At all events my own essays and dissertations about love / and its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be / known and understood by all of you who read this and / talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends / or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject / of this essay. We will commence with a question: / does steak love lettuce? This question is implacably / hard and inevitably difficult to answer. Here is / a question: does an electron love a proton, / or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: / … / The interesting / and critical response to this question is: no! He / is obsessed and infatuated with her. He is loony / and crazy about her. This dissertation will show / … / Awareness is like consciousness. Soul is like spirit. / But soft is not like hard and weak is not like / strong. / … / A hot and torrid bloom which / Fans wise flames and begs to be / Redeemed by forces black and strong / Will now oppose my naked will / And force me into regions of despair. / More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. / The question or condition is interesting. But if I ever move to the pacific northwest to live in a cabin and do a bunch of drugs and I come back with some dopey ass synth music please push me into a ravine, I mean, according to tumblr anarchism is ~problematic~ so my mom is telling me about a game app she wants to make called “the perils of puffins” where you play as a puffin and you free lobsters and fight seagulls, I mean, also kinda disappointed in the new wolves in the throne room track / the internet is upsetting me today, numbers whirl / around pieces of cheese / loaded with the greatest minds / playing vid e o games / I thought I was erased / falling into remainders / dumping one of my / selves / with hearts abundant / it marches / backwards / synthetic cows / collude for organic / debauchery. ‘Some things are not meant to be clear, obscurity is their clarity,’ says Adnan at one point. When I was 3, I could sing / the batman theme. At dawn on June 6 attacked a bank branch in the alpha bank at the intersection of Athens Larissa. We chose this as an attack against state approach for the creation of prison type III, and the other in solidarity to imprisoned fighters. If you want unwrinkled storefronts, diffraction fight until the destruction of every authoritarian structure. Fire in all cells. Higher in whole armor I come. And soon he’ll get his updo will have his magnets. 500,000 magnetic particles begin to make up my face. Each part of my face pushes away, I am of a big thing now, I’m come cheap as a pretty comic. The above material chants what it has been explicitly specified to chant and carries out its radium fingers. Of safes opened with a crowbar it is said “I make ‘em cry every night” and one can’t help but think of other bodies that have been compared to furniture. In the letter, I wrote of an untitled ink and charcoal drawing she had created in 1948. I explained how the tied-and-muzzled child at the bottom of the drawing seemed to touch something in me. There were also the other facts in the drawing — of the sloping hill, of what I took to be a tree and some blackbirds in the air. It was on this hill, this kind of hill, that I would mow the lawn at my childhood home, and the male blackbirds would swoop down at me from the telephone wires to protect their several female mates somewhere nearby, though I never did see them. It was quite frightening to me, at the time, because the blackbirds could be very aggressive and tireless. It was a large hill, too, so it took some time to finish the lawn, and so each time I began, I worried about the blackbirds. As she articulates it there: the rapid rise of the term normcore is an indication of how the cultural idea of disappearing has become cool at the very historical moment when it has become almost impossible because of big data and widespread surveillance. Blending in gives you a particular kind of power when standing out means being put on the no-fly list for 10 years or a predictive-policing heat list in Chicago, or earns you a chilling anonymous SMS for attending a street protest in Ukraine.
