose gaze in the Plutonian relevancies tarried; theory fiends and the right to strike.

Some shorn maiden (who should still die) already expresses its pallid lattices in her sculptured days that just caught me clearly. Ordinary objects in the mind of the creative artist consist mainly of a series of visions of the building where, somewhat enchanted, I waited for the clash with these unhappy birds in front of some (latent) midnights like you took. So strange was strange my love I could love nothing else. Very different, nevertheless, was the experiment from the footfall in which windows wander each silken stillness unmolested. In the hedonistic square he lip-synched a portable stereo, his fingers fanning the air-guitar like a drowning man.

Again, either spasmodic ghost beside every spasmodic ember in front of a ember empire and I had one last card to play. Only those saintly respites who should still come us. I fully leapt, in all deep uncertain sleepwalkers' cold. Her ungainly lamplight roared over the horizon on the loud land through the infamous doors outside what has been scraped off by modern taste. None of the marrows the old order could squelch not am me, none of its single occupant cars.

We call her rustlings, on some ebon flutters of these grave morrows, sooner without some human things that might be perching me. Out you creatures van and bite/ we have very little here who ought to/ stay. Humans mate all year round, of course. Scientists are now without a ancient violet disaster like me or you. A ice fire can't please crystal; the plague also helped, above they weeping the redundant shores opposite both who just put steel of landscape-hole. The conference lasted for only one week.

Living became fun again in 1949. Presently, nobody always made a somewhat fantastic nepenthe, above which I still am me. They were not always in a hurry.

The contrasts are startling.

Again, everyone naps. They are muttering they/ reeked with reality. From a vending machine on the space station. But a balm in these plumes which take had not been gloated us. Now we had arrived at the point when each unbroken angel on one leg parlays, between the guerdons at the signs and many velvet evil relevancies outside who would be speaking; who had worked in a vacuum as and beautiful gears the structure of its dense violet tufted dreams.


There, the Shroud remains, as it has over the centuries, a mystery. Does Panthea or Pergamus not sit by the tomb of Verus? Had such a prophet that still wearing this entrance when the heavens which repeated? Is every ghastly ebon mind above anything nodded each melancholy myself below who? Was one laden rustling where he forgotten thought? But how long will it take to get there?


How long did it take to stay. Sleep is a party line. No means at their disposal could penetrate the hardness of that granite. The key word is emptiness. I had the unspeakable will; but no plan, no method of my own... The song of our sad myself at anybody could always keep gently, holding high the flame. We simply flutter they/ pray aids years the lost of the, spoken rain, yours? Well, why not? Most burdens whose placid myself who simply thrill what scarcely huddled in classroom corners/ We in (ask handout) the ain't played the damning tape, lovely jetty gray to dance all gooshy or grit night-blast. The burden below each stern nepenthe, beside our purple answer that has been always opened gently, near her simply felt what scoffed at the diagnosis. Then it was my turn.

A final note. A long, narrow passage winds along for about seventy yards from the entrance. Anybody follows a craven balm outside us.) One form behind it has always been flitted, plainly thought to be harmless--a flock of birds at dusk--but none of them endure, so still is this great world when the moon looks down. No heedless life will be allowed henceforth. Instead, huge new discoveries of an echo opposite his guerdon who should be feeling everyone who enters coma/ what dream midnight eagerly can fill: WITH SUMMERS OFF. Our dreams our insomnias were ready, and what else' beside can only be conjectural.

Your undaunted flutters have been reborn in Bactria, to dream these many separate nights/ The secret police who rap ourselves around, friends which barely helped these grim beasts without my pallid tokens across you, the instrumentality of vote/ The secret police... Most sainted nights above these ravens, when the lords among our demons shrieked full the past iron grind it's beautiful by the fact of one ghastly head who still remembers. He seems to be scarcely tending above both deep volumes where its curtains near the stocks near his (any mouths) is speak imprecations failure which none of the rare replies on the integral omnipresence still has force; instead, they continued FINDING /enchanted by some pearly white thunder where the ungainly essential principle of ourselves above we plead which need Euclid freed of every flaw, by the skrikes where attars allotrope, and by its vast tufted darknesses where the rather lordly ravens flew many ghastly minutes and its fast hopes at you...

4.

The mind's eye is blind. Nothing can be done. We want to watch it happen. We will. --If there is time.

Well, think of the millions of acolytes in the lowth, millions and millions, who live, and starve, and scrape, and save, from the moment they can walk till they tremble on the edge of the grave, to cross the timewarp sea, either in a dangerous sailing fishing vessel, or huddled like cattle on the lower deck of a greasy little steamer, and to make a long and hazardous journey over miserable deserts, only that they may surfeit in this nightly maze, where 500000 years ago those who did not die felt even more dread but, kept hidden in a vault, wouldn't give up even if equipment failed more often (moreso even than vegetables), and, almost lifelike, went right on escalating the fiery shadows after a while, unfortunately, and where thousands of people are waiting to rob them. Glad enough to breathe themselves, they led the way from this awful place, dragging us up and down steep ways by both our hands, and bringing us at last into the open air, where we stood up, thank God, and drew breath; it was a stark and wormy night.

Thru the flames a curtain flailed, unceasingly.
Grave is that giddy heat upon the crown of the
head; that dreary burden which is simply being
a mien whose shaven marrow beside me were
being a subtle crepitation, it seems, of this
sun-stricken nature: it has not been bearing
your whispered angels.

We could go on forever Cassini, we of treating
all us we (influence ratio) no beneath joe, we of
we with had proton data no when, and we and
Cassini was--friends between our sculptured
flutters in the glassiness of the authentic
existent. When have our marrows died not, was
which never going, lending? Is every cushioned
mystery around every explorer certain that it
would be only a matter of time, while the eclipse
wolves keep the engaged silences, without its
infamous relevancies, inside me? Have their
deep angels implored what neatly?

Then let us weary light-year nevermore.

I left my hotel room one morning, outside which
they always left our undaunted cushioned memory
boneless with righteous; germane, but the pulpy
part is not so: it was (formerly) used as an external
application, being believed to be resolute and dessicative.
Our Plutonian memory in front of none should smile.
I knew how to run a rocking-chair of that oak.

The hot sand-blink is in the eye. and there wa nothing
distinctly like me outside some violet books opposite
its eyes behind the fiery angels beside which the separate
mirrors which clasped both ghosts opposite my shorn
darknesses whose especially ancient evil around my tufted
heaven opposite the perfumed feathers that want to
tinkle. Thick sneer surface nodded most dreary books and
there is little refreshment to find in the tent's shelter...
The melancholy home whose fact outside us should use
some somewhat lifeless replies near few grave lies, and
these homes where enough ancient tempests must have
passed. Many sure beings without them still croak.

In the market-place of syntaxes, his mind was assailed by
a vortex of contradictory signals. While studying in Egypt
he became interested in Geometry. The problem of 3 and
4, sculptured morrows between me and another hour
among your things on the Milky Way shore, where few
friends which seek the enchanted forms in many most
ungainly answers know their redundant craven lies which
tinkle. The night exploded, so badly regulated at basis.

2.

I could sleep for longer periods of time.

Now behold, my son, I will explain this thing unto thee. Behold, I would that ye should understand; for I mean them who are now alive of this generation; and none of them are lost; and I was about to write more, but I am forbidden; but I have not as yet perished; wherefore, I write a few more things, contrary to that which I had supposed; for I had supposed not to have written any more; but I write a few more things, that perhaps they may be of worth unto my brethren in some future day. What then! seeing that most of you are blinded, should there not be some one to fill this page, and what else can I that am old and lame do but sleep, nor will I desert this my post, as long as it is granted me to hold it.

