Death

"And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink."

--From "Aubade" by Philip Larkin, 1977.
Larkin died in 1985.

"Out of ten nights dedicated to work by young men, seven are spent in sleep."

--Balzac, Old Goriot

Golden Boys, and Girls All Must

Like Scrap-Yard Trucks Find Hoes to Crush

Like Hungry Squirrels Find Nuts to Bust

Leave Worms and Birds a Feast of Guts

KEYWORDS: Cars; Criminals; Drugs; Mutes

(Denis Johnson's 1988 story "Two Men", ' abstracted' for searchability at the New Yorker online. The story was later published as part of Jesus' Son.)

"Story about three men, the narrator and his companions Tom and Richard on a night when they encounter two other men. These three aren't exactly friends, but they hang out together and commit petty crimes together. One night they left a dance after the narrator was caught kissing a woman whose boyfriend, Caplan, he was afraid of. They found a man asleep in the backseat of his car; the man seemed to be a deaf-mute. They agreed to take him home, but the woman in the first house that he directed them to wouldn't let him in. The narrator worried that Caplan was chasing him to hurt or kill him. The second place they go is empty They then go for a long way out into the country and find a third house. They hear jazz playing, and inside are a woman wearing a bra and skirt, a large black man, and a college man with a beer mug the size of a wastebasket.. It turns out that the deaf-mute's name is Stan, he used to be a football player, and he isn't a deaf-mute. However, they are all "encouraged" to leave and the three friends take off. Stan runs alongside the car, but finally lets go of the door handle when he runs into a stop sign. On the way back in to town the narrator sees a man who sold him some bad drugs at a gas station. They chase him and find his car parked, empty, behind an apartment house. They find the right apartment, but he isn't there. They terrorize the woman who is there even though she says she doesn't know where he is. The narrator enjoys the feeling that the man and woman are afraid of him."

"North on Rte 1"

If it is proper to speak of an eternity for anything,
--And it is, I think--
Then I would bet it's like
Looking out across a cold pond.
More like this than like some mountains.
The only foundation of permanence is,
Probably, that stuff has to be forgotten.
--What color trash, wrappers near the road.

Totally pleasant yellow grass wet in the sun.
--Yeah but who fuckin knows.
The only question is, Does it make sense at last,
The wholesomeness offered in nature but withheld.
The scum all over everything.

FROM FACTS TO MEANS (instance to Idea)

“What Wikipedia is not”

1) Wikipedia and the fantasy of infinite recourse: all from one to all

The first proto-Wikipedia article, written by accredited knowledge experts. The lure and mythos of “scholarship”: we believe in history, facts, technological record, which distinguishes our epoch. There is no “dreamtime,” only privacy (the things in our private thoughts and records. We believe others have a private truth for themselves and a private existence.)

2) ‘Techno ugg’ Arthur and Marilouise Kroker- the nihilism of technology and the will to blah blah blah about the revolutionary new future, just crap and erotic lure of destiny, fumes of the Pythoness

3) James Wood- Don DeLillo replaces religious transcendence with, the same thing...

4) The central idea of the novel: everyone’s life is a chronological sequence, you must sit down and live through it this way, from beginning to end, through reflection and recycling: the record of how days on earth, walking around as a unit of life, is spent. Everyone fulfills the same conditions and lives in the same requirements: these are not vague or poetically general, but rich and specific: evolved from lower primates-lives in a language world-needs riches and peer attention to thrive-has curiosity and thirst for wisdom but is in darkness-born from woman, dies: dies before human history has ended. Lives with animals and bugs inside them and outside them. Processes heat, seeks sex and wants pleasure and comfort. Stimulated and repulsed by the universe, which is perhaps hostile to life, an unsupportable aberration.

The (punchline) Anecdote as the smallest unit of compression. And then the Day, as in “Today I repeated my usual duty, then met my needs, and thought of redemption.”

5) The right to block people from walking and seeing. (If I want to walk somewhere, the geographical point where my motives are questioned, my body is restrained, and I am in danger from the Enemy. The warzone civilians stay out of.)

The right to kill- the final arbitration; in the name of transcending principle. “I have spent my days Killing, with the hope that others may live..” XX

The totality of wanting to relax and have a City of God on Earth, but probably that isn’t possible and in history it’s been called blasphemous, which represses certain biological urges to secure peace and love for the family.

The Western idea of leisure and the surplus which creates culture and stockpiles abstract thought in an archive.

(To define wisdom as “resistance to reality” vs conformation; requires a position first as Enemy, an adversarial position that you have to declare based on deep intuition. “This isn’t Wikipedia data in an indexed public archive, it is a determined form of social life, where injustice creates oppositions” - the poetry of thirsting, hungering for justice)

To stay aware of division, in the “optimism of the will,” versus to stay lost in lifeyness, the dream of homo ludens and the ‘obvious scenario,’ the winnable contest: at what point in one’s life history do you begin to consider this choice, with any conviction?

Speaking to our friends, even in lying we give over a greater truth.

Gloats on Camp

The "Prologue" to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography, written 1956.

"WHAT I HAVE LIVED FOR.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy -- ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness -- that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what -- at last -- I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

'In the scene before Prince Andrei's coffin... where Tolstoy uses the past tense of the verb "to weep" (plakat') no less than seven times, Pevear and Volokhonsky are the only translators not to flinch from using "wept" throughout: Garnett says "cried" four times and "wept" three; Louise and Aylmer Maude say both words three times each, omitting one verb altogether; Edmonds has "wept" four times and "cried" thrice; while Anthony Briggs says "wept" five times, omits one verb, and then breaks the repetition with "gave way to tears."'

--"Tolstoy's Real Hero," Orlando Figes, NYRB

The Rainbow of His Will

Here, a counterpoint to Charles Altieri (one "encounters the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning, which is perhaps the result of all pursuits of sheer lucidity."). Augustine has a long intellectual conversation with his dying mother and undergoes a transforming epiphany, recorded in Confessions:

“If fleshly importuning were to fall silent, silent all shapes of earth, sea, air; silent the celestial poles; silent the soul, moving (oblivious of self) beyond the self; silent, as well, all dreams and shallow visions, all words and other signs, silent everything that passes away, all those things that say, if one listens, ‘We did not make ourselves, He made us who never passes away’; if, after saying this, they too were silent, though alerting us to hear the One who made them; and if He should speak, no longer through them but by Himself, for us to hear His word not as that is relayed by human tongue or angel’s voice, not in cloudy thunder or confused meditation, but if we harkened to Him we love in other things without those other things (as even now we strain upward and, in a mind’s blink, touch the ageless wisdom that outlasts all things else), and if this were made constant, all lesser vision falling away before it, so that this alone held the universe in its grip, in its enfoldment and its glad hidden depths, and eternal life resembled this moment of wisdom that we sigh to be losing—would that not be what is meant by the words ‘Enter the joy of your God’?—a joy that will be ours when?—only when all things rise (though not all are changed)?”

"Pizza Girl"

I was on the phone with a friend. I could hear my daughter’s TV program in the other room. My friend was saying her husband was acting funny around her. I was telling her that from a man’s perspective she shouldn’t worry. I had the newspaper open to the classifieds and I was circling ‘Driver Wanted’ ads. I specially starred jobs where the listing said ‘Previous Experience Not Necessary’. My friend’s husband had been on long business trips but my instinct was that they weren’t affairs. Was something else the matter? When the doorbell rang I put the phone down to answer it.

The pizza delivery boy turned out to be a girl of about eighteen with dark hair pulled back. Her face was beautiful and honest. My wife and I were separated although not divorced. Still, I knew I shouldn’t linger over the girl’s face and body. But when I paid for the pizzas and the box down she stepped into the house, saying, ‘Are these Rothko?’ They were just hobbyist paintings my wife had liked. They came from an upstate craft fair where my daughter had gotten a bad bee sting. I said,

‘Yes, do you like his work?’

She smiled at the two prints. Her nose wrinkled. She told me she loved art and that she was learning to paint. Her keys jangled from a clamp on her belt loop. Sylvia, my daughter, opened the pizza box without noticing the delivery girl. We smiled and said good night to each other.

That Saturday I went to the car show by myself, which is one of my activities when Sylvia is with her mother. The pizza girl and her boyfriend were there looking at cars. We passed each other along a row and she saw my face. As I was leaving, we bumped into each other. ‘Thanks for the tip, that made my night,’ she said. They were there for the record show next door. They came to look at the car show because, what the hell. Today, she wore just a little makeup around her eyes. She was tall enough that her mouth came to my chest.

She left to grab something and there we were, myself, a forty-two-year-old man with no steady income and a pending divorce, balding and maybe getting an issue with my prostate, and Greg Pinzcek, her boyfriend, who turned out to be the son of a realtor I had done graphic design work for the previous year, an honest and even-tempered guy I might get more business from. But if I ever turned on the computer in my study I would have to look at the iPhoto CD my old college roommate Geoff had mailed to me in March, The images all showed the co-ed I went with and was in love with when Geoff and I roomed together, only she was a porn actress now, breast implants, hard-core. For four weeks I hadn’t entered the study. I was behaving irrationally.

