Zeitgeist Spam

In the House of the Hangman 1841

Then I went to a poetry reading / Where I read poetry with 3 other poets / at McNally Jackson Bookstore in Manhattan / And wizard Keith Waldrop read poems past us all / But I hadn’t pumped in hours / And my breasts hurt so I asked / If I could pump in the employee bathroom / When I said what pump meant — from breasts — they looked at me blankly / When I tried to plug the pump into the outlet it didn’t work / The outlet in the bookstore wasn’t powerful enough / There wasn’t enough power / And I felt like a baby horse shaky / Today I read a conceptual poem about how to kill your wife / While breastfeeding at the back table of a sushi restaurant / With 3 friends drinking sake / I was holding my baby’s head in the crook of my elbow / But it got sweaty and he didn’t like it / While I was breastfeeding under one of those covers called a breastfriend / And he didn’t like being exiled or it was too hot in the crook / Not really friendly at all / So why cosmology, why the immaterial, and why the informational and the conceptual in an issue on CONSTRAINT? Microscopy is recalled: matters of scale in relation to text when closely observed become, like a Tardis, something of extra-spatial size and extra-temporal possibility. You are suddenly thrown forward into the Holocene, into your own time period again. After a hard day at work, you find someone’s wallet. You receive a text from a random number. It says: ‘You are possessed by a demon’. You delete the message and go shopping in the ‘spongey economy’ of the ‘nauseous twilight …’

Before having such questions
            had to pretend not to have them, had
to seem another way.
            One studies
the possibilities of being
            normal, reasonable (reasonably)
for a long time – and why not.
            Normal is: there are,
you know, places to sit, a place to sleep, friends,
            food enough to cook and eat, generally.
But if the children die from germ-teeming water?
            If their little guts turn inside out.
If the ocean surges with radiation.
            If the world is dislodged from its own implausible grace.
If all the checks and balances are washed over
            as if they never were,
If the things that break and give had once been labeled “strong,”
            guaranteed, profitable – or at least “legal,”
if nobody could have possibly
            imagined ...
if it is suddenly again and again unbearable
            to see the house or tent or zone crashed down
to see this etching pain ...?

            To not be able to assume a normalcy --- and then
have to ask:
            how in consequence properly to be.

Don't assume that you will act that well
            the way you often think you will:

thick waves of vomit splash around the moue – first a light mist loosening the shit-caked cheeks they wet – then, eyes pinched, still messing the glove, ass now heavy with grime bouncing to clench his lids against the waves coating the length of his frame and whether he runs with or is stopped by discharge, these the grimy bills heaving from this mouth as the vomit coats the contours mid-self trunk to hips: his fellow heaving caked bills in an arc; levitating now above the passersby, spraying each square in the face – stumbling through the vomit – fairly wading in it: holding the discharge back with trembling, screwed paw: dealing bills with such force his gaping breath, tumbling and roiling for beet, beet red pits, gaping for bills-coated paint an dirt despite both Linebaugh’s and Kocik’s claims, this Jubilee … The individual no longer has an alternative but to completely refuse the promoted and preached contemporary life. The only still free behavior is the noise and withdrawal, to never surrender to handling, socialization, and entertainment. The Bruitist Wall does not promise to repeatedly provide a direction and values with the lived existence. The opaque, dull and continuous noise allows a total phenomenologic reduction … The Bruitist Wall is a social challenge. … The refusal in the fold because any act even considered futurist, dada, situ or anarchist/straight edge is vain. The actionism of disrepair cannot face the dilapidation, with factitious recovery … In the … of the Bruitist Wall, cellular nothing, to become its shade – impassive murderer of oneself – The Bruitist Wall spreads its occult virtues, by hummings and the buzzes of its hermetic formulas … Then Rabbi Simeon said further: “… Three times a day they [the letters of the alphabet] fly un in the air and the Tetragram is visible for one hour and a half … ten systoles and diastoles slip by before we come within sight of the Gaseous Shore, The Pineal Tower with its uninterrupted blaze … It is this moment that the patagrapher must seize if she is to attach to her pataplasm the mediating lungs of solar systems, sardines, monerans, gemstones, and colloids. The kaleidographic field shall be the interior of a sphere of frozen mercury, a perfect sphere, the opposite of gods, to prevent the absorption of violet rays into the cryostat, but in this case it is the world that now and then goes cross-eyed.” Each herd is placed under the protection of a little fire-board, strictly for family use, which is carved into a vaguely anthropomorphic form. Over and above its basic purpose, the Chukchees regard it as a particularized expression of the Reindeer-Being: Bring me my gold / My serpent my rod / Pour hot gold into my teeth. There is something gorgeously Egyptian about him, maybe even trilobitic or tic-tac. If you want to know who we are, just read Tom Cohen and try to forget it, I said to the judge who had stolen my phone while I was asleep on the beach. Does that make any sense now in a preconceptual arrhythmia? What about the tender hook of a next level healing? The children kept saying ‘dead caterpillar’ and ‘it’s not meant to be funny.’ Gyre-

            sized young animal
            sob me out ‘on fleek’
            a brown future of what
            or luxurious bead

To what extent will it ever be possible to actually cognise this? Which might be the same as to ask, What do I do if I want to wear my eblex jetpack and still not be a hermeneutic traitor or an old deck of cards that’s been thru the rain on Houdini’s grave? A whole nation could bury its heartbreaks there and forget about them – the pictures? The pictures don’t prove anything. Once the Cobblestone has snuffed out its cyclone, The Sandman mimes into a lampshade. He’s a genius. All this you can have for free – the rest is priceless, like deep-space and vaseline. You respond and are thrown back in time to the Jurassic Period, alongside everyone who was with you in the street that night. You’re diagnosed with another incurable illness. You become a vampire and acknowledge it in an angry outburst. You meet someone at a support group. It is a dark and stormy night. No throbbing sea behind you / You go out into orality to purchase a pencil. “This is philosophical” and everyone, the darkened formerness or formlessness or formalness of something into something something something. Property of Massachusetts this fulsome garden: so get out! Start your life and again, with calm whirls of the thing! One day all of this will not coalesce — seriously, it’s been months and it’s bullshit to think of having to say it’s not that political or Hegel Wednesday or eating at Starbucks or being and “not much imagination!” said someone of me, to me, well, if one side of the dyad’s bad the other’s nothing to be had t’enjoy, if you understand my meaning like a bank where I got this candy and totally. By late summer, everyone on the riverbank was dead, / Not just the once living creatures, but the summer grass, the rusted bicycles, the summer grass, / Cars without doors or windows, the warped porn magazines, the summer grass, / Empty cans with food stuck inside and empty bottles full of muddy water, / Recently, on the bank, I noticed a kind of grass that multiplied conspicuously / It is about one meter high and stands like some kind of rice / It has ears / It is everywhere / It glimmers white in the dim evening light / Sticky liquid oozes from the ear / The dogs get sticky / The dogs smell terrible / Hey I’m itchy, so itchy, my younger brother cried, I told him not to scratch, but he did it anyway, the place he scratched soon turned into a blister, I didn’t scratch it that much, only a little, brother cried, but even if he only scratched a little, the place he scratched turned into a blister, all over his body were blisters, after they ruptured, they got inflamed and / I want to take him to a hot spring, Mother said I’ve heard of a hot spring good for your skin, if we’re going, why don’t we take our dead father and dead dog along to put in, so just left everything as it was, dirty dishes, old clothes, wet towels just as they were, then we carefully laid my wheezing brother on the rear seat, and we stuffed some other things in the car, my little sister, spare clothes, dead bodies, dogs, plastic bags, pillows, food and drink (even some flowerpots), so much stuff, and then we took off, as I stared at the road from the passenger seat, / Beyond this is the pure land, Mother said / The dog noticed the smell of the sea / It stuck its nose out the window, howling for the sea / We should’ve crossed a large bridge, Mother said / I forgot the name, but it’s a large bridge / There were big floods there late in the nineteenth century / And again in the mid-twentieth century / Lots of earth, sand, and drowned bodies … and all that dross bogus TREAT-BAG CULT VOID underworld of adorer followers in no space a BROken WINdow little man crushed instead of a SELF a bottle of WINdex blue spray WITH THE FINGER OF NO MAN extant in the AEROSOL YOUNIVERSE supposing every past action of yours and anyone’s trivial why were you alive wanting everything to gratify HALF and astound the other my I want ADORER TIC kicking in your BROken WINdow O ver and O ver a TICKing trick no treat the easy after the hard the painful the history after the math the reverb of the primal the inner the outer as my SHELF en LARGEs you can fit MORE BOOKS (serious) Hey, man, I know you! You’re a carpenter if I were you I’d be aSHAMED (where are my tools) I AM TRYING TO TELL YOU YOUR FACE CHANGED in the night 2.0 I reach out feel around in the dark later left elbow purple bruise lights out haunted not answering door no one CRAZY enough to risk appearing to feel my disease / It will get you and it’s never what you think it will be / It will get you and it’s never what you think / Then he shook his head at my idiocy and I smiled and reminded him that “Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.” Or at least that’s what I’d like to say happened, but I can never think of the right quotes to use at the time and I was distracted because Ferris Mewler started chasing after my sleeves because he thought they were cat toys and he was hanging off the end of one while I tried to shake him loose, screaming: “MY DIREWOLF HAS BETRAYED ME” and then Victor just walked away.

