From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free. She swallows once more. (Once more. One more time would do.) In preparation. It augments. To such a pitch. Endless drone, refueling itself. Autonomous. Self-generating.
It was famous soup
… whose bones therefore appear short or thin relative to dental age
anemia recorded as porosity of the eye orbits
The rest buried him by striking him with fir trees
The wounded were washed in hot waters
the mystic dialectic of toxins and hormones
(more hormones, less toxins; less hormones, more
toxins; movement between toxins and
hormones and sometimes their confusion
for hormones can act as toxins and
toxins also can act as hormones) so that
(here by landscape I mean political economy)
body organs cast in metals
—divinatory objects—
a throw of dice
I start a school called how can I live
In my school called how can I live
my skin itches
When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say. Now there you go, he responds. The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask,
there are these things:
cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells
and then the general beating of circulation
and hands, and body, and feet
and skin that surrounds hands, body, feet.
This is a shape,
a shape of blood beating and cells dividing.
But outside of this shape is space.
There is space between the hands.
There is space between the hands and space around the hands.
There is space around the hands and space in the room.
There is space in the room that surrounds the shapes of everyone’s
hands and body and feet and cells and the beating contained
within.
There is space, an uneven space, made by this pattern of bodies.
This space goes in and out of everyone’s bodies.
Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone
with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out
as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
the space around the hands in and out
as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and
the space around the hands and the space of the room in and out
nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and
argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria
mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and
titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized
glass and concrete
the liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?
if the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets
into the air and harvest the fog
In clumps.
Sometimes legibly.
Like organs, they were internal.
They grew larger.
One scale was blue.
Another orange.
Some flames were green.
Lakes. (The Green Lake Is Awake)
Still others were without color.
And others with all.
His favorite color was the vowel.
Her favorite vowel was the atom.
His favorite atom was the rhythm.
Her favorite rhythm was the prism.
His favorite prism was the violet.
Her favorite violet was the lyric.
His favorite lyric was the logic.
Her favorite logic was the toxic.
His favorite toxic was the vertex.
Her favorite vertex was the tonic.
His favorite tonic was the cortex.
Her favorite cortex was the planet.
So we go to have Chinese for dinner and my friend who is visiting from another planet is horrified (and perhaps a little excited also), until I explain to her that we are having Chinese food, not Chinese people. We go to a place that serves not dumpling soup, which I love, but soup dumpling, with which I am unfamiliar. The soup is actually inside of each dumpling, and everyone develops their own system of eating it. My friend Morton, a sweet and gentle man, is sitting quietly beside me with his uneaten hamburger. I don’t know how he managed to get himself a hamburger in a Chinese restaurant, but there he sits, and there sits his hamburger, with the top bun off. Morton says he wants live ants on his burger but does not want to go hunting for ants himself, so he is waiting for the ants to come to the burger, at which point he will replace the top bun and eat. I tell him that he will probably have better luck with that outside, and he says that’s a good idea, thanks, and goes outside with his hamburger, and that’s the last I ever see of him.
DELTA DELTA DELTA
CHANGE CHANGE CHANGE
I cannot feel my cat’s fur
with my left hand
I cannot
feel my own body with my right
He was so calm when he cut them off
He chopped me over a stump
He chopped the tree, then me
What if I told you
he begged his mother & sister for forgiveness
while they searched for my left hand in the forest?
Some nights I dream of my hands. The life they are living together without my body.