Greg was out of high school but didn’t have college plans. He was going to tour with his band around Essex County, then for the summer rent a house on the shore. He had a broad, guileless forehead with freckles at the edges.

‘Look at her, man’, he said as we watched the pizza girl, ‘she asks everybody every single question that pops into her head.’

‘She’s great,’ he was saying. ‘She just doesn’t really get me. She thinks I’m some kind of burn-out because I don’t want to go right back to school,’ he laughed.

I said, ‘You know what, Greg, she really likes you, and that’s what’s important when you’re your age, she’ll stick by you.’ I liked that we were speaking intimately. ‘I can tell you’re somebody who’s going to follow his dream no matter what, and if she really cares about you she’ll be behind you.’ I never spoke to my daughter this way.

Recognizing the record under his arm, I said ‘You’re probably not going to believe it but I went to see that band in New York City. They used to play at a place called 7A.”

“No shit, I mean...”

“No shit. Actually, coming home on the train back, that’s where I met my wife.”

“You married?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, Chrissie. She’s with my daughter right now.”

He was studying an engine for a long time, and finally said, “If I ever got married I’d want to know everything about life first. To know, like, what I was missing.”

“That’s how I felt, too,” I said.

He glanced over his records and we saw the pizza girl approaching. “Because, like, I could never give up certain things, I feel like,” he said.

"Catena" (Mark)

Some hustler, one of the young wriggling newts of the New York art world, had coaxed Mark into sub-letting the cabin in the Adirondacks, where the newt had been keeping a studio through the summer and early fall. Mark had nowhere else in particular to go. There was no heat in the cabin and so Mark slept outside. There was nothing left to eat after three days and he had no provision for a ride to town. He dug up a last paint-flecked vodka handle and cradled it in his sleeping bag while dusk turned into night and the trees stood apart to let a chill breeze through. His body fell asleep inside a film of what seemed like July grease, and his sleepy mind troubled itself with recollected fragments of the lost summer. There was a pond in the clearing before the cabin, and he had spent the morning stagnating goldenly. At twilight an owl had flown out of the pines at the pond’s edge and given a sad cry, which was like a piercing call-to-arms.

He imagined taking out each perfect organ one by one, drawing each sphere or sac out through his navel, his pearlescent darlings, wiping them all around with a soft clean lens cloth, caring for them. Wiping each soft sphere clean of ichor and gently returning it to its foxhole beneath his ribs. (xx) His guts swam like fish through rotten logs. The fish spine, the smell of life. The ticklish pulse of piscine life, the glimmer of fish in an overgrown pond. Then all of a sudden it’s September. There’s all this ragged fiber and no rope to make a knot with. Miss Catena, her day-lit shoulders newly freckled, prods the sleepy, ropy form in its fish daze. He dreams on about snow in August, puns in the tabloid headlines about the aberrant weather and what it could mean for the commuter.

Mark came around again. A dog was barking, far off. He felt Catena nearby, peeing along the bank of the pond, obscured by reeds, clouds on the moon, low-shadowing pine boughs. There was a soft odor of urea and new menstrual blood rising through the golden, stagnant smell of choked aqueous dirt. He rolled over in his sleeping bag and studied the dark shape of the pond edge. He was drunk and the white moon reflected on the water’s surface fell and fell away each time he fixed it in his vision, like a hail of meteors streaking earthward. He rolled on to his back. There was the moon itself, if this was the real one, bobbing like somebody was rolling it around with a computer mouse, and there was no Catena. He closed his eyes again and wished for a great fish-hook to fall down and catch him up by the lip and reel him into the murmuring mountain clouds. He remembered the last time he had checked his email, the note from “CATENA & ALEX” and the jpeg he had opened, without really wanting to, and it had shown them cuddling under the doodle-scripty announcement. It didn’t change anything but what was the use of lying? It changed everything about the summer, because he had waited for her while she experimented with him, and now the summer had turned out not to be a wait after all, but a long empty time that he had spent drinking and getting high. It was dazzling how magnanimous she must be thinking she was, thinking she was going to invite him, and Alex was going to joke together with him, and they were going to be a bunch of cool friends like once upon a time, it was so dazzling, it defied credulity and it dazzled him.

Mark thrashed out of the sleeping bag and crawled to the bank of the pond to vomit. The crackers and vodka came up swiftly, tingled in his eyes and nose, splashed like frogs around the reeds. There was moonlit floating scum, sending a warm vapor up. He found himself standing up with his forehead propped into a tree trunk and he tried to pee. Only a tiny drip. He had dehydrated himself. Fragrant pine needles were in his mouth and he bit some to chew, that would freshen him. Like the gum. He hadn’t brushed his teeth in three days. He wasn’t wearing shoes; was he wearing socks? There was a bright light hitting him from the left side. He turned his head and blinded himself. There were voices, how many?

“What are you doing, man?” A car was idling. Daniel was coming down the hill at him and his form blocked the car lights, Mark couldn’t see his face. He tried to zip his fly and saw puke shining on his fleece. “Jesus Christ, you have like a bad trip?” Daniel’s big dark head came right up in front of him and a bird squawked.

“I’m fine, I got a little sick,” said Mark. “I got a little sick... I was laying here and I don’t know what happened, I started feeling...”

“Felt like yackin?” said Daniel.

“Looks bad?” said Mark. He brushed one of the stains with his sleeve.

“Looks like you’re not having a good camping trip man. Do you want a ride out of here? I got my car over there. It’s fuckin cold.”

There was still a wind. Mark fought the urge to hug himself. The surface of the pond was skittering. He wondered if there was food in the cabin. On the hill, the car’s interior light went out.

“Who all’s in the car?”

“Alex.”

Mark unzipped his fleece and dropped it in the leaves. Daniel craned his neck at the car. “Come on, man, leave your stuff here. We’ll come back. We’ll go fishing tomorrow.”

“Can’t,” said Mark, “it’s my sister’s birthday.”

“Come on. Get the sleeping bag. Get that stuff.” Daniel moved to pick up the sleeping bag, rolled the glistening bottle with his boot, then rushed back as Mark fell to his knees. “Hey. Hey. Hey. We’re gonna go for a drive, man, okay?”

“Can’t fuckin go,” said Mark. Daniel got an arm under his shoulder, began hoisting him, and gave a loud whistle. “Can’t fuckin go.” The car’s interior lit blinked on again. Mark cursed louder and louder until he coughed. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve as Daniel walked him up the hill in the headlights. Mark wasn’t wearing shoes or socks and his feet had gone numb and felt small.

“You’re being an idiot man. This is a bad vacation. Why don’t we go to your sister’s house and we can chill out there for a while. We’ll go for a drive, okay?”

Alex wore a thick flannel overshirt and a deerstalker cap with black furry muffs. He was moving junk out of the back seat. There was a pile of records and a bicycle wheel on the road by the car. Alex straightened up and offered his gloved hand to Mark, who leaned over to help so that Alex and Daniel had to stand him back up again and chuckle. “Looks like you had a bad camping trip, man. You feel okay?” said Alex.

“I think I probably drank to much and it’s fucking freezing,” Mark tried to say, but ‘fucking’ came out as a squeak and his teeth chattered involuntarily. Alex’s big blue eyes were shining with sympathy as he leaned a little to look at Alex. “Are you gonna be okay to ride?” Mark looked at the bicycle wheel and the empty cassette boxes. There was a Palmcorder and a tripod with stickers on it. Finally he nodded.

“Mark’s driving,” said Daniel. The trunk slammed.

Alex patted Mark on the arm. “I’m gonna call your sister,” he said slowly.

Music

“Swallow reality/ Belch the truth” -Wayne

"Ours is a time in which every intellectual or artistic or moral event gets absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing. Any statement or act can be assessed as a necessarily transient 'development' or, on a lower level, belittled as mere 'fashion'. The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achievements that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth."

--Susan Sontag, writing in 1968, apropos of a philosophical work published in 1956 (E.M. Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist).

‘FATALLY’: this means that, for the dwindling crowd of readers for whom philosophy is a means to an end and not a diversion, the birth of a new thought is a milestone in the history of futility and sorrow, like the birth of a man in Ecclesiastes. The real keynote of Sontag’s appraisal comes later. Regarding the ‘transvaluation’ of historical thinking, she proposes the following course:

“Perhaps... one must look to those thinkers, like [John] Cage, who—whether from spiritual strength or spiritual insensitivity is, to speak bluntly, a secondary issue—are able to jettison far more of the inherited anguish and complexity of this civilization... For relief, it may be that one must abandon the pride of knowing and feeling so much—a local pride that has cost everyone hideously by now.” She cites Cage’s Silence: “Error is a fiction, has no reality in fact. Errorless music is written by not giving a thought to cause and effect.”