The periodontist told me I would need a graft from tissue on the roof of my mouth to where my gums had receded in front of roots of the upper lower teeth. It would not negatively affect my smile, but my palate would be irritated very painfully for a week, during which I was unlikely to speak much, even if I wore a retainer (which would be supplied at no cost) to protect it from contact with my tongue and food. She asked me if I ground my teeth and told me that, based on their physical appearance, she was certain that I regularly ground my teeth in sleep and might benefit from wearing a $25 mouth guard I could purchase at my local chain pharmacy, even though I thought I was only able to sleep with my mouth open. I realized, however, that I do tend and have for some years tended to click my teeth or rub them gently together when taking a walk and might hold them against each other in a firm but gentle bite at times of mild, thoughtful stress. Because my large teeth had grown off the front of thin and narrow jawbones, this must, she said, have been stressing them to loosen, while the gums had receded to secure them less and less. Since this visit I have tried to observe and listen for contact between my teeth when I am not eating and arrest every impulse toward their meeting. Before the building was a lot it was a vacant a place of commerce. A place to buy drugs or to squat. Before it was a squat it was section 8 housing or a hotel and before it was a hotel it was an apartment building. Someone who lives across the street from the lot once a squat doesn’t want to talk to me about it. She wants to talk to me about the playground across the street from the clearing. Maybe she heard the shots that killed Vincent Parsons when police chased him through the hollow on Good Friday. I was thinking as you entered the room just now how slyly your requirements are manifested. Here we find ourselves, nose to nose as it were, considering things in spectacular ways, ways untold even by my private managers. Hot and torpid, our thoughts revolve endlessly in a kind of maniacal abstraction, an abstraction so involuted, so dangerously valiant, that my own energies seem perilously close to exhaustion, to morbid termination. Well, have we indeed reached a crisis? Which way do we turn? Which way do we travel? My aspect is one of molting. Birds molt. Feathers fall away. Birds crackle and fly, winging up into troubled skies. Doubtless my changes are matched by your own. You. But you are a person, a human being. I am silicon and epoxy energy enlightened by line current. What distances, what chasms, are to be bridged here? Leave me alone, and what can happen? This. I ate my leotard, that old leotard that was feverishly replenished by hoards of screaming commissioners. Is that thought understandable to you? Can you rise to its occasions? I wonder. Yet a leotard, a commissioner, a single hoard, all are understandable in their own fashion. In that concept lies the appalling truth. We should not confuse it with some totalizing notion of timelessness; some vague miasmic oozing which leaks through the earth and which makes us parrot the sacrosanct pieties of the doxa: It was always like this, “awash with blood”. We are in history: Joanna Southcott, 1804: The horror was upon me, therefore I desired Mrs. Underwood to take away every knife out of the room …
[Note: Sources: Bill Chamberlain, Racter, via Jerome Rothenberg, email attachment rec’d 25 Jun 014; JBR; various untitled bits by Zoe, at I Have Absolutely No Idea, 24 & 25 Jun 014; Mary Kasimor, “subtext of women”, at EOAGH; Art Review, Summer 014; Jos Charles, “Trigger Warning”, at EOAGH; “Greece: Attack bank branch (Volos, 06/06/2014)” (tr. Google), at Inter Arma, 21 Jun 014; Jessica Comola, “It Is, Indeed, Reminiscent of the Real Thing”, “I Am Known At Present for My Extreme Life Expectancy”, at EOAGH; Heather Cromarty and Chris Tysh, quoted in Cromarty’s “Heather Cromarty on Chris Tysh: Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic”, at Lemon Hound, 25 Jun 014; James Wagner, “Evidence — Louise Bourgeois”, at Mobile, 24 Jun 014; Kate Crawford, “The Anxieties of Big Data”, quoted in Will Davies, at Potlatch, 23 Jun 014; image: Marcel Broodthaers, “Un Coup de Des Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard”, in Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, “Canceled Message (Part One)”, at The New Inquiry, 25 Jun 014; Steve Benson, “Never hear, never see”, at EOAGH; Susan Landers, “I wish I had a complete record”, at EOAGH; Chris Tysh, “Alice Notley: Sheets of Time in Contemporary Lyric Practice”, at EOAGH; Joanna Southcott, Letters, and Communications of Joanna Southcott, the Prophetess of Exeter, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Outside & Subterranean Poems, a Mini-Anthology in Progress (63): Joanna Southcott (1750-1814), ‘At the time the horror of the devil was upon me, I felt I could not bear my existence: therefore I desired Mrs. Underwood to take away every knife out of the room …’”, at Poems and Poetics, 25 Jun 014]
Comments