( via / via )

Red & blue waves.

"More persons have been hated and killed for having awkward mannerisms than for any other thing." --Aurelia

Cityscapes.

the dufflebag that holds my not yet written
works, unclenched its teeth & let one fall
today; i tossed it over the windowsill,
& wait in silence till the thing's forgotten.

How much more satisfying is a blog
that you can post the instant it is done!
--Never have to vie with this age's spawn
of noises calculated to the therblig.

ɢʀᴜᴍʙʟᴇʀ now .02 Ξ 𝐅𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐥𝐲🌈ᴵᴺᵀᴱᴳᴿᴬᵀᴵᴼᴺ.

( via / via )

Can You Hear Me Now?

advancement in the pseudo-plot
or play of signs or grin of tulpa
line unbroken coffee leads
in contrast to the headlines frenzied
5 AM a strange loop

bridge across an abyss raised
smirk clenched in Narcissus' pool
the near invisible leaves me bruised
i lug more air-snow in a pail
fifteen feet of pure white smoke

Silent episode of ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING.

"It is so subtle to write things that have no meaning." --@icomptonburnett

Digger the raccoon playing with the floatie ball.

( via / via )

Stopped?

monkeys clasping eyes
so as not to see
purchase a dram of ease

monkeys clasping eyes
deeper plunged in ooze
sorrowful whirlwinds sow

monkeys clasping eyes
so as not to see

Shake Sugaree.

we don't talk about Paxton
he's a clown but he's one of the gang
a barefaced clumsy thief
to re-elect him beggars belief
we don't talk about Paxton
check your pockets when he's gone

Only enjoy art you like.

( via / via )

Dark Woods.

"Written in Miles' Poets of the Century

I saw the youthful singers of my day
   To sound of lutes and lyres in morning hours
   Trampling with eager feet the teeming flowers,
Bound for Fame's temple upon Music's way:
A happy band, a folk of holiday:
   But some lay down and slept among the bowers;
   Some turned aside to fanes of alien Powers;
Some Death took by the hand and led away.
Now gathering twilight clouds the land with grey,
   Yet, where last light is lit, last pilgrims go,
   Outlined in gliding shade by dying glow,
And fain with weary fortitude essay
The last ascent. The end is hid, but they
   Who follow on my step shall surely know."

--Richard Garnett

Cat burns several of his nine lives at once. (via @auntbeast)

"We have no use for the music of the spheres. Ours is the music of the prolate ellypsoidals." --Aurelia

feels 🖌️ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜ ⁺̢̧̲͇̟̰̙̼͜.

( via / fritz eichenberg via feuilleton )

The Dark Night of the Soul.

" 'Because we have broken all the major compulsions,' the man said, worrying his words a little bit, 'so we must be chained to the minor compulsions. We cannot be free completely, or we would violate the freedom-slavery dialectic; and we can progress only by dialectics. We have freed ourselves from the slavery of fact, so now we must bind ourselves to the slavery of fetish. There's no other way.' " --Aurelia

Affordable Sunday Surgery [II].

transfixed feeding the cheap SLOTS
i lived for more than LUCRE

in earshot of the OCEAN
plastic stack of half-dried TRAYS

a connoisseur of nonSENSE
scorns to field this ALIBI

barrenness more than LUNAR
in the slow guitar INTRO

tapestry for a BARON
depicts without IRONY

The Absolute Elsewhere.

( via / via )

Release Decay.

   "was it your hand
that held my own so tenderly
   in dream last night
just so the chrysanthemums
hold traces of summer rain"

--Marjorie A Buettner in Tanka Splendor 2003

"Shen Yun was a Baader-Meinhof object: once I saw it, I started to see it everywhere."

"...'By the way, what is this world? I will just read its name that you have written here. -Ah, nothing. Say, does invisible ink on every world use a banana-oil base? When will it come clear? When will I be able to read it?' 'When you leave this world, Aurelia,' the consulting doctor said. '...When you have left this world, then you will be able to read its name. You can't know where you are, but you can know where you have been."' " --R A Lafferty, Aurelia

Fate.