Today, music owns this territory indisputably. Music is the form easiest to achieve effects in: if you line up two words, or two lines in space, they will be dead in the water without an effort of contextualization, on the part of the artist, or reflection, on the part of the audience. But if you play two notes in harmony your audience will be gratified.

‘Whether from spiritual strength’—the clause’s ungainly nesting above betrays its primacy. The drug rap braggadocio of musicians like Lil Wayne can claim, in our era, a unique profundity and scope. And spiritual strength isn’t exactly the name for what force vouchsafes this music. Because Wayne, for example, isn’t afraid to rope together the most divergent, bizarre sentiments over a few supremely confident bars, his songs are able to impose a world of indescribable power and authority under the sign of a speaker’s tone, a tone of studied and flawless effortlessness. The art of the most capable, most charismatic rappers transmutes death itself into punch lines; the easy authority of the gangsta rapper’s technique renders the speaker’s persona inviolable, like the narrator of the Iliad who was given to describe the most shocking derangements of human beings in love and at war.

When we are truly at war—fighting the wars we were born to fight—spiritual error is a fiction. The gods excuse every excess. Violence, then, like music, has a law of its own. But is this the way forward, following the path of the gulliest musicians (spiritual insensitivity) and the most jaded (‘strength’)? The pleasures of music are certainly one great, turbulent affinity between Sontag and her subject. Among other forms of culture, Cioran may have had music in mind when he characterized Western history: “Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming.” Like Cioran, who hoped that the punishment for believing in the truth of great music was to burn forever in its flame, Sontag was an ardent, if anxious devotee. In a year-end wrap-up in her diary, she recorded that a particular moment spent listening to the Beatles had been the year’s most profoundly moving experience. And so a synthetic resolution must wait for a discerning reader of both. Can music (and the question concerns pop music in particular) be construed as a part of ‘life’, or do we consign it to the cesspool of hedonistic escapes, with sex, drugs, etc.? Music seems like bondage. (I was intrigued by athletes who compete with music blasting. Why doesn’t it throw you off, how do you reconcile it with your efforts to dominate at any tempo? And soldiers who raid cities with music blasting. Why doesn’t rap music distract you from efficiently killing people?)

The bait set for Western man, the terminal counsel, is: “Relax and tap your feet to the music.” What if there is no music?

You get sucked back into these preposterous proofs.

1. The Absolute is eternal.
2. In its historical manifestations, the Absolute has material qualities.
3. We enjoy a finite amount of time in which to figure out how our material lives should be spent.
4. Our decisions affect the Absolute.

This sequence can abort right there because it triggers a bodily response: an “ukkhh” noise, like hacking a pretend hairball. One starts pretend-drumming bass and ride-cymbal with one’s hands. Music is bondage. In my bondage I know nothing but the truth, I feel nothing but the sirocco of truth.

What they were playing in STARBUCKS one morning while I tried to read:

The Smiths—Radiohead—Dave Matthews—The woman from Morcheeba—Morrissey—The Beatles—Nancy Sinatra—Vintage Blues—Vintage Bluegrass—‘Bootleg’ Bob Dylan—Alanis Morissette

I Cannot Read, and Therefore Wish All Books Were Burnt

"FAUSTUS. Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon?/ Are all celestial bodies but one globe,/ As is the substance of this centric earth?"

Biography

"I have latterly become intolerably repulsive to myself... Had I been persistent in my desire for women I should have had success and reminiscences. Had I been consistent in continence I should have been proudly tranquil."
--Tolstoy, diary June 25, 1853 (tr. Aylmer Maude)

It can seem to me that my mind is entirely full of gray shit, and that nothing more can go in. It lies quivering like a section of dark Jell-O with dust on the surface, collecting, blowing, twinkling.

2 from Boris Pasternak's memoir Safe Passage, pub. 1949 (tr Babette Deutsch):

• "I agreed that formlessness is more complex than form. That an unguarded volubility seems attainable because it is empty. That spoilt by the emptiness of trite patterns we take just that exceptional copiousness coming after long desuetude for the mannerisms of form."

• "The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers."
  

(Regan) "Spull Point"

She is too tired to pry open her mind, too funny about its little mussel moistness.
My life is so difficult, she thinks. But it would be very easy if I became stronger.
She is out on a sand spit in a salt marsh, the tide beckons to her.
Three white wading birds track fish in the grasses. Snails sleep in the mud. I stay still to watch the birds stand so alert, and because when I walk I get more sand in my running shoes. I try saying, Nature, come to me and stir me up. Snap me up like a shining fish. Consolidate me.

If there is a force of nature who makes sense of imprecations like this one, then it is content to bide its time until the day comes to snap her. Now the wind drives rows of tiny waves against each other.

NUMBERING THE PROBLEMS I THINK ABOUT EVERY DAY IN ORDER TO FINALLY MOVE PAST THIS OBSESSIVE, SOPHOMORIC CATECHIZIN

(They said, ‘You must find your path to a fulfilling life!’ But I was distracted by the impression that life had different details in it.)

A man reads a book in a chair while guns blaze.

Two fates cross paths: mine, and the fate of the man I did not comfort.

I used to be sharper because I read harder things. I had been on some journey. I set out with the soul of my wit and made my home in all of these white worlds of prose, that coruscated and hummed to me. They made a mobile galaxy. I was the demiurge who said how good it was. I was always feverish and I mumbled.

At eighteen I was already overwhelmed by the condition of being, and I wrote in order to turn aside the onrushing future. Then my father died, other events pushed in to catch me up to speed. I never felt at home again with a blank piece of paper. I did other things for a while and in some ways developed myself.

When I write I am always, already, contaminated with other social needs, and tuned to a crowd of voices: imaginary modeled voices of my friends and peers; and of my enemies, people from whom I have demanded judgment, who I’m always on trial before, until I can pronounce on their behalf, ‘That’s just the naïve, shallow, lazy thing he’d offer us.’ That’s just the getaway you could have expected him to make: from the threat of a blank page, into a blind alleyway of selfish amusements or petty agonies.

That is a paragraph, and it gives me a voice with broad appeal. I say this for no-one, and the paragraph abides un-disseminated. The casual reading ego offers to my paragraph its trite retort, which is the concept of self-esteem in the system of American fulfillment and social health. I can worry about my self-esteem. (I can sleep with women, I can ask for more than I deserve, I can challenge my friends to top me.) But from my senses and my intellect I still want new knowledge, and if I am patient, my private faculty which explores, looking to describe and narrate, will draw up behind the roil of reflexes which receives: praise, rebukes, aggression, attention.

Now, as I meditate gingerly (with scorn for my frailty rising), leaving my first intended topic to linger at harbor, I am approached by my own thoughts. There are so many more than there used to be, when I was eighteen, and they are more recognizably epochal, more banal. They repeat themselves, and whine like bells in a slot machine. I have permitted myself to play out my consciousness, and win a little, lose a little. I have let my time slip away. I think of women on telephones: who might call me, who might boost me with their alien weather and affection. Who is with me in this circle of Purgatory: us who went about things the wrong way, got teased in middle school, and became self-conscious and emotionally diagonal. My dog is barking like mad in his sleep. The sound comes out as a little beep like a sneaker squeaking. I’m alone with my cultural inheritance and the chugging of these so-called mitochondria.

And so, I wonder: Can I write again with feeling and style? Or is it a lie, is it sealed off, and I’m lonely for music, addictions, lust, parties, camaraderie. Brotherhood, a father.

(I guess it is a lie. A sargasso sea around me.)

Sing, muse.

I have found the time to be alone. Only my dream of civilization is here, in a white roil, like a bathroom after your shower. People speak into my mind, but not with tidings, and so I slip low-down and try to nest like the newt close by a cool brook that rushes the pollutants away and carries home my food and drink, and my bundled recollections: reflected in water they have a milder character.

Don’t rush with the stream. Don’t form plans, or let sentences fall on their feet and slink away. Observe the quality of mind which is most alarming: that mind is like an oily shark steak into which something has sliced. Where is the fat, and where is the clean spur of pearly bone? Ask your questions. What do you draw from the sheath when the day is dead.

Mind is a direction, and you think the truth has no direction.

Mind is a presence, and you think the truth is absent and mystical, as though we saw through a glass darkly.

Mind is an appetite for aggrandizement, and you think the truth is allied to coldness, to incorruptible serenity of a permanent stillness beyond God, where nothing but thought would dare to go.

Finally, mind is truth, where you think the final truth is an eye put out with a burning brand.

You are attracted to the sweetness that reposes in a void, where we will no longer be made to endure. You hope for the best (a library) but cherish the worst (death, like life, is an accident in an accidental universe). Every day, you should pull yourself out of bed and set to smoldering with the sun under the heat of your appetite for true texture. Every night, under new moon and full moon, you should fall asleep resigned to die in a nameless shrug of pitiless, dwindling reactions.

