So you will have to imagine the picture I was trying to upload of the metal water hydrant cover that looks just like a medieval engraving of the cosmos. Maybe tomorrow. The blossom is out in the road. And the feeling grows as the day progresses, as a soft wall, water, toss it on me and buried just before sleep. Do not call me, please, that these comments are not careful. Remember that nothing happens on this page that is not a page, it happens in real time. My mum told me when I was a baby I slept so intensive so I turned white! So she had to check me all the time if I were still alive! This is serious! That is true! Maybe the whole thing started there? And maybe it started before that? My great great grandmother was a sorcerer but only white magic. So a Scout, a Synthetic Humanoid, and a Weyland-Yutani Executive walk into an army medical lab operating outside of regulated space. “I got signals,” the Scout says. “I got readings, in front and behind.” “Forget the signals,” the Executive says. “Where Are the Brothers?” Yeah, a couple of Brothers from the double-Y chromosome correctional facility had gone missing. The Scout did some Reconnaissance on the Ventilation Shafts. “Uh, guys,” he said. “I mean gal, and thing. We better do this job quick. What I mean is we got No Time to Waste. This thing’s on a collision course with planet Earth! Oh, and there’s a Xenomorph Runner in the Weapons Locker.” Pretty soon there’s a Runner and a Noxious Xenomorph standing right in front of them. “They’re All Around Us!” the Executive shouts, and the Scout takes that as his cue to kill the Runner. But then he sees another Runner coming out of the vents. The android knows that the xenos in front of them are bad, but the ones farther are the more important threat; remember, they’re supposed to be finding the Missing Brothers. “Look into my eye,” the Scout says, pulling down his right eyelid. The Synthetic gets the picture. Then the Scout kills an Acid Spray Xenomorph and a few Specialists die, which is actually a good thing because they were like dead weight at this point. “Look into my eye,” the Scout says again, then the Executive is like “They’re All Around Us!” and the Scout wastes a Runner that just appeared in front of them. The Synthetic goes on a Secret Mission to check out the Power Station. There’s a Skittering Xenomorph, and the Synthetic wastes it before it can skitter away. “Prune the Growths,” the android mumbles ominously, and then suddenly the crew doesn’t feel as pressed for time. By this point, they’ve found both the Brothers cowering in the Airlock. The Scout is like “Look into my eye” while the Synthetic goes and rescues them. I have little doubt that given enough time, a meticulous close listener would find hundreds of similar moments in the thousands of hours of recorded poetry on PennSound. Most of us don’t have that time, though. My initial experiments suggest that ARLO will be able to reveal a large number of sites for interpretation that I wouldn’t have been able to find through close listening alone. The man then turns to the elephant, leans over, and, with a heave, tosses her into the stunned crowd. Screams shake the room until … the divine essence became palpable … the Kabbalist rabbis of Toledo understood that a new form of biblical interpretation had been born. There are times when the relentless pace of the outrageous and surreal incidents feels a little like Pixar in overdrive: people fall into vats of honey and are embalmed by bees, drops of semen turn into white butterflies promptly devoured by green lizards. Back at John’s house the last of the natural light had dissipated. There was no overhead lighting, so as it got dark, we carried on talking by the light of two lamps. And what with the old-timey American music playing on the nearby record player, the continual flow of wine from the clay jug and cheese, pastrami and bread simply arranged on a plate, it all looked oddly beautiful. Even the soot-lined cobwebs in the corners. At the end of the evening, I stood up unsteadily to leave. My B&B was a mile up the hill. I had deliberately left my car back there knowing that I would probably be having a drink. “I’m going to drive you back to your hotel,” he insisted. I flatly refused. He continued insisting to the point where it became clear that this was a matter of honour to him, and furthermore that an argument may ensue if I didn’t let him. He opened the front door and, by the light of a tiny torch, negotiated the narrow track from his house, over the footbridge, to his vehicle, and announced that he would refuse to go back in until I had installed myself in his vehicle. With John’s foot firmly down on the gas, his green van unhappily ascended the single track road up the hill and then up a steeper gradient to the driveway of my B&B. “Please promise me you won’t die on the way back,” I begged him. “Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “I’ll be fine!” Ten minutes later, the furious landlady of the B&B knocked on my door and berated me for allowing him to drive me home. Apparently, John’s attempts at a three-point turn had laid all her freshly planted flowerbeds to waste. She told him that if he didn’t vacate his van immediately, she would call the police. The last I saw of John that night was his enormous frame wedged into the passenger seat of her tiny Renault Clio, his smiling face emitting an impish high-pitched laugh at his own denouement. “See! I told you it would turn out fine, didn’t I?” Which was followed of course by the typical Greek
CHORUS
Strophe
In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But after pondering much
To this conclusion I at last have come:
LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.
