Zeitgeist Spam

One Sky No. ??? (After Stephen Shore)

[Note: Source: Stephen Shore, “University Drive, Fort Worth Texas, June 3, 1976”, in Uncommon Places: The Complete Works]

Autopoiesis LIX

I’m down here

Well if I was I don’t know

How this

Well if I

If this after all

Still

Yes

What you here

If I

Oh I don’t know

How that was

Yes

Everywhere

Always and everywhere

Ever and ever

Morning noon and night even in the office

This this is a

Whatkindofa

As at if on or in that is as what other than

And that which if nothing but this and so on

Fixation fixes

In the position I one lead to precisely into one

Chanical chanized phfor

Meta far

Domicile micivil civil

Sin gle graspable grasping

“Why not”

“Why if”

“Why

Because I”

“Be it”

“With respect to him”

Further an absolutely senseless “Oh”

“Now I shall”

“You were to”

“I shall”

“It will be”

“Lacking now is”

[Note: Sources: Roman Jakobsen, quoting I know not what (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop?), and Helmut Heissenbüttel, Textbücher 1-6, 35 (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), in Rosmarie Waldrop, “Helmut Heissenbüttel, Poet of Contexts”, in Waldrop’s Dissonance (if you are interested); Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (trs. Ida Macalpine and Richard A Hunter), in Rasula/McCaffery’s Imagining Language An Anthology]

Homage To Sam Bloomberg-Rissman's skyline

[Note: Source: Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Ojos en los ojos / The Eyes in His Eyes; see this]

For Ginger

[Note: Source: Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Ojos en los ojos / The Eyes in His Eyes]

Autopoiesis LVIII

“A history of German cakes and bread-rolls may contain some unexpected disclosures”

Human breath

Is a dangerous weapon

Fifteen 2-meter grapevine and wire arms occupy a whole room

Delicately approaching visitors and singing them touch-tones

When asked a question which required deep thought

She would screw her eyes tight shut

Jerk her head down to her chest and then freeze for up to half a minute before looking up

Opening her eyes

And answering the question with fluency and intelligence

I know a twelfth spell

(This for the folks in Jena, Louisiana)

If I see on a tree a corpse swinging

Then I cut and colour runes so the man walks again and talks to me

People usually assume that the best place to look for emotions is somewhere inside the mind or body

Here S is

In this multisensory environment

And here is the organist inside him

Playing to the ever-changing picture

While the complex many-stranded lines of music create those vibrations in his soul

Does this mean that everyone will become nicer and nicer and nicer without limit?

Of course not

Thus

Chapter 1 offers up the hypothesis of postmodern memory

Where recollection

Representation of the past

Proves to be another name for intertextual re-presentation

To wit

For the re-enactment of the literary past

Others’ pasts as recorded in their own autobiographical texts

I know a fourth spell

If I am tied

I chant it and free myself

The fetters will fall from my feet

The bonds from my hands

The act of cutting through from one space to another produces a certain complexity involving depth perception

A bicycle-wheel robot rolls around a room in a nervous interactive dance with the people gathered there

Another room is filled with loud

Skeletal machines that shriek and flail

Seemingly attacking each other

Menacing passersby with blinding lights and horrendous noises

Here is a day in the life of a small

Gray-white rock nestling amid the ivy in my backyard

It stayed put

Some things happened to it

There was rain

And it became wet and shiny

There was wind

And it was subtly eroded

My cat chased a squirrel nearby

And this made the rock sway

The importance of the heart

Here

Is not as a pump

But

In Aristotle’s terms

As the centre of intelligence

With presumably a prior claim on the fresh blood

I now accept that a real set of processes exist in the social world that correspond

(Though inexactly)

To what people mean when they talk about emotion

And to what people are doing when they say emotional things to one another

Dear blank

I am writing because I feel you are the chosen one

The perfect subject for a culinary communion as the modern world has long forgotten

I have part decided that my mission is to restore the art of eating with love instead of fear

I hope by now my meaning

And its historic as well as beatific importance is clear

It is inevitable

Now is the time for an age of renewed cannibalism which completes still another stage of development and resolves the malaise du siècle

Just imagine what a fabulous treat you would make

You would not only be well remembered but superbly catered

Remember

There is no rush

I understand this is an important decision

You will be the leader of an incredible eatable art movement

Plus!