‘God make me a vaulted tomb to rest in,’ you say.

‘God bite me in the belly, and rend my guts like a hind,’ you importune.

‘Bother me, strew my belongings,’ you say.

‘Unseat me. Disabuse me, and rake me over fires.’

‘Uncouple my sureties and blaze on me the signal that men die away.’

Blood drops from me in licks before I break.

I see it on the floors of days and recognize its taste: warm and multiple, like poetry. (xxx) The time itself passes through me before I can smell or touch it, and I fat in secret on spilled fluids from other creatures. Only my cell phone and my email account are active; for the rest of the white galaxy, I see slumbering forms like soldiers curled up on a killing field.

‘Fulfillment’: I am condemned. I am in on the forbidden secret of experience—that is, I move about in a sensual, deadly world—but I am locked out of truth, which would have to be constituted of an assumption of all subjectivities, and beyond these, of all universal activity, sub specie aeternitatis. I wish to know why I have to suffer, but moreover, why I have the words to form unanswerable, painful questions about my condition. (‘It’s a sad side-effect,’ they might say. ‘Words are symbolic. You may pretend that they thresh truths from falsehood.

‘Why do you chortle, “I know I will die?” You do not know what it means, “to die,” and so you let your guts speak for you. You are guilty all over, with the fallen-ness of your many words for qualities.’)

You are seduced by the incantatory:

You do not easily proceed.

Are you bored by your repetitions?

The heart beats a repetition.

Every day you shit.

Every day you can die forever.

Every day you can ignore and do violence to anything you have learned. You can burn all your journals and forget how to read. You can become brain-damaged. Then you will only be a very sad story (maybe a powerful tragedy if your philosophical efforts seem muscular enough). You hunt nuance, to get around the plain speech of cultural inheritance.

You are seduced by the incantatory. The poet confides, “We share sex, we share death, we share the speechless dread between the stars. Can I sing for you?”

“The future is full of people you care about,” that is the premise of writing. When you say ‘contaminated by the social,’ this is the reactionary expression of a fear, born out of past exposure to the painful side of social life. I make myself approvable, want to be liked, I want to use the speech of my companion to put him at ease and kindle him, so I can please myself by liking him, as we like ourselves more and more and spark together in effortless conversation. But I react to a fear of appearing a clown, prick, or dupe, or worse, an outsider, and master my will until it ripens into a self that others expect every day, and I expect it every day. Then they offer me ‘creative self-expression’. ‘I do not wish to make art,’ I snarl. ‘I do not wish to make a poem. I am the convexity left from the impress of an absent poem, and I know there is no poem.’

Whom do you address, when you write in confidence? After a few hours of catechizing, time will trickle, like water. The future is crowded with readers, offspring of yours, who are in on the joke with you. (You can think of a thousand different terms to describe something, or a thousand different categories to put it in to!) Someone will receive the burden of your mysteries, like a box of non-poisonous snakes. There will be quiet, you will imagine sound.

A Life of Fantasy, or, Fantasy Come to Life

"Franz Kafka gave me a short essay on Soren Kirekegaard by Carl Dallago. He said on this occasion:
'Kierkegaard faces the problem, whether to enjoy life aesthetically or to experience it ethically. But this seems to me a false statement of the problem. The Either-Or exists only in the head of Soren Kierkegaard. In reality one can only achieve an aesthetic enjoyment of life as a result of humble ethical experience. But this is only a a personal opinion of the moment, which perhaps I shall abandon after closer inquiry. '"

--Gustav Janouch

A Place to Grope to

There is no voice that approaches bone as close as the voice of the disembodied ghost, who has not yet learned to live.

In learning to live, we break with the written record, which is a record of failures to act, and march in the footsteps of Jesus, who wrote nothing, or the Emperor, whose speech occasioned a condition of emergency. We are like a crying baby, which is supposed to make one of the sounds most discomforting to the human ear.

More from the philosopher: "It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future."

Isn't it helpful as a stylist to be able to stipulate, "in the fresh sense of the word"? Writing should be taken fresh by someone with fresh starry eyes, like the lovers in Frank O'Hara's poem "A Pleasant Thought From Whitehead," about how awesome it is to love writing poetry.

In desperation, we look over pages of print. Nothing "pops out," like a magazine pull-quote, nothing "rings a bell," like a helpful prompt from an acquaintance. Only this, in an old essay on T.S. Eliot's mature poetry: "Imagining characters whose feelings are insubstantial or puzzling to themselves, the poet moves swiftly--and often too swiftly--from asking what these feelings are worth on the plane of personal living to asking what their status is in relation to the absolute. In the long run the feelings are left even emptier than at first."

Presently, everyone is allowed to choose the dissipation that suits him best. If it wasn't for art, I'd just be a fucked-up person who was in other respects regular. Since I did discover a while back that there is indeed a written record, it has been weighing me down and forcing me into unusual contortions of spirit. I have felt grateful for the tragedies and disillusionments in my private life because they made me a better reader. 'Help me build this o so exquisite bridge.' In a letter to his newly-divorced wife on May 26, 1973, Lowell wrote "It's a desolate thought that all I have from the past is grandpa's gold watch and some fifteen books." That is super-desolate, and his grandfather thought he was an embarassment to the family. Charles Altieri wrote on "Skunk Hour" that "[the narrator] encounters the ultimate nothingness or absence of meaning, which is perhaps the result of all pursuits of sheer lucidity." That's super-desolate, too! But during a phone chat, when my friend and I decided that this was the result, it was more like a piece of badinage and we recuperated easily. It depends on whether one is using 'lucidity' in the 'fresh' sense. Everyone is allowed to choose the dissipation, the exculpation, the disability, that gets him past this result and back on the phone or back in the restaurant, a little out of breath, to resume the chat.

Facts, Dreams, Events, Whatever

Speech to no one in particular, thoughts while flossing my teeth, hollow sounds of the voices of people not present, imagined, impassioned conversations carried on over minutes and hours in self-imposed seclusions, whispered soliloquies, muttered apologies, rhapsodic expostulations to nobody, unraveled and generously footnoted in a spirit of complete contrition, manic crescendos of second-guessing, culminating in strangled self-doubt, or in arch comedy, or in professions of meek good faith, or in episodes of variously directed and fully impotent desire: to make clear, to lay out, to endorse, to proscribe, to communicate with fresh terms the strange triangulations that lead mens' minds in their loneliness to grope for clues to their history and destiny.

"When I was working on Life Studies," Robert Lowell says, "I found I had no language or meter that would allow me to approximate what I saw or remembered. Yet in prose I had already found what I wanted, the conventional style of autobiography and reminiscence. So I wrote my autobiographical poetry in a style I thought I had discovered in Flaubert, one that used images and ironic or amusing particulars." (Hamilton)

This is the introductory phase, in literature, of a long and weary farce: the contamination of literary discourse by the half-conscious whimsy and chat that ordain our lives, as social beings, like the points of a compass.

Jonathan Raban noted the ugly side-effects of this liberty in Lowell's revisions.
"[H]is poem on Flaubert ended with Flaubert dying, and in the first draft it went 'Till the mania for phrases dried his heart' --a quotation from Flaubert's mother. Then Cal saw another possibility and it came out 'Till the mania for phrases enlarged his heart.'"

Another critic, responding in 1974 to The Dolphin, imagined the poet summarizing his working method: "Here are the facts, dreams, events, whatever; I present them; they are unimportant, incomprehensible, and boring."

Here I am compelled to record that I searched on the internet for more writing on "robert lowell flaubert". But having accidentally searched Merriam-Webster instead of Google, the only result I got was the suggestion "reprehensibilities".

So without quite knowing what, I move to share.






Hospital in Bridgeport where Lowell was treated after US entered World War II

Ultima Thule on Nine Dollars a Day

"Now, it may be intolerable to believe that when the angels were created, some were created without being giving foreknowledge of their perseverance or fall, while others were given full and genuine assurance of the eternity of their bliss.... Every Catholic Christian knows that no new Devil will ever come in the future from the ranks of the good angels, just as he knows that the Devil will never return to the fellowship of the good angels."
City of God, XI: 13

"As If you Could Kill Time Without Injuring Eternity"

(Thoreau)

Eternity is the enemy that has gotta die for human beings to live in accord with reason.
The one thing I don't want outliving me is eternity.
As soon as one bad thought or one miserable soul is permitted to hang on until it secures a home in that sweaty, black abyss, they all will.

This will seem like 'ad plures ire' but in practice it will be the same as waiting forever for a train while a baby cries and a disordered person weeps and a sick old man coughs.

And on the other hand. Why can't we be at home in death? "There is no death," Ivan Ilyich said to himself. Our lives would definitely be better.

I myself would be kinder to people I met, and if Tolstoy is not to be the cause in me of any practiced kindness, at least he's the cause of some ruminations on kindness. Kindness also gives you the sense of 'ad plures ire', because all kind people imagine themselves in a smug conspiracy with the universe and the universe's eternal promise of healing and renewal. This promise of healing and this conspiracy constitute a bond between human beings which reaches past religion, but not quite to the threshold of reason. It loops.