( via / via )

"That he feels that the past lives in him, and that it stirs him, doesn’t mean that the past actually exists inside him. The past, too, is a narrow valley, one refusing occupation."

"...let a vague pity blur the formal roses."

--Judith Wright

Rückkopplung #21.

"The Fox’s Lover

The howling air blows snow into your footprints,
four-toed, leading from my door.
Everything you touched tonight is cold again.

Every time, I plan to be prepared.
Night to day; the sleeping side
of a cycle; no great pain. Every time,
I'm screaming along with the wind.
We do not know where you are,
the wind and I,
nor when you will return.

I set out, each morning, for you.
Trinkets to attract your playful spirit:
acorns carved into dice, hare-skulls,
glass like ice dyed sunset-color,
broken traps. For the animal
who cannot be caught unless it wills it.

White fox, I would hold you to me,
weigh us down and let the snow-mountain cover us.
Let the wide-footed bears pad overtop,
crushing snow into static blue ice.

In the dark, if I am careful -
if I set the trinkets just so,
if I do not light a candle
or open my eyes -,
your weight is like a man's.
Your skin, silky and shivering,
a woman's. You are no dumb beast
when your tongue rakes winter lightning
across me, nor when you hold me after,
warm against the air.

Later, I rise -
the nights are long here - and tend
the fire back to wakefulness.
I offer you the dark morning's
eggs, the salt fish.

You have padded to my feet,
you and your shock of white fur,
all dog again. In this form,
something blue-white shines
under your fur, like a snowbound sky.
I ruffle your ears, as if touching you
so lightly could pull that heart
and that light into my hand.

You tell me, with that rough and pointed
tongue: I am beautiful.
I am clever, to have captured a fox.
Watching that light in you,
I almost believe it: I am warm,
safe here with one who loves me;
this snow banked cottage is a circle
of enchanted grace. Everything white
and shining.

Will you stay? No.
Never.

Howling with the wind, I fall backwards
into powdered white. Watch the uncaring sky,
its green and rosy flickering lines,
until all tears have frozen
and my eyes close.

I am safe here in my fur-lined coat,
warm enough to sleep out the cold.
Scarf piling wool on my face,
I breathe warmly and deeply.
I dream:

My heart is scrubbed with blue-white frost,
glowing and clean. You did not bring it here.
You led me, mirrorlike, in fox-print circles
back to the soul that already
looked like yours.
I am beautiful, clever,
warm and safe and loved in this white world,
whether or not it is said
by a trickster's shining tongue.

There is no need to wait in the weeping wind.

In the morning, I set out your trinkets again."

--Ada Hoffmann

"In short: it was pretty much like watching a roving pack of sneevy, concave Harvard MBA’s in blue blazers go to the poorest public schools in town, slap kids around and take their shoes."

( via via @derekbeaulieu / via )

"Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath."

"constant wind
the icicles more curved
with each drip"

--an'ya

Black Hills.

"When a lighted candle is placed inside a hollowed-out pumpkin, the pumpkin will know it." --R A Lafferty

Harvest Time.

( via / via )

4ᴾ | DEAD LETTER OFFICE.

"I hate the slow apocalypse." --@saintsoftness

Medieval Bestiary.

1.
eclipse-dust & cloistered
clown's needle · succeeding
disappointments · Dantesque

ado traiks the lakebed
flooded with wraith roadkill

2.
switch lanes for less lurching
& lynch resting Grinchface
snarl-riddled cerulean

ran on a ghost planet
under devout oatmeal

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

( me / via )

Oppression and Liberty.

"The Time Beneath

In the premortuary tomb
Of ancient time--
Who does not lie there,
A mummy not yet born?
Who does not lie there,
Who lives?
Except mock-creatures in wild numbers
The upper air usurping
While the great dead still sleep?