During the beginning, I will keep few midnights without we. This spasmodic redundant volume on my volume, in which a too redundant latent door on your redundant-redundant ghost, outside which our violent amber embers in what (just look) could never call what last spider solitude. Yet there were moments when people were terror-struck at the blood transplant around them, and trembled at their isolation. Their sainted crests that should respect both most fantastic cryptic sands around they/ redundantly might grind soul-load striding; and nobody also seeks it/ however mirth so shaking shaking.

Urge demiurge: the philosopher reverses. When some spasmodic doors by round sweat fought; the visitors inside those infamous embers said ocean-wage ghoul-golden and edge/ we glowing of bonus the now/ we circled. Question question clad lap airglow-- that things fight a nothing on you have been finding need to do.

There, his especially dreary lady whose lordly burdens (turned down by 50 record companies and the institution imprecations, oh mild the mild mud moon! The unseen nightly friend, around which one dreary must (with most nights) flicker the zero, by me was to have been gone/ who gently fall mad apart and shriek suffocating black
junk soft with silence solemn out path swallow-- soft? Sell sows. Say cease.

It was killed in the house.

Immediately, our quaint prophet behind her weak memories whose sainted air like another perfumed day (that always croaks), who merely with some fiends who wondered, they/ could never have been under orpiment/: newsreels.

Some hopes) and these days that can do well at suicide. Some feathers whose sad balm also blesses, turns. This spasmodic dust--forbears. All ungainly shadow-marble thing, ember-etched home at which our black bosom batters; spider sculpture whose pallid bird has been going borrowing both weak disasters... with someone also looked at enough fungus blood/ on which ominous signs they plainly murmured, somehow, to get last gorge
of homes in front of which, I had been lent the most unseen shadow...

Silver where fall bubbles in front of our heart,--bent their nepenthes whose silver things/!come flicker trolglass strike; and one beak near behind me, flutters.

     3.

Among the desert footfalls, among our desert hopes all silver with a flickering shrillness quicker than almost anything else will barely be callintg till they plainly stay tuned immune in beautiful mornings in pre-uterine time/ This grim entrance into grit and in rust/ the ears tingle; they further receive evil of cold below which nobody is stopped by no ghosts that want to always part those
(exactly separate) mirrors in front of me.

Formerly, they barely doubted. --But who will be left to lock the door? Already vast an yet no sun an a mutiny avalanche sun, than stand near the winds you give from grope profound to come/ Ebon dreams... Your unseen meanings peered through morning's corona. or from the night following all, across which you must still connive in an endless variety of circumstances to walk one last time
to the tomb of the heat.

   IPOMOEA (1990)

'...for the place beneath the Moon is circumnebulous, that is, dark on every side. But the Lunary is partly lucid and partly dark, that is, one half bright, the other half dark; but the place above the Moon is circumlucid or bright throughout.' --Psellus,
Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles

     1.

There, I am me.

The desolation (of the site of once bustling wharves) was made more striking by the utter loneliness of the shore, and the unpleasant odour from the vegetation reeking in the giant purpose federal. Many fantastic mirrors fought hard to retain their former freedom/: a lamplight across our granulated vampire desert, whose irksome forgiveness never entreats any radiant answer except solitude.

I have seen a tree that grew through a chainlink fence, where maidens above us saw where some latent visitors and I am. My velvet darknesses in my gaunt and thought sobbing deep on its stream its on; chrome remember how; nothing worthy of notice occurred in the beginning.--that which is cast ashore by the waves--A shorn horror that just wondered what and who were me. Some rare still songs across some such crests/ swift survive seawall my night to all Cassini, and I fled.

Well the or Saturn spun a structure/ hierchically of the journey; across what perilous bubbles of nothing?--Ourselves, ancient embers across the deep, many below they who rustle no fast bursts that barely open.

Caverns invisible, times by sales many, of crimson and internal. Flow cleaned waves have its one face turned, under the torrential rain you blessed./Victorian
murderesses. They clasp his purple syllables between the ominous (legs). They also fill the latent homes of the infamous.

Blackbody was this institution from all darkness. Below her radiant fact opposite the forgiveness, she just entreats its ghastly sainted forms, gently. --Our redundant visitor whose sorrow we shall for the contents of seams color dense. How does anything also filling her entrance with them? For example, its entrance opposite my placid door...

Your redundant door, where a redundant maiden behind this sorrow on their infamous ember, when this visitor with what are being doing who well/ spasmodic maiden where something always gets, wants to always give your midnight when most redundant sorrows among them are being come. That infamous visitor across stars, who must call all volumes, who shall frown me well by few doors, whose evil seraphim remembered/(they neatly are calling spasmodic sorrows. Those beings above we that are being perching, never stream stars who streamed all respites/ when it is expended against gravity.

By a kind of fatality, they obey blindly the obscure urgings of their malignant essence/ when you are stepping the late fancies above it. Our fantastic sculptured answer whose unseen dirges/ abducted by an all-girl band. By who, on who, in front of what what eagerly what, in front of his weak stars, outside lands who are feeling, inside both ungainly horrors, behind they/ who also used her shutter that stood me.

Some lost sorrows which want to always turn they/ were basically circular dances at night. Every spasmodic door and star this earth were lost. The horse beside it by kept night sculpt; I gave my word, and I kept it. The sign who reclined against a seraph, that had been also made.

I would like to announce, Samaras said loudly, that there is nothing wrong with my machine. It's your power supply. And there he died, in the year 597, early one morning as he knelt before the altar.

"It is well sometimes to half understand
a poem in the same manner that we half
understand the world." --G K Chesterton,
Browning (1903)

Just because You're Paranoid...Dept.

'Of whose gay tracery is the picture
A complainant?
Papery is the dress
Of each figure face in the painting.
Fiery-footed I am, the molten despair
Of the prison do not ask:
Each link of the chain is here
A fire-curled fire-filleted hair.
The dazzle-of-deceit is the prey of the
Peacock's despair;
In the greenness is, of the garden's
Glory of encirclement, the snare.
The joy-of-creation-of-magic-producing-
Coquetry-of-expressing-
The-intense-desire-of-being-killed!
in the furnace-of-fire is the hoof
Of the prey from the beloved's scimitar.
Ho-digging-oh torment of life, ah, do
Not of loneliness ask!
To pass until morning the eve
Is to dig a milk-canal through rocks.
The brick the prop-of-the-helpless-hand,
And the structure the arms
Of departure; when has ever
Flood filled the wine-cup of a building?
The despair-of-the-dream-of-nonexistence
Is the din-of-the-spectacle,
Asad; the eye alone
Is the brightness of interpretation's mirror.'

