We can discuss later manifestations of romanticism another time. Just wanted to share a quote with you that I think could be brought to bear on these topics. I read it last night and I love it. It’s from the memoirs of Louise Michel (absolutely fantastic wonderful book, as captivating as say the autobiography of Emma Goldman), and it comes as a note she appended to the transcript of her post-Paris Commune trial that sent her to New Caledonia: “Perhaps there is some use in noting that contrary to the description of my person given at the beginning of the account in the Gazette des tribunaux, I am tall, not short. ***In the times in which we live, it is proper to pass only for oneself.***” (JBR emphasis) Anyway, after typing the above, I get this via email: “This week in the PEN Poetry Series, guest editor Cathy Park Hong features an excerpt from new work by Eugene Ostashevsky. About the excerpt, Ostashevsky writes: “These poems are from my new manuscript, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, a poem-novel about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot who, after capturing prizes all over the seven seas, suffer shipwreck on a deserted island, where they discuss whether they would have been able to make themselves understood by people indigenous to the island, had there been any. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretical, philosophical irony and narratological handicaps, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi steals from early modern texts about pirates and parrots, Russian 1960s folklore, old-school hip-hop, game theory, controversies of copyright, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, abbreviated as PI. Of the poems selected here, Pirate Party Music comes from a section of pirate songs that also include a shanty and a Russian folk piece to the tune of Bei Mir Bistu Shein. The piece formerly known as Pontius Pirate appears autobiographical. The piece about communicating with hypothetical indigenous people repurposes a line by William Carlos Williams. For the pun piece it helps to know that, prior to the invention of biscuits, parrots enjoyed almonds, as John Skelton attests, and that ‘almond’ in German is Mandel.”
PIRATE: Do you think this island has any indigenous people on it?
PARROT: If it does, we won’t understand them or they us. Indigenous people never have any common sense.
PIRATE: Why “never”? Have you met all of them?
PARROT: I don’t have to meet all of them. That’s what logic is for. If they had common sense, they would emigrate. If they emigrated, they would no longer be indigenous people. Q.E.D.
PIRATE: But, parrot, why should they emigrate?
PARROT: But, pirate, why shouldn’t they emigrate? Should they sit here all of their lives? Don’t they deserve a second chance?
PIRATE: Why do you take it upon yourself to speak for indigenous people?
PARROT: If I don’t speak for them, who will? Somebody has to speak for them if they don’t have any common sense! Most of what they know is numb terror under some hedge of chokecherry or viburnum, which they cannot express!
PIRATE: Poor indigenous people! Poor poor indigenous people! O poor unfortunate indigent endogamous ingenuous—
PARROT: Poor genuine people my pope’s nose! What if they show up and ask to see our visas?
PIRATE: But we don’t have any … We don’t even possess passports!
PARROT: This is what troubles me, pirate. Suppose we get deported?
PIRATE: We must persuade the indignant people that in our culture it is not proper to ask pirates and parrots for passports!
PARROT: How can you persuade anyone of anything if they don’t have any common sense?
PIRATE: But are you sure they don’t have any common sense? I mean, you proved it but are you sure?
PARROT: Let me read you something. “Unlike their peers, the Tonga Islanders do possess native numerals up to 100,000. Not content even with this, the French poet Leconte de Lisle pressed them further and obtained numerals up to 1012; however, his data was proven upon publication to be partly nonsense-words and partly indelicate expressions, so that the supposed series of high numeral forms at once a modest lexicon of Tongan indecency, and a warning as to the probable results of taking down unverified answers from savages.”
PIRATE: I can see why you’re nervous. Ingenious people are really hard to talk to! I mean, it is with the velocity of a giant squid and the sprawl of its erogenous arms that with water-wheels the leverage in any musculoskeletal appendage can move into positions within the time it would take the engine of filaments to accelerate the psychic mass of bodily understanding and construction for such a displacement to continue in different venues and as multiple in purpose as the simple machine of our vessel will allow toward the disappearance of a nexus like in infinite mirror games but with the ability to count each movement of the progression as it acts in mechanical, yet organic, jerking behind the dreamlike animals with their pink illusions that roll their wet bodies into our delicate systems. There. Now we are here. So, let me say if by government you mean bank, then I will agree with you and if you reminisce about the historical mass and its subjective valves of speaking into the romantic motions of people, I will say that has worked with people but what has grown around us like a flesh is not within any subjective register so really, you can’t speak to it because although there is a mass of skin, it is made of machine that not only might laugh but can’t even hear our emotive sentiments and the skin is our skin and the gear is our gear and we speak to ourselves but can’t listen because as the body expands it flairs out in a web, this is because it is giant and from the outside and uh-oh, a border collapses, toss a pinch of salt over your shoulder, the salt the ancient Romans mined from Appian ways, the salt we pressed into ancient earth to deprive our enemies of crops, it was like