What

is Art, is art
truth? is, truth is,
not what it is.
?

I'd like to send out an open request to everyone involved in this blog to rewrite this stanza. On the one hand, I'm dissatisfied with it, and on the other (or possibly on the same hand, but on a different finger), I wrote the poem I posted (2 posts down) because I wanted to know what people thought about art, in general. Is it absurd, elitist, servile, nothing, everything, precogniscent, nostalgic, progressive, destructive, honest, hypocritical, purposeful, aimless, mutable, static, important, pretentious, cow?
Why is there something we call art?

The most amazing thing I've read in awhile

The recurrent dialogue (and my unrequited monologue) could use a fresh Deleuzian infusion...

"Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes-- the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land-- or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol-- or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresitably; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations.

"How poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-option of it by a social order. People are co-opted, not works, which will always come to wake a sleeping youth, and which never cease extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks through this "form of the content" that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier. Yet it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated, already apropos of Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifier of his work, and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather the absence of style-- asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what cuases it to move, to flow, and to explode-- desire. For literature is like a schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression."

(From Anti-Oedipus)

Art

is, we, what,
will be, told,
young, old, was.

but [is that to] say it's
room in the fridge
for fresh milk from a rotten breast?

more or less
the same difference -
I, guess -

wether, wind or earth,
cathectized catechism
'r, fire 'n water,
catalyzed cataclysm

too? the Future three-for-one-free-for-all!
For the Past pedophiles progressive peace persue...

do we look to the finger? or make it a point to
bring down The House, over, end, over,
Onstage and on-
stage to get off-
ended over a point -
boo-hoo.
get a hold of yourself, man -
(ha-ha! cathetized catharsism!)
pointing is rude.

But, but
do we look
too fragile
in five-finned-fantastic-form-fitting-fabrics?
God it's a good question.
Good it's a god question.
Good god it's a question.
perhaps its preferable (possibly even perferable
too) to plainly penilize the -er of the product
and, too, to tie our tongues with the curly hairs of
necessity, the faster father of convention
or was it the other way around?
which brings us back to
issues of Heat, Drought, Fog, Frost.

cause that
is the, awful lawful, state, is't not
to insperate
?
is Art, is art
truth? is, truth is,
not what it is.
?

the poetry of donald rumsfeld

http://www.slate.com/id/2081042/

(i say this mostly because only a disclaimer seems fair, so; i realize this may not be in the groove of this blog so far, but somewhere to begin again, finnegan. anyone know that old rhymesong?)


subway lips

a women holds her son's mouth on the NQRW
he leans into her palm
will he vomit, will he cry?

pressure necessary in the yellow light
and he, slightly uncomfortable releasing something
spitting his weight into her fingers
through lips, witholding a kiss

i imagine his mouth inside there as mashed
up against a glass, kissing for winter
or jack frost or steam marks
although they are probably more pliable
than that against her skin

remembering how i used to dart out my tongue
to lick the insides of the knuckles of those
who tried to shush me with their hands
a fourth grade trick, they had no choice but to whine

my mouth free, wiping against the seat of their pants

does this boy feel the weight of his mother's hand
on only his weight on her or as two papers in a pyramid
leaning margin to margin both weighing in

did he make a sound to deserve her hands, this silencing?
he squirms slightly, hips jerking backward
but does not pull away, he dances below the neck
to use the inactive muscles as his lips rest

his other hand grabs the bar for subway-steadying
he leans into her hands and away from her body
eyes open, wandering the train car
searching its advertisement, maps

and loose seat flaps for his stop

After

Some links, to follow up on the presentation:

http://www.francis-bacon.cx/ (more Francis Bacon)

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley.html (more Creeley reading)

And I suggest checking out some 1-size books of Bacon's work at the Rock if youse got the time.


Here is that other paper I wrote for Bewes' Aesthetics and Politics class...for anyone interested in Adorno, Lukacs, and/or debates within Marxist aesthetics...