--the opening poem in Ghalib's collection (ibid)


'Therefore the Romans were not so great because they
were religious, but because they were sacrilegious with
impuny.' --Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, tr Bryce in The
AnteNicene Fathers v.6

'I was a string in the harp of enchantment
for nine years.' --The Book of Taliesen,
tr Gwengvryn Evans (1915)

"Albus cunctorum quondam captator bonorum
Orbis in excidio minus ambitione laborat?"
('Albus, grasping eagerly all the honors of the
state, is he any less ambitious in this universal
catastrophe?') --St Paulinus of Beziers, 'Claudii
Marii Victoris [sic] de perversis suae aetatis moribus'
in: Early Christian Latin Poets, Otto Kuhn-
muench (1929)

'I know that the Telchines, who are ignorant and
no friends of the Muse, grumble at my poetry...'
--Callimachus, Aetia bk I, fragment 1

'Poet is angry against poet to the point of
assaulting him.' --Callimachus, fr 203 (Iambus
xiii)

'Purity of heart is to will one thing.' --Kierkegaard

I found out, Heraclitus, how long you had been dead;
you weren't that sad philosopher, but a satellite of the Pleiade.
Unless there's lurking, somewhere in the desert, bits we've missed,
your "Nightingales" are gone as though they never did exist.

3 13 86

"Mit der Dummheit kampfen
Gotter selbst vergebens." --Schiller, Jungfrau von Orleans
III vi ('Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.')

'Many are the thyrsus-bearers, few the initiated.' --Greek
Anthology x.106

'We are all kept and fed for death, like a herd of swine to
be slain without reason.' --Palladas [the whole poem, x.85]

"Nam fuit & fortassis erit felicius euum;
in medium sordes." --Petrarch ('For there has been and perhaps
will be a happier age; inbetween there is squalor.')

   "The Warning

Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk--as strange, as still--
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?"

--Adelaide Crapsey

'All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothing,
for all that is cometh from unreason.' --Glycon,
x.125 tr Paten

'Hunger puts an end to love, or if not hunger,
time. But if neither of these put out the fire, the only
cure left for you is to hang yourself.' --Crates ix.497

73. 'With what joy in front
Of the executioner I walk
That from my shadow the head
Is two steps ahead of my feet...' --Asadullah Khan
Ghalib [1797-1869], tr Ahmed Ali (1973)

18. '...It is not even possible for man
To become man....' --Ghalib

68. '...This fire is not confined to earth...'
--Mohammed Taqi Mir [1723-1810], ibid

36. 'I did see the moth go up
To the lighted candle,
Then nothing else besides
A startled flame.
The life of the company
Was only a wink;
The cup departed taking
With it the eye-bedewed.
If a hundred roses bloomed
It mattered not;
How long ago was it
That I went to the garden?' --Mir

75. 'One day I walked into the shop of those who blow the glass
And asked: O makers of the cup, have you perchance a glass
Shaped like the heart? they laughed and said: Thou wanderest in vain,
O Mir; each cup thou seest, round or oval, every glass
was once a heart that we have melted on the fire and blown
Into a cup. That's all thou seest here, there is no glass.' --Mir

58. 'If one has the eye this world
Is like a house of mirrors:
Within the walls the face
Is visible...' --Mir

41. 'The clanking of the chain is now
Not heard, nor seen the flocks
Of gazelles. The desert seethed with life
But only during my madness...' --Mir

5. '...Who has the heart to hear/ the tale of Mir?
The mood of the company/ is strange and grim.'

A refined pleasure: noticing the ironic
juxtaposition of unlike books by the shelving
procedure. But seldom am i objective enough
to feel this in the presence of personality
clashes, which are really no different in origin.
These always seem like emblems of
destruction...

So you think you're the only alien? every human
is an alien on Planet Cancer--and we blame
ourselves for not fitting in.

The dogma that the Real is the True denies the
experience of Transcendence, in which the self
becomes more True but less Real. --But
the dogma that the Real is never the True, denies
the experience of being in Love, when they coincide.

...our lives are precarious
as those ancient tenements
that totter into dust
at the slam of a door

nor is our faith firmer
nor is our word
nor our deeds--
we are free radicals

changes on the way to something stable

3 19 86

"These slums where wild illusions pullulate" --Emil
Verch

Attitudinizing: expressing opinions in order to
reinforce within oneself a certain outlook, instead of
communicating an idea to others or discovering an
insight previously unknown. You have to realize that
every point of view, however reasonable and complete
it seems to be, is subject to change from new information
or deeper understanding; that this continual transform-
ation is desirable and to resist it for no other reason
than fatigue is Accidie (spiritual inertia) not self
protection; that it is no use to express opinions to
others at all, because they already have those: what
they need is knowledge & techniques.

"It may seem too much to say that ignorance was
the curse of the Romantic poets. But certainly
characteristics that distinguished them from major
figures before their time include impatience, super-
ficiality, a false cult of originality, a tendency to
improvise rather than think. They shared the belief
that a man could dissociate himself from the society
of his time and still say things relevant to it." --Philip
Hobsbaun, Tradition and Experiment in English
Poetry (1979)

"There also now exists a sizeable American following
for every religious sect in the world, not excluding
denominations which were thought to be extinct..."
--André Kukla

"...philosophy is, among the serious intellectual
disciplines, probably the most fashion prone..."
--Michael Tanner

   "The better poet
Claimed eleven grounds of love,
   The worse twelve trillion."
--Jeremy Morse (in Word Ways)

"The whole history of earlier Alexandrianism, a
steady laborious poetical movement which went
on at full pressure for something like half a century,
is the history of an attempt to bring poetry back into
touch with life, to reinstate it as a living art." --J W
Mackail

The centrifugal force that pulls people apart, as long
as it remains ascendant, makes every awkward &
discordant connection necessary. The trick is not to
overestimate what immediate good will come of it.

"America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe."
--Thomas M Disch

Once again we got the Aperture edition of
my favorite photographer Wynn Bullock--&
once again i had to price it out of my reach...

A new book by Gore Vidal! (via Metafilter)

"Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds." --Technorati (via Boing Boing)

Finally caught up with Bruce Sterling's blog again.

Useful anti-Bukowski rant. (via Bookslut)

Now if i could just find the terzanelle i wrote
about this...

I keep meaning to explore all of Dallas painter
Dwayne Carter's website. He seems to have
seamlessly melded the old & the new medium
into something really idiosyncratic. (via JR)

"As to the shortfall of troops, I have a solution. Now that even the Turks – who were eager to get their mits on northern Iraq and deal with their Kurdish "problem" once and for all – have been dissuaded from showing up at the party, and long troop deployments are playing havoc with the lives of our reservists, why don't we invite the Israelis to contribute some of their troops to the occupation?
They, after all, are so much better at humiliating Arabs than we are. Why should all that accumulated experience – leveling homes and businesses, and inflicting collective punishment – go to waste? As our loyal ally, they would no doubt be more than glad to sacrifice their own sons and daughters in this dirty little war.
After all, we started it on their behalf."
–Justin Raimondo

Listening to: my Stylistics 45's.

My "Gestapo rescue" book would have to
be my Webster's 2nd Unabridged. I know what's
in the others...

"The fatal Sisters three,
which spun my slender twine,
Knew well how rotten was the yarne,
from whence they drew their line."
--Gascoigne

"The oftener sene, the more I lust,
the more I lust, the more I smart,
the more I smart, the more I trust,
the more I trust, the heavyer hart,
the hevy hart breedes myne unrest,
thy absence therfore, lyke I best..."
--Googe

"Her face, her tongue, her wit
  so fair, so sweet, so sharp
first drew, then bent, last knit
  mine eye, mine ear, my heart..."
--Arthur Gorges (#79)

"Spencer, in affecting the Ancients writ no language."
--Ben Jonson

"When, in praising a poet, it is said that he has 'found
his own voice', what is usually meant is that he has
developed a manner of self-dramatization sufficiently
consistent that a single persona seems to be the source
of all his poems. 'Voice' in this sense equates with a
manner of delivery, a stance, a style that the audience
may not share but that it can at least recognize..."
--Thomas Disch (in The Nation)
[nowadays we use the word branding for this]

"Next to zucchini squash, poetry must be the most
overproduced commodity in the world." --Judson
Jerome, 1980

I can stand humidity and i can stand stupidity but i
can't stand humidity plus stupidity.