This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff
On tablets not of wax,
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
For many reasons: LIFE, I say, IS NOT
A STRANGER TO UNCERTAINTY.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphine tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.
Antistrophe
Why should I mention
The Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus?
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for,
And sent her forth to learn
The unfamiliar science
Of how to chew the cud.
She therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
Nor did they disagree with her.
But yet, howe’er nutritious, such repasts
I do not hanker after:
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?
I have no notion why.
Epode
But now does my boding heart,
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A strain not meet for the dance.
Yes even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes<
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament:
And to the rapid
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.
Meditation
However, I have never dull
With praise of pastoral life,
Nor nostalgia for a past innocent of
Perversions on the prairies.
No. No need to cross the borders of New York
To find all the greenery you want – can not enjoy a stalk
Of grass without a metro stop by hand,
Or a record store
Or any sign. It is important to affirm
With equal sincerity;
Clouds already receiving considerable attention as well,
And it still happening.
Did they know what they’re missing?
Aha.
I wish I had gray, green, black, brown, yellow eyes:
I stay home and do something.
Not that it is not funny.
But it is my duty to be careful,
I need things like heaven to be on earth.
And last,
That I have very little sleep, San Serapio,
Which is like midnight in Dostoevsky.
But how do I become legend, dear?
I tried to love, but
I always hopping apparatus like the lotus –
The ecstasy of always fly apart!
(But do not get distracted by that!) –
Or as hyacinth, “to keep separate the dirt of life”,
Yes, there even in the heart,
Which pumps dirt.
But when the haunted voice recorder replayed its ghosts within the context of the epistemological frame of a bodiless autopsy ritual designed to magically enter the mind of the Andreas Lubitz that breathing became a confession. “We could hear human breathing inside the cabin,” said Mr Robin, “and this breathing noise we heard up until the moment of final impact. That means that the co-pilot was alive. Apparently he was breathing normally, so this is not someone having a heart attack, for example. You don’t get the impression that there was any particular panic, because the breathing is always the same. The breathing is not panting. It’s a classic, human breathing.” Just imagine a painted owl eyes door. And rat bells, as in, You hear rat bells all along the wall. It helps you. Imagine owl eyes, all along the wall. A colored egg hidden in the fireplace. A dead motor. You think, This will be the mold that holds it, this will be the matter. All roads end in spools of pink, then fasten to other roads. The hand that cannot feel the watch’s gears in the second stanza translates onto the body Beuys’ piano wrapped in felt: steroid flowers paper a room. I have crawled their backs and wept in their wire baskets. Can’t you see that this is how I, radiating outward, happened to appear on this planet, this speck of dust? Yves Klein was born because Baudelaire predicted this propitious event by naming colors, which, like all colors, escape the confines of their names, becoming more than an emanation of infinity. Even black can get away from its name, which is why Malevich had to surround it. But what is color that isn’t surrounded by another color? What is that boundless world we catch a glimpse of whenever we look up at the sky? Is it so vast that we must turn away from it, afraid that it will swallow us up, which it will? Astronomy, the Greeks believed, was a royal science, which means I am a royal painter. Do not confuse me, however, with a painter of royalty. Nor am I the prince of clouds, Baudelaire’s