Crafting a Marxist Aesthetics: The Lukacs - Adorno Realism Debates

Debate within Western Marxist aesthetics has, historically, taken as a point of focus the relative value of realism and modernism. At stake are claims about the nature of reality—is it a comprehensible whole? Is the role of art to duplicate it? In this paper, I will critically examine two major players in this debate—Georg Lukacs and Theodor Adorno—and, by presenting their fraught exchange, show the difficulty of crafting what is a truly Marxist, and truly aesthetic, philosophy.
Lukacs, at the outset of his essay Realism in the Balance, identifies “three main currents” in contemporary literature: “authentic” realism, the kind of literature he advocates; “pseudo-realism,” or conservative literature bent on justifying the status quo; and avant-garde modernism—what he sometimes labels Surrealism, or Expressionism—whose “main trend is its growing distance from, and progressive dissolution of, realism.” (L29) Lukacs’ critique of modernism is threefold: 1) That it fetishizes subjective (fragmented) impressions, instead of seeking to make objective reality (a totality) comprehensible 2) That it is formalist, that its movements value style over content (e.g. impressionism is an idealistic reaction to naturalism, simply another –ism); and 3) That it privileges a bourgeois subject, and is inaccessible to the masses.
Art’s task, for Lukacs, is mimetic: it is supposed to faithfully represent the world as it actually is. He writes about this as a kind of breakthrough, using a number of verbs (“penetrate,” “probe,” “uncover,” etc.) that are predicated on a base/superstructure model in which a superficial appearance is pierced to discover the underlying essence (i.e. objective reality, true totality). The notion of an underlying whole (totality) is distinctly Hegelian, indebted to the concept of the Absolute Idea. Realist literature moves toward sensual presentation of this Idea, which, in a Marxist analysis, involves discovering the class/economic structures that drive the world. This depiction of relations of the whole is an objective truth, and thus differs entirely from the kind of subjective truth that marks modernist literature. An author like Joyce’s presentation of the fragmented consciousness of man is irresponsible in that it abandons the task of objectively depicting totality. The notion of objectivity is crucial here: as Lukacs writes, “If literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is.” (Lukacs 33) If man’s consciousness is fragmented, it is due to the crisis of late capitalist society of which he finds himself a part; the underlying reality remains whole and in tact: “As a result of the objective structure of this economic system, the surface of capitalism appears to ‘disintegrate’…Obviously this must be reflected in the consciousness of the men who live in this society, and hence too in the consciousness of poets and thinkers.” (Lukacs 32, italics mine) Literature, to perform its proper social role, should avoid this situation and make the conditions of this society more comprehensible, rather than fetishizing its incomprehensibility by lapsing into “mere” subjectivism.
Adorno, in his Reconciliation under Duress, opposes Lukacs on multiple grounds, accusing him of dogmatism, abstraction, of being undialectical, and of reducing art to a social science. Lukacs’ notion of comprehensibility is deeply disturbing to Adorno, as it marks a kind of totalitarian impulse to gain control over the world through representation (Adorno calls mimesis a “vulgar-materialist shibboleth to which he [Lukacs] doggedly clings.” (Adorno 153) Adorno shares a debt to Hegel, but is not interested in the pursuit of the Absolute Idea / totality, but rather in Hegel’s notion of the dialectic. Adorno’s negative dialectics moves not toward final understanding, but again and again away from it—emphasizing the Hegelian continual critical effort to refine the idea, without any transcendent Idea at the end of the road. The tension of non-identity is what is crucially worth preserving for Adorno. This is why Lukacs’ philosophy represents a kind of dogma for him; why he feels compelled to overturn Lukacs’ statement “the true is the whole” to read “the whole is the untrue.” (Lecture 3/7/06) Works of art do justice to world not when they allow us to comprehend it, but when they remain incomprehensible—when they resist simple interpretation, or appropriation by concept/category, at every turn. This “residue of incomprehensibility” is precisely what grants the artwork its status as an autonomous object. The Kantian notion of autonomy is incorporated into Adorno’s Marxist aesthetic as a way to explain art’s revolutionary power: although the work of art remains a product of its social/cultural circumstances, it, through its irreducibility to a concept, helps to liberate us from a reified way of looking at the world. If art is reduced, as it is alleged Lukacs would like, to a social science—a way to transfer objective facts about the world—it would lose this power.
That this is a debate within Marxist aesthetics is something important to keep in mind. As Marxists, one of the accusations these writers constantly had to ward off was of being overly “Idealist” (as opposed to materialist); this of course means different things for different theorists. For Lukacs it is associated with an over-reliance on form and a disregard for content. Lukacs accuses modernists of this “formalism,” that they are more concerned with style than reality: “It is symptomatic of the entire process that each movement in the past confined its attention entirely to the movement immediately preceding it; thus Impressionism concerned itself exclusively with Naturalism, and so on. Hence neither theory nor practice ever advanced beyond the stage of abstract confrontation.” (Lukacs 40)
Adorno responds, “What looks like formalism to him, really means the structuring of the elements of a work in accordance with laws appropriate to them…The objectivity he misses in modern art and which he expects from the subject-matter when placed in ‘perspective,’ is in fact achieved by the procedures and techniques which dissolve the subject-matter and reorganize it in a way which does create a perspective—but these are the very procedures and techniques he wishes to sweep away.” (Adorno 153) For Adorno, art does not ever deal with reality but only with un-reality, or “appearance,” and thus must not make claims to do otherwise. “Art does not become knowledge with reference to mere immediate reality, i.e. by doing justice to a reality which veils its own essence its truth in favour of a merely classificatory order. Art and reality can only converge if art crystallizes out its own formal laws.” (Adorno 159-60) Art can only concentrate on matters of style—to deny this is, as he says earlier in the essay, “symptomatic of the dogmatic sclerosis of content.” It is perhaps for this reason that Adorno’s own style of writing is so complex, difficult, and relevant.
However, one of the main thrusts of Lukacs’ argument—the value of accessibility—is perhaps less easily dismissible within a Marxist aesthetic, even behind the shield of Adorno. What is the ideal relation between literature and the masses? For Lukacs, literature is supposed to reveal the underlying reality; it plays an edifying and mobilizing role: “Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs of human history” (Lukacs 56) And elsewhere: “A vital relationship to the life of the people, a progressive development of the masses’ own experiences—this is the great social mission of literature.” (Lukacs 57) Modernist literature is to be condemned because its “excessive” stylistic experimentation is only accessible to the bourgeoisie, and fails to have relevancy in “a struggle for a genuine popular culture” (Lukacs 57).
Adorno does not have a model for popular culture to replace Lukacs; in fact, he is extremely skeptical of all forms of mass culture as such. This refusal to put faith into art as mass industry—and his refusal, unlike Lukacs, to be taken under the wing of Stalinist Russia (and, later, to join in solidarity the student movements in ’68)—is what places, for many, his status as a Marxist under fire, as well as what makes his aesthetic theory so compelling for others. For Adorno, true artwork is fundamentally inaccessible, has some “enigmatic” quality that defies interpretation. It must remain out of politics—must refrain from attempting to move the masses, as Lukacs would expect—although, again, this is “an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political.” (Adorno 177) Adorno’s style itself is consciously inaccessible—a trait for which Lukacs would fault him. But it at least adheres to its own stylistic principles: Adorno’s “tortuous” style does resist appropriation at every turn, through its layers of contradiction, reliance on metaphor, and unwillingness to settle on any straightforward “thesis”— whereas Lukacs’ dense, dogmatic philosophical style is not exactly the stuff of the proletariat breakfast table.
As theories, Adorno’s seems to be the more internally consistent—even if this quality results precisely from its refusal to be consistent. As an aesthetic philosophy, too, Adorno’s is more compelling: his incorporation of Kantian autonomy opens up a role for the work of art beyond mere mimesis or instrumental transfer of content. As Marxist theories, both seem to have points of weakness: Lukacs’ hypocritical idealism (his “dogmatic sclerosis of content”), and his formalism (his obstinate clinging to realists of the past as the only proper models); and Adorno’s also obstinate inaccessibility to the masses. But to try to identify what makes a philosophy “truly Marxist” seems to be missing the point—that the aesthetic and the political have a more fraught, complicated relationship in Adorno’s work is to its credit, or, at least, what makes it less easily susceptible to critique.