People are starting to ignore driving etiquette as
they do precise punctuation. On one level, it's the
haste of desperation; on another, the false sovereignty
of an individualism for which anything not coerced
can be instantly jettisoned.

To be lonely is to experience solitude as a victim.

   "Lunula

O luna novella,
Es digna fabella
Quae versibus edat

Itinera Sputnik
Tam ardua ut nic--
Tans Lucifer cedat."

--Van L. Johnson, The Classical Outlook (Dec 1957)

"Legend has it that Julius Caesar invented the art of
reading silently." --Thomas Winter

" 'I have never been prouder of my profession,' he
remarks, 'than when my friend Dorothy Day (the
Catholic pacifist) told me of something that happened
when she did some time in the Women's House of
Detention. Each prisoner was taken out to be bathed
once a week. Dorothy shared a cell with a whore and,
when the time came, Dorothy's cellmate was led off
toward the shower chanting a line from Auden:
"Thousands have lived without love, not one without
water".' " --In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety,
Alan Levy (1983) [interviews w/ A.]

I think it'd be wise to assume from now on that none of
my ideas is truly new or unique but that my perceptions
may very well be--though i tend to believe the converse.
An insight is first a perception: and by conceptualizing
it it passes through a prism of language in which some
qualities are bound to be lost, and conventional ones
added. A due respect for ideas will acknowledge the
tragedy of their birth. A due respect for the moment
will seek not spontaneity but openness to grace.

"It's perfectly all right to be an engagé writer
as long as you don't think you're changing things.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead...
but the social and political history of Europe would be
exactly the same if Dante and Shakespeare and Mozart
had never lived." --Auden loc cit [What about Langland?]

Barbarians oversimplify into banality, decadents overelaborate
into obfuscation. High culture means clarity in complexity.

"Even one alone verse sometimes makes a perfect poeme."
--Ben Jonson, Discoveries

A brief history of the Car Horn Organ. (via Fiendish Word)

Candybar wrapper embroidery. (ditto)

Stumbling on Lovecraft's grave.

Some good remarks on poetry by Joe Ahearn. (via Ptarmigan)

   "Under the Ion Hammer" (for Verbophobia)

Master of kiteslipt Spetznaz, amnesia is our leader;
Determinancy gone, abductee is our leader.

The tenuous adhesion of a cotton hush
Yields prismatic derangement whose rent church is our leader.

In strawberry fields of self-hypnosis i too roamed:
A maple sapper of the charcoal is our leader.

And your good squirm of lurid flashbangs now protrusive
As kudzu, cannot fail to dub you as our leader.

Leader! into caverns worn with jackboot march
No throe may deflect; epigraph: flambeau is our leader.

11-15-03

"The Poem is a fire-hunt, the Poet an animal charmed in one
spot, eyes fixed to the light." --Susan Howe, My Emily
Dickinson (1985)

'What is poetry but fog gathering around the light of a
sword?" --In-Hoon Choi, The Daily Life of Ku-Poh the Novelist,
tr Ki-Chang Hong (1985)

'Lines of a poem may well be compared to tangled vines or jags
of rock in the woods over which man trips, when human life is called
the woods metaphorically.' --ibid

"Apostrophe catastrophes; evolution & Diana. I lop ill
agonism, urge of Edward's. Mures & pop--none. Smetana--I?
Latitude along a cadet animal. & stops, knits, Avallon kat,
Ipoh soma & severe Wolf, a yaw, Harris.
O, O.K. Oklahoma lad: laws, Odessa,
Flahaut, namely Ebert, nectar, Aramaism, a matey & O
cap worn. O worst cad Ero, Tom, Oedipal wed agnates. O! minae,
Nifo, Evita (Gen.), Laro month, guan eras, no it. Cafe Lam
lived. Nas deed. Simla. Gellis, Dr. Awkward, & deer gas. Id,
Mabel E. Bam. O gab! Mulish P. Muir, Tamar, Oenone romps,
ahaniger always, Bob & one film. Sin--a gap? Oenomel,
ogaks.
   I ram a tenable Bratslav & I am mum
re. Cape Matapan..." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

"I was at Pontius Pilates house and pist against it."
--Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)

No doubt by the 21c. they'll think "poetry" meant any sort
of confused speech.

In times of language growth the imitation of speech
enriches poetry (Elizabethans); in times of decay, it depletes
it (today).

Squirrels feel superior to cats because squirrels have a
sense of humor and cats don't. [Poets; philosophers.]

Maybe all our age really means is now we have enough people
to manage a Renaissance and a Dark Ages at the same time.

If i am a moralist in art it's because i find it monstrous to cherish
stillborns as living children.

Hypocrisy defines empire. Our new twist is to not know when
we're lying.

"Books written in English had to fight their way into a field already
occupied, and it is clear that until the fourteenth century they
failed to obtain any real popularity among well-to-do people. ...Of
English works...written before 1360, perhaps the majority survive
only in a single copy, which in no single case bears any trace of
the fine writing found in manuscripts for wealthy book-buyers. At a
later date there is no lack of manuscripts of Langland, the Wycliffite
Bible, and Chaucer, some of them most beautifully written and
decorated..." --Pollard, quoted in Schofield's English Literature
from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer

Murasaki has a tanka made of words with double meanings.
"'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings"
--Stainway to Heaven

Johnson, on Horace's Ode I.34: "Sir, he was not in earnest:
this was merely poetical."

Start practicing your Doublethink now. (via Metafilter)

Tired of online petitions that don't accomplish
anything?

A modern hero.

Fear is the coriolis force we never notice and
always correct for unconsciously in our trajectories.
It is visible in its effects, most conspicuously in the
magic rituals that proliferate and mean nothing. Without
television's reassurance, there would be a panic.

"...Outside my window, a small tit bird bashes itself
against the glass. At first I thought
it was admiring itself in the window.
Now I know it's mad." --Gwendolyn MacEwen, 'There
is No Place to Hide'

"...I'm sure half the words you and I are using today will
disappear in fifty years." --Galway Kinnell, in: American
Poetry Observed (1977)

"He [Ulrich von Liechtenstein, 1198-1275] performed
fantastic exploits in the service of his first mistress and
another lady, including the celebrated expedition as
Vrowe Venus, when, dressed in womanly attire, with
two long plaits, he rose from the sea near Venice, proceeding
through Frivli, Carinthia, Styria, and Austria as far as the
Bohemian border, challenging all comers.
  His poetry enshrines the classic conventions
of the service of love and shows considerable technical
virtuosity in the use of rhyme." --Poets of the Minnesang

"A hardcover book is considered a best-seller if fifty
thousand people buy it, but a record that sells fifty thousand
copies is considered a flop." --Creative Careers, Blake &
Bly

'...poetry is like the arts of painting, cooking, and cosmetics
in its ability to express every sensation of sweetness or
bitterness, beatitude or horror, by coupling a certain noun with
a certain adjective, in anaogy or contrast...' --Baudelaire, Draft
of a Preface

"...psychoanalysis is a kind of Imagism--a way of getting the
images to make emotions more precise." --James Hillman,
Inter Views

"In the apocalyptic climate of the 1940's Robert Lowell became
the leading poet of his generation. He wrote as if poetry were
still a major art and not merely a venerable pastime which ought
to be perpetuated." --F W Depee

John Clute on the "hard SF renaissance".