But when the great dead at last live,
What are those deep worlds then?
When beauty rises from the blackened queens
And the lachrymatory vessels sparkle
With tears from unbound eyes
That grieve sinmcerely how they lay
Long closed?

They are the pit of future then,
Where cautious souls that never risked name
Lie down in ghastly triumph of will
And dream of grandeur never lost
To the ancient test of death."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

Continuum #152.

“It is closing-time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.”

― Cyril Connolly, 1950

Just some photos from my nightly forest walks.

( via / "Drone display in front of the United Nations in New York ahead of the March to #EndFossilFuels and #UNGA." via @luckytran on mastodon )

"The Origins of Woke features a perverse blend of academese and alt-right shitposting not because Hanania is a moron who can’t tell the difference between the two, but because he is trying to appeal to—and profit off of—both normie conservative elites and angry online mobs..."

"On all hands one is obsessed by a representation of social life which, while differing considerably from one class to another, is always made up of mysteries, occult qualities, myths, idols and monsters; each one thinks that power resides mysteriously in one of the classes to which he has no access, because hardly anybody understands that it resides nowhere, so that the dominant feeling everywhere is that dizzy fear which is always brought about by loss of contact with reality." --Weil, "Sketch of Contemporary Social Life"

The Good Host.

closing time
in the gardens of the West
bored snail in the interim

closing time
as i heft another tome
as i sift through reams of waste
closing time

in the gardens of the West

Impossible.

( via / via )

Created using a pipe.

this is not the muse
this is a call for justice

hunched deep in the secret maze
this is not the muse

one among many memos
no one knows whose the jest is
this is not the muse

this is a call for justice

Who's wearing the dunce cap now?

"Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well." --Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

Night Out.

( via / via )

SS-2.

"Thou hast a thousand names,
A thousand silent arts of injuring..."

--Mooney's Hosidius Geta

Pxlns 04.

"HYMN (Palindrome)

We dye
no hymn
in words.

Drab bards drown
in my honeydew."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Vivid memories of an uncertain past.

( via / via )

EDENFALL II.

1.
   turmeric
hum · fringed smokescreen
   ferries trowel
wistful scuttle
   shrift culver

2.
   steeply lost
from the main game
   in bought time

windshield snapshots
   can't capture
more than tumbling

   karst handouts
the mall empty
   came to see

   steeply lost
from the main game
   in bought time

3.
Jupiter or Venus
my porchlight shadow
stop sign down the street

picks up the brake lights' momentary glow

"Poz Outlooker" 🔭🌻.

"There is a certain element of the detective novel in the Mallarméan enigma: an empty salon, a vase, a dark sea--what crime, what enormous misadventure is indicated by these clues?" --Alain Badiou, Being and Event (tr O Feltham, 2005)

Buddha's Face.

( cardmember, 6-9-09 / via )

Blue Fire with Musical Harmony.

"Let us seem to speak
Or they will think us dead, revive us.
Nod brightly, Hour.
Rescue us from rescue."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

Interpenetrating cube-arrays on an invisible trampoline.

"SNOW-BED

Eyes, world-blind, in the fissure of dying: I come,
callous growth in my heart.
I come.

Moon-mirror rock-face. Down.
(Shine spotted with breath. Blood in streaks.
Soul forming clouds, close to the true shape once more.
Ten-finger shadow, clamped.)

Eyes world-blind,
eyes in the fissure of dying,
eyes eyes:

The snow-bed under us both, the snow-bed.
Crystal on crystal,
meshed deep as time, we fall,
we fall and lie there anbd fall.

And fall:
We were. We are.
We are one flesh with the night.
In the passages, passages."

--Hamburger's Celan

Bone blanket.