Work in Progress

(the) Sun (the) day
soon or late
the day the sun
will pop a decomposition composition
pop brilliance pop within it to expose it to
it it
suck
in in
return for
all the
suck
ing we have
done from
scares me to think about
now or
scares me to think about
then
sooner or later
but ill be dead before the sun explodes thank god thank god

Deluge II

(If only to move that lovely picture a little further from the surface of the blog, I present the following)

To be is not to be: this is the answer.

I am constantly remembering and working through the things people tell me.

Punctuation is the organization of living, vocal speech.

What a pain that Freud ever happened.

It is at times a degradation to read a man in the context of the class.

To become an -ian is to enter and relive the past at the absolute expulsion of the present.

Poetic expression is the only creative project which can be said to factically move us forward.

America once signified the new. We lay claim to this in reinvigorating theory by a strictly literary application.

I am constantly forgetting who I am !


(By way of response, redirecting of, and admission to the admirable aquatic admiral's most recent tripartial amendations, I provide the following, in ossianic meter.)

Regarding what I wrote that day. I must emphasize that I was speaking from a theoretical standpoint, and that I was talking about myself. What I hoped was that I was also talking about the general 'us'.

Theorists approach things from a notion of 'oughts.' We want to know what this is, this that we are in, this that we are thrown into and forced to confront and negotiate every day. We are happy to find that others also want to know. And so we speak to and for these others. [Genius is to want to have something to add. The genius is always finding his thoughts already said, and upon finding this, resolves always anew to think something original.]

The question of nonaction is such a question of oughts. If I am to continue wondering, what am I to do? Where shall I go? What shall be my vocation? Nonaction is such a vocation. It is an answer. What I was asking is: Is it THE answer?