"Green Box Cutter" (Mark)

It was night and I was alone on the first floor. Who is outside, I thought. I went to the window. There was his face, looking in. He was bald and his head shone. I recoiled and went to the interior of the house. My sense of having any special personal situation ended, and there began an impersonal situation which contained me inside of it.

What could I do if we were going to meet. I went through the kitchen drawer, at first very cold and distracted with adrenaline, and then, there came a calmness all through, a calmness coming to meet me at the high hill above some valley. There were pens and dirty coins in the drawer and I saw the bright green box cutter. What a fantastic turn of events, in a nightmare: to be relying on the bright green box cutter. I had never been cut by one.

The razor blade, someone must have loaded it innocently, came forth into the light of the kitchen at a cunning angle when the switch was thumbed. I went outside and onto the sidewalk holding the box cutter. There was a row of streetlights down the block. The air started to turn the metal handle cold. I noticed him standing still in the shadow between streetlights. I felt an obscure gratitude for being allowed to use the box cutter for this perverse and ingenious new application.

For an instant I thought the box cutter was useless. Then, I saw it drag a bloody line or two. To see the blood made a difference. The box cutter was a tool that put us on equal footing. He swung a metal rod at me, a tire iron maybe, and I went beneath it and reached for his body with both my arms.There was a brute solution I had arrived at, which held together with the clarity of a poem: I clapped his back and drew him close with my left hand, to embrace him, and with my right hand went up and down his belly with the razor, listening to the clicks when I knocked his shirt-buttons because he wasn't wearing any jacket. He put his hand against my eyeball; I reached to tear his throat open if I could do it. I felt the box cutter snag in his hard larynx and I jerked it free, following the direction of my cut. All the blood in his neck began coming out on my arms and the temperature made me remember what it was like to wet your pants. I tried to cut the same spot, it was a lucky feeling, but he brought the metal rod to my forehead so that I flopped, trying to hold the box cutter at arm's length so I wouldn't cut myself, and like a firm kick the street hit me in the backbone.

He pulled back into a golf stroke to hit me again; I stood myself into his crotch and forced the razor tip into his thigh so that he fell. I hurried to kneel down on his chest and I cut his face back and forth with steady rhythm, like an orchestra conductor, I tried to let all his life out and kill him by getting his neck opened all the way. There were many fibers around inside of his neck that were like strong guitar strings, that gave and let go of their tension. I pushed in and down, around where his jawbone curved, until the box cutter went through and knocked on the pavement. What most surprised me, during the time I looked at his dying, was the high level of detail I was perceiving all around me without effort, so that, for example, the imperfect edges of his front teeth now had on them a specific set-up of dots of reflected streetlight that turned the enamel orange, and then a different set-up, no less specific, of dots of blood that were matte black.

Virgina Woolf on Emily Bronte

"She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to write it in a book."

More Greatest Individual Lines in Hip-Hop

"Ya ass all over like paraphernalia."

(Busta, "Light Yo Ass on Fire")

"Roger Sherman's Headstone at Grove Street Cemetery"

Born in 1721, and in 1793,
He 'died in the Prospect of a Blessed Immortality'.

4 Helpful Hints at Dusk

"Everything on television is educational in the sense that it teaches something."
--Richard Serra, Television Delivers People (1973)

"I could love myself if thou didst but speak to me, O God! If thou wouldst tell me that I am fulfilling a task imposed by thee, I could make myself walk through rough roads forever."
--George Sand, Diary

"I admit that unweeded soil grows wondrous things, which nobody can predict. And these things we have in abundance. But it would be a rash man who would call it a harvest."
--Jacques Barzun, "The Centrality of Reading" (1971)




From Jorge Luis Borges, "A Profession of Literary Faith" (1926):

"Everything is poetic that confesses.... I have conquered my poverty, recognizing among thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page. The page that justifies me, that summarizes my destiny, the one that perhaps only the attending angels will hear when Judgment Day arrives.
"Simply: the page that, at dusk, upon the resolved truth of day's end, at sunset, with its dark and fresh breeze and girls glowing already along its streets, I would dare to read for a friend."

Sheer Literariness

"The lights were put out in the house; all sounds died away; only the nightingale filled with song all this bright, silent, unencompassable space. 'What a night! What a glorious night!' thought the count, drawing deep into his lungs the fresh and fragrant air of the garden. 'But there's something amiss. I seem to be dissatisfied with myself and others, dissatisfied with life itself. What a dear sweet girl she is! Perhaps she really was offended....' Here his musings took a new turn; now he saw himself in the garden with the country girl in the most odd and varied situations; then the country girl was supplanted by Minna. 'What a fool I was! I ought to have simply seized her round the waist and kissed her!' And with this regret in mind, the count went back to his room."

"Two Hussars," Tolstoy 1856

In the Hallway of an Old American Building

"We are presently seeking in faith what we shall then joyfully share in vision." -St. Augustine, Sermons


On giant paws crept the State like Death's cat
Here where the blood and rust come home to scab
A parasite, on the back of the beast's dick,
That bundles its way through the scrum of shits and grunts
Foreshortening the tissue of brilliance,
Of levity, to a hard pustular mass.

What do you need, they ask me
I am looking for a way out, I say but with stilled lips
Where are you? they ask
Inside an egg, I mutter
An egg so big? they ask
Maybe, I murmur
EWE HALVE EYE DEE
Then my guts spoke for me
URINE TROUBLE

"And Even, Even If They Take Away the Stove (My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy)"

I have a stove
similar to a triumphal arch!

They take away my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!

Give me back my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!!


They took it away.
What remains is
a grey
naked
hole.

And this is enough for me;
grey naked hole
grey naked hole.
greynakedhole.


-Miron Bialoszewski (tr. Czeslaw Milosz)

["szara naga jama/ szara naga jama/ sza-ra-na-ga-ja-ma/ szaranagajama."]

(Becky)

"TEARJERKER"

(She has only to speak to him on the phone, as he calls her out of the blue while she is nude in her bed--two minutes of catch-up conversation, and then she goes to masturbate, dizzy. Her roommate can hear but as a married thirty-five-year-old she's uncurious and lets masturbate who will. And the roommate is no voyeur or anything. Just a nice lady. Becky saw nothing as she was bringing it home: no cock or hips or back of neck or anything. She saw him smiling at her in seventh grade but her focus came to be all about the pencil drawings he made of baseball players. The notebook paper and all the eraser marks, that were so delicate, and so attentive, as bad as the drawings were, the eraser marks so meticulous and artful and fretful, so vigorous and then swept all clean with the darkened side of his palm with such rigor, he must have frowned over them, he never signed the drawings. His hand against the strewn hot spliffs of twisted eraser rubber. She shuddered and gulped and gulped.)

Who's an artist? Who's a real artist? Who's some boring cliché? She looked for the last wine bottle. Who is a real specimen, and who's the knock-off? Who's the true Animal, the animal intelligence with whatever, with God showing through, and who's the Scholastic with chalk on her sleeves and goo all in her bedsheets from the rubbing? She found a flask with something and put that in her cold coffee, and drank that down in one, two swallows. The north wind was picking up outside on the avenue. What a conversation that had been! She remembered them doing the dirty pictures on the Lite-Brite in his mother's basement and she felt like crying. It was some bad PMS. It had been an ugly year, too.

The other dude had told her that when boys cry it felt like busting a nut. That was somehow true, it was all tied together down there, in the waterworks and all that leaky endocrine shit that accounted for the leftover bullshit in human affairs. Gordon, with his sadistic expertise in slowly fucking her, bringing her to real tears. Why couldn't this whole tragedy be brought to a close already. Why weren't we all given clear vision one day so we could get out of bed as the Solstice was hitting and see what a lump of junk it was. Her room was so dirty! Her room was so fucking dirty, and half of this stuff was Gordon's! And the other half was quite useless to her. She needed, what? A toothbrush and a fucking tampon. She was moving to Los Angeles. She was moving to Los Angeles. It was fucking freezing.

It was better to go than stay. It was better to go out than stay in. It was better to be open, to share and attack and move forward, than to slink back and retire and nurse one's shame. It was better to go out, be drawn into the world and brought back under its power, and to fall in love with a man's face and body. And now she thought of in the Starbucks, the couple right out of college who were so mature but in two different ways. They were healthy, tall, and clean but with a hippie edge like rich Vermonters or liberal arts in Massachussetts. She was acting out the role of Being in a Healthy Relationship. She was saying plainly, 'Can't you just tell me you're mad at me?' He was mad, his grey eyes shone, but he wouldn't admit it to her. Just tell me. No, I'm not mad at you. She made it her business to get him to admit. They were mature but he would not admit. At last he refused with great finality and gathered her in his arms, his hands thrust between her backpack and fleece, drawing her close with a look of angry, devoted love. She was defeated by his emotion and by her own emotion returning. Becky wandered out and in her imagination watched the scene repeat and repeat. Sometimes the girl was played by Becky. Sometimes the boy was played by Becky. Sometimes it was other people watching Becky and the boy, or Becky and the girl, and weeping at this defeat. What good, after all, was discipline and carefulness. It was just like rock and roll. Everyone was overmastered.