I imagine them flying through the sky, no longer weighed down. Clutching one another when they get cold. They sew deep purple silk gloves for one another as gifts. They clap together in a sunbeam. They have many wishes, my hands. They take their wishes to the river and dip their fingers in. The water is clear. They no longer look for love. They go everywhere but the forest. Donald Trump says he is going to read a book. Because he’s interested in climate change. The book is called Donald Trump: An Environmental Hero. No shit. So it is not surprising, then, that the construction of walls and fences to block rising sea levels and incoming people has become one of the world’s fastest growing industries, alongside the detention and deportation of those the fences fail to stop. Each step in the “crimmigration” process now has its own corporate sector and dedicated army of rightwing lobbyists to perpetuate the laws that support it. Neither is it surprising that state prisons in nine states have struck deals with private equity telecom companies to introduce pay-per-minute reading and video conferencing services in their facilities. In December, the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation launched a policy that charges inmates $1 for every two minutes of reading. In Missouri, where prison visits are increasingly being banned or restricted, inmates are being charged more than one month’s prison wages to make a 30-minute video call. In 2017, research by the Prison Policy Initiative found that the average minimum daily — not hourly, daily — wage paid to incarcerated workers across the country was 86 cents, down from 93 cents in 2001. To quote Tsedaye Makonnen, I would never do anything like that again. I was tired as shit and over being a black woman in these spaces. I literally laid out the rebozo, a cloth that you use to alleviate pain during labor. You put it around pregnant women, and you shake their butt, and it shakes the baby down. I lay on top of it and pulled out my massage things that I use with the moms. I was like, “Massage each other, and massage me.” It turned into this situation where all these white people had to take care of a black woman. I don’t know if they realized that, but that is what happened. I got the best massage of my fucking life. I called the piece I Need a Motherfucking Doula. So of course I wanted to know what Harry and Meghan were up to, so I turned to their website and read, “Sussexroyal.com was created as a source of factual information regarding the workstreams of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Through this website you will find key information about their commitment to: Community, The Monarchy, and The Commonwealth, as well as answers to many questions. This information can be found on the following pages: Funding and Media.” Which doesn’t mean the word workstream is unknown in the US. It’s used, for example, by devotees of agile software development. A May 2018 article in the Harvard Business Review informs us that “implementing agile at scale requires modularizing and then seamlessly integrating workstreams,” and good luck with that, amirite? Kumanu, based in Michigan, advises that agile marketing managers “should take into account the workstreams of their cross-functional helpers so progress is not stunted.” Indeed. Workstream seems to mean what you do, I guess. By this point you may be wondering what agile software development is. I quote: “Agile software development comprises various approaches to software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer /end user.” In other words, we code, if it doesn’t work, we fix it til it works, then we change it if the people we want to sell it to don’t like the end result. But of course a text speaks various languages. Various languages simultaneously. Hermeneutics supposes that each text has a double. And structuralist semiotics treats the text as composed of parts. The text, in truth, as is well known, is various. The text is various texts and the text we read is only the apparent text we perceive, the text-apparent is constructed in the reader’s perception through the superimposition of only some of its texts. The page is not a palimpsest, as has been said, but rather a tower-of-texts. Let’s imagine a glass plate onto which a text has been inscribed. This glass plate is covered with another similar glass plate onto which another text has been inscribed. And another plate, always, is placed underneath. This forms a tower of glass. The reader only observes the last plate. What is read are the words of this last plate, along with the words that show through the transparent spaces from the plates below. This roof — the top plate — is taken for a panopticon. Of course, it is a false panopticon or, in other words, there are nothing but false panopticons. Each level of the tower is its own time.
Let’s say it started with larvae threading
kaleidoscopic worming
long dark up
my prepubescent ass
Males die in the small intestine
as the females begin
In the matriarchy
everyone gets as much pie
to do with, as they want
In fully automated luxury communism
everyone gets anointed with
vat-grown hyena brains
Europe fashions you an asthma of sand
Europe
with its fatal rat tail
There under the boatman’s damp armpit
are more of them than birds on all the earth
To find out what was happening at a genetic level, the researchers compared gene expression in leaves and the cambium, a thin layer of stem cells between the internal wood and external bark that differentiate into other tissues throughout a Ginko biloba tree’s life. The team sequenced the trees’ RNA, examined hormone production, and screened miRNA — molecules that can turn specific genes on and off — in trees ranging from 3 to 667 years old. As expected, the expression of genes associated with senescence, the final and fatal stage of life, increased predictably in dying leaves. But when researchers examined the expression of those same genes in the cambium, they found no difference between young and old trees. However, there is evidence that the trees do experience some changes over time. The older trees had lower levels of a growth hormone called indole-3-acetic acid and higher levels of a growth-inhibiting hormone called abscisic acid. Those 200 years or older also saw decreases in gene expression associated with cell division, differentiation, and expansion. This means that cambial stem cells in older trees don’t divide into new wood and bark as