To speak on a subject more clearly:

That day when you tried to explain to me, along the lines that Foucault provides, that every work must be understood as somehow reacting to (and thus constructed by) its historical context, I disagreed because it seemed to me that such would be to leave everything in the past and, moreover, to deny a meaning that can transcend the death of people and the passing of events. I suppose I realize now that there is no way around the fact that a work is historically confined. A thing I would say, just to get my bit, is that some works are more affected by the times than others, and that some authors manage quite admirably to create ecstatic pieces, pieces which can appear wholly original for their time, and that even if you could show what they were responding to, that this would not diminish or in any way change how original and unlike anything else those works were. But my main realization in relation to your point is that while historical influence is of necessity a fact, to move forward, to create anything anew, anything useful and progressive (or progressively-digressive, as with a work engaging the death drive), one must not look at things in terms of their context. One must take them straight out. One must read them on their own, read the books without knowing hardly anything about them, and form an opinion and interpretation based on nothing but one's own subjective impulses as they happen to arrange themselves at the time of reading. This was my general situation with Nietzsche. He is someone that I think should not be read in class. Because there is so much there to interest an individual, in his style as well as in his points, so many concepts that ought to really shake one's mental representation of existence in this world: to read the book in a class context tends to only mute those effects and divert the focus somewhere else. I would say that if one is to do anything at all, to make anything out of those works, to insure their continued lived experience (as opposed to the gross recapitulation of enduring eulogization), one must do with the works exactly what I have said here: one must read them for their own sake. And by 'their,' I denote both the books and the readers.

(As per last instantiation of this prosal mode, I conclude with something in the manner of the Absinth):

Song to the Sun

Various religions give us a picture of world created and destroyed repeatedly, our current world being only one segment in the process. Christianity posited it all just within this current segment, beginning with one ending, the deluge, and ending with another, the fall of a star which would poison the waters of the earth and so set in motion the period of judgment.

I cannot be this, for I am not a star. But you, my friend, my father and fire, you will at once take us back into your crushing embrace.

Stories of Death

The comments about Tyler's music video and the reading I'm doing for class inspired me to write up a little rant about race in our culture. Do read the dialogue on the comments to that post.

I'm reading this book called "Jurors Stories of Death" by Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, in which he interviews and analyzes the accounts of people who served on juries in capital cases--that is, they put men to death. The book is trying to understand the huge racial disparities in the application of the death penalty. To do so, he relies on a lot of theoretical constructs that we're familiar with, although he doesn't name them specifically. His thesis is that a (predominatly) white jury casts itself in opposition to the (black) defendant:

"capital jurors' multiple, often conflicting narratives mask a meta-narrative--a hegemonic tale of moral insiders and immoral outsiders. Consequently, how jurors 'do' death is simultaneously how they do dominant-subordinate relations"

Here's the testimony of Shelia Brooks, who surved on a capital jury that sentanced to death Ray Floyd Cornish, who shot a convenience store clerk--it's worth typing up:

"I saw the defendant as a very typical product of the lower socioeconomic black group who grew up with no values, no ideals, no authority, no morals, no leadership, and this has come down from generation to generation. And that was one of the problems we had, for me, and in the jruy. Because some of the jurors were looking at him as your average white kid: he wasn't a white kid. He came from
a totaally different environment. I'm just saying that he was the one that he was the defendant. And I just saw him as a loser from day one, as soon as he was born into that environment, and into that set of people who were basically were into drugs, alchohol, illegitimacy, AIDS, the whole nine yards. This kid didn't have a chance. That's how I saw the defendant. And there are ten thousand others like him out there, which is very tragic."

This is how people see Black criminals. And there's no arguing against it: black ghettoes are shitholes where all of these things exist, drugs alchohol aids etc. But what's important is how Brooks defines herself (and herself as the entire jury: "for me, and in the jury") against this black community where people don't even have a chance to be human. It's an argument that's essentialist and determinist: this kid didn't have a chance, from day one. And that kind of essentialist thinking comes from the long line of racist logic that's pervaded the american conciousness for hundreds of years--it's the logic of the steriotype, which relies on the images that the media produces. How much of Brooks' view of the ghetto is obtained first hand? none. It's all from TV, from gangsta rap produced and consumed by whites, from COPS, etc.

there's a lot to be said about criminal justice in america, but also there's very little to be said. Because when it boils down, it's a system made to reproduce itself as it has reproduced itself since America was born, starting with slavery, jim crow laws, systematic disenfranchisement and physical segregatation, it's all the same tradition. It's straight up oppression. The denial of humanity to a constructed identity.

The prison and the ghetto are two aspects of the same particular institution of repression and confinement. They both serve to spacially isolate a population and prevent it from gaining power, education, or even the right to life. Human bodies cycle through both institutions unceasingly, Bush Sr.'s rhetoric of revolving door prisons reflects and unbreakable cycle wherin citizens, blacks, are doomed to live their whole lives in futile labor without hope. Because that's what it's about, securing cheap and subserviant labor. partly.

It frustrates me that I can never write well about it, because there's so much to say and so little, and I see straight red when I think about it.

What can we do, as the elite? how can we break the cycle?

Life drive and Death drive

(This is to be read in conjunction with my comment on tyler's video post.)

All action aims towards progress. This is the meaning of the life drive. What is nonaction? Is it necessarily the negation of life? Two shades color this world. Our existence comes on top of this partition, swaying half towards this, half towards that. Life and death are somehow the same, and the differance holding us in the one and out of the other can be crossed over in the blink of an eye.