albatross, fallen from the sky. Screw that fascist Marinetti. I fall effortlessly through the air, I mean I jumped out the window and I stayed in the air. In some ways, it was easy. We received submissions from a great group of contributors who are passionately invested in teaching, and whose innovativeness in the classroom, as expressed in their essays, continually surprised and inspired us. Questions raised by contributors included: How did nineteenth-century translations of Beowulf for children shape British imperialism in India? What cultural work motivates the adaptation of early modern Italian epics featuring Christians and Muslims in nineteenth- and twentieth-century folk theatre? I’ll get to the quandary of the good life later. Inadequately, but that may be for the best. In Goya’s great painting ‘The Third of May 1808,’ already three lifeless bodies are lying in pools of blood, and now, kneeling beside them but with his hands held high, is the next victim. The sky is black; this is happening at night, or in Hell. With a look as much of sorrow as of fear or anger, the powerful man glares at the men, factota of the firing squad. There are at least five of them, left foot forward and right foot back, faces hidden (they are wearing shakos and turned slightly away from us), the long barrels of their rifles raised and thrust forward. On the ground, at the center of the scene, and casting luminous light on the man who is about to be shot, is a large square lantern — it must be at least two feet tall and equally wide. It’s a yellow lantern, the color of the condemned man’s pants. Its light casts forth the white of the condemned man’s shirt. They say Picasso said, ‘The lantern is Death. Why? We don’t know.’ I walked over to the trashcan to throw away a receipt, when I saw a worksheet from another class. The title of it was ‘True Love’ written in excitable bubble letters at the top, and underneath it, a series of coordinates that had to be graphed — on the back was the graph, and on the front, the whole page was covered with coordinates, ‘(8, 3)’ and so on, followed by the phrase ‘LINE ENDS’ — and printed in a lighter tone ‘TRUE LOVE’ was a cloud, behaving, situated over the numbers, and ‘LINE ENDS’ floating around the page, so the eye received this confusing montage of Love as a Line, then Love Ending, and then some truth produced as apotheosis between the two that true love does not live endlessly, but is finite, on a line, is lived in time — what makes love true is that it happens, and it could happen to you, or it could not, and the numbers were rain across the space of the sheet — then gentler, gendered, colder, snow — finally, quickly, shifting coasts and was where I was again — the numbers were frantic piñata candy of kids cackling — through the colorful pow of me imagining the effigy of the animal bursting open. So goes the liturgy. That was a little distraction for those of you who aren’t accustomed to heights and depths. Throw that carabineer into the south gust. Get blown off track but stay on the scent. That’s the hunt code. Pull your furs tighter. The spell holds. These Icarian gliders aren’t what they use to be. Lean pole-ward. Rotate your mirrors. Charroux first related the Hyperboreans to an ancient astronaut race of “reputedly very large, very white people” who had chosen “the least warm area on the earth because it corresponded more closely to their own climate on the planet from which they originated.” Are the poles white? So white that we travel through white to the other side of brightness. Lo! The new Jim Crow. Again we are blinded to the vast prismatic spectrum that prevails there. Borea and Abaris, feasting on gold, show us how to see in the bright. First they purify themselves by rubbing their skin with oil of ice. Then they collect plankton, mineral crumbs, bird saliva, parachute debris, used acupuncture needles, essence of map, poisonous mushrooms, wings from downed planes, celluloid film scrap, parakeet feed, anything with which to make more Rovers and T2 Landers, and anything that falls from the sky and can be retrieved from a thousand fathoms below. Not