easily as in younger trees. Plant biologist Jinxing Lin, one of the authors of the study, says it’s possible that if the division rate of cambial cells continues to decline after thousands of years, tree growth could slow, and ginkgo trees might eventually die of old age. Most trees, however, appear to die from “accidents” such as pests or droughts. To see whether the trees become more vulnerable to such stressors as they age, the researchers examined genes related to pathogen resistance and the production of protective antimicrobial compounds called flavonoids. They found no difference in gene expression for trees of different ages, suggesting the trees do not lose their ability to defend against outside stressors. That’s a “striking” ability that helps the ginkgoes grow healthily for thousands of years, says another of the study’s authors, molecular biologist Richard Dixon. Lijing Cheng, the other paper’s lead author, said the ocean temperature was 0.0750 C above the 1981-2010 average in 2019. “There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat trapping gases to explain this,” Cheng said, adding that to reach this temperature, the ocean would have taken in 228 sextillion joules of heat. “I did a calculation,” Cheng said. “... the amount of heat we have put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions,” he added. That’s equivalent to dropping roughly four such bombs into the oceans every second over the past quarter century. But because the warming is speeding up, the rate at which we are dropping these imaginary bombs is getting faster than ever. “We are now at five to six Hiroshima bombs each second,” said John Abraham, another of the authors of the study. But no terror is unspeakable. Unseen doesn’t mean invisible. Civilization is just another name for the self-destruct button. The “social” is only an expanded battlespace, predestined to contingency. Like History when it switches to a first-person monologue. About the eroticism of teargas canisters. Backwashed with rancid haemoglobins. Acid bath, arms & legs in wheelbarrows. Eyeball spit. How is it even possible for life to exist at street temperature? Just another “death in custody.” The only real question is when will you realise this is all-out-war? Initiate terminator code sequence. What refuses to rhyme with XYZ? By now everyone should have learned the lesson that the logic of Power is the logic of sacrifice. Regimes of austerity are never regimes against expenditure, but of a heightened sacrificial mode of expenditure, which is why they attract to themselves the appointments of religiosity & of the sacred mission (ARBEIT MACHT FREI). Indeed, research & development has been increasingly directed towards a future of off-world resource exploitation: virtually every known body within the solar system has been analysed & indexed according to what are only, for the time-being, hypothetical forecasts for industrial growth, based on the rate of resource depletion on Earth. Accordingly, segments of the media have begun reporting on prospective extraterrestrial “mineral wealth” in counterpoint to the narrative of climate catastrophe. The logic of economic scarcity has led to claims of exorbitant “value” of space objects like the asteroids Davida, Psyche, Anteros, regularly assessed in unworldly denominations. (A NASA mission, incidentally, plans to arrive at Psyche in 2030.) BLA BLA BLA. Walk. Don’t Walk. Walk et cetera. To the pyrocumulus, thou art the worm our father, roar upon the deep! Walk. Don’t Walk. Walk et cetera. There are humans stalking the world of specters. They want something from these spirits, and they return again and again to them, seemingly relentlessly. That humans are stalking the spirit world is apparent everywhere you look. And what are you, then, in relation to it? You would not know at first glance that the room is actually built of old teak boards, because the old wood is shellacked to a point approaching vinyl. The house is built to last. For insurance, there are photos of family ancestors, kings, and Buddhist saints hung all along one wall as well as bright-red protective flags hung near every door on which arcane inscriptions of numbers and sacred alphabets are inked into complex matrices designed to cheat fate. The brand-new flat screen plays over and over the images from exactly halfway around the world of two tall white buildings tumbling down and lashing out with giant paws of dust. Kamnoi, in her sixties with failing eyes, is latched to the set. With her notebook and pen in hand, she searches the screen through big frog-goggle glasses. Her jet-black wig is tilted off-kilter, but she takes no notice. The colors of the smoke, the shape of the rubble, and the numbers estimated to have died, all these are inscribed as quickly as Kamnoi can perceive them or can receive information from the on-the-fly Thai translations of the live video feed that chime in and out of the foreign broadcast almost randomly. Interpretation runs in her family. As a young woman she would attend the backyard cinema her neighbor would set up on Sundays, where it was her uncle who served as the voiceover translator and dubber for Hollywood films, although he knew no English. Sitting in the back, throwing his voice through a PA system, he would ventriloquize whatever he decided the characters might be saying to each other. A deep voice for men, a high voice for women. The drama did not suffer, Kamnoi has insisted on several occasions. Her notebook is a mess of observations, readings, and numbers. “These are the raw events,” she explains. “The rawness is the misfortune. But it leaves a hole in the world. And to that hole of extraordinary misfortune, fortune is drawn. Then you have to pull out the cooked meaning, and you get the number.” As Kamnoi moves quickly but calmly, my own mind is spinning political nightmare stories and future scenarios (which, it so happened, paled in comparison to reality). I am comforted by Kamnoi’s combination of assurance in the future and her whatever-will-be-will-be attitude. If she gets the right numbers, she will know soon enough. But in a few days it will become apparent that they are not the right numbers. Actually, she could have won if she had not spent today decoding her tv set and had instead gone out to the market, where she normally would have gone had none of this happened exactly halfway around the world. If she were in the market, she would be privy to the general consensus, which is short