Now I wrote this when I was high and on a bus. And I didn't make the point I wanted to make. Which was this. I feel like of everyone I know, there are two paths that are being chosen between. Either we're entering the world wanting to make a direct difference, seeing a problem and wanting to fix it, or we're deciding to exist within the world but wanting nothing to do with it. There are two branches to each of these. In the 'entering the world' option, one can either do it with a will to change things (hippies, peace core joiners, teachers, political revolutionaries) or simply to make money (businessmen; lawyers come somewhere in between). For those of us who are more or less disgusted by how the world works-- and let us not suppose that there has been any time in the past several millenia that this was not the choice people had to make-- there are again two paths. Either we become 'absurd men' who decide to exist within the world that nauseates us but attempting to live more authentically, less commercially, more enlightened -- and this we do by writing books, making films, or perhaps by being actors or playpersons (read: Don Juans). Or we withdraw completely, we become recluses, hobos, hermits. These last are of course the fewest among us, and certainly, among the hobos and hermits of the world, there are few that have chosen of their full and principled volition to be such. The point, though, is this. Either we enter the life of people, of politics, government, social concern, and revolution; or we do something else. The question is: is this something else opposed to life? Is a life of nonaction, such as that intended by doctrinal Daoism and some Zen Buddhists, necessarily a negation of life, some sort of death drive?

I truly believe that among the aggregate of all persons in the world, there are those who are on the side of life, and those on the side of death. These are of course really one and the same, because we all are EXISTING whatever we individually choose to do with it. But all the same, there is still a fundamental difference between choosing to do with our lives what society (parents, peers, media) tells us to do with it, and deciding to do something that is somehow always in opposition to that social reality, that social drive, that drive towards progress, that drive towards directly helping people, that life drive -- and I believe that to do the opposite is precisely to engage the death drive. Thus the two shades, thus the swaying this way and that. And in terms of the blink of an eye, well, this is the freedom that every man always has, whether or not he should wish to confront it. Death is always just a slip or a jump away.

Any thoughts?

From Foucault,

one of the best excerpts I have read so far:

"...This accounts, no doubt, for the confrontation of poetry and madness in modern Western culture. But is is no longer the old Platonic theme of inspired madness. It is the mark of a new experience of language and things. At the fringes of a knowledge that separates beings, signs, and similitudes, and as through to limit its power, the madman fulfils the function of homosemanticism: he groups all signs together and leads them with a resemblance that never ceases to proliferate. The poet fulfils the opposite function: his is the allegorical role; beaneath the language of signs and beneath the interplay of their precisely delineated distinctions, he strains his ears to catch that 'other language', the language, without words or discourse, of resemblance. The poet brings similitude to the signs that speak it, whereas the madman loads all signs with a resemblance that ultimately erases them. They share, then, on the outer edge of our culture and at the point nearest to its essential divisions, that 'frontier' situation - a marginal position and a profoundly archaic silhouette - where their words unceasingly renew the power of their strangeness and the strength of their contestation. Between them there has opened up a field of knowledge in which, because of an essential rupture in the Western world, what has become important is no longer resemblances but identities and differences."

A Blackbirdsploitation Film

The Early Bird Gets The Worm (Right Place, Wrong Time)

Here's a little music video I made last night...

A quip about theory and philosophy

Theory looks at the genesis of terms. We exist in speech. We commmune by means of communication. Philosophy is a science that naively accepts the plausibility of terms. Theory rather identifies the mutability of speech (parole) and denies that there is any use in arguing about the meaning of terms. We can show how a term has changed; how the notion has affected the course of history and how social events in turn redefined the notion. What we are no longer capable of doing (a loss for which we should grieve) is supposing that there is real meaning out there, that our terms can be finalized in some sort of purified reference to the things out there which they describe. An epoche with regard to meaning.

Note: epoche is greek for something like 'abstention.' Husserl popularized the notion with his 'phenomenological epoche,' or 'phenomenological reduction.' He bracketed the existence of the outside world, that is, suspended judgment about it, and set about to ask what we can do with the phenomena themselves. Theory does something similar. It brackets the signified and attacks, yes attacks, the signifier. One opponent whimmed into nonexistence, and the other bombarded and dissociated. It's no wonder there's no one left to fight. (Perhaps there's something to be said in favor of naivete?)

A Dialogue between Old Friends

MAN:

My whole life can be summarized as a series of failures. Moreover, that series of failures can be summarized as one big failure, occuring again and again, over and over. But not this time. This time, I'm going to succeed. I'm finally going to create.

VOICE:

Aren't you aware that in order to create, you must yourself be destroyed?