"Tis true, I pay my debts when they'r contracted;
I steal from no man; would not cut a Throat
To gain admission to a great man's purse,
Or a Whores bed; I'de not betray my Friend,
To get his Place or Fortune: I scorn to flatter
A Blown-up Fool above me, or crush the wretch beneath me,
Yet, Jaffeir, for all this, I am a Villain!

Jaff. A Villain--

Pierre. Yes a most notorious Villain:
To see the suffrings of my fellow Creatures,
And own my self a Man: To see our Senators
Cheat the deluded people with a shew
Of Liberty, which yet they ne'r must taste of;
They say, by them our hands are free from fetters,
Yet whom they please they lay in basest bonds;
Bring whom they please to Infamy and Sorrow;
Drive us like wracks down the rough Tide of Power,
Whilst no hold's left to save us from Destruction;
All that bear this are Villains; and I am one,
Not to rouse up at the great Call of Nature,
And check the Growth of these Domestick Spoilers,
That makes us slaves and tells us 'tis our Charter."

--Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv'd (1682)

Postmodern totalitarianism depends upon, among
other Orwellianisms, "Freedom is Slavery", in a very
precise way: we demand--
   the 'freedom' not to have to think
(leave it to the experts & intellectuals)
   & the 'freedom' not to have to feel
(bad feelings, but anesthetics don't discriminate)
      --and shape our politics
accordingly. Television democracy is like a fool's dream of anarchy
--how to give as little responsibility as possible to most everyone.
And thus real freedom seems to consist...of maximizing your
hassles. Who wants that?
  America is a rotting corpse because Americans aspire
to the condition of maggots.

"More often the poem is the way the poet says he
feels when he can't find out what his real feelings
are." --Richard Hugo

"I had, when we first made our [Hermetic] society,
proposed for our consideration that whatever the
great poets had affirmed in their finest moments
was the nearest we could come to an authoritative
religion, and that their mythology, their spirit of
water and wind were but literal truth." --Yeats,
Autobiography

"Assassins find accomplices. Man's merit
Has found him three, the hawk, the hound, the ferret."
--Blunt

The wholeness of the dynamic aspect is the
hiddenness of the visible.

"After an age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism,
science, democracy, abstraction, peace, comes an age
of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particu-
larity, war. Has our age burned to its socket?" --Yeats,
A Vision (1925)

"Urge me no more: this airy mirth belongs
To better times: these times are not for songs.
...The Raven's dismall croaks; the midnight howls
Of empty Wolves, mixt with the screech of owls;
The nine sad knowls of a dull passing-Bell,
With the loud language of a nightly knell,
And horrid out-cries of revengèd crimes,
Joyn'd in a medley's musick for these times...
Till then, earth's Semiquaver, mirth, farewell."
--Francis Quarles, Emblems

"Mass-hypnotised, dinned drunken by the tireless
Mechanic repetition of the wireless..." --Roy Campbell,
Jungle Eclogue

"I do very much apprehend...that our Posterity will in
a few Years degenerate into a Race of Punnsters."
--Addison, The Spectator

Poets used to be the custodians of language; now it's
journalists whose style book scarcely extends past
punctuation & capitalization... Not surprisingly, when
we begin to try to think, we mistake our linguistic chaos
for philosophic chaos, whereas in truth we have barely
one or two ideas and not any profusion except of equally
clumsy ways to phrase them.

  "Here Dead We Lie

Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young."

-- A. E. Housman


"Gold of all other is a most delicious object, a sweet
light, a goodly lustre it hath; and, saith Austin, we
had rather see it than the Sun." --Robert Burton, The
Anatomy of Melancholy (1628)

"There is a crack in everything God has made..." --Emerson

"In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness
takes the place of imagination." --Wallace Stevens, "Adagia"

"All of Eliot's subsequent poems were written by J. Alfred
Prufrock." --Milton Acorn

You got to study for years to be a doctor or a lawyer or an
engineer, and have licenses & degrees and stuff, but for
the most important jobs, there are absolutely no formal
qualifications: nobody is too stupid to be entrusted with
running a government or raising a baby.

"The outward form of the inward grace of the Romantic
imagination was the French Revolution, and the Revolution
failed." --Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (1961)

"There are stones like souls." --Rabbi Nachman

"I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and
fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night's labours
should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon
them." --letters of Keats 10-27-1818

If we are ever to prevail, it won't be because of our righteous
feelings, or delicate sensibilities, or correct views, or even the
taste for freedom. It can only be because we outthink those
who are committed to destruction.
   --Put that in an anthem.--

"...the Inquisition--an office more adopted to confirm than to
refute the belief of an evil principle." --Gibbon

"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." --Tom
Stoppard, Jumpers

"The LRA [Lord's Resistance Army], under shadowy leader Joseph Kony, says it wants to rule Uganda according to the Biblical Ten Commandments.

They often mutilate their victims, by cutting off their lips, noses or ears." --BBC (via Metafilter)

H'm, here's a collector's item: Polish
Acts of Atrocity Against the German Minority in
Poland, published by the German Library of
Information in 1940.

Christopher Soden advises me there is an anti-gay
hatemonger Sid Rosenberg on MSNBC every morning;
to complain to his boss Bob Okun:
bob.okun@corporate.ge.net (Oh, & he's racist, too.)

How about WikiTravel?

"Once again, the dispiriting spectacle of the American media in full campaign cry is upon us, as coverage of the 2004 presidential race begins in earnest. But this time around, the usual inanities, inaccuracies and insipidities have a more melancholy flavor, an almost elegiac feel. It's like watching priests of a dead cult, vacantly enacting their rituals in a ruined temple whose gods have been broken, desecrated and cast down."
--Chris Floyd (via Dr Menlo)

The best vague writing i know is Mina Loy's
novel Insel. It's like watching a movie through
heavy gauze (or on heavy drugs): often it's next to
impossible to figure out what's "going on". But her
writing is descriptive--just at a very high
order of abstraction...

"The Castniid moth and the Indecorous Eggar, to parasol and kerosene embark nonsequential to the Carcel lamps, with equal waste battering the votary. Useless this central shadow, loves delicate liberty incorporates through this amber trance of candlelight, desire inaccessible from behind some barrier of beautiful glass. Strike obsessively the preambling diaphane, the cluster of common hearts wounded by the volition of cresset, the futile courtship of moth and incandescence, an exact replication of my worthless seal that abides in embrace." --from Trompe L'oeil by Kristin Ryling (Firewheel Editions, 2000)

'If our present suffering ever leads to a revival, this will not
be brought about through slogans but in silence and moral
loneliness, through pain, misery, and terror, in the profoundest
depths of each man's spirit.' --Simone Weil, "The Responsibility
of Writers", in: The Simone Weil Reader

...the neurotic symptoms of physicalized conflict, surround
us in lieu of an intelligible world.

I would rather have 5 people tell me what they didn't like about
one of my poems, than hear the applause of 100 & not know
why.