( via / via )

"I don’t remember how the conversation began; she declared in no uncertain terms that one thing alone mattered in the world today: the Revolution that would feed all the people on earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find a meaning for their existence. She looked me up and down: 'It is easy to see you have never gone hungry,' she said."

"returning home
from open ocean
a wanderer--
the wingspan shadow
of an albatross"

--an'ya

"The beauty of Venice...caused Jaffier to make the tough choice not to destroy the city." (--Hiroshima, not Kyoto.)

"Seminated the night, as though
there could be others, more nocturnal than
this one."

--Hamburger's Celan

"Her vintager’s (grape-gatherer) hat was presented to Ashford Borough Council by Monsieur Eugène Fleuré, a member of the Association for the Study of the Thoughts of Simone Weil, during the official naming of Simone Weil Avenue in Ashford on Friday, 8th July, 1983. The hat is now on permanent display at the Civic Centre in Tannery Lane."

( via / via )

"...I believed I could snatch something from Gass to make Barthes’s fast and loose tablet of mica sprout a more purposed glitter." (via @_ryanruby_)

"O, chaosists,

disintegratingly whisper..."

--Lissa Wolsak

"In her book Devotion (2017), the Francophile poet and punk-rock star Patti Smith described Weil as ‘an admirable model for a multitude of mindsets. Brilliant and privileged, she coursed through the great halls of higher learning, forfeiting all to embark on a difficult path of revolution, revelation, public service, and sacrifice'."

"STARS (Anagrammed Lines)

Stars in the sky:
Thirsty snakes.
Sky sirens that
skin the satyrs...."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Magic Book.

( via / via )

Ernie - the Herne shaman and Mare-E Mare the cunning mari lwyd.

"Ah, Quanta Melancolia"

So final seems this misery,
so final this bleak solitude
that starry wastes invade my soul
and I feel frozen and without
any echo in my heart.

What an anguish stripped of hope,
what grief that only tastes the end;
if nevermore returned the ship,
if in the street a blind man fell--
give it up, there’s nothing else.

Without content, without repose
not a single hour of mine
in which a soul finds full employment;
the blind man in the street succumbs,
the ship then dwindles out of sight.

So final seems this misery,
so final this bleak solitude
that starry wastes invade my soul
and I feel frozen and without
any echo in my heart.

--Fernando Pessoa (My tr.)

Un monstruo de mis sueños en otro mundo.

"When we are exiled from the order and unities of culture, language, ethnicity that make up the great smooth national narratives of history, we are cast out into a multicultural, multi-lingual, multiethnic 'non-nation', an empire that frustrates our need to narrate a descent from origins and forces us to confront the lyrical unevenness of our lives. This is a confrontation that from time to time, for good or for ill, we try hard to avoid. ...the medieval [is not] a moment of past time since transcended but [] a metaphor for a kind of [artistic] practice that defies the national culture paradigm." --Walter G Andrews. introductory essay to Ottoman Lyric Poetry (1997)

"Are there any other Roman mosaics that can equal the Chicken Man from @BradingVilla on the IOW or the wolf from Aldborough in Yorkshire?"

( via / via )

"The Greek has a fluidity of thought and syntax which in English has only been achieved by Milton."

"Neuroscientist Kiminobu Sugaya studied songbirds and found out that canaries stop singing every autumn when the brain cells responsible for song generation 'die'.

However, the neurons grow back over the winter months, and the birds learn their songs over again in the spring." --@zaharaesque

"While in South Africa, where Pessoa lived between 1896 and 1905, he sent another work to the Natal Mercury under the name of Charles Robert Anon, attempting without success to publish three political sonnets about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905." (via Mefi)

coolness, morning star, pale cerulean
ink glistens a second · windowflash turquoise

the last cicala
sizzling blue

that ocean when i got there
at times indeed shone azure

a message
in the paper's blooming Prussian blue

let Graywyvern delve
Döppler shift of the terrible oncoming

The Shakespeare of travesty.

( via / via )

Utopia or Planetoid Luzifer?