Night Fall and Luna

The day ends
The sun dims
And the lanters grow brighter

Leaves chase each other down the sidewalk
Tripping over outturned bricks
And crumbling under footfall

A spinning pinecone
Just arrived on the earthen floor
Smiles to a man who steps sidelong to avoid crushing it

The sapling at the street corner
Hurries its final upsurge
To match its neighbors height for height

Sound overturns sight
As the watchman over accidents
And the world turns
From work to play

*

In the dusk of night
she rises convalescent

Nursing her crescent wound
she reflects
that we might wait for day.

Excersizes in Style

Queneau, a frenchman, wrot the same story ninety-nine times. This was the story: On a croweded bus, the narrator observes one man accusing another of josteling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in a nother part of town, the narrator sees the man being advised by a friend to sew another button on his overcoat.

I had to write the story again, as if 99 times wasn't enough for this world. So I did, and this is what I wrote (completely fresh, completely unedited. forgive my errors and trespasses):

Self-satisfied elbow in my ribs, put there thousands of time before, by the unthinking masses. The selfless herds that roam the streets, flood the streets with moving machines, corner me in busses. This one has it’s elbow in my ribs. I don’t know whether he knows that this is a sign of war. But it is. I must maintain my dignity—just because I have no car and am forced to ride this cattle-car does not mean I am a cow, a hump of meat to be cowed up the ramp to the slaughterhouse. It is time to resist.
I put my elbow in his ribs and locked his eyes with mine. “Don’t touch me,” he said.
I touched his eyes to mine.
He retreated. Words and words do not make a man.
He flung himself headforth through the bus, squeezing past bestial sweating flanks, through heaving oceans of meat. He sat, head down.
I must remind myself that he exists, after I have forgotten his eyes. But he does, behind me.
The moment has come. I have been traveling to reach this point. My stop.
It is his stop. Perhaps he is also going to the Ministry. It summons all of us.
But he is too shabbily dressed for that. No man should present himself at the Ministry with one button askew.
Bodies swirl between us. All flesh hidden beneath cloth. My flesh hidden with gloves.
One of them pauses in front of him. I listen: we all must listen, to survive today for tomorrow, although none of us want to be heard.
The man was brave enough to point at his jacket, tilted and jilted. He gestures at the buttons.
He reminds him of his mother dressing him for snowplay.
He readjusts his blue-buttoned skin. It is not dead, the empty self beneath the coat, dangling open ridiculously, unshackled from its buttons, it is still a coat.
I look at the grey cement, until the revolving doors of the Ministry admit me

Catullus #85

I read this poem in AP Latin senior year of high school. I am posting it now (have I before?) because there's been a lot of poetry lately (on this blog and in this life) and I wanted to share some real oldies, but goodies. Just a snippet of a poem - but incredibly famous, perhaps because of its terseness.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.

Now this may be in Latin (and 12th grade Latin at that), but this here is not even the original as it was written. In addition to having little to no word order, Latin also of course had no punctuation, and believe it or not, no interword spaces (until much later). In place of those systems, Latin employed a rigorous declension system and some loose syntactic guidelines (such as the verb usually coming at the end of the sentence, or phrase). Latin poetry, like many other traditions, was furthermore governed by tight metrical structures (each type of meter with its own particular traditional and cultural connotations), which not only strictly limited word choice and placement (because of Latin's use of long and short syllables, somewhat akin to syllable stress in English), but also determined the overall rhythm and "line breaks" of the poem. Scansion was not just a limitation, however; it in fact added a level of signification which was more structured and visible than the individualized rhythms and breaks of modernist English poetry to which it could conceivably lay claim to grandfathering.

ODIETAMOQUAREIDFACIAMFORTASSEREQUIRIS
NESCIOSEDFIERISENTIOETEXCRUCIOR

Odi (o-dee) et amo (ah-moe). Quare (kua-ray) id faciam (fa-kee-am) fortasse (for-tas-say) requiris (re-kui-rees).
Nescio (nes-kee-o), sed fieri (fee-eh-ree) sentio (sen-tee-o), et excrucior (ex-kru-kee-or).

Translation word by word:
I-hate and I-love. How this I-do perhaps you-ask.
I-know-not, but done I-feel, and I-am-excruciated (tortured to death: "excrucior" in fact has no English equivalent. It connotes ultimate agony. It is derived from crux, "cross" and has the sense of being crucified, but this is 75 years before Christ).

General translation:
I hate and I love. How do I do this, perhaps you ask?
I know not, but I feel it done, and I am tortured.

Compare the words "odi et amo" with the last three words "sentio et excrucior." "I hate and I love"'..."I feel and I am tortured." This poem has an overall chiastic structure. It couples these juxtaposition-statements at the beginning and the end, and between those, in the middle, it couples the words "faciam fortasse requiris" with "nescio sed fieri": "I do perhaps you ask"..."I know not but it is done." To extrapolate on this idea of the chiasmus further, "odi" can be coupled with "excrucior" (I hate and am tortured), and between those can be coupled "amo" and "sentio" (I love and feel), and then between those come "faciam" and "fieri" (I do and it is done), and finally between those are "requiris" and "nescio" (you ask and I do not know).

