In the House of the Hangman 350

So Popeye rides in on a unicorn, reading a pop science book, with a lava lamp on his PEBBLE. Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque PEBBLE is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the PEBBLE that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the PEBBLE or emerges from it, or through which the PEBBLE itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is one the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the PEBBLE’s open mouth, genital organs, breasts, phallus, potbelly, nose. The place of the PEBBLE in modern aesthetics is that of Natural Man in the philosophy of J-J Rousseau. It is no compliment to PEBBLES to say, as a modern poet has said of stones, that we can discover no ruined ones. PEBBLES are, it may be, reformed, but they have a long and warlike history. The modern PEBBLE is prized as a sculpture, as it were, of a PEBBLE. A shore of PEBBLES is a very picture of Democracy; every PEBBLE on it is ‘interesting’. The PEBBLE never had so much dignity as when it was employed as an alpha by the old Pythagoreans. The PEBBLE is foolishly admired as being hand-made by the Ocean. Too much has been made of the untutored PEBBLE. Popeye rides out. Glass of water is a lake. Swing that hammer down. There was once a glacier here. “When I explained to an old Navajo patient of mine that we sometimes have to shock the heart to get it started, he said, ‘Why would anybody do a crazy thing like that?’ Then another voice said, ‘We are a sacred pattern of perceiving mysteries probing means of healing via some kind of cosmic harmonization among ourselves and our diverse psychological and cultural perceptions of pi, the golden ratio, sine waves, four-dimensional cubes, spheres and golden spirals, language and fucked up fiction composing Arabesques that stun us while titillating the devil. I shit you not.’ That made me think there were people who didn’t necessarily want the standard resuscitative efforts that we routinely practice.” I heard an unfinished diagram scrambling and unscrambling itself somewhere in the burnt-out suburbs of beta centauri. Folklore of lightning. Factored hive collapse. So this shaky notation. The gears of any machine are ragged. Network solutions likewise culled to distract luckless stars from portending blessed shades of flight into a conquered wood razed by thrashing combines.

[Note: Sources: Robin, as quoted in Levi Bryant, “The Strange Case of Imaginary Beings”, at Larval Subjects, 25 Jan 011 (see below for PEBBLE); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, as quoted in Johannes Goransson, “Media Bleeds Through Apertures: Necropastoral, Pornography and Insectoid Psychosis”, at Montevidayo, 25 Jan 011; Ian Hamilton Finlay, “DETACHED SENTENCES ON THE PEBBLE”, as quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Ian Hamilton Finlay: Detached Sentences on Exile, Gardening and Pebbles”, at Poems and Poetics, 25 Jan 011; JBR; Elizabether Witte, “This Fabric”, at Shampoo 38; Tim Yu, “L. A. Pantoum”, at Shampoo 38; Trey Moody, “Chatter”, at Shampoo 38; Mitzi Begay, as quoted in Ben Daitz, “With Poem, Broaching the Topic of Death”, at The New York Times, 24 Jan 011 (the poem reads in part “When that time comes, when my last breath leaves me, I choose to die in peace …” Yes. Please); Chuck Richardson, “Excerpts from 11 Realms of Infinity [an aspect from my novel-in-progress, Objective 13: The Pan-Spermian Apocalypse]”, in Eccolinguistics 1,1; Michael Leong, from “When I Put My Ear to the Earth …”, in Eccolinguistics 1,1; Deborah Meadows, various, in Eccolinguistics 1,1; Jonathan Minton, “Archaearium”, in Eccolinguistics 1,1; Richard Owens, “Disconnected Lines on Class Politics”, in Eccolinguistics 1,1]

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[agent taobao]

I just get all worked up , and I stew around!