and sweet not to mention correct. There are four planes, and two buildings have gone down. Four and two are the hot numbers. Everyone in the local market is going to clean up. Meanwhile, the bet takers in the local underground lottery (which uses the last numbers of the government lottery number drawing) will lose big and almost be bankrupted, as sometimes happens when a large social body cooks the raw event in just the right way. But we are not going forward much here. This is, more or less, the end. But here, now, near the end of time for Kamnoi, opportunities for numerical perception come while she is reeling from the financial catastrophe of the Asian financial crisis that has just unfolded over recent years. This happens to be a place severely impacted by the spread of neoliberal discourses of financial liberalization, which set up conditions of capital free-flow and financial panic and set in motion a painful aftermath of unemployment, inflation, and economic stagnation that is still very much present. And that was that. War, destruction, hate, loudness, the end of the human race, and the destruction of the planet followed, and we all know how that turned out, so we will not go further into all that came after life was over. Things like that go smoothly. But often they do not stay that way because, as with all good men, there was no avoiding the fact that other ladies would perceive this good heart as well. And it was not such a bad thing in his mind or in the minds of most men he knew to occasionally fool around with women. Or, as it were, many women, or, as it were, rather often, or perhaps the best way to put it would be practically all the time. His wife would alternate between knowing it, not wanting to know it, “not knowing it,” getting into jealous rages, and gambling here and there in her spare time in quiet desperation and treasuring her favorite possessions, most of all a big, thick gold chain, her favorite piece of jewelry of which she was quite proud. Things went on like this for her until she died of cancer, as many do in the area. Soon after, Uncle Wua fell in love. Too soon, it turned out. But he was sincere enough. He may have even been faithful to her (although he is not so forthcoming with the personal details the closer the story gets in time to the incident). But even after a few years, his wife did not fade from the picture. One night, a friend came to stay in Uncle Wua’s house for a couple of weeks, and his wife came as well. Uncle Wua put them up in what had been his wife’s room. The very first night, as soon as they put the lights out, they heard creaking footsteps in and around their room but thought nothing of it as it was probably Wua. But why it sounded like he was in their room, they could not say. The next night, they went out drinking and on to the village temple where there was a fair where you could pay to dance with young women for five baht a dance. Uncle Wua, especially, had himself a real good time dancing the night away. But when they all got home, they found, to their great alarm, that all the lights, which they had left off, were on brightly in every room. They were all afraid of robbers, but as they crept up silently to the door and slipped in, they found no one there. Instead, they found spoons from the kitchen scattered on the living room floor. That night, when the couple went to sleep, the husband swore he woke up, or half woke up, in the middle of the night and saw red eyes peering at him through the window. The red eyes made him feel faint, and he collapsed back to sleep. The next day they convinced themselves that it had been a cat, somehow hanging from a branch, or a dream. During the next night, the couple woke up together, and with a sudden shock, they saw looming up over them and right next to the bed the angry red eyes and the form of a pale woman. At first they could not move away from the thing at the bedside, the side of the bed that had once been that of the dead wife. But eventually they regained the use of their muscles and sprang forth and ran out of the room and out of the house. They had to be coaxed back in but refused, in any case, to sleep in that room again. Around that time, Uncle Wua’s new girlfriend came to him, asking him permission to sell the gold chain he had given her. In fact, it had been his former wife’s favorite chain, and he had had bad dreams from the moment he had first given it to his girlfriend. Now she wanted to sell his wife’s gold chain to help with the debt payments she was in for with a local moneylender, which she had contracted in building her own new house. As Uncle Wua was in the midst of building his, he could hardly fail to sympathize and quickly agreed to the idea. His wife, apparently, felt differently. The dreams became worse. At the end he could not sleep. He would lie on his back and stare at the ceiling. Every night, after an hour or so, he would become aware of a figure standing beside him. He could not turn his eyes toward it, so he would close them for a while, hoping it would go away. But when he opened them, it would still be there. He definitely was not sleeping or dreaming, he says, because he was too scared to sleep. He would open his eyes again, and the thing would still be there, and he would see it from the corner of his eyes, staring at him. Then, as the night wore on, it would try to touch his face, and he would go into a frozen-still frenzy. Finally he would become weak and faint, fall asleep, and then wake again in early dawn with a twitch of his whole body and a gasp of cold, wet morning air. One day, soon after the sale of her gold chain, while Uncle Wua was looking around his construction site and talking to the builder, one of his big teak pillars fell down, hard, on top of him. The dense, heavy tree trunk pinned him down at the small of the back, and he was screaming and pounding the ground with his palms. They eventually rolled the teak trunk up off him, though he himself never did get up ever again, at least not without being pulled up by others. The bad dreams and visitations stopped after that, but the punishment has worn on to this day, every day, as poor uncle Wua lies paralyzed on his bamboo platform. This is the area where the dead are burned. Corpses are placed on a pile of wood but also mixed with old tires so that the oily burn is hot enough to melt sinews and cartilage, which do not give up easily. Sometimes the heat is too little, such that it merely pulls on the body’s