[Note: Sources: Then I went … friendly at all: Sara Mumolo, “Top Places to Breastfeed”, in PEN American Center, “PEN Poetry Series: Sara Mumolo”, email rec’d 31 Oct 014 approx 8:25 AM PDT; Corey Wakeling, Jill Jones, “‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle’”, John Wilkinson, “Island of Love”, Timothy Yu, “Chinese Silence No. 40”, quoted in Wakeling’s “CONSTRAINT Editorial”, at Cordite 48; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Excerpts from Graphic Novella”, at Cordite 48; Michael Cross, “THE KATECHON (Lines 278-296)”, in Sundial; Romain Perrot, “Proclamation of the Bruitist Wall”, at Decimation Sociale; Rene Daumal, “Treatise on Patagrams”, in Pataphysical Essays (tr. Thomas Vosteen); Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (tr. Janet Lloyd); Ariana Reines, “Thursday”, text image embedded in “elanormcinerney: Ariana Reines | Thursday”, at Cassandra Gillig Dumb Poetry Blog, 30 Oct 014; Jonty Tiplady, “derrida.pdf — sample — derrida wears a backlace”, “Derrida.Pdf version : pocket mouse section : for the backlace to come”, at Trillionaires, 31 Oct 014; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on image of Houdini’s grave embedded in Allison Meier, “New York’s Most Unusual Halloween Ritual”, at Hyperallergic, 31 Oct 014; Louis Armand, “Unsanitary, or: The Candy-Coloured Clown”, at Cordite 48; Jill Jones, “‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle’”, at Cordite 48; Lisa Robertson, “Cinema of the Present”, at igittigittigitt, 31 Oct 014; “A theory of the lyric …”, “Dirge With Invective”, at [“IT’S TIME TO HOP TO THE BLUES.”], 31 Oct 014; Hiromi Itō, Wild Grass on the Riverbank (tr. Jeffrey Angles), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Hiromi Itō: from Wild Grass on the Riverbank (just published)”, at Poems and Poetics, 31 Oct 014; Tom Clark, “Red State Scream Preview (A Period Haunting)”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 31 Oct 014; Jenny Lawson, “Happy Halloween from Game of Thrones. Sort of”, at The Bloggess, 31 Oct 014]

Vomir live at LUFF 2013 [full set]

In the House of the Hangman 1840

The bats … the bats … Every utopia is someone’s dystopia, and vice-versa. We should not ignore the obvious signs of displacement in this discourse: it is ultimately that of the so-called developed world. To have the very ability to speak the word “posthuman” is a sign of privilege, of being situated in the zones mobilized around the massive excesses of finance capital, its war machines, etc. As such, the posthuman will by its technopolitical nature leave large swaths of humanity in the dust. It is no wonder then that Kroker linked the dreams of the digital utopians to both fascism and liberalism. The bats … the bats ... it’s a base today. In the doorways people are waiting to grind themselves to noise, metonymy for disposable morality; we think we’re the immune anti-Nero in this bad hospital for the stupid vintage rich. I mean, it really is, for those that know the sky, the root fallen in, sifting in rubble will be remnants packed, gets had, but bare, like a knot that fills a series of connected meshes, “and one can be sure that all these reds will be different.” The bats … the bats … tell me when repeating that gets irritating, so I’ll know when to repeat it again. “All gladness, dear Nelly, all light!” — that’s Paul Celan, entire last letter to Nelly Sachs. Light from my new window wakes me at 6am. I never hit the snooze button. I’m the only one who waters these plants. I mean, I think my feelings come out whenever they want to. But strange things catch me off guard. I can’t talk & cry at the same time — it’s true! I don’t know how people do it. So it depends. Nelly writes to Paul, “Despair / your letters like matches / spitting fire / No one gets to the end / but through the antlers of your words —” Tulips look honest. “Every disease is a musical problem.” “The lights are lit.” So little o so little o so little o so. So little o so little o so little o so. So little o so little o so. So little, o! So, little o. So little. o. So o. For all I can see Vomir stands like a zombie before his electronic kit with a burlap sack over his head. Without moving at all. The lighting is a flickering blue. There are a handful of people in the audience. I always wonder about the audience for avant films and music. Just found out the version of my new “three fish” symbol tatt was the one sketched out by Harry Smith. But it was Ginsberg’s old vision: “I saw the three fish one head, carved on insole of naked Buddha Footprint stone at Bodh-Gaya under the Bo-tree. Large – 6 or 10 foot size – feet or soles made of stone are a traditional form of votive marker. Mythologically the 32 signs – stigmata, like – of the Buddha include chakras (magic wheels symbolic of energy) on hands and feet. This is a sort of a fish chakra. So antique artists used to sculpt big feet as symbolic of the illumined man – before Greeks brought in human-face representation of Buddha. They never used to have statues of him – umbrellas, Bo-trees, or feet instead ...” And here I declare a mood, a mode, in writing, conceived as a tuning of the language, as the ear, hand and eye, brain are tuned — towards a possible music. Incapable of love, I have made-up love: I am servant of the Love. Incapable of writing, I have made-up writing: servant of the genius that lies in the language before which I have no genius. It is fortuitous reading your reference to “the meadow in the throat,” Chris. Because this past week I just finished an essay for Rethinking Marxism on “animal communism” in regards to the cinema of the Armenian-Soviet filmmaker, Artavazd Peleshian. And some of my thinking in this essay, I think, is in line with how I have always understood Michael’s work, if not the person behind the writing. That the poem may mark the place where the human surpasses itself not in its human nature nor in a prostheses per se but through its animal nature. In Peleshian’s films (which you can watch via Ubuweb) you see shepherds tumbling in waterfalls with their sheep, and sliding down steep hills in freefall. Here, as Wallace Stevens says, the “deer and the dachshund” are one. But whereas Stevens was talking about analogy and resemblance, I think what Peleshian (and Michael) get at is a recognition of the animal-human condition as a univocal one: which is to say, the human-animal is of one substance, a phylum of common expression. What’s more, at least in Peleshian, they are utterly collaborative and codependent. Their symbiosis and codependence is felt and real, such as in the scenes of shepherding. Which brings me back to the “meadow in the throat.” Of course I also hear Duncan in this line. But before Duncan, further back from Duncan, I hear an entire pastoral tradition (I guess we are as far back as Virgil). (And if you look at the third issue of P-Queue (ed. Sarah Campbell), Michael actually has an essay about “Pales,” “Labor and Regeneration.” I don’t know if we could solicit a copy of this text from Michael, but it would be interesting to look at it together since it reveals some of Michael’s intertexts and a lot of the thinking behind the book while it was in process early on.) What is striking to me in this little, but extremely dense, lyrical essay is how Michael relates the project of Haecceities through an acknowledgment of the pastoral tradition in relation to what he calls “invocation,” which I take to be the calling upon of a muse in submission (or “permission” to use Duncan’s phrase). To be called upon in such a way is to labor (as a slave or an animal or for that matter a mother giving birth labors). And it is to presence the violence of this laboring — what elsewhere Michael calls “event” and “becoming” [...] Maybe let’s remain with this question of labor, because I do very much think this is one of Michael’s big questions. What is labor? How is labor an animal-human quality? How is the poem (or any act of cultural production for that matter) a matter of laboring opening upon or into our freedom (the “meadow” of which you speak; the “wastes” whereof Taylor evokes a commons where our production capacities and consumptive necessities are relatively synched). An assignment of sorts: read Agamben’s The Open [where he discusses disinhibition], then look at reproductions of Bacon’s paintings of various animals (and humans) in rings, then read Duncan’s “The Matter of the Bees.” These are core texts for me, among a vast intertextuality scaffolding (or being the scaffolding in absentia) of Michael’s work. In this Michael is like Duncan (who actually left us many many clues to his intertextuality / reading practice), but more like Zukofsky, who stopped leaving us clues to his intertextuality at some point — 80 Flowers being a culmination of this strategy, so much that works like Michelle Legott’s Reading 80 Flowers were warranted, and actually a pleasure to read as supplementary literature. One may also read Michael’s relatively few critical offerings online, which I found revealing reading them today. Especially the text re: Duncan in relation to Nancy and Badiou. Can we return to the “meadow in the throat” this way? The principal site of Michael’s z-cited path? I’ve never heard him make reference to it, but I always think about Michael’s work in relation to Kleist’s conception of grace, which he articulates in the marionette theatre essay — where the animal and God are inverted through their mutual necessity. Michael’s lines strive for this necessity: they are a form of submission, forms of animal grace. Perhaps the animal, the human, and divine alike achieve “grace” through this infinite submission that is a laboring of invocation. And perhaps whatever opens, opens from this. That is, the freedom afforded in Michael’s lines both allegorize and embody this condition of freedom. A dance that brings about events, or that simply are evental [...] In reference to John Taggart’s work, Duncan referred to this as a “starsong of possession.” But the flipside of this starsong is disaster. The fact that in the line — a line that dances, that is movement and process and event, “we” is wrecked […]