"YESTERDAY

Yesterday the wind came to the bush,
Knelt and prayed in the bush,
Bled on the briar as it danced
Its incantation, yesterday.

Yesterday we walked in sackcloth
To the water, you and I,
Shrouding the rude skeleton of thought
In rough-clothed whisper, yesterday.

Yesterday I knew you and I loved,
I loved the soft wave licking at your feet,
You running on the sand, the gentle scrape
Of you upon my breathing, yesterday.

And now this endless calm.
Today, tomorrow, a tiny bush enflamed;
The far dark whimper of the hearth
Away, a light, alas, and gone
The mercy of a gentle rain."

--Lorita Whitehead

"Bookshops will soon no longer sell books, but only book-adjacent gifts, book-related merch and subscription cards to ebook servers."

"...you get used to living among palimpsests." --The Recognitions

"What will these projects reveal about what we used architecture to do, to project, to signify? I’m afraid they’ll evince that we were happy to use architecture to reinforce our sense of powerlessness in the face of huge injustice, that we were happy to be complicit in the hollowing-out of the civic realm, that the best we could do was hold up the status quo with the language of gentleness." (via @saintsoftness)

( via via feuilleton / via )

The art of Jordan Belson.

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty." --Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

Tech_alley.

"Memoriter

Ovals of opal on dislustred seas,
Skyshine, and all that indolent afternoon
No clash of arms, no shouting on the breeze;
Only the reeds moaned soft or high their empty rune.

The paladins played chess and did not care,
The crocus pierced the turf with random dart.
Then twanged a cord. Through space, from Oultremer
That other arrow veered toward your heart."

--Charles Spear

Sidewalks and Skeletons live in 2015.

( via / via )

"We were spoofing the idea of the concept album, but in a fun way that didn’t totally mock it."

gilded age engorgement
a good thing "more pudding"
falls among amusing
mass noises & pastimes

of a shipwreck rapture

Portrait of gone-feral C3PO.

"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

Yellow, black & white-quake.

( via / via )

Worlds within worlds.

"It is ironical that very nearly everyone glorifies Rome and admires her as the civilizer of the human race, while at the same time very nearly everyone is filled with horror by the thought that a similar phenomenon [Hitler] might appear in our day." --Simone Weil (1939)

Galactic Insects.

the humans, in their wisdom,
find neighbor-foes to fight;
which does not stop them finding
closer bones to pick

for any kind of diff'rence
can be made to blame
the "enemy" bug is fruitful
& the outlook grim

but let it be the thinking
that makes the other strange
quick they clepe it crazy
& all your rights infringe

the Nazis left no symbol
like pink or yellow star
to stand for those autistics
they hastened to destroy

but we're still puzzle-people
a syndrome to prevent
to torture into faking
as otherwise unfit

& made an insult wider
than public'lly we're known
first plied with pills when younger
then after, cast alone

to ponder this jerk circus
from a distant planet's remove
the only ones of the clownfolk
who weren't told how to live

Wizard & bubbles.

( via / via )

Dream waterfall.

         "X.

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
   Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
   Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
   One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
   Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
   Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
   Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
   To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
   Fare on our long fool's errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
   My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
   We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
   To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
   Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
   Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
   Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

--A E Housman, Last Poems (1922)

"I’m not sure I have a stable identity—or perhaps it only emerges through an engagement with language."

"Each being cries in silence to be read otherwise. Not to be deaf to these cries." --notebooks of Simone Weil

"And so black folk know the name of at least one black poet."

( via / via )

The history of wearable feelings and other sentient garments.

"We cannot know if there would have been a Romanesque science. If there had been, no doubt it would have been to our own what Gregorian chant is to Wagner." --Simone Weil

SB #3.

street so torn up
   i must take
no better luck
   for this scornful ape

   happy to carp
or offer critique
   as the sky grows dark
& the plight deep

"What inspired you to create a graphic novel using AI?