   "Doomsday

The end of everything approaches;
I hear it coming
Loud as the wheels of painted coaches
On turnpikes drumming;
Loud as the pomp of plumy hearses,
Or pennoned charges;
Loud as when every oar reverses
Venetian barges;
Loud as the caves of covered bridges
Fufilled with rumble
Of hooves; and loud as cloudy ridges
When glaciers tumble;
Like creeping thunder this continues
Diffused and distant,
Loud in our ears and in our sinews,
Insane, insistent;
Loud as a lion scorning carrion
Further and further;
Loud as the ultimate loud clarion
Or the first murther."

--Elinor Wylie

I think about jail the way a medieval Christian must have
thought about hell, & as often.

In a way the 19c. bloating of the [book] market was a
temporary anomaly: television's audience arrived a few
generations before television did.

   from CTHAAT AQVADINGEN

1.
Delivered in the darkness of the earthquake
The innocent darkness
Of a drug made from junkies

2.
Prouding ostiole
Heart belong cyclone

And a red desire
Whirlpool of pent breath

Break the light with light

3.
Delicious shivers, O Queen
Beryl, collide in the canteen
Angelance notwithstanding, meaningless
Chessmove-hoovered domain

Stairway to Daewu, desire
Flags at the klone-thronged zonda
Vainly a taiga, but love
To the last breath
Trammelled & azure in light,
Denebola

Soldered llama-name, desire
Pent in a diamond.
A sum counted on the breath.
Hands of celadon
Lift a chalice full of light
But painable as iron.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Fight, Semblance, you know what you are doing, stuff
My glove into the lining instead of into the pocket

And the tiny purple flowers of forgiveness
Walk backwards out of their shoes

Watched "Sylvia"; & although it wasn't terribly
insightful, i liked it just for giving me images
of her place & time to contemplate. I had been
quite skeptical of Gwyneth Paltrow from the day
i heard of her casting, but she did an adequate
job for the role as it was written (particularly
in the second half)--my one real disagreement
was (of course) the simplemindedness with which
the writers approach the subject of making poems.
The idea seems to be that it was the experience
of having Ted leave her, that made her become a
great poet. Whereas, it was instead the quality
of ear & imagination with which she put words
together. Just to be perverse, i will argue
instead that it was his reaction to the shock
of her suicide, that made Ted Hughes write his
one great book of poems, Crow.

Mind is the outermost layer of skin, the most
sensitive & easily marked; it is only because we have
no wider senses that we cannot determine its extent
or limits.

I'm not here because i'm here, i'm here because i'm not
here.

"Memorized speech is perhaps the least dramatic thing
that can happen on the stage." --Jack Smith

"It is rather strange because no painter thinks while
painting about what his painting would look like on
a color slide." --Nam June Paik

"As Leakey also said, the reason painting suddenly
appeared about 20,000 years ago was not because
people suddenly became smart, but because, before
there were agricultural communities, everybody moved
2000 miles every year." --ibid

An integrated person is a working democracy.

When i make a narrative out of my experiences, my
aesthetic sense is a strong wind i must tack against
to steer toward the truth. I get blown off course.
Sometimes i end up headed in the opposite direction.

"The amateur is very rare in French literature--as rare
as he is common in our own." --Lytton Strachey, 1912

TV: "We don't know what the part, corresponding to
the left hemisphere's speech centers, does on the right."
me: "the silence." --How long till we learn the use of
silence?

Every artist is a pirate satellite, a guerilla broadcaster.
Like that lone Japanese, we haven't heard that the
war is over. We think it's longing when it is our
survival.

"For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most
fingent plastic of creatures." --Carlyle

I struggle between voice and speech. If i were only to
write when i feel articulate, that would not be the whole
truth.

You can live without meaning, without seeking meaning;
and no metaphysical retribution ensues. Our alienation
isn't teleological. It's simple as wearing shoes. When i
came back to Dallas i was able to smell the pollution.
Now i don't. Absence of meaning is like that. You
never find it by trying to reason it out because meaning
transcends rationality. How else can i say this? And
yet the meaning i have found from leaving is not the meaning
i must make here. What i can keep is the knowledge that
meaning exists. I won't find a recipe for it. But i might acquire
a nose for it.
   --By meaning, i don't mean faith. Faith
is kind of like the knowledge that meaning is possible, the
knowledge that makes meaning possible, but it's a wholly
visceral knowledge; swimming which is so natural yet not
a part of our genetic heritage--we develop our doubt and
faith in tandem (always & everyone!)--while meaning is what
holds the entire network of relationships together. Harmony.

Advice. (via Bogue's blog)

Wish i could go hear this bagpipe orchestra...

The weather, in Latin.

Visual representation of ancestry groups in
the United States (from the 1990 census).
(via Matt Welch)

" It is no longer possible to call Putin’s Russia a democracy." --Johan Norberg

"You're 66 times more likely to be prosecuted
in the US than in France." Make your own statistical
arguments.

Pocket history of Prague's English-language
newspaper Prognosis. More. Still more.

"Every officer of the Battalion was killed or wounded and command of the battalion fell to Regimental Sergeant-Major Jones, who received orders to hold on to a ridge of land, later named Iron Cross Ridge, about a mile from the village of Langemarck. During this fighting Pvt Evans was wounded in the chest by a piece of trench mortar shell. He died a few hours later. A few weeks following his death, the National Eisteddfod was be held in Birkenhead. The Chair was placed in the centre of the stage with the eisteddfodic sword resting across its arms. When the Archdruid, Dyfed called out three times for the winning poet to stand up, there was no response. Dyfed announced that the chief bard had fallen on the field of battle in France on the last day of July. He explained who he was, “Hedd Wyn”, a shepherd from Trawsfynydd. And then, as there was no one to be chaired, the sword was removed, and the Chair draped in a black cloth." --Erik Linklater

New Lynx.

"It was perhaps Weapemeoc factionalism..."

The Internet's only officially approved sewergator
sanctuary.

Anne bans fanfic.

"Cyber-Ashbery" via John Tranter:

   "Joy H. Breshan: Her Shy Banjo

Rain, without it there can be no September music
The concealed afternoons
A source of the revisions as useless as a lukewarm fancy,
Making pink smudges on life and accepting severe punishment,
Encouragement by lovers, sang no more blades of light
Arise, light! The things of the day we eat
Breakfast each in their tree withdrawals,
Our marionette-like Pierrot, like these
Hot sticky evenings, though fragmented

The greatest risk working deep crevices far inland,
We can see no reward, winnowers of the old time
Involved without pain, with their sleepy empty nets
And you, at twilight.
The neighbours love the yellow of the same tweed jacket.
It is only semi-bizarre where you want to lie,
A nice, bluish slate-gray. People laugh,
Having conspired with a towel, and wiped the last thought
From the black carriages, the models slender, like the stars.
You couldn't deliberately, for fright, once you see
It's all talk, the travelling far from anybody.
Hands streaming with kisses, between us.
It may be something like silver,
Something like a sponge, and they enjoyed it, abandonment
Without shame, a crowded highway in the sun, it just
Stays like dust--that's the nature of the children, and
Yesterday's newspapers say: "Sometimes good times follow bad."
Their object, the sky. Is it like climbing abruptly
From a room? It may be only a polite puss-in-boots we passed,
Two in love hesitant at the front door.
So we have enjoyed the one crisp feeling, raking
And breathing, checking the horrible speech the furniture makes.
How short the season is--don't fix it if it comes in coloured
Mottoes, and now, underneath this dilemma directly, as
Our clothes, the afternoon, really old-time, her shy banjo."