[Note: Sources: JBR; “The Posthuman and the Information Guerrilla”, at Deterritorial Investigations Unit, 29 Oct 014; Samantha Walton, “Circuitous”, in Amaranth, Unstitched; David Grundy, Whatever You Think the Good Home; Reitha Pattinson, A Droll Kingdom; JBR; Julia Cohen, “A Year to the Day: On Coltrane’s A Love Supreme”, at Entropy, 30 Oct 014; Richard Lopez, “harsh noise wall”, at Really Bad Movies, 29 Oct 014; JBR, but see next; Allen Ginsberg, letter in Catholic Worker, May 1967, quoted in “Buddha’s Footprint”, at The Allen Ginsberg Project, 1 Apr 010; Robert Duncan, Letters, quoted in CJ Martin “Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 3:47 PM To: Thom Donovan”, Thom Donovan, “Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 9:18 PM To: Kyle Schlesinger”, in David Brazil, Thom Donovan, Brenda Iijima, C.J. Martin, Kyle Schlesinger, and Jamie Townsend, On Michael Cross’s Haecceities: A Group review & Sourcebook, at Little Red Leaves]

New Ink - halfway done

Just found out the version of my new “three fish” symbol tatt was the one sketched by Harry Smith (in the early 80s). But it was Ginsberg’s old (1962) vision: “I saw the three fish one head, carved on insole of naked Buddha Footprint stone at Bodh-Gaya under the Bo-tree. Large – 6 or 10 foot size – feet or soles made of stone are a traditional form of votive marker. Mythologically the 32 signs – stigmata, like – of the Buddha include chakras (magic wheels symbolic of energy) on hands and feet. This is a sort of a fish chakra. So antique artists used to sculpt big feet as symbolic of the illumined man – before Greeks brought in human-face representation of Buddha. They never used to have statues of him – umbrellas, Bo-trees, or feet instead ...”

[ Note: Source: Allen Ginsberg, letter in Catholic Worker, May 1967, quoted in “Buddha’s Footprint”, at The Allen Ginsberg Project, 1 Apr 010]

In the House of the Hangman 1839

Or, as Reitha Pattinson might say, take someone else’s devout solastalgia each day & touché: it guts us. Especially true in the era of work songs and now the song is the work. They didn’t come down from above; it was that omni-dimensional. Loping back to the blue vitamin bath. The hint of this is nacreous. Be so worthy to be so kind, let permanence fall, they said, let permission granted be transition enough, cupped in the hand. Mushroom lovers must wait patiently for the life processes of fungi within disturbed forests. Initially, she made these small wool sculptures as habitat for one species in particular: Bryum argenteum, silvery bryum moss. They also became habitat for forest mice, voles and salamanders. They became moth-eaten, food for the insect community. She named them Thneeds Reseeds after the commodity featured in The Lorax. “A thneed’s a fine something-or-other that all people need,” in the words of the Old Onceler, a haunting specter of dead capital. “It’s a shirt. It’s a sock. It’s a glove, it’s a hat. But it has other uses, yes, far beyond that!” Deanna Pindell has done the reverse: refashioning the form of wooly commodities, the excess of late capitalism, she knitted multiple species into imagined futures. An old flute is playing in the blood, in the glare, is stacking in photocopiers. I’m going to have a try at this strange meat. My lovely gris gris you sound just like Vomir. When I was asked about poverty (tho truly no one every bothered me) I replied, Yeah, I’ve read St Paul too (& Badiou on Paul, it’s true) & it was John Cotton said the limbs spun outward along multiple paths. Thank you, Rich Owens for this and the other Punch Press and Damn the Caesars objets d’how-it-is-how-it-is-how-it-is. The brittlestar does not suffer the Cartesian doubts of an alleged mind / body split. Brittlestars don’t have eyes. They are eyes. That is, it is not merely the case that its visual system is embodied. Its very being is a visualizing apparatus. I say all this but really. Who is it falls down the cracks of each successive rift? You can normally enter thru there. But if our bodies do not at first sight do not always show to the outside that, structurally, we are wrecks, drawn, quartered, hung, cut up, if to the outside we may still resemble something like bodies that hang together, as if it were possible to be a person, well, I remember myself as more stupid than I must have been. A piece illustrating one crisis, called “Multispecies Migrations,” involved living African Clawed Frogs in mason jars alongside pictures of microscopic spores from a pathogenic fungus. So along the tensor hamstrung zoning in atop a crane of makeshift improve there would be for cherub no possibility of but who crams the afterlife of high frequency trad back into it? I feel rough. Piccinini says that her Bodyguard was “genetically engineered” with large teeth that have a dual function: “He will protect [the honeyeater] from exotic predators, and he has powerful jaws that allow him to bite into trees, to provide the birds with sap.” “With only the handle visible”, the carpet burns. Home amputation the historical reenactment. Threat in counter-point in lockstep actuated by no sober predeliction. Am not passin out on the floor til I can’t hear you divin for the mute button. The ripped-off outer trachea is ours. How can we not be consented to that? Artagoticamente. In the fixed analogue replay. The balloons on fire make us laugh so cold we throw splinters of our outcome, one knife driven into the back of both mouths. See also Grundy’s “What’s the Matter with Antonin Artaud? Or, Why the Soul is a Pile of Shit”. The feeling that your head is exploding (the feeling the top of your skull should really tear apart, burst wide open) – The feeling your spinal column is pressing into your brain – The feeling your brain is gradually shriveling up, like baked fruit – The feeling you’re completely and surreptitiously wired, under remote control – The feeling the associations you make are being hacked away – The feeling your are pissing the soul out of your body, as though you can’t hold water – The feeling the cell is moving. You wake up, open your eyes: the cell is moving … The feeling you are growing mute … Wardens, visitors, yard, all seem to be made of celluloid … The feeling that time is flowing away, your brain is expanding again, your spinal column slipping back down, for weeks … The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream / the only emperor is the emperor de glace / the only emperor is the one who stands naked / the only emperor is the emperor sans pants / and communicates to youth, directly in his nakedness. O dream of a crystalline communication. Flap flap to dirty ears. The pidgins of pigeons. The germs they smuggle in their penates and pinions. The germs they share for a puddle of crumb-ions. Good pigeons, grey matter, rats with aspirations! O rank mass, its rank communicants! Its holy communications! We Catholics believe in transubstantiation. Our uncanny valley runs on circuits of revulsion. How like a thing, how like a paragon / how like a think, how like an epicure / how like a stink, how like a pedicure / how like bacteria that thrive in the footbath / how like a strand of flesh-eating staph / how like the society ladies hobble on no feet / until they realize Jimmy Choos fit better with no feet / how they then occupy the lotus position / how like a bath salt / how like a bidet. What a piece of … work is man / Le seul empereur est l’empereur de glace / Caveat emptor / Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. Follow your leader. That’s called dictee. Just six weeks earlier, towards the end of August, the 27-year-old Trakl had undertaken the 1000-kilometre train journey from Innsbruck, at the western end of the Habsburg Empire, to the far eastern crownland of Galicia, where he was to be deployed as a military pharmacist. His frontline experience was brief but traumatic. During the Battle of Grodek-Rawa Ruska of September 8-11, he was assigned sole care of ninety badly wounded soldiers sheltering in a barn, a task for which he had neither the training nor the equipment. As he later recounted from his hospital bed in Kraków to his friend and publisher Ludwig von Ficker, when one of the wounded men had ended his own suffering by shooting himself in the head, Trakl had fled outside only to be confronted by the sight of local peasants hanging lifeless in the trees. One evening during the westward retreat of the defeated Austro-Hungarian forces, he announced his own intention to shoot himself, but was forcefully disarmed by his comrades. His committal followed on October 6, and he died in hospital on November 3. “Let’s hide behind the chainsaws.” In the evening you hear the scream of bats …

[Note: Sources: JBR; Reitha Pattinson, Droll Kingdom; JBR (= “the distress caused by environmental change.” Here I take environment in the very broadest sense I can imagine); David Grundy, Whatever You Think the Good Home, “From The Problem, The Question, The Poem”, in Sundial; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Blasted Landscapes (And The Gentle Art Of Mushroom Picking)”, at The Multispecies Salon; Eben Kirksey, “Recipe III: Multispecies Communities”, at The Multispecies Salon; Samantha Walton, “Amaranth, Unstitched”, “Admonishment Sub-Plot (Intentionally Unsung)”, Amaranth, Unstitched; JBR; Boyd Neilson, “Untitled”, Untitled”, in Sundial; JBR; Karen Barad, “Invertebrate Visions: Diffractions Of The Brittlestar”, at The Multispecies Salon; JBR; Lisa Jeschke, “On David Grundy’s Poetry”, in Sundial; JBR; Yosefa Raz, “Rate of Exchange”, in Sundial; “Migrations”, at The Multispecies Salon; Joe Luna, “For a Quit Day”, “Per Cherub”, in Sundial; Donna Haraway, “Speculative Fabulations For Technoculture’s Generations”, at The Multispecies Salon; Justin Katko, “With Only the Handle Visible”, in Sundial; “Letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing, June 16, 1972 to February 9, 1973” quoted in Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weather… We Don’t (ed. Karin Bauer), quoted in “Meinhof’s Brain”, at H NN H, 28 Oct 014; Joyelle McSweeney, Trial of MUSE, quoted in Joe Pan, “‘Trial of MUSE’ by Joyelle McSweeney”, at Hyperallergic, 29 Oct 014; Richard Millington, and Georg Trakl, “Towards Evening My Heart”, quoted in Millington’s “Wild Heart Turning White: Georg Trakl and Cocaine”, at Public Domain Review, 29 Oct 014; Geico ad seen during the World Series 29 Oct 014 approx 6:24 PM PDT]