Think what a great film it will make

By now the sun was overpowering

It shattered into little pieces on the sand and water

What is the this?

Songs start

Manic sounding singing

Night follows

Manic sounding singing

Only the name of Urth is old

The translation is almost unintelligible

Eat your way home from the moon

A drum rat-population garbage eco-cycle

Buses parked in a tight defensive ring around the White House

High voltage danger zones:

A radio active landscape

A room with a wasp in it

Something between a hotdog stand and a hospital

[Note: Sources: The books in my office this morning. Bill Griffiths, Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic; John Agard, “Listen Mr Oxford Don”, in Other: British and Irish Poets Since 1970 (eds. Ric Caddel and Peter Quartermain); Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life, describing Kenneth Rinaldo’s Autopoiesis; Richard Dawkins, foreword to Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, and Blackmore; back cover of Brian Parkinson, Ideas and Realities of Emotions; Nicholas Humphrey, Seeing Red; Christian Moraru, Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism; Gordon Matta-Clark, as quoted in Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings (ed. Gloria Moure) and on a wall card at MOCA’s Matta-Clark show, slightly “misremembered”; Andy Clark, Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science; Albert Camus, The Stranger (tr. Matthew Ward); Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (trs. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly); Donald Bahr, Lloyd Paul, Vincent Joseph, Ants and Orioles: Showing the Art of Pima Poetry; Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (tr. Ralph Manheim); Jean Leclercq, “Influence and noninfluence of Dionysius in the Western Middle Ages”, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (tr. Colm Luibheid)]

Autopoiesis (And Not Autopoiesis) LVII

Dreamt I tripped

On something like

A stair but

I hadn’t been

Climbing landed face

Down not too

Hard so was

Back on my

Feet a few

Seconds later looked

Back to see

What got me

Couldn’t tell but

Saw my body

Lying there naked

Hairless on its

Side not quite

Fetal said to

Myself shit I

Must be dead

Woke then had

A busy day

Wrote my thing

For Bill Griffiths

Drove into LA

To drop Rose

And K at

LAPL for the

Yarn Harlot circus

Picked up Bob

Ate lunch went

To Bergamot Station

Was blown to

Bits by the

Álvarez Bravos at

The Rose Gallery

Popped in to

Wilshire Books an

Old bookstore gone

In the teeth

Picked up a

Paul McCarthy cheap

Gaped at a

Pam Anderson lookalike

Displaying a hypnotizing

Inch of ass

Crack squatting before

True crime took

Bob home crawled

Back downtown through

Seriously fucked-up traffic

Picked up the

Ladies and because

Of FSD snarled

Once at K

Drove home through

More fucked-up traffic

Talked with Rose

Over Chinese fast

Food about brain

Science and therapeutic

Techniques at home

Found Whitelaw’s Metacreation

(A-Life and

Art) in the

Mail we drove

To Little Bridges

Heard Rachel Rudich

And Karl Kohn

Premiere two beautiful

Kohns they finished

With Hindemith’s Sonate

Für Flöte und

Klavier (1936) had

A late snack

Crawled into bed

Read Jonathan Israel’s

Radical Enlightenment slept

Like a man

With a swollen

Prostate forgot I

Was dead til

7 a.m. when

I read Bernadette

Mayer’s “Summer Solstice”

And You know /

How with some

Dreams, only some

Words / are left

To the dreamer

[Note: Sources: an actual dream, an actual day; Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”; Bernadette Mayer, “Summer Solstice”, as found on Poetry Daily, 16 September 2007 (FSD = Freeway Stress Disorder)]

