In the House of the Hangman 242 & 243

And isn't the triumph of the picnic over death, however briefly, the lesson of the Aeneid (7.116-117)? Our philosophy stops with the sigh “If only ...” and with the insight “Once upon a time ...” When Dodie Bellamy recently quoted Octavio Paz: “ … what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?” Nada Gordon countered with, “or even a weak, ignorant unreliable one?” like in Mike Tyson’s Punchout!, tottering, tottering flustered chunk of neutral reality, kindled poverty with nothing but dark hands to stick to this bubbling, disconsolate mess, with blurry eyes for the huge stroke of the pen that would give to you / give you to everything. On the other side of this blindness is an orgasm in the public void. An orgasm is an elegy in which there is no

consolation. Machines, like orgasms, are, it’s like when the kids ask if they can speak to Jim, and Burroughs replies, “Jim, got kicked in the head by a horse last year … went around killing horses for a while, until he ate the insides of a clock, and he died,” it’s like when the rain hits the / snake in the head / he closes his eyes and wishes he were / asleep in a tire on the side of the road. Yet for all her cautious qualifications, her backpedaling and existential waffling, Kate doesn’t hesitate to make outrageous assertions. She says she sailed to Byzantium on her own and then drove across Siberia. She says she has taken up residence in museums around the world. When she was living in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she left her own paintings standing between those hanging in the second-floor galleries. She also shot holes in the skylight in the Great Hall so the

smoke from the fire she built with the museum's artifacts could escape. Oh, and she sprained her ankle falling down the stairs there and then had fun maneuvering a wheelchair “from the Buddhist and Hindu antiquities to the Byzantine, or whoosh!” So much fluctuation: I don’t know what mood each day will bring. My behavior mystifies even me. Most of you probably missed the photo of me in my underwear here yesterday morning. My sympathies go out to you! You throw a big woolly sweater, the one you call My Bear, over your bulging belly as you drive the car through a blizzard, in a place where it doesn’t even snow.

What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which follow the contour of the natural harmonic series—the rainbow of overtones—and have the brightness of music in a major key. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out

they stretch across four octaves. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of

noise. Pulsating patterns in the Earth Drums are activated by small earthquakes. And shimmering sounds in the extreme registers—the Aurora Bells—are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights.

[Note: Sources: 242. William Flesch, “Great post plus picnics!”, comment appended 15 Oct 010 to Joshua Landy, “SUNY Albany, Stanley Fish, and the Enemy Within”, at Arcade, 14 Oct 010; Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, as quoted in Sunjoo Lee, “Nietzsche’s ranting”, comment appended 18 Oct 010 to the same Landy post. Now for some bits found via Ron Silliman’s links, 20 Oct 010. Dodie Bellamy, “Oppositional Weakness”, at Belladodie, 11 Oct 010; Mike Tyson’s Punchout! is something two sportstalk guys were reminiscing over on ESPN as I drove to work around 7:15 am 20 Oct 010; David Huerta (tr. Mark Schafer), as quoted in John Oliver Simon, “Translation 5 — Coral Bracho, David Huerta, Homero Aridjis”, at John Oliver Simon’s Blog, 16 Oct 010; Carla Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, as quoted in Kit Robinson, “Review of Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise”, at EMO Creative Writing Blog, n.d.; Wikipedia entry for Twister (1989), which goes on to note that Burroughs’ line was “originally found in John Millington Synge’s 1907 play Playboy of the Western World.”; Frank Stanford, “On Jesus Highway”, as quoted in John Oliver Simon, “Aldeberan” [sic], at Big Bridge; Joanna Scott, and David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, in Scott’s “A Passionate Reader: On David Markson”, at The Nation, 13 Oct 010; Nada Gordon, “it’s just so weird”, at Ululations, 20 Oct 010; Joan Swift, “Sweater Villanelle”, as quoted in Ron Slate, “Three Recent Poetry Titles by Joan Swift, Nguyen Trai, and John Taylor”, at On the Seawall, 18 Oct 2010. 243. Alex Ross, “Letter from Alaska: A composer takes inspiration from the Arctic”, at The New Yorker, 12 May 08 (describing “The Place”, by John Luther Adams). For Steve Mitchell]

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