strings, and the corpse sits up suddenly in the fire, raising its arms stiffly and hissing a crazed shower of black ash. At his side stands an emperor penguin, cheerful companion, loyal friend. My grandfather has named him Franklin after one of his favorite dogs from home. When he waddles across the deck, he reminds my grandfather of a black and white signal buoy that bobbed near his home cove when he was a child. “Shall I tell the children we’ve arrived?” Franklin asks. “No, not yet,” says my grandfather. A thought forms in his skull and evaporates. The ship dips with the swell, and he steadies himself against the roll. His mind is shorting out. He thinks: the sea is like … is like … is like … the sea. A bolt of freezing sea wind bores an acid tunnel to the back of his throat. He coughs into a handkerchief. Blood. “On second thought,” he says, “yes.” Once his companion leaves, he folds the handkerchief twice, remembers it was a gift from his own children, from his wife, and throws it overside. No need to worry anyone. The stained piece of cloth flutters and dips on the wind like an enormous white butterfly before settling atop the leaden water, saturating, and sinking. Onward, he thinks. The children appear on deck. There are twenty-five of them, little blonde Norsemen. They’ve read my grandfather’s books, they are excited to be a part of this expedition. Below deck, they’ve made dolls out of sticks and sailcloth, pulled clothes from the winter chest, staged elaborate plays. They’ve helped with dinner and cleaned their plates, they’ll do whatever Franklin asks of them. They’ve shown no greenness on the waves. Looking at them now, however, my grandfather realizes he cannot tell them apart. The only name he can remember is Hjalmar. But which one is Hjalmar? He was one of the smaller boys. Not here, now. Or is he? I had studied the Dust Bowl, the architecture at Delphi, Judaic & Islamic legends of Moses, Midianite theology, the History of Haiti, Aryan horseman of ancient Iran, the collapse of Sumerian agriculture, Kundalini yoga, Allan Savory’s & competing theories on desertification reversal … Apparently, I have a body that produces a lot of blood. Yesterday (for example),
I ate the same sandwich I eat every week: eggplant
roasted in red pepper aioli, a focaccia jammed full
by arugula, capers sweaty in browned butter.
Then one student said her sense of smell is hyperactive because she doesn’t hear well. The conversations formed a fugue, so I played them one. The room is way too cold. Another student says his name lacks the second “r” found in Trump’s son’s name. He’s adamant on that fact. “It’s about eavesdropping,” one student exclaims. Another wrote in his portion of an exquisite corpse that it was getting harder to fold the pieces of paper. One student wants, in her next life, to be reborn as a unicorn. She took “I am not a crook” for “cook,” but that was the fault of my bad handwriting. Mashing up WS Merwin, Li-Young-Lee, and Jane Hirshfield, we discover that
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live
In league with stones of the earth
Flies, dust, an unnameable odor
The little bells of the bridle will
Hang
beside you quietly
in the heat and the tree’s thin
shade
So this is indeed more than just a mystical day planner. Commemorated dates include events like the Buddha’s birthday, Ana Mendieta’s death and the X-Files pilot premier, esoteric festivals and artistic and occult history. It provides full astrological navigation with an overview of the year, a birthchart template and guides to moon magic, houses, planets and symbols. Key transits, retrogrades and lunar phases, noted throughout the planner, allow you to organise your life in alignment with these occurrences, visible at a glance. A global map showing sacred sites provides inspiration for transformative pilgrimages. To support a holistic approach to health and wellbeing, an appendix contains guides to healing herbs, key acupressure points, the chakra system and Ayurvedic medicine, as well as a directory of key magical places, shops and websites. You will also find guides to Acupressure by Maria Christofi, Astrology by Francesca Lisette, Herbal Remedies by Seed Sistas, Psychedelic Journey by Julian Vayne, Rituals by CAConrad, Jesse Darling, Bhanu Kapil and Nisha Ramayya, Soji by Shoukei Matsumoto and Tarot by adrienne maree brown, Rachel Pollack (author of the bestselling tarot guide 78 Degrees of Wisdom), Candida Powell-Williams and Sabrina Scott, as well as a guide to Soji cleaning by Shoukei Matsumoto, author of the bestseller A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind. Which is why Sean regularly cites a popular and revolutionary English ‘countertradition,’ which reaches back from Maggie O’Sullivan, Barry MacSweeney, and Basil Bunting, to William Blake, Percy Shelley, and John Clare. He suggests that this countertradition was particularly active in the seventeenth century, when it included Giordano Bruno, Tom O’Bedlam (the hero of an anonymous broadside), women on trial for witchcraft, and the Ranter Abiezer Coppe. Coppe’s fiery antinomianism is particularly attractive to Bonney (he refers to an anecdote about Coppe standing in a London pulpit and swearing nonstop for an hour as a ‘lost avant-garde classic’ and he’s right for damn sure.) As Sean puts it in Letters 140, Rimbaud’s ‘derangement of the senses’ dictum can be read as a ‘recipe for personal excess’ only from the perspective of police reality. Like, I just took some speed, then smoked a joint and now I’m gonna have a pepsi, but that’s not why I writing this and it’s not what it’s about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. It’s only in the English speaking world, where none of us know anything except how to kill, that you have to point simple shit like that out. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie. Or not. As a witness to the death of Jacob Michael put it: (1) They had banged his head on the floor and they were giving him punches. (2) He was already handcuffed and he was restrained when I saw him. (3) He was shouting, “Help me, help me.” (4) He wasn’t coherent. (5) I went to speak to his mum. (6) He couldn’t even stand up after they hit him with the batons. (7) They knocked on her door three hours later and told her “your son’s died.” Which is why Sean argues that ‘There is no prosody, there is only a scraped wound — we live inside it like fossilised, vivisected mice. Turned inside out, tormented beyond recognition.’