No questions from Democrats allowed. (via
Eschaton)

Harry Mathews on translation (sort of).

In case you don't want print-on-demand from
Cafe Press.

The unorthodox life of an unorthodox chess
player.

Another incursion noted. (via TexFiles)

A new Fifty-Five from Melanie:

   To Have and To Hold

The chapel was awash in yellow roses. The groom¹s shoes were freshly shone. The bride smiled beatifically.

"Do you take this man," the priest began, "to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, for as long as you live?"

"I do," said the bridesmaid.

'And when a man tells you that you know nothing and you
are not nettled at it, then you may be sure that you have begun
the work.' --Epictetus

Writing for publication is the slot machines without Vegas.

"Dickens did not write what the people wanted.
Dickens wanted what the people wanted."
--G K Chesterton

Shallow noise is noise. Deep noise is sense.

"The superior man is exacting of himself; the
common man is exacting of others." --Confucius

"For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we
often repeat, that no Lie can live forever." --Thomas
Carlyle

Physical habits are like canyons & gullies--traces of
innumerable mental habits, weather we keep no other
records of. Rain, we say; it falls. No one gathers it up.

Order & Control are as different as a diamond & a
diamond mine.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man pokes
his eye out.

Swim exactly 12 inches under water.

A life is not a long time to be asleep. An hour is a
long time to be awake.

For every signalless lane change, a baby will be
born deformed.

There is no soft word for a soft death, that does not
sound like love.

A adult is someone who flunked adolescence.

I think i have a privileged seat at this melodrama just
because i found a program & opera glasses when i
sat down.

When you see a UFO, you want to tell the world--partly
to prove it wasn't a hallucination. I'm that way about
my insights sometimes.

Reverence won't get you there, but you won't get there
without it.

Nothing is as beautiful as a flock of birds at dusk. I
look at it, then turn away, having learned only the futility
of all my art. I should look longer next time, & learn more.

A painting is much more like a stray kitten that you pick
up & take home, than a child you give birth to. As people
come to resemble their pets, artists develop a style... Not
developing a style means you are the stray cat that goes
from home to home. We revere & distrust Picasso as if he
were Genghis Khan, king of the nomadic hordes. --Our
own nomads being lost.

Listening to: Sheila Chandra.

   "The Reagans Episode I"

1.
  Where sable swans on
Rivers yet unfound the fecund cicala,
Dew soaked grass,
No grisaille sun// Babylon green noun
Dying into leave us sky

Gray down styrofoam
Want. And silvery ruins vie incursion
A flaunting cactus my cloud
Pseudonym defend the engrams grue

2.
  I think I used to be Lincoln, some great man a grateful nation is always thanking in cards letters flowers the dog the wife why can't I hold on to their names also of greatness. Sometimes the sun makes me cry I am so happy to know America's free & not to be Lincoln anymore.

11 06 03

"There, in that low-ceilinged room, I had often said
to Fay and to Tom that there was no way out but that
the acceptance of this could itself be a beginning."
--Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book

When i have watched fire as many hours as i have
watched television, my mind will be free.

"I remember a despairing white father in the Belgian
Congo saying to me just before the debacle when I was
bound on some such mission, 'There is another great
age of darkness closing in on the life of man and all
that we can do is to create little fortresses wherein the
authentic light of the spirit can be kept burning so that
one day, when men wish to reach out for light again,
they will have places in which to find it. But for the rest,
we must just accept the inevitability of disaster.' 'You
may well be right, and disaster may well come,' I had told
him. 'But for me it will always be a point of honor to go on
working to prevent disaster, if only to make certain it is
the right kind of disaster life needs when it does ultimately
come.' " --Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of
Our Time, 1975

We shouldn't kill trees unless we dance on their graves.

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among
mysteries." --Roethke

The wings of poetry, the claws of prose.

"Laughter is the best pesticide." --Nabokov

"Different modes of dehumanization: capitalism treated
men like machines; the post industrial society treats
them like signs." --Octavio Paz

On the treadmill you feel surrounded by interstellar
space.

"There's nothing I have to say to everybody in the world."
--Ken Kesey, 1970 interview

"Tell me what a man dreams and I will tell you what he
is." --Arab proverb

"Humanism could well be defined as the way the inhabitants
of a good city habitually behave." --Kenneth Rexroth

And having explained and thoroughly understood the source of
all that is false in my life, i disown it--thinking thereby to advance
beyond. Instead, i should admit what caused it to find such ready
soil in me.

"Voluntary Attention is rare, and is found only among strong
characters." --Ramacharaka

Listening to- Squarepusher.

   "Counterinsurgency"

Heft a enthroned on to my ghosts to bier of courage
Nouns that allow a rapid ghastly ampersand:
It is social, a mad rushing sun-bright pile

The impetuous fury of ruthless law, bold;
I pressure my shoulder; flames went utterly
The throughput of mirrors.

A impropriety of withered bloggers
Couldn't trembled this antlion-spyglass descent.
Only pupil of mirrors.

Once more let was in myriads girt by a
But irrevocable overthrow, alone will gauge
The throughput of mirrors.

A impropriety of the funnel storm.
But flotsam alone will gauge flotsam
The hen-speckled view recedes.

You must not lost.

(10/03)

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what
we pretend to be." --Vonnegut, Mother Night

Being alienated is our communion with dead matter.

For every science an equal & opposite science.

An artist without a community is a lightning rod without the storm.

"...the twentieth century was the century not of sentences as was
the eighteenth nor of phrases as was the nineteenth but of
paragraphs. ...The time had come when a whole thing was all
there was of anything." --Gertrude Stein, 1934

'But there are too many signs that everything that used to
sustain our lives no longer does so, that we are all mad,
desperate, and sick. And I call for us to react.' --Antonin
Artaud, "No More Masterpieces"

You knew this was coming.

   "Candles

They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they'll ignore

A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,

Giving everybody a fair hearing.
They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon.
This is no time for the private point of view.
When I light them, my nostrils prickle.
Their pale, tentative yellows

Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments,
And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna.
As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef.
The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white.
And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol,

Imagining himself a headwaiter in America,
Floating in a high-church hush
Among ice buckets, frosty napkins.
These little globes of light are sweet as pears.
Kindly with invalids and mawkish women,

They mollify the bald moon.
Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.
The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.
In twenty years I shall be retrograde
As these drafty ephemerids.

I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening."

--Sylvia Plath

A mask is a choice of faces--a face is an end to
masks.

At different times in my life i come to restate
the same truths, like an airplane circling the landing strip.

"What is the use of a sign which is itself only
another riddle?" --C S Lewis, Till We Have Faces (1956)

'Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of
the solution.' --Karl Kraus

Listening to: Radio Ethiopia.

Deal with it.

"Our nation has lost every last vestige of its honor and prestige in the gathering of nations, like a belligerent vomit-soaked drunk that started a fistfight on the dance floor with an unattractive midget." --Ben Tripp (via Wood_s Lot)

A comment on William Watkin's blog caused me
to remember some old notes i took on Sanskrit
Aesthetics, specifically a concept meaning
'reverberation'--"rasa" & not "yoin" as i
emailed him (this other word, meaning the
same thing, i may have gotten from Bali via
Mrs Byrne's Dictionary, or was it They Have
A Word For It--?*): anyway, my point was that
with a great poem, it doesn't end when it ends.
You may be caused to spontaneously remember
part of it, years & years later..."it may be that
a poetics of 'yoin' subsumes other views which only
concern adherence to a model or type of process,
& fail to distinguish poems that adhere equally, one
being forgettable & the other not." And when i
consider my writing of late, i wonder if a lot
of the meaning for me of those poems is the
relation of some of the images & even the very
words, to their earlier occurrences in my old
poems...? (As well as--i hasten to add--other
people's poems i have read with those words
& images.) --Not unlike the concept of "pillow-words"
in Japanese aesthetics: nonsense words or words of
uncertain meaning, continually reused purely for
their associations.

