The earth is currently operating in a no-analog state.
– Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, 13 July 2001
... however,
I have
a redeeming quality:
I
was gifted
with a sunny
disposition.
Ergo, redundancy
must play a
preeminent
role in
the marking system.
This text of Daniel, then is as clear as the bright sun, and the work of ending the fifth Empire of the world is now in full swing. The first Empire is explained by the golden knob - that was the Babylonian – the second by the silver breastplate and arm-piece – that was the Empire of the Medes and Persians. The third was the Greek Empire, resonant with human cleverness, indicated by the bronze; the fourth the Roman Empire, an Empire won by the sword, an Empire won by force. But the fifth is the one we see before us ...
flakes and flashback to bedroom, to spectral
glistening, midday makeover wanting to see
open dance floor but only knowing the clearance
rack,
in
the center
of the grid
is
a glass
water pitcher, 9
pieces
of clear
quartz in the
bottom,
gathering the
transmissions from all
the
crystals in
the surrounding grid
and
infusing the
water.I asked
the
spider her
name and later
that
night dreamt
of the goddess
Freya
hanging from
a thread.I
slowly
ate the
toasted pumpkin seeds.
But
for Spence,
the work she
had
done around
breast cancer did
little
to prepare
her for her
diagnosis
with leukaemia.
In an interview
with
Jan Zita
Grover in 1991,
Spence
noted the
change in her
relationship to politics: I’ve taken up tapestry and gardening because that’s the only way I know how to have any peace in my life. It seems to me that choosing to go like an Amazon into the lion’s den over and over again in order to be politically useful is just too energy-consuming and too conflictual. In the end it didn’t seem to me to serve any function at all, so it feels at this point as if I will never do anything again except look after myself. The task of looking after myself with leukaemia is like having a newborn baby to look after; the amount of things daily that I have to do to nurture myself ... If there was a movement to belong to it would be a different matter, but I don’t see one.
That
summer, there
was an alley
with
a graffiti’d
kitty cat and
coffee
by the
sea. There was
a
Mexican wrestling
mask. There was
a
red sack
on the butcher’s
table.
This question
is made of
gold
and silver
and all the
darkness
in the
earth.The pink
lightning
was branched –
forked – in five
places.
Then the
city spun into
the
sea where
the gulfs of
the
pterodactyl beckon
there is a
whorl
of terror
livening my mind
there’s
the hum-whirr
of the skeleton
lying
still dances
flash from
upon
lyingstillyingstillyingstillying
stillyingstillyingstillyingstill
so
instead of
an edible fish,
any
small fish,
sweet or sour,
or
even the
grotesque buffoonery of
the
striped scorpion
fish, crowned with
spines
and followed
by many tails,
a
veritable sideshow
of a fish;
instead
of these,
I was given
an
insect, a
peculiar prehistoric creature,
part
lobster, part
spider, part bell-ringer,
part
son of
a fallen star,
something
like a
disfigured armored dog,
not
a thing
you can eat,
or
even take
on a meaningful
walk,
so ugly
is it, so
stiffly
does it
step, as if
on
ice, freezing
again and again
in
mid-air like
a listening ear,
and
then scuttling
backwards or leaping
madly
forward, but
of course a
name means nothing to a place
place-names are necessary relations
a name recovered returns the claims of human affection for a place
place-names identify a field of biotic relationships
place-names are allied to habitat restoration
listen to a place-name, hear the dead speak
some place-names follow speech but run counter to meaning
names change when the guard of speech alters
some place-names are all that remain of lost languages
our place-names un-name older names
most people live in places, a few dwell in names
the meaning of a name may go into oblivion long before the name itself
perhaps
in the
way Dipesh Chakrabarty
once
said the
colonized are placed
in
a perpetual
“waiting room of
history.”
To wait
for what? — For
it
to get
worse? It already
is
worse. For
it to get
better?
People are
raining from the
sky.
I wear
a flowery dress
to
prison and
let them shave
my
head off ...
The rings, the
spirals
the chain
being whirled round
and
round by
a maniac. I
press my hands to the window and hang my head. I know that somewhere in the darkened city there is a silent place where a tiny, frightened animal is scratching at the dust and earth, and it won’t stop until it uncovers some kind of burning rock that will illuminate the entire structure, and in the midst of that illumination all of our languages will sparkle and burn and words we have never spoken will lacerate the air. Which is to say that one way The Good Life cashes out is ‘Fuck. / / Am I smiling [anyway], I think / so?’ Because parts, after all, are always unequal to the whale. It's like the ‘lillies in the valley full of swag, and fomo.’ Or it’s like when McLaren told Johnny Rotten that Picasso died & Rotten said ‘Oh good.’ Well, it's not like that — really, like being in Dallas with Pasolini, because after The Good Life you can say ‘I don’t care where I die. / Why would I?’
I
am easily
distracted and I
like
to put
clothes on dogs.
I
like to
wake up at
noon
in a
leisurely way. In
the
beginning there
was nothing. And
nothing moved nothing was moving. Nothing moved. Nothing was moving it
was
moving but
at first it
wasn’t
going anywhere.
You can see
the
ripples whoa
you are the
ripples
because the
ripples are everything.
Then
one of
the white goes
with
one of
the black and
the
second of
the white goes
with
the sunlike
one. That’s right.
