Here at the center of a void … (HTADL/SCACIEO transformation View of “Girl Singing” No. 2)

Here at the center of a void inundated by a shadow of flashing color, the necessity of the voice released by psychic automatism to find its body provokes the primal spark of dynamic movement while the great “negativistic hand” André Breton exalted as an essential lever of poetic vitality opens dialectically the window on the Heraclitian plane of “the hidden harmonies.” It’s sort of like when you fly from America to Australia and lose an entire day - somewhere - somehow - it just doesn’t exist - and yet it does - and so I want to know where it is. The first sleep, where the eyes are involved--gives one time to look around. I usually say that I am seeing myself when I am asleep, but don’t really mean that. I mean that I am first sleeping. Here the concept of rule begins to move beyond the obvious and to extend, as a general principle. Like water, the earth’s crust, mental illness, and knowledge, where is the true red, yellow, or blue? Who’s Afraid of Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives? I don’t know what the sound of a 25-mile ice shelf detaching into the Arctic Ocean after 3,000 years sounds like, but I walk out into the night with that seemingly impossible sound in my head. Even the cracks in the ground cast long sharp shadows. We live through it the way aphids traverse a rose. You will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. Bish bash bosh. Off the ricta. No bliss more blatant than, clearly beaten by the stars, trying to underline a verb in a text without any: aaaa aaaaa aaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaah aaaaaaauugh aaaaaagh aaaaaahhhhh aaaaaaugh aaaaagh aaaaah. “Garcia Lorca stole poetry from this drinking fountain” (Robert Duncan, Caesar’s Gate). “Content never equals meaning.” Meaning = “frame lock”. It’s no mistake that one of the most hilarious interludes in this long poem is the meta-redundant, “And then we’ll go axeroxing! Axeroxing! Axeroxing.” A carpenter plays a xylophone with two hammers. A Marxist makes use of a burning palace for his “sensible reading lamp.” These are love poems—written by everyone to no one in particular. In a two-dimensional house the stairs are drawn of chalk. A flat sun holds dominion in the mirror, dear reader, and the basement is a theory. That is, they say, they suppose, as they say; on a clear day, for example on a clear day, they suppose. In a large room, in a very large room, with very large language in a large room; suppose it’s a clear day, and this is a very large room with very large language, as a conditional persistence of the room; unable to think of a thing without insisting this is a room that is large, obeying some secret imitation of a large room, in the momentum of large language, that is an imitation of a large room, as an imperative without a departure, with is a given, that is a word given, given in a word, much closer than we think, thinking in terms of a familiarity, that could be a proximity of familiar, and or a haunting familiar in close proximity, anticipating a future, anticipating a potential possible, the advent of the eventual. In the Liber de Ascendi et Descendi, one lie after another, informing you a bit about the translation process and how this process might maintain a stylized history-as-bitchin'-travelogue. The author, an author, asks, smittenly, “Are not dead birds mushmouth color, turning in this wind in rotation?” And then it was dark. As we scrambled for the car, it became apparent to me we had not brought a designated driver. It was my Rambler, but as I took the wheel it seemed to break off in my hands. I didn't tell anybody this; instead, I translated: We're going to have to wait here a couple of hours while the battery re-charges. Nobody challenged me. It was a perfect translation. Leave it in the ground. Adios, Busy Signal. O little beep beep beep. O. So long nothing about you means anything anymore. “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” A falsetto voice, a spare piano line furnished by Erik Satie, the occasional echo effect, a smattering of out-of-nowhere rolled Rs, some deep-throated recitative, a little Björk-like mangling of English phonemes, and, for lyrics, a passage out of Adorno's Minima Moralia. We don’t even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths—but. It is out of such dust that the annihilated It is out of such dust that the annihilated It is out of such dust that the annihilated. Birthed from and of. Without a center, vital energies flowing skywards and waterwards and sidewards. Aerial roots. Latching and pushing and moving and prying, but always always always. It was a beautiful night, I was in love. “That’s what it was, but I don’t know if I really said it, or if I was convincing enough.” I touch one lip with my middle finger. Consciousness dwells in this contact. I start to explore it. Often consciousness conceals itself in folds, lip resting on lip, palate closed on tongue, teeth against teeth, eyelids lowered, tightened sphincter, the hand closed into a fist, fingers pressed against each other, the rear surface of one thigh crossed on the front face of the other, or one foot resting on the other. I bet that the homunculus, tiny and monstrous, of which each part is proportional to the magnitude of sensation, swells in those automorphic places, when the skin tissue folds upon itself. By itself, the skin takes on consciousness ... Without this folding-over, this contact of the self with itself, there would be no internal sense, no body of one's own, or even less coenesthesia, no body image, we would live without consciousness, featureless, on the point of vanishing. Or not. The Mumbai Highgrove Stud Racing Syndicate owns a horse named Spinoza. Every evening after nine at least five people are staggering. Alas, The Bleeding Skin, The Day of the Great Pardon.