In the House of the Hangman 1838

Even the most immersive consumption or do I mean production bleeds into the world. But it doesn’t always drag us back to the kennel. Unpredictable pops, sparks, and fizzles. What I miss most is the Groove itself, which is kind of kledonomancy of the shaman’s wrong shinbone. Ask Wendy. Transcript Not Available. A wallop’s packed behind that bland title: dangerously hot scripting, fully engaged performers, and gorgeousness like unearned grace wherever it looks. This early composition reminded me of a Jess collage — the false starts and blind alleys, the peaks and subterranean pipes, lingering tenderness can be revisited like an old diner in an old neighborhood. I thought that was the point of Hesse’s Magister Ludi, scholars archiving someone else’s exegesis on lepidopteric classifications, then some wayward genius in another time sparks everything off a phrase the author never even recognized as significant. Because it wasn’t, to him, or anyone else he knew. There is no cosmic metric, no scale that holds still. Not this side of the Big Pillow. Here is Pausanias's description of kledonomancy, a divination that became associated with Hermes the messenger: “The market-place of Pharae is of wide extent after the ancient fashion, and in the middle of it is an image of Hermes, made of stone ... It is called Hermes of the Market, and by it is established an oracle. In front of the image is placed a hearth, which also is of stone, and to the hearth bronze lamps are fastened with lead. Coming at even tide, the inquirer of the god, having burnt incense upon the hearth, filled the lamps with oil and lighted them, puts on the altar ... a local coin ... and asks in the ear of the god the particular question he wishes to put to him. After that he stops his ears and leaves the marketplace. On coming outside he takes his hands from his ears and whatever utterance he hears he considers oracular.” Like periods and vulvas and vaginas and uteruses can be talked and should be talked about and acknowledged for the stigmas attached to them and the violence enacted against people who have them and it can all be done without having to discredit trans women or turn into a “you have a peepee and that’s gross” shitstorm. But really I just want a giant notebook that I can describe as a tome. As The Giant Notebook of Harsh Noise Wall Bejeweled Barrettes Anything Sumak Kawsay OK The Orphaned Zag Kledonomancy Tome. But such simulations only act to hide the fact that we can’t get back to reality because we’ve lost it. So this explains why Baudrillard drops us into the mix. He can’t explain why this happened. Once we’ve gotten sucked into hyperreality we’re here. It’s a traumatic event. The sheer force of hyperreality obscures any possibility of a central signifier. There is no metaphysics of presence; in fact he doesn’t even mention such a concept because it’s not important. Instead, he talks of what remains when the model has exhausted itself. “When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothings remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder.” You might say hey, wait, isn’t everything real? Yes, but the model for what is real and what is hyperreal have become the same. This is like how fake internet money in a game if treated like real money in an economy becomes real money. The caveat is that real money then is just as fake as fake money because it’s just another simulation due to a formal process. Baudrillard notes that, like the Borges story, the territory itself decays when the map of the territory replaces the territory by being the territory itself. The simulacra of simulation, the pattern itself, the hyperreality has taken over reality by replacing reality. In hyperreality, the map meant to represent reality becomes a simulacra of reality itself so that we don’t get real; we get the map qua real qua map. But that’s not what Borges says, if I remember right. And I do. I just looked it up. He says the map decays, not the territory. Fuck Baudrillard. Rachmaninoff and the fake princess Anastasia move into the stucco house at the end of the block. They invite me over for a BBQ (they abbreviate like Americans). “Don’t you love the suburbs?” Rachmaninoff asks me “the way the sidewalk repeats itself?” The fake princess Anastasia jingles her drink “that’s nice that’s nice that’s nice.” I offer to help the fake princess Anastasia in the kitchen. In search of a knife we reach into a drawer at the same time. She places her hand over my hand over the knives. She places her other hand over my mouth. Her eyes say something in a low rumbling Russian. This is before the lost sacred corpus vision, someone says Look at my author photo. I don’t really want to I’m turning to defiant metal. The soul is so thick. And then there was more hoax a view as I am the rose here. And you never wanted to be that, did I? Blackness eats you but your soul eats it without your knowing that figure, because it is causing your appearance to the world. Do glaciers listen? At one store, Comercial Mexicana, the students erected a banner reading “Everything Is Free.” How do you paint that? There is always that question when I sit down to paint. I draw a snake. I paint the snake. The snake coils into a variegated iridescence. Then I get into density. The volumes of things. Houses, forklifts, a fingernail, a pin in a map, a screw. I admire the machinery of the screw. The tea of incident, bubbles rising in a ginger ale. Alligator gravity flying saucer soup. A wheel that is a real wheel. And there you are, little one. Match that! The sun may be direct and “no nonsense”, but look at that shit that follows its daily lap across the zenith. The gold, then indigo fade of dusk melts onto a different stage and script entirely. Naked busty dancers sporting rainbow erections parade across the proscenium with heads of caribou and elephants. Look at that bottomless pool next time it’s moonless. It is the situation. Every time we ask that colossal lit onyx, “Baby where is your heart?” it responds by asking us the same question.

[Note: Sources: Ray Davis, various, at Pseudopodium, 4 Jul – 27 Oct 014; JBR; S Archer, and Pausanias, Descriptions of Ancient Greece, 7.22, quoted in Archer’s “Kledonomancy...”, at    Tribe, 5 Sept 05; Zoe, “like periods”, “but really …”, at I Have Absolutely No Idea, 27 Oct 014; JBR; Alex Lee, “Simulacra and Simulation”, at Entropy, 28 Oct 014; JBR (here’s Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science” (tr. Andrew Hurley): “…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda, Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658”); Rachael Katz, “Dream Set, Piano Concerto No. 3”, at Everyday Genius, 28 Oct 014; Alice Notley, “Individual Time”, at Poets.org; Julie Cruickshank, Do Glaciers Listen?; Jeffrey Dean, “‘Everything Is Free’ – Mexican Protesters Raid Supermarkets”, at Systemic Capital, 27 Oct 014; John Olson, “The Painter”, at Tillalala Chronicles, 28 Oct 014; Richard Grossinger, The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos. Updated and Expanded Edition; JBR]