Anyway, here in 1917
we’re having a right laugh
no point in waking you…
For some reason, it was 1649,
we were trapped inside it, clutching
our most reasonable point of view.
…Maybe it was 2003, or something,
I don’t remember, my favourite laws
were just a system of false brains
I recognise that / splintered & oblique
social utterance flaming malevolence
magnetic, would soon go dancing etc
Which is when Glissant reminds us that, “Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. No one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed organised their speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of pure noise,”
Metal Throat Spike Language
I/we/he/she/you/they
Ack
(locked:)hail
in brass howls (ona)
red wind:
churning over ( ) bodies / wind
rawstarz raw
light my
I wish I had a word for
tideclamps/ slashpalms/ furnace
tide-laps
ticktick-
tideclamps
(m-way silence-
webshine
[t
Poisons
“SMILE YOU’RE ON”
break window
boil
with
( )
1=1
howled hand
lethal virus
thwack impact
is gorged loop
is sharpening wires o
I am replying in fragments because it is painful to articulate — I feel I am losing some battle though it’s a battle whose arena I can’t even discern. This world is breaking me down. Apart. There’s something I’m reaching for and I’m buckling from the effort. Also true: Bo itin nyen’s respo in his wrg h hs bec ao mem ore des nse pe rat ed an mre vioo lent lod h tse em oock ti ns in hec … The purpose is to drag you into the woods and leave you there, disoriented, probably covered with mud, vulnerable. It is in this space that the cuckoo bird dwells. The shoes come and go by themselves. Pirate Jenny scrubs floors in a hotel til the time comes to signal her secret armada to blow up the town.
BANG
night of the living dead
So Set I is laden with gnarled semi-pastoral scenes of the ragged poor — the cuckoo and its interruptions, with log cabins, rings and coins, ribbons in hair, flowers, soot, the black hair of true loves, thrushes, hares on mountains, the counting of heads, geese, witches and cauldrons and magic and heresy, sightless souls and wandering ghosts, lily-white hands, and walking around and meeting fair what/whoevers. And most notably, figures that I have not yet mentioned, the incarnated form of ghosts as taken from both Vodun and modern Western sources: zombies. Lurching, they are not yet organized or capable of enacting their full functions, their potential to break out of the alienated and oppressed state they are in. At the moment they are in a process of being created and controlled by (rather than resisting) “the police computer” and the lords of finance capital. Almost in response, Set II keeps a traditional folk flavour of birds, dogs, beetles, flowers, pretty frocks, but shifts focus to the landscape of Hell that the zombies with their false consciousness seem to be taking us to. Everything is “burnt”: histories, words, rooms, numbers, speech, voices, frequencies, decibels, and people. My set-up was simple: an amp, a microphone, a loop pedal — and a box of everyday items such as beads, coins, butter knives, trowels, and baking implements. A buzz or low note or bit of feedback typically initiated a sequence of sounds. The sounds achieved range from low rumbles, to string-like tones, to sharp squeals. The loop function on the effects pedal was one of several settings, but the one that I used most often in order to capture and sediment layers of buzzing, gurgling, sustaining or repeating of shifting sung notes, etc. This included moments where sudden silence seemed most appropriate. In the words of the famous song,
In fair Nottamun town, not a soul would look up,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
To show me the way to fair Nottamun town.
[…]
Sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone,
Ten thousand stood round me, and yet I’s alone.
Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm,
Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.
Which meant it was time for some hissing, scratching, some always present long and discordant drones. The cuckoo, then, was the warning, and the crow, a suspiciously they-like haruspex, prepares to inspect entrails as they are made available. So it’s unsurprising that someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
“Escape from this truth lies through no doorway, no slippery construct of language or argument: ‘we’ are ‘it,’ inextricable from our circumstances. The point on which all else turns: within this ‘drastically collective’ condition, how, then … live?” asks Marthe Reed. “In times like these,” she adds, in a revision of Rich, “it is necessary to embrace the ‘somewhere in-between’ affording and sheltering difference not as distance but as intimacy.”