• When the time comes, it will be unmistakeable.

More Greatest Individual Lines in Hip-Hop (50 Cent edition)

"Shell hit my wisdom tooth, I *kkhh--pt* spit it out"

(50 Cent, "Like Me")

(Becky)

"I KNOCK YOU"

Human beings Love each other--
Love your fellows, Mother fucker!

That was all she could put on that piece of paper before the evening bout of introspection was over.
Yeah, it was a poem, and it rather rhymed, but anyway, it could end up being a long time (in time terms) before she might be able to set down a hard-won insight. And she thought on this: amazing revelation, won from suffering.

She thought, You go through these different experiences--(and cliché, that was what this was)-- and it forges you. By looking straight ahead, meeting other people but not being swayed by them, you come out More Fully Yourself as a Human Fucking Being, and that's all you can hope for if you're not some kind of social revolutionary. (But what about Michelangelo Buonarotti?) What's the alternative? Sitting around the day long, sipping coffee in the morning and beer in the afternoon, wine in the evening and coffee in the early morning. There was so much junk in her space.

She thought of a whole ordeal, setting her apartment on fire or smashing a storefront, all the risks involved, the mis-reading, the imprisonment. And then, something super-profound: oblivion, obliviousness. For an hour, or an hour and a half, the vision beguiled her: oblivion wise and cold, no metaphor accurate. But the phone rang.

And it would be a boy, who wanted her, or a girlfriend, needing her ear, super-petulant. These days she delighted in company, it made her.

The phone rang, but she put it down again when she saw the number. She knew the digits. She had never needed to program the name. She looked at it, she made an effort to become secure in herself, and then for a moment she allowed herself the bodily experience of her own hands, arms and fingers, by their nerves and tendons, ramping up to answer. She steeled herself back again with a hard thought and put that shit down. She knocked it on the nightstand but she did it very gently.

'I won't answer, I'll knock the phone,' she said to herself. Yeah: She had been forgetting aspects of life-routine and forgetting herself around boys, but she would not forget which boys were no good. 'I knock you most gently,' she inwardly intoned. Becky would let the Eucharist come to her. As a text message on her phone. Or as one of those emails dashed off in a drunk fury of empassionment. (An email beginning: "All I want to say to you is...") The words that these boys wrote her were so forgettable. If they had any real passion they put it into super-stupid stuff like rock and roll drumming.

The phone said it was 11:45 at night. What was she doing, it was still so early! (She wanted an audience to practice her new maturity and reserve upon.) She thought if she should call back. She watched the phone sit on the nightstand for a little while with its clock-belly up in the air. Or if she should go out. Infinity passed and returned. Like a stray cat she fed out of kindness.

It was almost full winter. Any day now she would discover her first gray hair. What would she do on that day, what would she be doing? By then the Eucharist would have come.

"Smalls" - A Doggerel Epic

(The Smallsiad?)

1. URBIS MUNDI - THE ENEMY'S REARED HEAD

The televised signal stabs into space
The ivy vine covers the brick
The party collapses divisions of class
The cocktail is making guests sick.

Something for Nothing was promised by God
Then reneged on by agents of peace,
So as comfort in time of a Borderless War
They memorialize the deceased.

Little by little the catheter fixed
To incontinent bladders of lust
Demolishes all of the signposts affixed
To the flooded-out inroads of trust.


2. WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

I'm every bit as zealous as your friends--
I simply don't believe in 'talking down'.
If people at the party
Cannot understand the jargon
It's not my style to feel for common ground.

There's only one or two great pressing problems:
The quickest route to paradise on Earth,
And whether to attend the claims of Beauty.
(The second you could group under the first.)


3. THE LAND OF THE THOUGHTLESS DEAD

You came to the metropolis to overlook the Turks
Who band together, gangster-style, to cross-promote their works
You found a chain of correspondence, going back to clerks
Who slaved in gas-lit offices, with hidden aesthete quirks.

The second Herman Melville moved to Massachussetts' sprawl--
The instant Wallace Stevens heard the Necessary's call--
The moment Andy Warhol saw his silk prints on a wall
Somebody in Accounting had to fill their jobs, or stall.

An appetite for paperwork is all you need to thrive.--
(I think the unemployment rate is less than 4 point 5.)
If you can get through undergrad, then you can stay alive
And knee-deep in some day-job from the moment you arrive.

(The class of petit-bourgeoisie, the managers and bosses,
Responsible for hirings and the nets of gains and losses,
At some point past (in undergrad?) mayhap have written glosses
On the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Yeats, or icons, saints, or crosses.)

"Before I Write Words, I Like, See Them," She Was Saying

Outdoors at Summer's End

"And if a Pearl in a Toad's Head may Dwell..."
(-Bunyan)

Two strong Puerto Rican boys are by themselves in the grass, a gay couple enthralled by one another's presence.

Line from bone. Flesh in sway to gravitation. Indication of structure. Symptom of chordate life.
An animal that has a soul.
A thought invisible in the sun.
Photographers stalk, prowl, hang back. They record this and that.
Animals that think. They're deciders: on what to frame, isolate, and share, or on what outfit to present and what physical bearing, and they go out and you see them and we're all together, and we could do anything if we knew we would be happy, but who would listen to me, and why do I make problems for myself, and what is the best way to get strong enough to plan, and how can I go through with it.

I ask, "HOW CAN I BRING MYSELF".

In the self, there is a lightless pool. I fall in, and there listen for the sounds of saints haunting. Their speech and their aspect--one to another of my clamoring selves--is cold (without the heat of friendship) and dim (without the light of wisdom). It takes place in the dream that the woke self turns blind eyes to: the incessant dream of the dreaming self, an animal that lives inside me like a coiled crab in a moon snail shell.

All day inside there's envy and lust for violence, and all night strange attractions to ideas and to the shapes of unfamiliar women. Without real hope to, the dreaming self chews on the prospect of getting to see God, or else some comprehensive library, or some just society where it can shut itself away in the open like a speechless statue. I guess: a drape thrown over the physical being, a beautiful covering of great worth and skill. I guess: a thing you would see and sigh over, saying, 'This is the most accurate portrayal of the man.'

Cloaked with wrought art and speechless as in a sarcophagus. Meanwhile the light of the present world bends the same over everyone in the grass, and over passing ships on the river, and ugly cars and tall buildings and passing fictions. Rhythm is all: a tide, a lunar sympathy, with others. A correspondence with inhuman energies that as people we share. The pool of the self being so deep, and the icy center being so familiar; the ancient comforts of the flooded cold cave.

You, too, will sigh someday.

Headlines

A new, glossy 'business news' magazine is launched. The title:
BUSINESS as USUAL

"It's better than having your clitoris cut out," one hears.
That practice, that custom, I guess you could point to as an unmitigated evil: an unmistakeable flashpoint in the war between dominion and liberty.

Callousness and.
Forget it.
Pleasure.
Human mercy and heavenly mercy?
Inhuman order and human something something. I don't want to say 'jouissance,' such a pansy word. 'Love' is not it. Pleasure, or liberty: but liberty connotes Jefferson and Voltaire. Those magnanimous Houdon brows need not be connoted.
Not connote anything!
Just, to pursue, to live in the being with the consciousness unique to the human!
Even 'free' means, free from, which is to say, It is permitted.
I mean, freedom from having to have permission.
Jouissance I guess.

I have my own Philosophy of the Bedroom: I stay up at night and sleep till afternoon.

Legend of the Horse

Attribution

Mare piss

To be born and forced to learn a zodiac

Shape of a thought, difference between fantasy and premonition

The horse cock, foam in its hide like frothed sperm

A woman on horseback

The wildness of dissimilarity

(Something about learning the sounds different animals make.)

No Can Do

Collect up winter clothes (such as gloves, warm coat, thicker shirts etc.) in a storage area, for use at certain times of each year (each time a season ‘rolls around’)

Collect fresh produce at intervals and prepare daily food

Talk on the phone to agents of rapacious corporations – suppliers, lenders, even representatives of the local and federal government

Come out of bed and exercise, eat, shit, bathe, look out the window, keep appointments

Say hello, explain myself at length to everyone

Stay informed about what is going on in the world

Combat physical illness

Buy new shoes and new silverware when the old ones wear out or break

Psych myself up and make an impression

Traipse around like a sheep on a green hill

Suffer each small inconvenience and regrettable setback

Utter every cliché

Wax-impress

Intellectuals?

"The institutional world needs intellectuals because they are intellectuals, but it does not want them as intellectuals."