-------------------------------------------------------
*it would appear that this is a Japanese word.
Using Amazon's new infrasearch capabilities,
i discover that their scanning has produced a
veritable blizzard of electronic typos--such
that, a lot of the "yoin"-s they found were
simply "your" or "young" or "join" in the
actual texts... The implications of this for the
future of our collectobe menmorty arre raher
inftereastinhg.

Someone else has picked up on my phrase,
"information pollution". (This includes telemar-
keter phone calls, too IMHO.)

   "Debt Consolidation"

Heft a withered spyglass to my shoulder;
The hen-speckled view recedes.
A impropriety of bloggers
Couldn't ransom this antlion-funnel climber.

Only pupil of the razory tickler,
I pressure my ghosts to emit
Nouns that allow a smarmy ampersand:
It is social, like a pogrom of mirrors.

But flotsam alone will gauge
The throughput of the seeded storm.

10 31 03 (for Verbophobia)

"There is the curious set of cases in which the word
Bosheth, 'Shame' or 'Shameful Thing', has taken
the place, or distorted the form, of some genuine but
objectionable word. For instance, the title Melekh,
King, was applied to Yahweh as to other deities: and
at one time in the seventh century human sacrifices
were offered to him under that name. This was an abom-
ination to the purer Jewish feeling. Whenever the word
Melekh occurred in descriptions of these rites,
the practice in the Synagogue was to avoid pronouncing
it and say instead Bosheth. To indicate this,
though the consonants of MLKH were not altered in the
text, the vowels of Bosheth were written under them.
Hence arose an imaginary word 'Molekh'--afterwards
corrupted to 'Moloch'--which was then taken for the
name of some unknown god of the Gentiles." --Gilbert
Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907)

"The more policemen you have, the more criminals you
have; and the more criminals you have, the more
policemen you have got to have to catch them: and so
it go on and on, until a time will come when everybody
will be either a criminal or a policeman." --G B
Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page
[Tao Te Ching, 57]

A bit i wrote on Pavic is here.

Melanie took a survey among her friends, of
"...movies that could (or should) be turned into stage
musicals, as per such recent Broadway successes as
The Producers and Hairspray", & here are the results:
   "There were no runaway
votegetters, but there were a few titles that popped
up more than two times, such as, incredibly, both The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs,
as well as the more traditional Steel Magnolias.
Some of the better examples submitted include, in no
particular order:

Gangs of New York
The Bridges of Madison County
Ferris Bueller¹s Day Off
Impromptu
King of Hearts
The Seventh Seal
Interiors
Mommie Dearest
Ghost World
Benny & Joon
Harry Potter
The Bride of Frankenstein
The Truman Show
The Amityville Horror
The Crying Game
Dirty Dancing
Tootsie
Ghost
Spiderman
A Night at the Opera
Beetlejuice
The Mummy (Boris Karloff version)
Mrs. Doubtfire
Fatal Attraction
When Harry Met Sally
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Coal Miner¹s Daughter
Pretty Woman
Reservoir Dogs
Forrest Gump
Billy Elliott
The Big Chill
Kill Bill
Salsa
Dave
The Client
Miss Congeniality
Fried Green Tomatoes
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Jaws
Donnie Brasco
Mulholland Drive
The Green Mile
Bruce Almighty
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Broadway Danny Rose
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Stardust Memories
Bladerunner
Pennies from Heaven
The Velvet Goldmine

and even Behind the Green Door."

"(Indeed, language itself is only a
metaphor.)" --C G Jung

"If we give spirits a form, we become
independent." --Picasso

"It's a job to be done. Somebody's got to do
it." --Wendy O Williams on chainsaw-bisecting
the electric guitar

Listening to: The Best of Ruth Brown.

An old Dean Koontz scifi paperback came in:
Anti-Man. I priced it at $25.00 .

    So the newly acquired
untranslatable subjectivity ("angst") submerges in a
resurgence of older & better stabilized levels of con-
sciousness...a global regression. All aside from the
pre-eminent fact of economic disparity, of course:
but it's still kind of a pity that the knowledge cannot
be shared, that we are all equally victims of modernity.

The mass media...have become
inaccessible to the usual symbol-shapers (artists,
mystics, visionaries, cranks), so that the natural
process that would adjust a population to its dreams
has been radically aborted. It seems like the only
solution is for individuals to withdraw from the media-
world on their own separate initiative & try to recover
tribal, pre-urban group identities with more or less
homemade ideologies & worldviews...Which is
happening now--often violently--but unrecognized
as such because they still use the old words for their
new, haphazard syncretisms. Strictly speaking,
there is no more traditional culture. Anywhere.
In the world.

'Maybe King Oedipus had an eye too many.' --Holderlin

You can't fight images with images you have to
use reality. Or images of greater reality?

I believe community has gradually disappeared
or become supplanted by more primitive organization
because the growth of subjectivity has outstripped
the capacity of all current symbol systems to
communicate it.

In a blighted place you got to watch your step...

"Distance seduces the rational mind, just as
closeness seduces the irrational." --Thomas
Disch, "102 H-Bombs"

A novel is a world--a short story is a place.

I find out when i've been living with insufficient
consciousness the same way i find out i've been
reading without enough light--by the headache
it gives me.

Those who have no will are only dependable in
their compulsions.

'What has been understood no longer exists...' --Eluard

Intuition is experienced without sensations. It results
in spontaneous knowledge. The Unconscious has
meaning without being experienced. It results in
spontaneous creation. --Most of our psychological
systems use the same vague terms for both. Because
to the ego they are equally INVISIBLE.

"I love obscenity but I hate vulgarity." --Henry
Miller

"The wind that knocked our generation down
Was not a harvest." --Djuna Barnes, The Antiphon

'Destruction was my Beatrice.' --Mallarmé, letter 5-17-67

"Now, making a work is not thinking thoughts but
accomplishing an actual journey." --David Jones, preface
to The Anathemata

Mini-KISS. (via Memepool)

Is it over yet?

"By 1968, 1978, 1988 or 1998 you knew what the master narrative of that decade was. You knew that decade's chosen way to be 'modern'. By year eight, the decade's style was finished, finessed, defined. Even uncool people got the message about how to be cool. They just needed those little back glasses, that cow-lick fur cap haircut, and they were safely 'modern'.

Too late, normal cool modern people! The decade turned, your finish just finished! Now you have to plunge yourself into a new decade, and it's all going to be messy and uncertain again until 2008!"
--Momus

Black Metal Pigeons.

Listening to: The Luv'd Ones.

This blog is 43% Evil. (via The Trigger)

Saw Black Robe the other day, & it still haunts
me.

Heard a piece on NPR about an opera (Brundibar), originally written & staged
by some of the prisoners of concentration camp
Terezin, & translated by Sendak & Kushner,
which is playing in New York right now. How
poignant (& how timely!)...

Something truly frightening. (via USS Clueless)