In the House of the Hangman 1837

To leave with a tree under your arm is hazardous if you are also falling out of sentences the dead make of your bones. To leave with a tree is easy if I also curves. This dream the world is having about itself will eat the cloud. In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the “explicate” or “unfolded” order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders. You know: the leap goes over you, always. And no, this was not the first moldywarpe he’d seen. Labours, as their playful groups were called, of dog-sized specimens constantly dug in Streggeye Bay. The earth between the iron & ties of the harbour was always studded with their mounds & backs. He’d seen pups of bigger species, too, miserable in earthtanks, brought back by hunters for Stonefacemas Eve: baby bottletop moldywarpes & moonpanther moldywarpes & wriggly tarfoot moldywarpes. But the great, really great, the greatest animals, Sham ap Soorap had seen only in pictures, during Hunt Studies. He had been made to memorise a poemlike list of the moldywarpe’s other names — underminer, talpa, muldvarp, mole. Had seen ill-exposed flatographs & etchings of the grandest animals. Stick-figure humans were drawn to scale cowering by the killer, the star-nosed, the ridged moldywarpe. & on one last much-fingered page, a page that concertinaed out to make its point about size, had been a leviathan, dwarfing the specklike person-scribble by it. The great southern moldywarpe, Talpa ferox rex. About sunrise the next morning the members summoned prepare themselves to go to the house of the candidate, the place of meeting, by putting upon themselves the signs of the earth and sky. For the sign of the earth they blacken the upper portion of the face with moistened black soil, and for the sign of the sky they spread the white down of the eagle upon the crown of the head. At the outer corner of one eye a figure is drawn resembling an ovate leaf, from the pointed end of which a short line is drawn running slantwise toward the ear. No satisfactory explanation could be obtained as to the signification of this figure, but it is said to belong to the Men of Mystery. From the inner corner of the eye a line is drawn toward the corner of the mouth. The meaning of this line is explained as representing the tears shed during the rite of vigil. These figures are made by removing from the skin, with the nail of the index finger, the moistened black soil. The men belonging to the Earth People put these figures on the right side of the face and those belonging to the Sky People on the left side. The men of both divisions paint upon the middle of the forehead a round red spot to represent the sun which travels over the earth and across the sky. The first act is in three parts, which are performed simultaneously. This act is called “Carrying a Pipe and Wailing.” The participants ignite the incense of the gods in their brains. Stars’d quickly be damaged / if worn as jewelry, Jupiter’s magnetism conducive to the heat / unlike a ruby or sapphire, a painted ball, a Saturnian system / a topaz is not a potato but a potato can be like a heart / the night geology sky, bye bye, the night pigeon sky / the pearly silky luster of your opalescent heart glimmers / like a sequel to a night sky, the prequel being splendent / like an opera in a small hall, the pyramids are closed / Desdemona will collide with Cressida or Juliet in 100 million / atomic structures like a bird of geologic light years / superstring theory might be astrology, the plump indigo fruit / of a crystal system / falling hail of telepaths, it’s so unlikely we’d be here … and I mean really here … as Virginia Woolf wrote Katherine Mansfield, back in the day: “I’m in the middle of my novel now, but have to break off, of course, to make a little money. I shall write an article on Dorothy Wordsworth, and so pay for our new sheets.” But yes, OK, these algebras do concern the X and I, maybe some sense of the elusive Z-plane in the shifting. It’s based on Catullus ‘43’. I am obsessed with Mayer and when I was working on my book I wanted to pay homage to some to the great things she has done, like loosely translate Latin poetry. And of course, in a book called ROME, what the heck else are you doing? Speaking of social media, some moron on Twitter claimed that there should be no more poetry books about Rome in 2014. I had to laugh. And while I remember being with you astride the Colosseum with Eileen Myles where you looked up, darting your eyes, furtive, no, no, not furtive, maddeningly clear-eyed, and declared to us, ‘My next book is going to be called ROME!’ I can’t help thinking two things – the town you live in is a place and the pastel diamond-patterned blanket you have that your grandmother made you as a baby is unique. 11:46 PM / shit like this makes me so, so glad I wasn’t born white / I can’t even imagine the vast emptiness they must feel / the bitter taste of coleslaw / so what does your “friend” mean by “intercultural exchange” / is he talking about sex with timid azn babes / I want to give him a fortune cookie that comes with a message saying, “too bad you’re white” / seriously like white boy cooks viet food, whoa how amazing! how versatile! / viet person does it, well that’s certainly logical … crickets / like whoa let’s go on an adventure to their dirty hole-in-the-wall and instagram that shit / white people can better us and our cultures, wendy. just ride the white whale~ / lmao sorry / man, how many times have you been randomly “ni hao” on the street? ugh / I have still never gotten a good rationale for someone doing that / why is it justifiable to use when the targets for that question are ppl marked by race? / like the payoff is never anything thoughtful or fun or good for in my case, the followup is generally, “OH! I love pho!” like great. ok. what can I do with this. / how do you not stop to wonder, why is “me love you long time” funny? / why do I find it funny, and why should my asian american girl friend find it funny? / but yeah like why would he do it in the first place?? / like ok, I understand that we are hanging on a fairly precarious moral edge here, but it still seems pretty legit to be like, how about you don’t use misogynistic, ableist, and racist language toward a person regardless / like how about you guys try to seem a little less eager about that / Vietnamese woman cut off her husband’s dick / he was raping her / I just love the super death metal detail of her putting it into the garbage disposal. Thank you, all, for the comments and feedback on this piece. It is amazing to see it shared so widely. However, I’d like to just offer a few follow up comments to clarify any confusion about what I wrote above. First, I’m not ‘anti-Latour’ or ‘anti-ontological turn’. In fact, Latour’s critical writing on the production of scientific knowledge is one of the reasons I left biology and pursued scholarship in the social sciences. I also use the work of Descola, Kohn, and Viveiros de Castro in my dissertation. I think that, on the balance, the emergence of work that acknowledges that the agency of non-human persons, that queries our constructions of nature / culture and human / animal, that imagines our relationships with the world in ways that acknowledge humans are embedded in very complex ‘meshworks’ (to borrow an Ingoldian term) are very important and very timely. I do not dispute that this is an important moment in anthropological thought. Whether Latour is a proponent of the Ontological Turn or not is not the point of this piece — in the lecture, he referenced a sentient climate but did not refer back to the myriad works on Indigenous perspectives of such a phenomenon. For anthropologists, so careful to cite each other, it seems strange [ed. note: a very tactful word] when we omit Indigenous philosophy and thought from such discussions, or, worse treat all Indigenous thinkers as homogenous / nameless / faceless. I can assure you, as well, that this critique is not based on one lecture alone, but rather on years of experience as an Indigenous person within the academy, watching and noting how information is presented and who is (or is not) credited in the process. And how strange it is to me that we do not engage, very often, with contemporary Indigenous thinkers and their substantive critiques of the academy (or of anthropology specifically), when it is so clear that this is a space for fruitful and important discussions about the future of the academic project. Second, I use the term ‘Indigenous’ in keeping with the definitions and concerns outlined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Third, my critique is meant as a substantive response to the inequalities I have experienced and perceived as an Indigenous scholar within the euro-western academy, and the tendency for us, as scholars, to elevate non-Indigenous voices and philosophers above Indigenous (or non-white) voices, stories, laws, praxis. As long as the system within which knowledge is produced still favours particular bodies, and particular forms of expression, and as long as we ignore contemporary Indigenous thinking and praxis (and contemporary political realities), we will reproduce the colonial relations that pervade every aspect of the current global geopolitical moment. This piece, at its core, is a critique of the structures and power relations of the academy, and a call for us to question how even the most well-intentioned intellectual discourse can still be steeped in heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Fourth, I think it is very important for scholars writing about Indigenous epistemologies, Indigenous cosmopolitics, etc. to understand the day-to-day lived realities of Indigenous peoples vis-a-vis settler colonial states that deny Indigenous people their self-determination, the right to safety, and the right to assert their own legal orders (what we call cosmologies in the anthropological tradition). There is an inherent privilege in writing about Indigenous thought – quibbling over which European or North American or non-Indigenous voice captures that legal order the most ‘accurately’ – while Indigenous people themselves are in the trenches of the violent and ongoing global colonial experience (and are consciously and actively refracting, reframing, and shaping what that means on their own terms, using dynamic tools and processes to tell stories on their own terms) … Perhaps unwittingly, Veit Erlmann’s claim in Reason & Resonance that “the acoustic and physiological phenomenon of resonance … was, for all intents and purposes, modernity’s second science” echoes the title of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This resonance between sound and femininity also emerges in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze & Guattari argue that modernity’s becoming-music is also a becoming-woman; that comparison works, they think, because of music’s and woman’s analogously minoritarian position in Western modernity. As these examples suggest, European modernity feminizes sound, music, and resonance: resonance is the (male) gaze’s feminized other, the constitutive outside of the classical episteme. What we tend to call “neoliberalism” is an upgrade to the classical episteme. This upgrade includes a re-valuation of (some kinds of) femininity: from Tiqqun’s Young Girl to Sandberg’s Leaners In, to the more fundamental “feminization” of labor as fully subsumed care and affect, neoliberalism’s ideal subject is still patriarchal, but exhibits classically “feminine” attributes. This faux-post-feminist politics echoes the post-visual and post-discursive turns in contemporary theory: new materialism and sound studies are increasingly prominent and influential across the humanities. Just as the becoming-femme of neoliberalism doesn’t make it less patriarchal, the becoming-sonic of ontology doesn’t make it less theoretical, more material, less discursive, more sonic. Certain beliefs hold that the serpent, while swallowing itself, writes its history on its intestinal walls. The wind operates that way too. Little I can do to change that. Nothing, I mean. THERE MUST BE A DIFFERENT WORD, YOU SAID, for swimming or flying back.

[Note: Sources: Juliet Patterson, “Half December”, “Return”, at Reading Between A&B; David Bohm, quoted in “Implicate and Explicate Orders”, at Wikipedia; JBR; China Miéville, Railsea, at Random House; Francis La Flesche, The Osage Tribe: Rite of the Wa-xo’-be, quoted in “Smoking Ceremony from the Songs of the Wa-Xo'-Be (Osage)”, at ArkArchaeology, but see next, in which most of this is also quoted; Richard Grossinger, quoted in Grossinger’s The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos; Bernadette Mayer, “Geology Sky of Geology Night”, in Grossinger; JBR; “Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield …”, at The Paris Review, 27 Oct 014; Dorothy Lasky and Adam Fitzgerald, quoted in “Friends Lasky & Fitzgerald on Cassavetes, ROME, the I in Motion, More at GRANTA”, at Harriet, 27 Oct 014; Soleil Ho, “Race Recorder: August 5, 2013 to October 15, 2013”, at The Atlas Review 4; Zoe Todd, 27 Oct 014 comment appended to her “An Indigenous Feminist’s take on the Ontological Turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism”, at Urbane Adventurer: Amiskwacî, 24 Oct 014; Robin James, “Music & The Ambivalent Politics Of Feminist New Materialism – AMS MPSG 2014”, at It’s Her Factory, 27 Oct 014; Ethan Hon, “Infoxicated Corner: Lyric Essay by Ethan Hon”, at The The, 27 Oct 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1836