Or take the line, "Quare id faciam fortasse requiris." The alternating assonance here of both the hard "keh" and the grinding "r" sounds with the soft "f" and "s" sounds reiterates the dual sentiment of the poem itself. This assonance is then repeated in the reply to the question: "nescio." It again continues, into the next phrase, which is full of softness and runs off the tongue beautifully: "sed fieri sentio." Yet from this soothing sonorousness, we are soon led by the "et" (and) into the final, and incredibly forceful word, "excrucior", where the "keh" sound is repeated three times, and the "r" sound twice. It might also be important to note here that the "r" ending of "excrucior" denotes the passivity of the verb. And of course, besides being the kicker in this game of mouth-sounds, and being the final word in the poem itself, "excrucior" also stands out because of its unique four syllables. It is in fact an almost excruciating word to get through, which is exactly the point.

It is a poem toying (toying may be too light of a word) with the theme of irreconcilable internal contrasts: hate, love, activity (embodied in the verbs of the first line), passivity (embodied in the verbs of the second), feeling, pain. In my short little humble analysis of these two huge lines, I did not even get to things like meter and rhythm, etymology of the words other than excrucior, intraline syntactic structures, other overarching syntatic structures such as the possibility of an ABAB structure in addition to the chiasmatic one (i.e. I hate/I do not know... you ask/I am tortured), nor the context of this poem within Catullus' works - many of which are focused on "his" relationship problems with a specific girl (or at least a feminine figure). Nor did I mention Catullus' ties to Sappho (who may in part play the figure of the girl).

I hope you guys like this poem as much as I do. I'll probably post another Catullus one soon with another short analysis.

An Invitation to Matt, love Nothing

lizard lips spewing
semen bank and froth
tro and foo
man chew, yer goddam colored greens
seems these days when nico says
that lonely shots of cardamom and freezer burn will never ever retrodeposit the hefty payload of modernist post dramatic truss disfigure
this
into equation of life-like
style
poseys
thump
non sense lets
write and
it post internet
on it as if
had meaning!

welcome to the virtual womb
soon to seed the doom of man
to bear the dawn of moon

Ten thousand eyes transcending towards the deluge

Well, how the kettle boils over. Remember what she said, "Boiled coffee spoiled coffee!"

A life so overrich, so overfull -- indeed it is too much, and to perish would seem an alleviation.

Some men study too long. To theorize is to accept that one no longer has the energy to live.

Lessing's Nathan the Wise: a stupid and childish work exhibiting all the nearsighted and false idealism characteristic of the Enlighted sophisticates.

A truly sublime stream of thought

Man likes that which makes him think of himself.

He likes better that which reminds him he is right.


(And now, an abridgement, that is a break, an intermission to be filled by the midway act, the irremedial Jacques Lacan [favorite guest star of this foray], here presented in a poetic variation. Verily he says all that we wish to be able to say, and with a capricious tongue the wit of which can only be described as the poignant inscription of ideational jouissance {not to mention a pile of loquacious rubbish.})

The myth of unity of the personality,
the myth of synthesis,
of superior and inferior functions,
confusion about automatism,
all these types of organization of the objective field
constantly reveal cracks,
tears and rents,
negation of the facts,
and misrecognition of the most immediate experience.

It is not by accident,
because it couldn't be otherwise,
that by a bizarre stroke of luck
we go through life without meeting anyone
but the unhappy.
One says to oneself that there must be happy people somewhere.
Well then!
unless you get that out of your head,
you have understood nothing about psychoanalysis.
That is what I call taking things seriously.
When I told you things had to be taken seriously,
it was so that you would take precisely this point seriously,
that you never take anything seriously.

All human apprehension of reality
is subject to this primordial condition-
the subject seeks the object of his desire,
but nothing leads him to it.

Observe the number of things in normal subjects,
including yourselves,
that it's truly your fundamental occupation not to take seriously.
The principal difference between you and the insane
is perhaps nothing other than this.
And this is why for many,
even without their acknowledging it,
the insane embody what we would be led to
if we began to take things seriously.
So let us,
without too great a fear,
take our subject seriously


(And finally, to conclude, to conclude in a conclusive manner, the final pages of what are to be the Absinth Pages)

This week I constrained my intake of the sundry stimulants I generally entertain. I allowed no caffeine - no that is a lie, I drank quite a bit of tea, one even with miteine - and was thus quite tired and insociable a majority of the time. I did not imbibe alcohol until last night, nor smoke, again, until last night, and now, strangely, I feel intoxicated by all three. I have felt so all day long, and it has reached a peculiar (and quite enjoyable) pitch in the last hour.