--Irving Howe, "This Age of Conformity" (1954)

'Because there are so many intellectuals',:
Let's try, for a second, to complete this proposition about American life.
For just a second. Corollaries. We'll try a few different ones.
What can we honestly adduce?
'Because there are so many intellectuals':

• NYRB runs in the black?
• Book readership something something?
• Movies and TV etc etc?
• Higher education uh bluh bluh bluh bluh?

There are over thirty times as many adult intellectuals in the United States today as when Irving Howe wrote the Partisan Review esssay quoted here. And yet for all this burgeoning culture of resistance and critique and intervention, and yet for all this analysis and systematization and decipherment and conjecture and avowal, for all this dialogue and diegesis, for all this effort, for all this habitual action of reasoned freedom--of liberty--are we not, truly and in the final instance, enslaved?
Books cost money, computers cost money, little garrets with ink-pots and ashtrays cost money. Benzedrine and matrimony and open-heart surgery and double-espresso and childbirth: you balk, it needles at you, you take on debt. You wear the yoke! Anyway, the only people moaning over it are intellectuals, thus Q.E.D.

(Excrescence)

"All that disturbed me once, has become delicious to me." --Gide, The Immoralist (1921)

Movin on, walkin down, desertification.
Excrescence: once in a while he does some nutty creative project to his surroundings.
Origami, you call this.
Straw-wrapper doilies.
Pennies glued to scratched CDs.
Cigarette butts in an orange plastic pill bottle.
Songs on YouTube.
Shirts with rips.
Stickers on Polaroids.
Soda-can flowers. Things like this.
Things like that.
Wetted temporary tattoos stuck to glass.
Pencil drawings of a TV show.
Newspaper hats!
Human beings, looking at their lives, fighting back!
Pushing hard against the tide of commerce and co-optation.
Living like geese on a golf course.
Stupid organic meals. Stupid rented real estate. Lame hacks looking hard.
Lame ducks looking up mates online. Planning an alternative wedding; rap and neo-folk.
Oozing.
Sleeping.
Aggregating RSS.
Breathing CO2.
Sharing pdfs.
Describing OBEs.
Feeding on spirit.
Hoarding details.

"The Black Rainbow Over the Minch"

A black rainbow owre the Minch

Needna mak' onybody flinch.

It means juist aboot the same

As gin the usual colours came.


--Hugh McDiarmid, 1977
reprinted in TLS

Ripeness is All

(...of cunt, and pussy hair.)

In my mind's eye I see wreckage of ships on the sidewalks and angelic hosts with polished forks and knives poised about your ball-sack. There's no privacy, to be sure, and neither is there any comfort: there is only an opaque Emergency, in the shape of a woman's ripe body. My gift to friends will be more like a twinge of fear than one of hope, but it's the same in the end: I say it's the same in the end: I say it's the same in the end.

"Two loves I have of comfort and dispaire"

A Pretty Kettle of Fish

In an 1818 letter to his sister Fanny, written during a tour of Scotland, Keats breaks into a little song lyric about all the animals he used to bring home to the family house, over the objections of their grandmother Alice Jennings. Keats as a boy was enamored with "the whole tribe of Bushes and Brooks."


"There was a naughty boy
And a naughty boy was he,
He kept little fishes
In washing tubs three
In spite
Of the might
of the Maid
Nor afraid
Of his Granny-good--
He often would
Hurly-burly
Get up early
And go
By hook or crook
To the brook
And bring home
Miller's thumb,
Tittlebat
Not over fat,
Minnows small
As the stall
Of a glove,
Not above
The size
Of a nice
Little Baby's
Little finger--
O he made
'Twas his trade
Of Fish a Pretty Kettle
A Kettle--
A Kettle
Of Fish a Pretty Kettle
A Kettle!"

"Havin money's not everything/
Not havin it is."

-Kanye

Exquisite Bridge

"I feel now as if I were building a very delicate intricate bridge quietly in the night, across the dark from one grave to another while the giant is sleeping. Help me build this o so exquisite bridge."
--Sylvia Plath, December 11 1955

'This is the Life I Chose, or Rather, the Life that Chose Me'

"PROPOSITIONS
1) There is not really such a thing as privacy.
2) I'm hoping for peace and death. Seems almost do-able.
3) To live this way is not to hurt anyone. Not so far, I guess.
4) Whatever I've tried to do, this is the product.
5) Everybody dies, thank Christ. (Cioran- "We shall never have existed for so many of our idols, our name will have troubled none of the centuries before us...")
6) I would like ECSTASY (first preference) or ANNIHILATION (second). Just these two. This is the being I am, at my worst. No energy or imagination to spare on the world, all the stuff of it.
7) It's all so silly. I picture a deep sigh of relief, a chuckle at the far-off day.
8) LITERATURE--It's a mythical white beast. Like the Loch Ness Monster, it's just hype and badinage, a localized force-nexus of polyphonic hype.
9) In the Hereafter, I want to understand and comprehend infinity, I want to understand and comprehend God's love and infinite mercy, I want to learn about justice, how everything totals up--however--If after death your petty subjectivity lives on, that would be a gruesome disappointment. That would feel to me like Hollywood.
10) I am convinced, but only down to a certain watermark, that you die and that's it. Life is an incomprehensible trick-of-perception, like green in a sunset. What we think of as consciousness, what we think of as local. The troubling thing is how zeitgeisty this is. Surely the laws of the universe... Human societies evolve differing outlooks...

Onward.

11) From newspapers and TV I've learned about many people, English-speaking and otherwise, living and dead, who lived worthwhile and meaningful lives. (That cocksucking fireman who taught karate to the blind. 'What color belt are you?')
12) It's like I fell in a trap and broke my leg. But, I will never know if it was set for me somehow, or what. You could think of the known universe as a trap. Can there really be no way to get OUTSIDE REALITY? I remember intuiting the great infinite and things like that, but I don't put stock in those intuitions now.
13) Everything is so goddam interesting and worthy: Every beautiful or noble thing in the world is only a pure piece of garbage. I could renounce it. I'd feel a little dizzy.
14) Today in America we think and speak in this particular way; what does that mean?
15) "I'm going to Hell to burn lovelessly, but I would like to bring my iPod with Bach and my charger, and naked photos of my ex-girlfriend to jerk off to. Surely this is permitted."
16) Fuck my faculties of comprehension. I truly have nothing on faith. I live in a tiny clean space in my own cold heart, far from the overgrown ruin of my intellect.
17) Even if it's just on paper, I'm one of those who can chatter their heads off until they die, blithering back and forth in the storm of subjugation. Noise: that's something to renounce."

Hopes and Dreams at Bedtime

"I tried to write a love poem, just one good love poem to her. It seemed so hard to do--seated at my desk, I did not feel suffused with love. I felt dry and panicky. ('I feel, I feel'.) I wanted to compose something classic--the truth, the general, expressed perfectly in the particular. -Ah freedom--If I could but taste it..."

"I swear that all I want to do is read great novels attentively, and be a novelist. Otherwise fuck it, go to Iraq and take an IED."

(What a misguided juxtaposition there. A shrapnel splinter dug from Hans Castorp.)

"In childhood I became myself... the wounded dreamer, the musician with weird pain, the hurt one in the twilit valley singing in the flowers and watching my melancholy reflection in the brook: white-eyed. -Everyone asks the question: 'Why unfit?' What unfits you besides your lack of will? Well, it's the lack of will. Or lack of an instinct to want to project the will to will oneself. I mean, you could go on and on having more and more fun. -A person who's so good at having fun: eating a nice restaurant dinner, watching a porno, fishing a mountain stream, playing pick-up basketball, cooking for two, putting together a surprise get-well package for a sick friend. One of those people, and there are a ton of them. --Lightning from God is what you pray for. 'God!' These incidents crystallized out of your life, when you called out from hilltops in the wilderness. But you were calling for a particular kind of God, the God of the artist, and that's not a real god, it's a figment.
"I have certain flashes of how I could be satisfied to live my life as a monk on the knife edge of joy, serving God. Letting God prepare my meals and walk in my footsteps. Inhale and exhale each other. Be close to God and religious. That would be like the Monastic Life, it would be in a certain sense like the life of a soldier. To reject these lives means hitching a star to private, personal Progress. What kind of progress do you see yourself making?"

(I am alive and Life is not.)

Farce continuelle!

"Chacun a sa raison, mépris et charité: je retiens ma place au sommet de cette angélique échelle de bon sens."

-A Season in Hell

(Each has its perks, contempt and charity: I reserve my place at the top of this angelic ladder of good sense.)

"Just depressed out of my fucking mind, want to sleep it out. Ever since I was sixteen I've been filling notebooks and hard drives with terrible, weird writing. I can't withstand it anymore: just a waste, a misguided, ragged, shitty hobby. Just makes me angry, nauseates me. What was I thinking. My brain, my stupid dick. What was I trying to redeem.
"Whatever it is, depair, whatever, it gets so fascinatingly clean and pure. Almost beautiful, this hopelessness or somehing--the absence of woman, eros, play. Sealed. It is so clean and undiluted: it startles, attracts, scintillates with novelty."