Autopoiesis LVI (Unpsalm, Us-Balm, i. m. Bill Griffiths)

How it howled up

Uncanny

Lots of it, blasting, a deafening singing, A-Z

It doesn’t halt

For unto us

I dunno why

(Me / them / things)

The sun

Ptink, ebbibi-tink

Wood-tree, grove-leaf

A god in each caterpillar

In each moronic cloud of mould

[Note: Sources: this is a little collage from Griffiths’ own work, as found in the Salt collection The Mud Fort, at my magic pages 30, 27 and 57 and (mirror image) 57, 27, and 30 pages from the end of the volume (pp. 219, 249 and 246). Unpsalm, Us-Balm is from p.250]

Autopoiesis LV

Steering between the ant colony and the inner theatre

Like the six plastic Buddhist monks sitting in a shop window

Contemplating dependent co-origination

And how technology has advanced considerably since Zapruder

Since Baby Jessica and even Baghdad

And how each shot has been meticulously superimposed on its simulation

While the mass of watchers blinks and stupidly stares until finally it too totters and falls

Into the screen of the moment of delirious silence

It is no longer we who ask the universe about the meaning of life

But the universe who quietly asks us

We reply simply that we have forgotten

Skin becomes alien matter folding in billows

Sitting restrained at the desk burning its eyes out at the monitor or television

Inside of which is a phenomenal space under the spell of eros and memoria

Ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions

The obsidian chip and the silicon chip are struck by the light of the same campfire

Downwind in the smoke of which       dot dot dot

Let us now praise famous Alex the research parrot

Who died today

Who could count to six

Identify colors and even express frustration with repetitive scientific trials

And who occasionally instructed two other parrots at the lab to “talk better” if they mumbled

Though it wasn't clear if he was simply mimicking researchers

And who had just learned to utter the word “seven”

[Note: Sources: Andy Clark, re J T Ismael, The Situated Self; William Grassie, “Plastic Monks Reflecting on Pratitya-samutpada”, in The Global Spiral, September 2007; William Bogard, “Distraction and Digital Culture”, in Life in the Wires: the CTHEORY Reader (eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker); Ted Hiebert, “Hallucinations of Invisibility: From Silence to Delirium” , in Kroker/Kroker; Matthew Fuller and Linda Dement, as quoted in Anna Munster, “Digitality: Approximate Aesthetics”, in Kroker/Kroker; Christina McPhee, “Net Baroque”, in Kroker/Kroker; Janne Vanhanen, “Loving the Ghost in the Machine: Aesthetics of Interruption”, in Kroker/Kroker; George B Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence; Ecclesiasticus, James Agee and Walker Evans; “Gifted Research Parrot Alex Found Dead”, AP story on Yahoo! News, 11 September)]

Autopoiesis LIV

Power’s got a fulcrum that’s half self-portrait

Half goat sacrifice

(To ensure your flight’s on-time arrival)

And half the body fat of a normally constituted man

Enough iron is found in the organism to make a medium-sized nail

And enough sugar to sweeten a cup of coffee

The mouth is humid from the in and out of the soul

It was going to be a beautiful day

Not

A job but a verdict

So

I proofed the poem

(Found the need to insert a comma)

And sent it back as approved for publication

I love that feeling of exhaustion

Of the last sprint in which you feel it’s a matter of life or death …

Like Kerouac before us

We hit the road

We rented a huge Ford

And packed it full of toys and snacks

We towed a huge rectangular barge behind us

Filled with rocks

Trees

And other plants

My heart

Like a bird

Went flitting with joy and soared freely about the gear

The ship sailed on under a cloudless sky

Like an angel drunk with the sun's radiance

What is this sad dark isle?

This is Cythera

We're told

A land famous in song

Banal El Dorado ...