I myself sort of thought differently about that at different times. Probably now I tend to think of astral things as being very internal – not internal completely, as opposed to external, but I don't anymore think of, for instance, people going and visiting the astral planes of Mars and Jupiter. I feel as though they’re talking about something contained within terrestrial tradition. They’re talking about the earth and the same kind of version of the planets that astrology uses. Why does it contain in it the same root as astronomy? Why is the night sky contained in the astrum as well? And I think one very simple thing that we have to think about in relation to this is that there is no dividing point at which the sky lets off and the earth begins. The sky comes down and merges with the earth, the earth is in the sky, and everything on the earth is stellar product, refined by the earth’s particular climate and chemistry. “Harnessed jelly”, right? Still, there’s a sense in which it seems appropriate to me that the physical universe, as known by astronomy, which is a vast and powerful science, should somehow be embedded within a larger mythological system, because it developed that way historically, right, and you don’t ever get to extricate one entirely from the other. Astronomers are always trapped within their own history, the history by which they come to speak about the sky. One of the things I’ve thought about in relation to this a great deal is the fact that descriptions of the sky seem to reflect cultural patterns themselves. I’m not convinced that there’s not a relationship between the types of cataclysms that are routinely “discovered” in the sky, and the dilemmas that are most serious on the earth. For instance, the discovery that the universe is incredibly destructive, self-destructive, that it’s expanding and no one’s absolutely sure why, and that time and space are relative within it; that objects have no basis on which their value can be determined, or their concrete reality can be determined – all this reflects the kinds of changes our cultures are going through. You might ask: what do you make of this chaotic jumble? Well, I’m taken with it. I’m taken with the fact that things have gotten that confusing. To add one other point to it, which makes it even harder to know what to make out of it, what are so many of them UFO folks doing being humanoid? And also, why would there be breeding experiments being carried out with us, with humans, given that any creatures that arose on another planet in another solar system, or even in this solar system, would not only not follow our evolutionary lines, but would not even be based on DNA? So how is it possible for them to breed with us? Could they really be aliens from far away and have that capacity? And if they’re not, if they share some history with us, what does that mean? The day of your death I put a 50-mg dose of Testogel on my skin. The carbon chains gradually penetrate my epidermis and travel through the deep layers of my skin until they reach the blood vessels, nerve endings, glands. I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man, nor as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is post-pornographic, add a molecular prostheses to my low-tech transgendered identity composed of dildos, texts, and moving images; I do it to avenge your death. I spread the gel over my shoulders. First instant: the feeling of a light slap on the skin. The feeling changes into one of coldness before it disappears. Then nothing for a day or two. Nothing. Waiting. Then an extraordinary lucidity settles in gradually, accompanied by an explosion of the desire to fuck, walk, go out everywhere in the city. This is the climax in which the spiritual force of the testosterone mixing with my blood takes the fore. Absolutely all the unpleasant sensations disappear. Unlike speed, the movement going on inside has nothing to do with agitation, noise. It’s simply the feeling of being in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the city. Unlike coke, there is no distortion in the perception of self, no logorrhea nor any feeling of superiority. Nothing but the feeling of strength reflecting the increased capacity of my muscles, my brain. My body is present to itself. Unlike speed and coke, there is no immediate come down. A few days go by, and the movement inside calms, but the feeling of strength, like a pyramid revealed by a sandstorm, remains. How can I explain what is happening to me? What can I do about my desire for transformation? What can I do about all the years I defined myself as a feminist? What kind of feminist am I today? A feminist hooked on testosterone, or a transgendered body hooked on feminism? I have no other alternative but to revise my classics. When I take a dose of testosterone in gel form or inject it in liquid form, what I’m actually giving myself is a chain of political signifiers that have been materialized in order to acquire the form of a molecule that can be absorbed by my body. I’m not only taking the hormone, the molecule, but also the concept of a hormone, a series of signs, texts, and discourses, the process through which the hormone came to be synthesized, the technical sequences that produce it in the laboratory. I inject a crystalline, oil-soluble steroid carbon chain of molecules, and with it a fragment of the history of modernity. I administer to myself a series of economic transactions, a collection of pharmaceutical decisions, clinical tests, focus groups, and business management techniques. I connect to a baroque network of exchange and to economic and political flow-chains for the patenting of the living. I am linked by T to electricity, to genetic research projects, to mega-urbanization, to the destruction of forests and the biosphere, to pharmaceutical exploitation of living species, to Dolly the cloned sheep, to the advance of the Ebola virus, to HIV mutation, to antipersonnel mines and the broadband transmission of information. It is ALL signal. Riknen gurpmagnut hwofhno, hehi daphhi tginhwut lindendu, tebih meltehno Rotsumer retwor tginsunatrot hwofnutsta Repden wudena hopelet Funda hne, hninda tabndu, tabne tab detirndu hwutelimifunden nderotrin hgi Rihda nde godenus, rikden hgiti renasel gnem nasel Retned mernule hno nus Tarhe wewetar hwut, litishigle lugower, retirtir retned tehgi nehge basenod. Nerhondenod rotnduhne werin, resda tgehnuserep tlestgi, bafihte, stahnelu ner rnof. Sturtlesel gesbos ritra nduhwut hgi. Hhirneden hgejeetenura shig. Hwuthhehno pehgi nus staletsel hwut. Nduegur rnof. Dapmi gesmeltehih, tarselrad henu. Rehnen hnoweepmaghwofmernen sethnosol. Desupmibneene grelnasel. Grelhhirneden resden nehnohhe temindis. Wnedmisisned hwofhge, netlesna. Retda sol rnoftlesehneset we nehnin ndisner darot mernuehhiner ndis bagnembne norsturadhu. Sturpmiefe reswor hningostur tepmagda geksel hnin hetles rihda bneehosehno banesol. Retsel denhajnut hihmelnat, hwut gek, hgiti hno, rehle limifun setgnemeda statab ndenusmel hninletho hgiti hhegekwe retle tenu tabnewned. Rawden gestgehnus dibabih, nutar resle hgi jengehtef hower nendaw resle seshhibih je tgigo, hhahno rotnduhne nde pehgi gnemsuden, tginersol midete tgihningeh degurhur hhi rikle nut hajndele degurhur ndutihno. Sturtles redahwutweden temindis. Boshnin hgi rnof, we hnoletgeh, nepnaba natndu rawda nutnemshig nendaw hhagekhaj ngeh he tgihgirad. Hower fenada dednemnu rawra meltgi hhete, rawned tgi bashig. Dednderot rad. Retda tiselda na, denu rehda litishig ndutihno? Mel lute rnofte letefun lugower rawned gurpmagnut fih, rnafih mededsolho rikle wehwofegekrad natboshnin, resle nuhge rithgug tgehgehha tginbostena hopelet rnasesnusngeh hefunsel rikhgug tefnodgur hnefete, melute bnera denut greltete hwesrnewe jengehtefda natngehfun tefesetnu balu tena dape geksel ses setnu hhahno. Gesgnemhhatnen hohwof rawda nusnemtgehda rnofsetho. Rikhgug radbos hninrne tabndu. Mirin setnunen rot, tehha. Rawnen hnehnehnisewehgebih ne, denegnemdam su, resden ngehweden tgihningeh rehsel tgeteepemerwned hhinhhesenat. Stahneluewnedgekden meltles, reshgug bospmihih tgihgirad humel. Rikhgug hajhihtgehgug hgi hihshig neestahnelu hajrotpmag. Reswor tirtir hgenden hnisnem, werephge. Rawned tabsta ndis ritda lided rnofteda pmi. Rawhgug tgeh henemte hihwnedner. Hajnathih fun go, ritnen tenerpe gnemti senbosnewe, rnof. Funtgehwe rikned wenusel hu tgihningeh rnetgitgeh, reswor ba luboshhi. Hohwof nus resle tefte hninhne. Resnen hhi dedfun geksel. Retned rep gofih tefnodgur rnandengo. Tgeh daphnis, rinwer jenut fihte, rawned mel daphhat retned tef sturtles dedhhat tabne bafih riknen nersol luboshhi, reswor nahgi hne ho mi tefestahnelu sol hgi. Hihwnedner ritsel stur pmag. Grelwnedmisis rnernofwer, rad ritned ti te babih. Rihwor nusndaw we hu. Fe nate hhegekwe ndawhaj meltgi wned. We nasu rikned nusunerewnedwer nderotrin. Melfun hnis resnen wnedwer rotleshhat meltehno. Nutleshih rotnduhne, tefhnin, hwofrineradbos wned. Hhinstatab nehnohhe hha hwutlupe. Tgeh neradhwof, ndugo fihte, rikda tabsta hgi, nedehnis rotnduhne tef. Nertehha rehra hgeje nersusethnis ndu. Hhegekwe hhi je rihda wnedgek tgetabndenem. Tgerepdenra hhintefjernof, bosnewe. Statab hneset susethnis, resel wned saletarndusel lu pehgi. Sdetendawte bape ba mernusel gestindisndis. Radhwof rawden tendub rawsel nusndawsel dedhningur hihmelnat. Ritnen gurnod hniseden nus, dedlufih hgi peshig. Rawor melfun rehra nushwof fungondaw, nod ndaw tebih. Nehhatmer ded, histur. Resda hwut natner merfihi dednemnu. Rehda rnahutife rewnedrinsel retden hi hhinhwut ner. Hwut rehgug fe temindis. Rawle hihtabte rebosnewe, riknen gur darot repner pehgi fih ndawhaj. Rihnen we hgi, rikwor hnehnehniswor ses. Bospmihih radhwof nerwe. Tabhge den rikwor gurpmagnut dednatstur, ritle hgiehnehnehnisle batefndaw, rot ndisle rnahhi nedehnis wetener, ner nerneestahnelu susethnis. Whatever the problem is, I am always a part of it, effect “an echo”, finally the rumors grew more fabulous, Zwang-drang-befelsergang-hanf-schlang [the minute visual and rhythmic interval defined by the tmetic comma preceding an ampersand] tmetic comma ampersand, I can still remember the first time I read Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” in the original English, shagadam, magadam, vigadam, pitz, potz, patzu, ELEFANTEN KARAWANE: Ekoralaps! bifzi, bafzi; hulameli: Bhm-T-Nsh-tpt’Bhm-T-Nsh [thsss] – Ush-NsgNshsh … Physical or digital instantiations, an interstitial continuum, a method to do again and again, with the persistent awareness that what is done cannot be redone or undone., work!. .,work!” – bueno! BLBRNG BLBSH the blubbering logic of the stuttered blurt. A different voice is blown into the body and replaces the old one: scow aback din / flicker skaeg ne / barge quagg peat / sieve catacomb / stint chisel sect / Silence goes faster backward / Trois fois / A mix of Viennese dodecaphonic theory and Brazilian bossa nova swing, “a single glass of water illuminates the world”. So Jah say. When I put my ear to the page, I hear nothing but the sound of my hair against the surface. EYE CEE (“Sparks,”) tribal-tribulo-luminescence, behold them shatter, kxv, “cross-platform”. It’s an ext ….. uh, an extremely, uh ... wait, what was I saying? Uh, oh, yeah? What did you … ? It’s an extre, uh, you know, uh, ex, ext, ah, uh huh … work of modernis … yeah, OK.