that a three circle Venn diagram is composed of 7 regions (right). If Something Is in Region Number 1 in category S, Then Is IT outside of Categories P and M. This Would BE A Nice passing of Representing Laruelle's Real That Is Completely Unrelated. If something is in region 2, it shares a relation between S and P; there is an overlap between these two domains. We have a mathematics of string theory (symbolic) that potentially explains certain things about nature (it remains a hypothesis), but the n-dimensional spaces of string theory have no correlate in phenomenological experience because we can neither imagine (produce an image of), nor experience 11 dimensions. If something appears in region number 5, there is an overlap between categories S, P, and M. Read on! This free trade agreement exists as a nearly four hundred page document, parsed into 22 chapters. Why is there no copy of this document in each of our homes? Why can’t we find this in the night-tables of every Motel 6 and Best Western around this Great Country? Why doesn’t this land on my front porch every six months, wrapped in pink plastic, like the Yellow Pages of Disaster? It should be hung from chains in defunct public telephone booths so that time and the elements can tatter its pages and send them tumbling onto windshields moving through cities at 90miles an hour. It should be hung on flagpoles on May Day so that we can hoist its promises into the breathless ozone. There is essential information here — information that we can’t live without; information that we have not lived with; information that has named the objects that we have lived with: a person “means a natural person or an enterprise,” meat means “meat of swine, carcasses and half- carcasses, fresh or chilled.”
[Note: Sources: “Just wasted ten minutes …”, at belgianwaffle, 28 Mar 015; Dolores Dorantes, “Life is strange …”, at Dolores Dorantes, 28 Mar 015; Dead (Per Yngve Ohlin), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Rerun: Dead aka Per Yngve Ohlin (orig. 01/21/09)”, at DC’s, 28 Mar 015; Byron Alexander Campbell, “Session Report: Legendary Encounters and Adaptation”, at Entropy, 28 Mar 015; Eric Rettberg, “Hearing the Audience”, at Jacket2, 28 Mar 15; Askold Melnyczuk, “Askold Melnyczuk on Where the Bird Sings Best. The Art of Disillusionment: Alejandro Jodorowsky and the Uses of Fiction”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 Mar 015; Pete Paphides, “John Renbourn: ceaseless explorer of song – appreciation”, at Guardian, 27 Mar 015 (RIP); JBR; AE Housman, “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy”, quoted in “here’s the full text of that! it’s hilarious. it’s a parody of bad translations”, at I Shall Destroy Everything Around Me That Prevents, 28 Mar 015; Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency” (tr. into Spanish by Fruela Fernández then back into English by Google, then “edited” by JBR); “Andreas Lubitz & the unhuman evil of murder-suicide”, at —catastrophic edge, 28 Mar 015 (Lubitz = the apparently suicidal copilot who apparently crashed Germanwings flight 9525 into the Alps); JBR; Debora Kuan, “How to Take Black-And-White Pictures”, “How to Make Bells”, “Pastoral”, “TV Room”, John Yau, “From ‘Further Adventures in Monochrome’”, in Michael Leong, “Lines of Sight: Visual Art in Asian American Poetry”, at Asian American writers Workshop, 3 Mar 015; Karina F. Attar and Lynn Shutters, “Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Pleasures and Perils of Research on Teaching”, at In the Middle, 29 Mar 015; Lyn Hejinian, “Turbulent Thinking”, at Journal of Poetics Research 2; Alana Siegel, “Alana Siegel Reviews Katy Bohinc”, at Journal of Poetics Research 2 (a review of Bohinc’s Dear Alain); Susan Gevirtz, “Hyperborea or Bermuda Triangles I Have Known”, at Journal of Poetics Research 2; Levi R Bryant, “Realism and Constructivism 1”, at Larval Subjects, 29 Mar 015 (as it appears in my RSS feed w/Google Translate turned on); Divya Victor, “MISCREANTS & MISCREATIVE WRITING: On Hugo García Manríquez’s Anti-Humboldt”, at Harriet, 28 Apr 014]
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