And there are three stages of that:
The musical, the architectonic
And the textile
These scrolls speak of nearly everything
Like blood in a sponge
Blood washes out pretty good
In cold water
If applied soon enough
Someone said
You can’t wear a bone for a hat
But the mystery lies there
A hat within a hat
Stately, deep green of leaf
Something like a stone doesn’t look like
It’s got that problem
But, you know, it does!
1.
“A little further down a tiny pool is seen,
and still further down two others,
sizable pools, crystal clear and deep.
They have no visible means of support,
no stream is seen to enter them, none to leave;
but their suppressed sparkle
tells that they are living water.
These are the pools of Dee.”
2.
“Cairngorm water is all clear …
When it has any color at all, it is a green
like the green of winter skies, but lucent,
clear like aquamarines,
without the vivid brilliance
of glacier water.
Sometimes
the Quoche waterfalls
have violet playing through the green,
and the pouring water
spouts and bubbles
in a violet froth.
The pools beneath these waterfalls
are clear and deep.”
So, what happened is, there were robots.
and he had to go through the sewers. And then lasers.
And then he had to destroy the monster in the sewers.
Okay. That one is 30,000, triangle, zero, check mark,
check mark, square “diagumol,” a cube, check-em mark,
whatever.
Then the greatest and mightiest of these spirits, the God, Orpheus spoke, let there be a star on which we will all be able to find a reason able residence and shelter and, as soon as He had so commanded, it was there. A planet, named Earth: desert, raw and empty: And it was dark, as far as their gazes were even able to reach: And, all spirits hovered over the water. But now they came to solid ground. Then the God Orpheus said, let there be light: And there was light. A splendid sun high above them sent its glowing rays vertically down onto the earth: And hardly had a few hours passed before the latter went down with a second divine almighty-word and an enormous number of sparkling and twinkling, brightly-shining stars, with moon comet, and eclipses, stood or circled in the blue firmament. And, with yet another majestic almighty-word of the latter, the most manifold, splendid and extensive flora, culture, and vegetation was created all around all the spirits, as well as over the entire globe and over all the uncountable stars that were circling in their orderly and lawful orbits, a creation with often the most luxurious and resplendent, in all ways most diverse genies and congregations, fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and other manifold, tame, wild, and rapacious animals, springs, streams, rivers, currents, waterfalls, cliffs, manifold mountains, glacier chains and ditto, labyrinths, valleys, giant-planes and mighty ancient-forests, etcetera, etcetera, overgrown paradise gardens, etcetera, etcetera, the position of the numbers right up into the myriads,
One, ten, hundred.
One thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand.
One million, ten million, hundred million.
One milliard, ten milliard, hundred milliard.
One billion, ten billion, hundred billion.
One billiard, ten billiard, hundred billiard.
One trillion, ten trillion, hundred trillion.
One trilliard, ten trilliard, hundred milliard.
One quadrillion, ten quadrillion, etc.
One quadrilliard, ten quadrilliard, etc.
One regoniff, ten regoniff, etc.
One suniff, ten suniff, etc.
One jeratif, ten jeratif, etc.
One unitif, ten unitif, etc.
One vidoniss, ten vidoniss, etc.
One weratif, ten weratif, etc.
One hylotif, ten hylotif, etc.
One ysantteron, ten ysantteron, etc.
One zernantt, ten:zernantt, etc.
One agoniff, ten agoniff, etc.
One benetif, ten benetif, etc.
One corrantt, ten corrantt, etc.
One deretif, ten deretif, etc.
One eratif, ten eratif, etc.
One ferrantto, ten ferrantto, etc.
One generative, ten generative, etc.
One horatif, ten horatif, etc.
One inioth, ten inioth, hundred inioth.
One kariffa, ten kariffa, etc. etc.
All the way up to
One oberon —
Do not go past this, for that is a misfortune. Hmm: Indeed, Oberon, the god of Sirius-echo-giant-fountain, the latter with a water-stream-diameter of 10,000 hours and a height of around 2,220,000 hours, that is, falling from its knoll-giant-city-mariposa into
Bi-Bi-B i-Bi-Bii-ih-flii-ih; Bi-Bi-Bi-Bi
Wiiga, i jiiga
Chlii-Chlii
ii-ih bii-ih, the cuckoo is gone, anyway.