Look how after all it's only a miserable tract

And how

On the street outside the prosthetic wetware sanitarium

In a towering summer heat-wave

A young girl hops

With her hands over her ears

And how another

(Her sister

Perhaps)

Leans against a wall plastered in posters of gods and stenciled DO NOT URINATE

Cleaning her dolls' mouths with a toothbrush

Brushing hard

Breaking their tiny celluloid teeth

[Notes: Sources: Noah Eli Gordon, Novel Pictorial Noise; the goat sacrifice refers to a story in today’s news, in which Nepal’s national airlines sacrificed two goats to a Hindu deity in order to to take care of technical problems with one of its aircraft; “Man” and “Spittle”, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica; Albert Camus, The Stranger (tr. Matthew Ward); Flor Aquilera, “Ladies And Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen.” at ars poetica, 6 September 2007; Eileen R Tabios, “Another One Returns to Mama Moi”, at The Blind Chatelaine’s Poker Poetics, 5 September 2007; Ernesto Priego, “Run For Your Life!”, at Never Neutral, 6 September 2007; Ginger Stickney, “On the road …”, at Green Tea Ginger, 5 September 2007; Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art; Charles Baudelaire, “A Voyage to Cythera” (tr. Keith Waldrop) as found at Poetry Daily, 6 September, 2007; Yi Sha, “Common Knowledge” (tr. Simon Patton) and Meena Kandaswamy, “Reverence::Nuisance”, for the image of the wall, at Poetry International, September 2007; Augusta Faro, “The Ants” (tr. Alison Entreken, at Words Without Borders, September 2007]

Autopoiesis LIII

Another animal moving across the earth

An earth

Lit by the dual glow of a sign by the side of the freeway

Flashing FREAKS! FREAKS! FREAKS!

And a new risen sun braising the sky the color gravel / sand / old sawdust

My own hunch is to base our utopistics on the inherent lack of long-term equilibria in any phenomena

Let this be said

Then

And also that

According to the funny papers the checkout line is a manifestation of worship in its purest form

And that Demeter

Grieving for her loss of Persephone to Hades

Is restored to hope by the sight of Iacchus drawn on Baubo’s belly

On October 3, 1786

Goethe wrote in his diary about his visit to the Chiesa dei Gesuati at Zattere

“On sections of the ceiling

One can see more of the lovely saints than their thighs

If my perspective does not fool me”

Therefore I have placed a seascape inside the reliquary

And a crystal ball atop a plastic lotus in the bell-shaped thing where the sutra used to be

To epornuflate’s to seize a patient by the right emfle and emarcillate him in a fixed arstene while keeping the free end of his pelin a short distance from the emorfilator

The verb is also used in the sense of dispersing fallions with blows from a charm

To quote Maimonides

“You should not think these secrets are fully and completely known to any of us

They are not”

Foreground

Middle distance

Background

It is impossible to hang on to these for long before one slips into a new mode of perception as the motifs are stirred together in a new order

“It starts out here

Respecting the gravity of our situation but it more and more sees as a planet does

Up downs up

Down ups down

Up ups up”

Everything changes when you grasp base-and-superstructure not as a full-fledged theory in its own right

But rather as the name for a problem

Whose solution is always a unique

Ad hoc

Invention

[Note: Sources: Noah Eli Gordon, “The New Hymn to the Old Night”, in A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow; Immanuel Wallersein, 1^st epigraph, and Frederic Jameson, 2^nd epigraph, in Peter Hitchcock, Oscillate Wildly; Plato, 1^st epigraph in Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom; Brooke McEldowney, 9 Chickweed Lane, 4 September 2007; Laurence Lampert, paraphrasing Clement of Alexandria’s Exhortation to the Greeks, in Nietzsche and Modern Times; Hans Haacke, “Gondola! Gondola!”, in Hans Haacke For Real Works 1959-2006 (eds. Matthias Flügge and Robert Fleck); two assemblages by Hiroshi Sugimoto, in History of History; Encyclopaedia Da Costa; Steven B Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity; Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art and Johanne Sloan, “Millennial Landscapes”, unpublished doctoral thesis, U of Kent at Canterbury, 1998, as quoted by Andrews]