That
room is
locked. Is it
the
same room
or a completely
different
one? We
ran the numbers
on
the past
five election cycles
to
find out ...
we had an
old mattress wed had it for years and the salesman
wed bought it from had assured us it would last us a lifetime and it
was getting older and lumpy or lumpy in some places and hollowed out
in others and i just assumed it was part of a normal process of aging
it was getting older we were getting older and wed get used to it but
eleanor has a bad back and she was getting desperate to get rid of
this mattress that had lived with us for such a long time and so
lotally that i thought i knew all its high points and low points its
eminences and pitfalls and i was sure that at night my body
worked its way carefully around the lumps dodging the precipices
and moving to solider ground whenever it could
but maybe eleanor
sleeps more heavily than i do i have a feeling that i spent much of
my life at night avoiding the pitfalls of this mattress that i was used
to and it was a skill id acquired over the ten or fifteen years of this
mattress’ life so I felt there was no reason to get rid of this mattress
that had been promised to us by a salesman who said it would last the
rest of our lives i figured we were going to live long lives i didnt
think we were anywhere close to dying so neither was the mattress
but eleanor kept waking up with backaches
still i figured it was a good mattress and that elly just didnt have
enough skill at avoiding the lumps it never occurred to me that the
mattress was at fault so i didnt do anything and elly didnt do
anything because shes not into consumer products and hates to go
shopping but by the end of a year elly convinced me because she
has a sensitive back and i dont that she had a more accurate
understanding of this business than i did so I said sure eleanor
lets get a new mattress were rebuilding the house
[Note: Since ZS is an “altarpiece”, and altarpieces are traditionally symmetrical, Shatter is going to (more or less) mirror Flux, Clot & Froth. Eye eee, I’m going to “unpack” my c20-21 lit library, volume by volume. I will also interpolate from whatever comes into my RSS feed, downloads email, and whatever other sources present themselves. As with all of ZS Shatter will be composed in sections; the sections are designed to merge into one long work. For the first section I will use the 1st book on each shelf of the first range of shelves. As well as my RSS feed, etc. For the second section I will use the last book on the 1st shelf, the last book on the 2nd shelf etc of the last range, etc. For the third-sixth sections the procedure will be identical except I will work the next sets of ranges towards the center ranges. This means that in ranges 1-3 will start with the first book on the shelf, with ranges 4-6 I will start with the last. There are six ranges. For the seventh thru twelfth sections I will duplicate the procedure of sections one thru six except I will reverse the first-last book thing. The next “round” will use the second (or the penultimate) book on each shelf. Each round will work toward the center of the shelf. Etc etc. Shatter is over when the last book is used. Theoretically, it will be the book at the dead center of the “collection”. New texts in any format that enter the house during composition will be used as soon as possible after they have entered the house. I am feeling that this should also look like FCF, eye eee, hay(na)ku, w/at least one bit in any other form in each section. I will “source-note” everything. And, of course, I am free to “go rogue” at any time. The title: Shatter derives from the cannabis extract I like best, at least in Shatter Tank CBD Pen form (THC is bad for my nerves, which are shot, and have been for something like 35 years). Shatter feels like an appropriate name in a multiverse of other ways, none of which I want to even vaguely begin to reify, except to claim for them all the status of a ‘Discourse on Thelonialism’. What is Thelonialism? There’s an old note in Robin DG Kelley's prefatory essay to Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism which reads: “This essay is dedicated to Ted Joans and Laura Corsiglia with love and gratitude for our ‘Discourse on Theloniolism’” ... I wrote Laura Corsiglia, and at one point in our correspondence she wrote “Theloniolism is immediate yet also a lifelong process. One thing to bear in mind is that it is highly melodic.” That’s good enough for me. [N.B. I spell the word Thelonialism, with an a, a spelling Corsiglia also used in our correspondence.] It’s the most real name I could come up with. This section is a prologue of sorts. Sources: Robert Rissman, No Sounds of My Own Making (see RR’s original for his source notes); US Department of Energy, Message to 12,000 AD, at US Dept of Energy; Thomas Müntzer, “Sermon to the Princes”; Isaac Pool, “Readings by Theresa”, at BOMB Magazine, 24 Oct 016; CA Conrad, “Spider Symbiosis: Time With Freya”, at So(ma)tic Poetry Rituals, 23 Oct 016; Anne Boyer, and Jo Spence, as quoted in Boyer’s “The Kind of Pictures She Would Have Taken: Jo Spence”, at Afterall 42; Bhanu Kapil, “Notes for a novel not yet written: BAN”; Philip Lamantia, “Vibrations”, as quoted in Steven Fama, “Phillip Lamantia Day – 2015”, at the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica, 23 Oct 015 (hat tip Eileen Tabios); Jeffrey C Robinson, Wordsworth Day by Day: Reading His Woek into Poetry Now; Brigit Pegeen Kelly (RIP), “ISKANDARIYA”, as quoted in John Keene, “Poem: Brigit Pegeen Kelly”, at J’s Theater, 3 Apr 08; JBR; Alec Finlay, “A Poem of Namings, from Gaelic and Norn”, as quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Alec Finlay: A Poem of Namings, from Gaelic and Norn”, at Poems and Poetics, 24 Oct 016; JBR, as remixed by Lynn Behrendt, “I Haul I Haul I Touch Myself”, in A Picture of Everyone I Love Passes Through Me; Sean Bonney, “Letter in Turmoil 14 / Note on the Hallucinations”, at Abandoned Buildings, 13 Oct 016; JBR; Rod Smith, blurb for Brandon Brown, The Good Life, at Big Lucks; Jenny Lawson, “Dorothy Barker is more graceful than any of us, really”, at The Bloggess, 23 Oct 016; Bernadette Mayer, Utopia; Ken Edwards, a book with no name; Emma Foehringer Merchant, “Climate change enjoyed its 2 seconds of fame in the final debate”, at Grist (hat tip K), 19 Oct 016; David Antin (RIP), “the theory and practice of postmodernism—a manifesto”, at Poets.org]