Ka      Thump                     Ka
Thump
Ka
Thump
(tikka tikka)
Ka
Thump
(tikka tikka)
Ka Thump
Ka
Thump

Our … jammed; and Its amazing … Sand can dance into a pattern and – oh, and/or, as said the whom to the reification (our brains our made of teddy bears), no known tongue can capture the (our tongues are made of teddy bears), gone thru the. Et in Arcadia ergo points to everywherewhen then Ten seconds of flesh adorn thy SOUL! – and that is PLENTY! there was, inexplicably, more: a test of the emergency alert system, as if once upon a movie’s philosophical time the sentient being went leaning & lurching. In the river fold a poisonous mush was boiling. A hairy bed. The / Joy was priceless / Because / Hope was / Just two syllables, / colon em dash / You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having. Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly ... As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens 
and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going. When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. I remember … feeling inside my head but then getting hit by the sun from behind a tree. I look up, into the song. The wind breathes yellow rain, it falls from branches as bits of yellow confetti cut out of construction paper that sticks to the bottom of shoes and gets dragged into the library. The trees cry light so that we may be happy. Are you happy? The German mathematician walks by, he seems not to recognize me. I want to find L but I haven’t got my phone on me. Maybe it’s okay to use this space to take a break from concepts, theories, ideas, even literature. To try to find my way back to the non-teleological event of writing. So when people ask me what I’m working on I can say, nothing. I have no grand statements for you. I am a life, like you, and this is about that. “I even loved everything bad, for it was part of the whole of life.” But this mentality also manifests as a self-destructive inability to stay mad at anyone. “Because she was real to me, I could not hate her.” Was the rain sent to cleanse me? I have a bowl of pennies … some sentences and half-sentences. Scraps of patterned origami paper. I have … the parti-colored lights on the bridge into Poughkeepsie. The death throes. The way it stared at me right before dying. My father told us the story of the man who killed the last passenger pigeon, how they were once so abundant they blotted out the sky. “Cumulative counterpowerfail according to the self-stylising of successive ally categories to successive frailly arising counterpower categories, ok, the horror itself is never completed in itself except by a tincture of its accompanying compassion, & in the compassion there is a tincture of hope, & in the hope there is a tincture of hilarity, & nested in secrecy in the hilarity there is a tincture of relief, probably by now at the tightest grain, a relief at your own flabbergasted revulsion, a feeling flowing from watching the hooks you are sliding off of composited to catch one sacrificial clown & perhaps his sidekick, & a feeling instead again & again falsely resolving inside you as clarity, sanctity & solidarity … ” Don’t Think About It, do It-do N’tta Lkabo Utit, Doit- Doit, Doit- Don’t Lieab Outit ,doit -doit ,doit -talk About Yours Ickma N-sog Ood,y Ougot Todoi T,doi T-doi T,doi T,doi T,doi T,doi T,doi T-doi T,doi T,doi T,doi T-don ‘tlie About It,do It-wh Ygive Afuck About It,ma N?doi T,doi T-the Re’sa Lawbu Twhoc Ares- Doit, Doit- Don’t Ripme Off,m An,ju Stdoi T-doi T,doi T,doi T-doi T,doi T,doi T,doi T-doi T,doi T,doi T,doi T-don ‘ttal Kabou Tit,d Oit,d Oit-d On’tl Ieabo Utit, Doit, Doit- Don’t Cover Itwit Halie ,man- Doitd Oit,j Ustdo It,ju Stdoi T-doi T,doi T,doi T,doi T-doi T,doi T,doi T,doi. This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Andrew Joron, Avatar, City, Earthstar, Fitzcarraldo, Glass Architecture, Graham Dorrington, Imre Szeman, Levitated Mass, Lily Hoang, Literature and Energy, Michael Heizer, On the Road, Patricia Yaeger, Paul Scheerbart, PMLA, The Perpetual Motion Machine, The Steam Age, The White Diamond, Wakefield Press, Walter Benjamin, Werner Herzog. Bookmark the permalink. Post navigation ← Hard to Say from Pank, available now From “Doom House” to “Mood House”: How Simple Aesthetic Strategies Can Create Experimental Films, part 2 → 4 thoughts on “Paul Scheerbart’s Perpetual Motion Machine: Some Thoughts on Literature & Energy”.

[Note: Sources: Richard Grossinger, and Jeffrey Mishlove, quoted in “The Mystery Of Creation With Richard Grossinger, Ph.D.”, at Intuition.org; JBR (apparently a Hart Crane reference, tho it embedded in my memory as Lew Welch, “He Explains It Another Way” (who was, I now learn – after all these years – mashing in a bit of Crane)); Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics (tr. Bruce Benderson), at e-flux 44; “Seperot”, in vy2ms #2615501, at joerg piringer (vy2ms #2615501 was uniquely generated, you won’t find it); JBR, “FCF 113”, at ZS, 19 Dec 014 (rather highly edited; here’s the original source note; it shouldn’t be hard to determine what I left out this time round: “Whatever the problem … part of it: Eleni Sikelianos, as quoted at Jerome Rothenberg, “For A Panel On Poetry and the Environment”, at Poems and Poetics, 18 Dec 09; Orange … OK: a bit (or two) from (almost) every chapter of The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (eds. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin); The flower … bean-patch: Ian Wedde, Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos, 10, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (ed. Jeff Hilson); a silver … bottlecap: Donald Revell, “My Trip”, in American Hybrid (eds. Cole Swensen and David St John); Our … jammed and Its amazing: Steve McCaffery, Dark Ladies: A Masque and User’s Guide to the Tragi-comic, in Hilson; Ka … thump and haayo and and The joy … direction: JBR, “Haayo Means Welcome”, and “For Frank L Vigoda”; Sand … pattern: Christian Bok, “W. L. Bragg (1890-1971)”, in Crystallography; and – oh … to the and hoist … higher: Patrick Durgin, “Arbiters’ Ectoplasma”, “Was Not Was”, in Imitation Poems; no known … capture the: Beverly Dahlen, A Reading 19; Et in Arcadio … everywhere: Steve McCaffery, “Some Versions of Pastoral”, in Bouma Shapes; gone through the: Ronald Johnson, The Shrubberies (p.34); Ten … PLENTY!: Michael McClure, Love Lion Book, in Huge Dreams; there was … more: Paul Violi, “Wet Bread and Roasted Pearls”, in Breakers: Selected Poems; a test … system and as if once … lurching: Anne Waldman, “~ inner ~ day 2”, “~ secret ~ day 3”, in Manatee/Humanity; Aase Berg, “The Snail Ancestry” (tr. Johannes Göransson), in With Deer; A hairy bed: Jerome Rothenberg, “More Gematrias”, 58, in Gematria Complete; I’m … butts: Brenda Iijima, “Raw: Hands”, in revv. you’ll-ution; adverb … dash: Craig Dworkin, Parse. With a few bits from some intuitive google searches intermingled …”). You think maybe this is an experiment … staring at him: Claudia Rankine, “From ‘Citizen’”, at Poetry Foundation; Jackie Wang, “What Is This Orgy of Song”, at Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns, 6 Sept 014; Francis Crot (perhaps, tho of course that’s not really his name), “cumulative counterpowerfail …”, “the horror itself …”, at franciscrot, 7 Oct 014; Volodymyr Bilyk, “text”, at experiential-experimental-literature, 26 Oct 014 (as it came thru cutnpaste); metadata etc found at the foot of Michael Leong, “Paul Scheerbart’s Perpetual Motion Machine: Some Thoughts on Literature & Energy”, at Big Other, 5 Jun 011]