[Note: Sources: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “Diesuse”, in Dictee; Myung Mi Kim, “Works”, in Commons; image: Marthe Reed, “Wasted”, at Best American Experimental Writing, 014; Lisa Robertson, “The Seam”, at Literary Hub, 3 Jun 015; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written After September 11 2001”, in The Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Kazim Ali, “Ramadan”, in The Fortieth Day; Amy Catanzano, “This is the Value of Inquiry”, in “Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella”, quoted in “Amy Catanzano: Four Poems toward a Quantum Poetics”, at Poems and Poetics, 9 Jan 011; Sawako Nakayasu, “We the Heathens”, in The Ants; Ariana Reines, “Death”, in Ignota, “22 Moons: Death”, email rec’d 10 Jan 020, approx. 2:42pm PST; Suzanne Richardson, “My Husband Chopped My Hands Off”, at BOMB, 10 Jan 020; JBR, but see Aaron Rupar, “Trump’s climate change reading material is beyond parody”, at Vox, 10 Jan 020; Thomas Nail, “The Climate-Migration-Industrial Complex”, at Public Seminar, 10 Jan 020; JBR; Mei-Ling McNamara, “US states move to stop prisons charging inmates for reading and video calls”, at Guardian, 13 Jan 019; JBR; Tsedaye Makonnen, quoted in Jessica Lanay, “Outstanding, Girl, You Knock Me Out: Ayana Evans and Tsedaye Makonnen”, at BOMB, 13 Jan 020; JBR, but see next; Nancy Friedman, “Word of the week: Workstream”, Fritinancy, 13 Jan 019; JBR, w/ a little help from Wikipedia; Heriberto Yépez, The Empire of Neomemory (trs. Jen Hofer, Christian Nagler & Brian Whitener); Rachel Rabbit White, “ASS Demon”, “Porn Carousel”, at Wonder; JBR; Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, “Horoscope”, “To Jean Dufoir” (tr. Conor Bracken), at Poetry Northwest, 24 Jun 019; Erin Malsbury, “How the Ginkgo biloba achieves near-immortality”, at Science, 13 Jan 020; Ivana Kottasová, “Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second”, at CNN, 13 Jan 020; Interior Ministry, various, at Alienist 7; Richard Makin, Nina Źivančević, Michael Rowland, Louis Armand, Tycho Say, “A New Decade of Alienism”, at Alienist 7; Alan Klima, Ethnography #9, at Duke University Press; Ethan Rutherford, “Farthest South”, at BOMB, 15 Jan 020; Ariana Reines, quoted in Sandra Simonds review of Reines’s A Sand Book, at Harvard Review Online, 14 Jan 020; Wo Chan, “june 8, the smiley barista remembers my name”, Poetry, Jan 020; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “Meditation 13”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 16 Jan 020; JBR; WS Merwin, “The River of Bees”, Li-Young Lee, “The City in Which I Love You”, Jane Hirshfield, “Mule Heart”, in Kathryn VanSpanckeren, Outline of American Literature, Revised Edition, 2006 (“Published By the United States Department of State Bureau of International Information Programs”; who knew?); JBR; blurb for Ignota Diary 2020, at Ignota, and email from Ignota rec’d 17 Jan 020, approx. 3:03am PST; JBR; Andrea Brady, Sean Bonney, and Édouard Glissant, quoted in Brady’s “Sean Bonney: Poet Out of Time”, at Academia.edu (lost the link); Sean Bonney, Poisons: Their Antidotes, quoted in Mark Jackson, “The Poetry of Sean Bonney: Form and Content in Poisons, their Antidotes”, at Readings: Responses and Reactions to Poetries 3; email from a friend I’d like to keep anonymous, rec’d 17 Jan 020, approx. 8:10am PST; Delilah Glaxo-Kleitmann, “Blade Pitch Control Unit / Sean Bonney (Salt, 2005)”, at On Company Time, 16 Aug 06 (a review in “dialogue” with Steve Spence); Frances Kruk, with one bit from Sean Bonney’s The Commons, quoted in Kruk’s “Betrayal and the Maligned Sound of the Cuckoo: A text/music Spin on Collaboration”, at Pores: A Journal of Poetics Research, ?2009; JBR; Teju Cole, Seven Short Stories about Drones, quoted in Andrea Brady, “Drone Poetics”, at Academia.edu; image: El Anatsui, Gravity and Grace, 2010, embedded in Mohamad Khalil Harb, “El Anatsui’s Urgent Visions of the Past and Future”, at Hyperallergic, 18 Jan 020; Marthe Reed, quoted in Elisabeth Workman and Susana Gardner, preface to “Marthe Reed Tribute / das kollektiv 9, ISSUE 22”, at Dusie; Norman Fischer, various, in Success; Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, quoted in Steve Mitchell, “Happy New Year”, email rec’d 18 Jun 020, approx. 2:33pm PST; Ezra Thomas Cross, Speedafore Ninja Turtle; Adolf Wölfli, From the Cradle to the Grave, Geographic and Algebraic Books, in Adolf Wölfli: Creator of the Universe (ed. Terezie Zemánková)]