a hydra growing heads the shape of brussels sprouts, liberally, under the planet — it began I guess when Santa looked up from his sluggish nap — the sleep of neo-liberal generosity — to find the elves had taken to the Pole, as in other cultures workers take to the streets, And in their caps and breeches said elves did bite down the pole with white teeth, teeth sharpened from thousands of years making toys for us. I am not sure if the disgust or fear is the disgust or fear of a white person in another era or a non-white person in this era. I think, for the purposes of the panel I am on, I would like to discharge the disgust or fear of a white person in another era but also this one. Perhaps we can work up to discharging – the particular, chronic – micro-expressions of disgust – that are situated in the soft tissue or the parts of the face – that contract – during eye rolls or tongue clicks, the sideways glance. And though I typically work on chronic, almost fleeting states – I thought today I would generalize -- to the broader: “grimace.” You have to ask the client to make that “face” in order to observe, very quickly, the extent [topography] of the platysma!!!! In the textbook, it reads, below this image: Exercising the platysma. I mis-read: Exorcising the platysma. 2. The pyschogenics of the master muscle: known: as the muscle through which: we express ourselves. So, I have to go to Walgreens to get duct tape and latex gloves. I will ask the Mongrel-to-be or Mongrel-in-fact – to read a section from DICTEE. And then I will release the deep belly of the masseter muscle, the clenching pattern, the part of the oral structures that effect swallowing – a necessary component of cannibalism – I also think of de Andrade here. Particular attention will be paid to asymmetrical hypertonicity. After the treatment, I will assess – the release of the oral structures – by asking the Mongrel client to read aloud once more from DICTEE – in order: to assess: the success of the treatment!!!!!!!!!!!!! This may be why, outflanking ‘radical poets’ like Shelley and Byron, Macfarlane’s polemics have the orotund, unanswerable ring of Shakespeare, Milton and Blake. These texts were written to be read aloud, in taverns where illiterate politicos would seize a newspaper and cry, “Who’s here can read? I want to know what Feargus O’Connor is saying about Julian Harney, has the man gone mad?” The Macfarlane revival — she was not only the first translator of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (38 years before Samuel Moore’s standard one), but the first translator of Hegel’s philosophical writings into English — is not simply an independent object to dent the armour of know-it-all Hegelians, it also breaks into the realm of English Literature and its pecking orders: The golden age, sung by the poets and prophets of all times and nations, from Hesiod and Isaiah, to Cervantes and Shelley; the Paradise ... was never lost, for it lives ... this spirit, I say, has descended now upon the multitudes, and has consecrated them to the service of the new — and yet old — religion of Socialist Democracy. George Eliot, another nineteenth-century woman (Marian Evans) who adopted a male soubriquet in print (Macfarlane’s was ‘Howard Morton’), is revered as a novelist, but if you explore Eliot’s critical relationship to Christianity (she was the translator of David Strauss’s scandalous The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) parallels with Macfarlane foam forth. Sally Carrigher, in a meadow one night, heard what seemed a bird trilling, then saw it was a deer-mouse. My friend Bill Winchester tells me that when deer-mice came into his house from the tallgrass prairie of Oklahoma, he live-trapped and released them in a nearby hedgerow, but they waltzed back in, singing an epithalamium. Latin Musa, Greek Mousa, English Muse / Mouse linked by an O – license to party on Parnassus and drenk from Helicon. Sir Toby, Reepicheep, Sir Andrew & Feste grilling Malvolia about Pythagorean metempsychosis, can join them in a catch, a coranto, a galliard, a jig, or sink-a-pace, singing to moon and stars, Diana and Venus, Blake’s Sunflower where the Traveler’s journey is done – but Deer-Mice got there before tourists with FOX2P genes arrived (see NY Times 29 May 2009, p. A5: human “language gene” put into mice deepens their baby cries). Anyway,
40,000 poets can’t be wrong.
I don’t write this kind
of poem anymore, but I
hear the economy worsens,
I hear it means
living forever. Bad timing
so what!
But, again, assuming this isn’t simply an exaggeration or even a hoax, the idea that humans can now see in the dark with the help of eyedrops based on chlorophyll — as if borrowing an optical superpower from the vegetable kingdom, incorporating other species and experiencing self-hybridization in order to capture light at even its wispiest and most ghostlike extremes — is kind of trippy. You can easily imagine this becoming standard for nighttime police operations or military raids — but one could even imagine this having an effect on global energy bills. What if improving grid efficiency is at least partially also a medical question — that is, if you could just drop some Ce6 in a dark city without the need for streetlights, or even walk through your own apartment with pupils the size of dinner plates, seeing everything?
Suppose, then, one just listed
house, book, mug, window,
daughter, dogs (gone), desk, Apple™.
Suppose it was budded tree limb, hair-thread fingers—
the baby oak in spring, rain “heavy at times,”
and the cleared branches of fall, suppose
yellow gusting in a greeny-pinkish light,
a dark red pear leaf blown into the room,
suppose a salvaged shmoo-like basil plant
eager, even in winter, to give pesto,
or a fondness, a warmth, eros
blue as the sky, could it be otherwise?
the apt healing of a wound, even with
its startling scar—
unaccountable enumerations:
the oddly glistening, the half-started language.