To take in is to change what is, and I am the glutton of intransiencies. I should not hide the fact that I disgust myself. It is the nature of my guilt. By guilt, I refer to the deflating sense of shame that has foreshadowed all of my recent actions. I have felt as if adumbrated by an impious and ignoble cloak which all others can see, and which I have no chance of displacing. That a cloak ought to be covered, surely, is a suspicious thought; but it is difficult, thoroughly difficult, to reconcile oneself to the enervating notion that one is oneself the most shameful object in the world.

And so I have come to ask whether I be not that Lucifer, who fell, quite unlike the martyr that Adam was, as a castoff from the realm of the blessed and eternally fulfilled. If I am, or if I am not, there is only to continue. I am become the absinth of that fated night, and I must drift along as the poison leads.

DRAMA

DRAMASCULA INHERITED THE FIRST MANUFACTURING OF THE SILVER CLONE. HIS COLLECTION HAD MOUNTED STEADILY BEFOREHAND, BUT HERE, HE HAD FINALLY ACHIEVED EXCELLENT STATUS. IT ONLY REMAINED TO GO ON. TO GO ON FROM WHERE HE HAD ALREADY REACHED, TO DO IT FINALLY. SAVE UP ALLOWANCE FOR 3 WEEKS. GET NO CANDY AT THE POST OFFICE STORE FOR ALL THOSE DAYS. HE REMEMBERED SOMETHING LAWRENCE HAD SAID. DO NOT LEAP AT THE NEXT STEP. HE SAID THIS WHEN WE WERE CLIMBING THE CLIFFSIDE, HORIZONTALLY THROUGH THE PINE TREES, AND WE CREPT UP THE STONY GROUND. OR THE FORT BUILT BY THE HILL BY MCNEIL'S. SKATE HAD ON LAKE POND. SNOWY AND FALL.

TERRESTRIAL SOUNDS RACE THROUGH TERRACED SCREENS THE EXCHANGE OF BEADS THROUGH AIR TAKES TICKS UNENCHANTED AND UNRELENTING ESTEEMED BY ALL AND KNOWN BY THE REST. WHERE THEY COULD BE SEEN IT WAS TOO MUCH, O TOO MUCH YOU SEE THEY COULD NOT UNDERSTAND THE THING, IT WAS TOO MUCH, TOO VERY TOO MUCH YOU SEE, AND WHEREVER THEY WALKED ALL WERE DISMAYED AND YET BY SCULPTURED BOY ON STOCKHOLM PARK BENCH, I DOTH GRANT THEE THIS EXCHANGE.

INSANTICIDE. I DO THINK IT IS A BLADDERAL DISEASE, RATHER THAN AN INTESTINAL ONE, CAUSES A BLOCKAGE IN THE WORKINGS OF THE DAY, SUCH THAT MIGHT BLESS YOU SAINTLY AND DIVINE. TO CLOSE ONE'S EYES AND ALLOW ONESELF TO DRIFT IN, TO LIFT AS ONE TRAMPLE''SS ACROSSS DISCOURSE, KNOWING EVERY NEGLICGENT PASS, ASSUMING THAT ALL WAS BUILT IN. WOULD IT BE TOO MUCH? EACH PERSON ASKS IT LEANING AGAINST THE BRICK WALL IN FOURTH GRADE. ONE CAN PENETRATE ONE'S MEMORIES LIKE A CLOSE LINK INTO COMMOTION. BUT INDEED IT IS QUITE A BIT TOO MUCH.

FIRST BLOG POST EVER!! (thanks to Tyler's hounding)

Here's a poem- well, two of a cycle- that I workshopped today in poetry class.



(II)

“A heart-like crater”: what, open, feeds
what is not open. Always, a double movement:
the event saying itself; what comes
after. A family sits around a table.
The signs are: fork, placemat,
face. The family talks. A face sits. Someone
else is there, in every case. “Stop acting,”
the face might say, like a boy growing old. Time

“to do the dishes,” or something, it might be time
for something. “Start acting” (like a man)(etc.).
A face sits, a family talks, we get the point:
the signs are: to know: to become:
even the possibility of family, the possibility
of possibility seems remote. The event closes itself, said,
always, a double movement: what can be
opened. What, closed, can be fed.










(III)

“A heart-like crater”: the heaviness of day.
A stone fills the crater. The said
fills the, what is new, say
a face comes into your
life, say there is a rushing of something
else. A family sits around a table.
There is the constant saying of faces.
“A heart-like crater”: there is a time, too,

there is a time that could hold
the saying. Constant,
a family sits around a table. Each one is someone
else. There is a life, say, there is a rushing,
a face comes apart, must be met again.
New. New new new yes but it fills
always, into said, the crater becomes stone,
a heart-like stone. The heaviness of a day.






**


(The leading quote is from a Paul Celan poem)

(The assignment was to incorporate 8 words, one in each line, and then to re-use those 8 words in a second 8-line stanza, in reverse order (so, 12345678; 87654321). It ended up being a really interesting exercise, and forced me to be more tight than usual, to play with a certain economy of signs. I liked the results, so I kept trying them...)