"An apology always on my lips for not giving all of myself in conversation, as stupid as I am and as lame as my ideas are. But it's not a man's ideas that are wanted here, it's his jellyfish-shaped sentiments, his charity of all his soul, which is the same for every being, the same for every"one, but this is what he has to give, and apologize because can't give more. So: the blank wait while I bite my tongue and simultaneously vomit tears... Close your eyes for a bit, and God will give you a taste of His Hell, of the world without His simple love, and this is more terrible than any nightmare dispersed by day which you record. --If I pull it out and am ever happy and efficient again, I want to always try to take care of everyone. Spare no effort. Bully them until they come out and lose themselves in something engaging and confraternal: not try to get them to see their folly, but just browbeat them into taking some pleasure in their experience. Drink this nectar. --It takes real courage for a joyful man to deny the Creator."

"My heart is full of itching sand. You dream about sliding clean for eternity across frictionless glass."

"God is Love, love is not ludic--Love is what is. Play is torture and power. God cannot tease, God cannot flirt. Only Zeus could fuck. God, no slave, cannot be enraptured."

'Leaves of Grass': "The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer." --When I die (of pussyitis) there will be in my nostrils the human smell of my armpits, mixed with the chemical-nostalgic smell of my deodorant, in a little piece of last music.

• "Must I pray for the strength to keep from checking my ex-girlfriend's blog?"

Valediction

"You glow in my mind."

"I had some magic days with you."

"I want to be a good woman--and I want you to be a good man."

"Maybe we should just stop."

"Good-bye, Giovanni."

"..."

"Don't say 'good-bye'. Just say, 'I'll see you later'."

"Have a good time."

"You are the comedy."

"Good-bye, I love you."

"Si, voy a renunciar a él."

Reflections

In living practice, Rock Music, and all good pop music, is nothing more than a platform for uncontrollable fantasies of adventurous sex, and of brooding journeys though nights of drugs and luxury. ('Rock criticism' which neglects this fundamental premise misses everything. There is not much to be said, after all. The salient fact of rock, as with sexual pleasure, is that it is either present or absent and longed for. The presence is only an annullment of the longing, and that's all we get, who are condemned to live this way: beholden to these coarse gratifications.)

To advance into time and the night, one must undertake not to be bored by the vacancy of one's self. It can be tricky when all you have are monotonous and uninspired records, like [this source], but the working method--recall--is to check your worst impulses and your scorn and your appetite for distractions, and fake being a scholar of your inner life until it finally seems to work: you begin to get gold and silver memories unbidden trickling out of cracks, old places and forgotten expectations lighting up, lachyrmose, in the darkness of locked-off places in the world.

Now--you could write simply. If you worry about cataloguing your wisdom, you should condense your thoughts, and condense your records the same way, and write down only what's important. If you want any of the possible satisfaction or the passion of this way of life, the only course is steeliness and withholding.

Forever

COCK
PUSSY
COCK
PUSSY
COCK.
PUSSY.
COCK.
COCK. COCK. COCK.
FOREVER. FOREVER. FOREVER.
COCK. FIND PUSSY.
COCK. PUSSY AWAITS.
MAKE HER WET.
MAKE HER PUSSY WET.
FUCK HER.
FUCK HER PUSSY.
FUCK HER PUSSY.
FUCK HER PUSSY.
FIND PUSSY.
FUCK HER PUSSY.
SHE IS IN LOVE.
FUCK HER PUSSY.
SHE IS IN LOVE WITH YOUR HARD COCK.
WET HER PUSSY. FUCK HER PUSSY.
I LOVE HER PUSSY. I LOVE HER ASS I LOVE HER TITS BUT I REALLY.
BUT I REALLY.
BUT I REALLY.
REMEMBER HOW IT GOES?
BUT I REALLY.
BUT I REALLY LOVE HER HOT WET.
HER HOT WET.
HER HOT WET.
AND MY COCK IS HARD.
AND I WANT TO FUCK IT
AND I WANT TO FUCK IT
AND MY COCK PERSISTS
AND THE COCK IS ETERNAL
AND THE COME IS ETERNAL
WHEN I DIE
WHEN I'M DEAD
WHEN I DIE I'LL HAVE A NEED
I'LL NEED TO FUCK THAT PUSSY
GIVE ME THAT PUSSY GIVE ME THAT PUSSY GIVE ME THAT PUSSY GIVE YOUR PUSSY MY LOVE MY LOVE GIVE ME YOUR PUSSY YOUR PUSSY YOUR PUSSY AND LET ME FUCK YOU LET ME FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU
PUSSY IS NOT A JOKE.
MY HARD COCK IS NOT A JOKE.
I WANT YOUR WET PUSSY.
I WANT YOUR HOT PUSSY.
BABY GIVE YOUR PUSSY TO ME.
BABY GIVE YOUR PUSSY TO ME.
FOREVER.

Out of the Sightless Paradise of Thingliness

WALKING:
All in all: Having moved between such profound doubt (who is this loser, this scum), and such profound affirmation (the truly private experience of the soul links us to the grand shared experience of all souls.)

Where would we be without drudgery?
As a little boy, I was so melancholy so often. You come from the abyss or something; you do prepare to return there. You try to prepare, or you try to be able to be prepared.
It is a state without music, but maybe there is another ecstasy outside music: of PRESENCE without MEDIATION. History and materiality, opposed to nothingless nothing.
(There is at least a particular problem, and you sense how one form of resolution would be an extravagantly direct feeling of existence: that there is that which is, there is that which is. You have a knowledge, and your knowledge touches and equates to the existence."

"-So who you checkin for now?"
"-Probably some intellectual."

Ecc. 5: 2-3, KJV - "Be Not Rash with Thy Mouth"

"Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God, for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth; therefore let thy words be few./ For a dream cometh through a multitude of business; and a fool's voice is known by multitude of words."

It's like, 'This also is vanity,' etc. etc. etc.

There's a far distance to go, if you wish to travel it.
The weak and the strong alike perish from the earth and nobody knows what crops up after them. A hundred years, two hundred years: death and tranquility bloom everywhere; the hardness of bestial endurance and the sweet spleen of vegetable idiocy.

-ART IS A HISTORY, just like personhood. It's best to draw art out of the wish to STILL be truthful, in the face of the monstrous need of survival. Survival is not as great as the thought that crystallizes it as a thing-choice-pastime-act of will. To see a thing as act of will is to have the greater power.

-LAST NIGHT, my wonderous thoughts. I couldn't sleep, though I was practically in a state of sleep as I reflected. Too tired to find a PEN, but my mind moved around like a starfish for five hours or six hours, prying everything open, regenerating its problems. For some individuals, this is simply a lifestyle. Thankfully few individuals. (They're a nuisance population.)

-SCHOLARLY WORK: Once you're in the real world for a while (inane shit every day to produce revenue for someone and complete 'projects') you have a better perspective on the full world that scholarly knowledge is a part of, how to write it up, what's top-importance. 'THAT WHICH DIFFERS FROM' the inane bullshit determined by capitalism.

-WHY LET YOURSELF BE UNHAPPY? Every character in this dance comes out preposterous.

-WHAT'S THE ITCH UP IN THE THROAT BY THE HEART? Joyful expectation, like an itchy clog of sand, like a sneeze or ejaculation coming on and postponed: the rawness of nerve endings.

-FATES, FINITUDE. Eternity of guesswork. -A nice fat ass and a sweet musical voice. Why dream about perfect satisfaction? Because your intuition has convinced you: things LACK, LACK, LACK.

-Manhattan is this last irremovable sliver of granite in the sluice of the great Northeastern drainage system. A sliver that has not been rubbed down yet.

Sheer Literariness

DOES IT MEAN ANYTHING FOR ANYTHING THAT THERE IS LIFE INSTEAD OF NOTHINGESS.
If so--if it does--Why waste anything?
Why waste your consciousness? What is consciousness, just something to waste and funnel away? (Did you TiVo your subjectivity so you could have it for when you got some free time, or when you were bored with other entertainment?)

What point is to be made here, here on this proposition, that life is unique against a backdrop of difference and death.

Hm hm hm.

"Slip-Ons"

FLAT
PERFORATED
MATTE LEATHER UPPER
COST ABOUT TWICE
WHAT THE MAYOR PAID AT SUPPER
FUCK
THE LOAFERS AND THE CHUCKS
WITH THE LACES
MY SLIP-ONS PULL THE CHICKS
AND I'M CUMMIN ON THEY FACES

I BE SLIPPIN IT
I BE
I BE SLIPPIN IT ON
SHE BE TAKIN IT
SHE BE
SHE BE TAKIN IT OFF
I BE SLIPPIN IT
I BE I BE SLIPPIN IT IN
SHE LOVE IT, MY SLIP
SHE LOVIN MY SLIP
ONS