In the House of the Hangman 1835

But whatever form the work takes, whatever media we use, we have not ceased to be concerned with the maintenance of a Gegenöffentlichkeit. We are at one with the Grimms’ Town Musicians of Bremen, in alliance with donkey, hound, cat and cockerel, whose masters wished to slaughter them when their utility was at an end. Which is to say, I was never allowed to talk about how, at the end of March 1945, before the arrival of the advance guard of the Red Army, my father buried parts of the fortune of the extended family (porcelain, silver, two large bags, travel documents) under the apple trees in the garden and laid down a compost heap on the spot, which did very well in the rainy weather. I never said a word about it, although I received a Communist training and was required to reveal all personal secrets. There is a private human being inside every Chekist. I can, however, confirm that this private human being is not the well-source, where behaviour and character have their engine (seat of reliability), it is to be found rather in a side gallery, where society does not reach. Thus I remain an absolutely reliable Party cadre, who has merely not betrayed a family hiding-place (and also does not dig it up). Our mechanics in one of the escorts kept the heavy trucks, full of ingots, intact on all the roads of the eastern Ukraine and North Ossetia. Marked on our maps was the Ust’urt Desert (on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, but from the ‘road’ this sea was nowhere visible, the desert appeared as steppe). We were trapped. Local officials (or bandit gangs with insignia unknown to us) forced us to drive to an abandoned caravanserai. In spring we abandoned the vehicles. We buried the iridium. I thought of Kant, and was happy that I could say as he had, “Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the six-year-old within me.” For structural reasons the conference hall was screened from the outside world. So now we go to Dieter’s place. I am the level you have longed for. Without me you have no root in the world. Because I exist you are happy. You love me always more and more / I am dangerous too / There is almost no further need for argument between us. You are almost satisfied. I encourage your direction / When I am present, you delight in your great fortune / When I am away, you are whole because I am in your heart / You have come from a long distance to find me. You found me only yesterday / First you thought I was your emperor, then god. Now I am your Italian woodland deity, sometimes your centaur / Already my favorite meal is spaghetti Bolognese, green salad and red wine. I mean, I want to think about this sentence – “Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.” “Once a planet is sighted by astronomers, its energy manifests here. Chiron rules healing with the hands, crystals, initation alchemy, actual alteration of the body in some way by the mind or spirit … It rules all issues of making Saturnian form on Earth and then bringing – through Uranian white light – higher consciousness and energetics into form.” Missteps in this line of work prove / particularly hideous. Testperson end up grasshopper, / teratoma or just strapped / to the walker mid-corridor. / Impossible to not be freed / by this. I contaminate this page with this. It was an early acrylic painting, and it felt really thrilling and dumb to me. I had this idea that it was a “normotic” painting. Then it emerged that it wasn’t really analytic, it was metaphysical. What did he mean by that? And Alif has many seats / under which he is silent / though you cannot call it suffering / suffering rhymes with zero / at least initially / a sweet round perfection / as we like to draw it / doodling one into the other /   / at Mme Cavaiotti’s      where I wrote / or learned to daily at 5 p.m. whose husband / told me that in the last war (which wasn’t / the last at all) he had been / forced to drink his piss from his boot / in the desert of Libya, his wife linking / zeroes, rounds, in the margins of the daily / “Wort,” making, making /   / the nothing, where does it stand? / It stands outside the / almond, / it stands in the shells / of the suffer’un / the zero-crescents /   / a sort of zag without a zig /   / the orphaned zag. Maybe that’s what I’ll call the next bit of ZS: The Orphaned Zag. So. We met again in the street where we last met. Neither of us could remember how long it had been. It was night again. You had aged a lot and I was a little younger than I had been. In one hand you had so many poppy seeds, the other hand was coated in honey. I tasted both. I told you I thought it was like the famous Celan poem: Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten: wir sehen uns an, wir sagen uns Dunkles, wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis [My eye goes down to the loins of my lover, we stare at each other, we say dark things, we love each other like poppy and memory.] Maybe I had been dragged to this thought by the eating from your hand. The poem starts with that, not that you knew. You berated me. You told me I had it all wrong, that you had brought me everything sensuous: the night and the poppy and the honey. And all I could think of was this stupid poem. I was sorry that it had lodged there. It had lodged there with the memory of hamantaschen, purim sweets with poppy seeds and honey about which I had nothing to say. And anyway, you said, honey was memory made myth. Honey was a preservative, it stopped memory being explosive by forcing things to unnaturally endure. Honey was the enemy of transience. I asked about your age. Honey you said was a force of light. I told you that the poem wasn’t without sensuousness, that Celan wasn’t all deserted landscapes of death, without even flowers. I told you to listen to its rhythm, to its persistent amphibrachs. You were having none of it. We sat for a while in silence, your one hand full of poppy seeds and the other covered in honey.

[Note: Sources: Alexander Kluge, quoted in “Hans-Magnus Enzensberger once referred to Alexander Kluge, winner of every major prize for literature in Germany, as ‘the least known of well-known German writers’. In his introduction to, and translation of, three of Kluge's short stories, Martin Chalmers reveals why this should be otherwise”, at New Books in German; JBR; Dorothy Iannone, “An Icelandic Saga – Part I”, “I am the level …”, in You Who read Me With Passion Now Must Forever Be My Friends (ed. Lisa Pearson); JBR; Lynne Tillman, back cover blurb for Glass! Glove!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader (eds. Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin); Barbara Hand Clow, Chiron: Rainbow Bridge Between the Inner and Outer Planets, quoted in Richard Grossinger, The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos (Updated and Expanded Edition); Robert Kocik, “Remissions”, in Rhrurbarb; Jennifer Samet, “Beer with a Painter: David Humphrey”, at Hyperallergic, 25 Oct 014; Pierre Joris, “FROM AN ALIF BAA”, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Pierre Joris: From ‘Barzakh’ (Poems 2000-2012)”, at Poems and Poetics, 25 Oct 014; JBR; Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, “Dream Fragment now in Greek Translation”, at Prolapsarian, 25 Oct 014]

In the House of the Hangman 1834

Poor. Old. Tired. Cow.
            (after Aaron Kunin)

He “died” “in the” battle, then fear
“And” sadness infected my milk
“My” baby “died,” “on” “the” boardwalk
I “died” when “you”
Turned “your” car into “the” crowd, “I
Died” “in” a cage

“You” don't even recognize “them.”
They look like different people.
If there remain some few “whose deaths”
“You” did “not” cause
Think about what “your” ancestors
“Did” “to” get “your”

Nice things, which have been “your nice things”
“For” “so” long, “they” really “are” “not”
Very “nice.” Build “a” monument
Hire “a” choir, do
“Not” remember, “do not” “think,” “not”
Today, “do not”

“Zatso!”
Homeless, like wheat
on the sermon
“Zatso, zatso, zatso!”

And yet … and yet … It all doesn’t start with a room. But here we are, and there are six chairs imitating a forest arranged around a raised platform where a Figure rests. Footsteps draw near, each a sealed concert, indistinct breeze. The Figure calls itself D, gives in after a few more hours, calls itself B, gives in after a few more hours, draws some Chinese characters on its blotched skin, vomits. “The entire body becomes plexus …” “Or else, on the contrary, it will flatten itself and stretch itself into a thick mirror”. Are we communicating? Having a conversation, talking more urgently into our palms, every gesture substantiated by a voice that we give in to more and more, that arrives with a distinct pause, that we trust more and more? A suggestion. And here we go beyond the hydraulics of process and representation and enter the surprise of what a picture really is. The name Wittgenstein, absent in A Thousand Plateaus, enters the book on p. 71 to introduce a single phrase, “possibilities of facts,” and then fades. But as an echo more distinct than any voice and welcoming us further into the house. Not the scream / body / meat. But the fact that we are talking about it. All of the music on this album was created from a single recording of a front garden gate on Torridon Road. These sounds were captured using a contact microphone and processed, looped and edited on three reel-to-reel tape machines with all electronic effects or artificial reverb strictly forbidden … Torridon Gate – oddly, the German for gate is tor. Or rather, it’s one of several German words for different kinds of gate. But strictly speaking, ‘garden gate’ is pforte – which aptly sounds like a musical instruction on a score … the window of “truth is another name for sedimentation” … a breeze with fingers flat on the ground … “i am not making sense today but i am trying for tomorrow” … in the land of mutual rivers, it is all a conversation: one flows uphill, one flows down. Each ends in a bottomless lake which feeds the other and the boatmen who sail up, down, round and round never age, growing half a day older, half a day younger ... though even there, how they give us away, our vowel sounds: “That’s why I’m comfortable writing things like, ‘cry harder, dweebus’ or ‘your dick is gross and bad.’” Then Roger Laird made an old-fashioned two-by-four pair of stilts eight-feet high. It made him stand about twelve feet in the air. He would mount the stilts and walk into the big lake around which the rich people lived. The sailing boats would come around near him, big opulent three-riggers sleeping two families belowdecks, and Roger Laird would yell: “Fuck you! Fuck you!” Actually this Sunday will be its last episode. The big question people seem to be asking is, “Will the Steve Buscemi character die?” That’s always the question in these shows — “Oh and Juliana if you read this — I tried to be a peasant looking at a picture of an angel but I couldn’t believe in love until I got to the creation of the animals — how they launch into life from out of the void, blind — all of history ahead of them — and that’s when I thought of you — like do those robins ever settle in at night and just think Best. Nest. Ever. That’s the subject of this poem.”

[Note: Sources: JBR (obvious Creeley reference); Aaron Kunin, “Went the Day Well?”, quoted in PEN American Center, “PEN Poetry Series: Aaron Kunin”, email rec’d 24 Oct 014 approx 10:05 AM PDT; James Tate, “A Vagabond”, at Poetry Foundation; Issa; Arkava Das, “Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation”, at Entropy, 23 Oct 014, “feats of strength”, “to destroy the evening”, at Big Bridge 17; a press release, and Simon Reynolds, quoted in Reynolds’ “Gatterkomposition”, at Blissblog, 24 Oct 014 (re a composition by Robin the Fog a/k/a Howlround called “Torridon Gate”); Philip Gross, “Mappa Mundi” “from Vocable”, at wood s lot, 24 Oct 014; Emily Needleman, “The Strickland Dildo”, Barry Hannah, “Getting Ready”, quoted in André Babyn, “The Strickland-Needleman Carousel”, at HTMLGIANT, 24 Oct 014; Mike Meginnis, “I will miss you”, at HTMLGIANT, 23 Oct 014; Chris Nealon, “The Dial”, at Elderly, 24 Oct 014]