[Note: I took the nouns in Alan Baker’s “Girl Singing” in order, matched each with a proper name beginning with the same letter as the noun (e.g. life/Philip Lamantia) found in the index to the SPD Fall 08 catalog (exceptions: the 2nd “girl”, which I matched not only to (the wrong, i.e. the not-SPD) Emily Galvin, but also to Gérard Genette), through “game”, at which point (bored with the choices in SPD – same letters, over and over …), I switched to the index of The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (ed. Lawrence D Kritzman); googled the resultant noun-and-name sets, took what I wanted. This is now known as the HTADL/SCACIEO transformation, after the title of its first manifestation, though the HTADL/SCACIEO transformation is slightly modified here, as I allowed myself the luxury of extracting texts from the “digital objects” linked to, not just the Google results screen.

Sets and sources: life/ Philip Lamantia: PL, “Between the Gulfs”, at Philip Lamantia; angel/Mark Amerika: MA(?), “What is a Blog? Becoming Research by Mark Amerika”, at Lonely on North 35; girl/Renee Gladman: RG, “First Sleep”, at How2, v.1. no.1; day/Craig Dworkin: CD, “Zero Kerning”, at UbuWeb; man/Jim McGarrah: JM, “Most Holy”, at Jim McGarrah’s Blog; winter/Marjorie Welish: MW, “Clans, Moieties and Other”, as quoted in Meredith Quartermain, “Undecorating the Lyric”, at Jacket 25; immortality/Brenda Iijima: Thomas Devaney, “Thomas Devaney in Philadelphia”, at The Poetry Project Newsletter, April-June 2007; shadow/Rebecca Solnit: RS, Wanderlust, “Hope at Midnight”, at TomDispatch; girl/Gérard Genette/Emily Galvin: Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (used as an epigraph in Richard Macksey’s Foreword to the English translation of Genette’s Paratexts); EG, at Mizz Emily Galvin; day/Alan Davies: AD, “Book 2”, at EPC; babaylan/Liz Beasley: Leslie Foster (?) at Leslie Foster’s Home Page, San Jose State University; clouds/Norma Cole: NC, quoting and citing Robert Duncan, in “SPEECH PRODUCTION: Themes and Variations”, at Shampoo 24; sun/Susan M Schultz: SMS and Charles Bernstein, whom she quotes, in “Of Time and Charles Bernstein’s Lines: A Poetics of Fashion Statements”, at Jacket 14; sky/Chad Sweeney: Tarpaulin Sky blurb for CS’s A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer, CS, as quoted in that blurb, at Tarpaulin Sky; cobalt/Norma Cole: kari edwards, “(title:it continues-)”, as quoted by Eileen Tabios, “kari edwards & BAY AREA POETRY MARATHON”, at The Chatelaine’s Poetics, 28 May 2004; gaze/Lars Gustafsson: LG, The Tale of a Dog; disguises/Brandon Downing: Jack Kimball, reviewing Downing and a number of others, BD, as quoted in the review, and David Rosenberg, also as quoted in the review, at The Poetry Project Newsletter, 191, 2002; angel/Jen Angel: slogan painted on t-shirt of a “climate change campaigner” who helped hijack a train carrying coal to Britain's biggest power station, as seen in photo or video still, in JA, “Climate Change Protesters Hijack Coal Train”, at Aid & Abet, 13 June 2008; girl/Benjamin Grossberg: Maureen Owen, “Goodbye to the Twentieth Century / or / Adios, Busy Signal”, at Poetry 365, 2006; ride/Jacqueline Risset: Albert Einstein, as quoted by Jennifer Moxley, in “To Whom It May Concern”, at Slought Foundation; spell/Gary Sullivan: “Sabbath Eyes”, at The Lipstick of Noise, 16-17 May 2006; game/René Girard: RG, as quoted in Cynthia Haven, “René Girard: Stanford's provocative immortel is a one-man institution”, at Stanford News Service, 11 June 2008; demon/Assia Djebar: Richard Priebe, “Literature, Community, and Violence: Reading African Literature in the West, Post-9/11”, at Project MUSE; poker/Dale Pendell: ??, “Olbrich Gardens”, at I was forced into this …, 26 January 2008; girl/Renee Gladman: RG, “First Sleep”, at How2, v.1. no.1; day/Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: D&G, What Is Philosophy?; secret/Michel Serres: MS, Les Cinq sens, as quoted in Steven Connor (in Connor’s translation?), “Michel Serres's Five Senses” , at Steven Connor.com; stakes/Baruch Spinoza: The Hindu, 28 February 2008; girl/Renee Gladman: RG, “First Sleep”, at How2, v.1. no.1; day/Jacques Derrida: JD, “Circumfession”, in JD/Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida]

Comments

[Leisure]

For one night, be a sexy maid or an alluring nurse and become the center of attention. http://poems.postedpost.com/2008/07/16/leisure/

[Ernesto Priego]

Wow.

[Bob]

I say wow too!

[Angela G.]

Brilliant!