In the House of the Hangman 1080

So what is this-a-here but a zone constantly eating itself, digesting itself, shitting itself out, spreading out, making more of itself, accepting and ejecting material, a flexing, spasming field, full of grazing animals and animots. Today I dreamed that I was The Little King of Everything, they were dressing me in black-and-white spotted pelts, today I moo with my head about to fall, melting, disappearing each other. This is a campo on loop a campo on loop, a Möbius campo which does and does not intersect itself. Climb up in sight climb in the whole utter needles. MILK. As far as I can tell (no subtitles) the basic plot is this — some Saudis send an agent out to collect a skin cell from Godzilla. This cell is to be used to genetically engineer a new type of plant life that can live in the desert so that the Saudis can stop relying on oil and instead displace the U.S. in its role of number one grain exporter to the world. Cut to five years later. The plant scientist has been working on some kind of genetically altered rose. This new life gets all tentacular and then slithers out to the ocean where it gets all huge. Of course Godzilla shows up and destroys Biollante, who gets reborn via beams of beams of DNA or light or something beamed down from the sky, this time with a kind of gator head and lots of toothy hydra tentacles. OK. This is why Grant affirms a transcendental philosophy that supports the fundamental proposition that the “transcendental is the in itself formless form of all forms that is always posterior to the unconditioned that generates it and is its ground …”. O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors. The penultimate chapter of A Line of Sight is titled “Quintessence.” It begins: “It is the last hour of your life. Turn down the thermostat.” Beyond Bhutan, exactly where you can’t see it, is the cabinet of alchemic texts, the red telephone you can’t use, the painful manuscript, the airconditioner plugged into the circuit too low in amperage to power it. The chemical lamp, all unseen things. The Brave Soldier has come at last to the bottom of the well. And finds himself in another house, just like all houses, every house. The wall. The wall might be the surface of what the Greeks, in nervous fear, ingratiatingly called the Hospitable, the Euxine Sea, a smiling most dangerous flatterer. We call it Black, and have forgotten to be afraid. The wall wants me to forget everything beyond its so casual opacity.

[Note: Sources: Joyelle McSweeney, Raul Zurita, Purgatory (tr. Anna Deeny), Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, as quoted in McSweeney’s “Campo-sition as Exhumation: On Zurita and Stein”, at Montevidayo, 9 Sept 012 (with bits of Los Lobos and Jacques Derrida added by JBR); Trane DeVore, “Godzilla vs. Biollante”, at Troutfactory Notebook, dated at the blog site 29 Dec 05 but dated in the URL 9 Sept 012, on which date it showed up in my Google Reader; JBR; S C Hickman, and Iain Hamilton Grant, “Movements of the World: The Sources of Transcendental Philosophy”, as quoted in Hickman’s “Iain Hamilton Grant: Movements of the World”, at Dark Chemistry, 9 Sept 012; Frank O’Hara, “Poem”, as quoted in Bookbat, “Poem”, at The Bookbat, 9 Sept 012; John Yau, and Robert Kelly, A Line of Sight, as quoted in Yau’s “A Map That Never Stays the Same”, at Hyperallergic, 9 Sept 012]

Comments

[Ed Baker]

thanks for the link/re:minder to/of Bob Kelly
I don't have nor have I ever read his A Line of Sight
however, not letting not-knowing (or knowing either) stop me:

I suspect that A Line of Sight came after his Kali Yuga (1970) and his CITIES (1971) (which opens with (also) this "line of sight"):

"Where shall I take myself with my ostrich luggage and my peacock pride?"

some "stroke" use of "luggage" rather than "baggage" (which automatically gets us far-beyond the trite & usual...
which brings me to my (round-about) point:

Kelly and his work greatly celebrated hardly used....

[john]

Yeah, I need to read more Kelly, no doubt. It's been a while. A Line of Sight did follow those books. It's a little Black Sparrow thing, published while I worked there ...