The half-startled. Twisting together
choice exemplars of exquisite debris:
“a cigar label, a metal buckle, a ballpoint pen,
a bottle cap, a bolt, a hair curler,
a drafting compass, a plastic bottle,
yellow tape, aluminum foil, drinking straws,
green paper,
broken blue glass.”
Would this be enough?
What would be enough?
Dunno, but “I have a fear of the vacant space underneath cabinets” and I love this I love this, they’re talking about irrational fears and people are calling in. One of the DJs was like, I’m terrified of big steel trains and cruise ships, or when the table rumbles quietly and you didn’t do it, I’ve been thinking about this too. You know, godlike bliss feelings hatred and worshipping love, responding and not reacting, feeling blank, letting yourself stay by yourself and trying to hold people in your head. How much is me trying to protect myself from breaking / shrinking and how much is bullshit? Maybe I have to be somewhere else to figure that out. I need to figure out change and swaddling. how 2 swaddle back also. How did I get here, this is so fucked up.
#
DESCEND
DESCEND
#
I said “you should dye your hair red again. Or blue” and he looked at me, smiling dumbly like “really? don’t you think I’m too old?” and everyone was like “No. Jesus Christ no” and he giggled and was like “maybe.” I then told him to play more songs from Newton abbot demo, like Boredom and Rain and he looked up alarmed and was like “you’ve heard those?! That’s so embarassing.” but I was like “no seriously though, Boredom and rain are actually really good, please bring them back somehow” and he was just grinning like “oh god, lets not” it was beautiful. Ok then I was like “ok, this is gonna sound creepy … because it is … but, can I please touch your hair? Sorry it’s creepy as fuck but I have to know”. He smiled and bowed in front of me and I need to start a new paragraph for this ... I ran my fingers through his hair like 10 or 11 times, for a good 30 seconds, gripping it and pulling gently which he seemed to love. Now, dear readers, his hair is … so fucking soft. Like, incredibly so. Like … Let’s try a calming exercise. Imagine you are inside an egg. You have been inside this egg for as long as you can remember, which, remember, does not necessarily mean your whole life. What shape is the egg? Someone, or at least, a voice is asking you, WHAT SHAPE IS THE EGG? It’s easy to get lost in the geometry. I lay down under my car, I feel the gravel bite into my back like teeth that are either too tired too careful or too generous. We could go anywhere in the whole world. Basically, just keep saying that & watching a new ball of gas form in the sky with each bout of laughter. I’m ok if you’re ok. Are you calm or not? Me too. Ultra blurry, anamorphic, some of this represents a certain depth and movement sung by writing it, but will turn in the latest form of your payment,
— Dear, you
weigh nothing in and get no credit, no
spectral, tiny swaggering to cash in
yah there’s a substitution agreement containing you
and me in force, pulled on from inside.
— Dear, and oh yah asleep awake again, more than once w/ a face of a filled out line. Or lines. Smiling lessons.
[Note: Sources: JBR; PEN American Center, and Eugene Ostashevsky, quoted in PEN’s “PEN Poetry Series: from The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi by Eugene Ostashevsky”, 27 Mar 015 approx 8:02 AM PDT; JBR; Lisa Cattrone, “Movement, written August 21, 2011”, at The Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology Compiled By Stephen Boyer, Filip Marinovich, Kari Giron, Jackie Simmons, Sarah Sarai, Eliot Glassheim, Jackie Sheeler, Chris Cobb, Ofelia Del Corazon, Sarah E. Robey, Rami Shamir and The Poets Of Occupy Wall Street; JBR; Kevin Killian, “Trouble at the Pole”, at The Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology Compiled By Stephen Boyer, Filip Marinovich, Kari Giron, Jackie Simmons, Sarah Sarai, Eliot Glassheim, Jackie Sheeler, Chris Cobb, Ofelia Del Corazon, Sarah E. Robey, Rami Shamir and The Poets Of Occupy Wall Street; Bhanu Kapil, “Platysma: A Thin, Superficial Sheet [Preparing for &NOW: Blast Radius at CalArts]: And OTHER ARTS”, at I thought I was writing about an immigrant. I was writing about a monster, 26 Mar 015; Dave Black & Ben Watson, “Helen Macfarlane”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 24 Mar 015; Carter Revard, “Deer-mice Singing Up Parnassus”, in Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (ed. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke); David W Pritchard, “Actual Handwriting”, at [“IT’S TIME TO HOP TO THE BLUES.”], 27 Mar 015; Geoff Manaugh, “Dropping Light”, at BLDG/BLOG, 26 Mar 015; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Draft 111: Arte Povera”, at Alligator Zine 146; JBR; “i have a fear of the vacant space underneath cabinets …”, “I think a lot about the contrast between banality and wonder …”, “cydoniahype: ok this was the big one bc me nd matt chatted quite abit ok here is me meeting MATT BELLAMY and fuck im exhausted after all this. …”, at Bulging Ceramic Superconductors, 27 & 26 Mar 015; Dalton Day, “A REVIEW OF HEATHER CHRISTLE’S ‘HELIOPAUSE’ by DALTON DAY”, at Probably Crying Review, 26 Mar 015; Jack Kimball, “This is an impressions album …”, at Pantaloons, 27 Mar 015]
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