Actually, it’s just as well. Above Slothrop, at eye level, is a terrace, and espaliered peach trees in milky blossom. As he crouches, hefting the bag, French windows open and someone steps out on this terrace for some air. Slothrop freezes, thinking invisible, invisible ... Footsteps approach, and over the railing leans - well, this may sound odd, but it’s Mickey Rooney. Slothrop recognizes him on sight, Judge Hardy’s freckled madcap son, three-dimensional, flesh, in a tux and am-I-losing-my-mind face. Mickey Rooney stares at Rocketman holding a bag of hashish, a wet apparition in helmet and cape. Nose level with Mickey Rooney’s shiny black shoes, Slothrop looks up into the lit room behind-sees somebody looks a bit like Churchill ... now here’s something Pynchon doesn’t tell you ... before Slothrop looks up, for one brief eternal moment he is mesmerized by a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance at the tip of Mickey’s left shoe. “The AlephAleph?” I repeated. “Yes, the only place and time on earth where all times and places are — seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.” I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless AlephAleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies ... for the next xxx words I too analogize) I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw, close up, unending eyes on endless planets in endless multiverses watching themselves fail again fail better; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a copy of the first English translation — Philemon Holland’s — of In the House of the Hangman and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark, near the Tannhäuser Gate. I’ve been Offworld and back ... frontiers! I’ve stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps with sweat in my eyes watching the stars fight on the shoulder of Orion. I’ve felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I saw the AlephAleph from every point and angle, and in the AlephAleph I my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face and your bowels; and I felt dizzy and wept — I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity. Slothrocketman saw it ALL. Janey’s mother will die when she is one. Her abusive father will abandon her nine years later. She will travel from the Yucatan to New York where she’ll be kidnapped and sold into white slavery. Then she’ll get cancer. Disgusted, her white master will forsake her. She’ll journey to the Middle East, wander into the desert, and die. In the afterlife, she’ll search for a book of human transformations, longing to leave behind her alligator shape and become a bird. Generally, then, the délok are simple ordinary people, either women or men, who die, tour the netherworld, and return to report their experiences. Although there is some scattered textual evidence that attests to the emergence of the délok phenomenon in Tibet in the twelfth century, the development of délok narratives as a distinct literary genre did not get underway, it seems, until the fifteenth century. In fact, to my knowledge, the earliest recorded reference to a délok in Tibetan literature occurs in the Religious History of Lhorong composed between 1446 and 1451 by Tatsak Tséwang Gyel and repeated by Gö Lotsa wa Zhönu Pel a few decades later in his famous Blue Annals. In the section on the life of Tashi Pel (1142–1210), first abbot of the Kagyu monastery of Taklung, Tashi Pel is said to have met an old woman at Tankya in central Tibet who had returned from death. These particular social-religious functions of the délok are corroborated by Françoise Pommaret’s pioneering ethnography of two female délok in modern-day Bhutan and Nepal. In interpreting the délok’s social roles, she distinguishes between features described in the literary sources and those observed in contemporary society. Pommaret shows us that the délok in the written sources are always favorably characterized as messengers of the dead and as preachers of virtuous action and of the effects of karma. However, in modern social settings, the délok are identified also as ‘‘shamans’’ who undergo the death experience at fixed dates and times, as guides for the dead. Furthermore, Pommaret reveals that the délok in contemporary society are also viewed as ritual outcastes and are prohibited from assisting with births and funerals. All of which is only to say,
It was like this, or a little bit different.
It is like this, or a little bit different.
It is like this, or like the perforating machine
in the tree house.
I have a million of these questions.
If the big bang happened in
the center
of the universe
what’s there now?
Something endlessly repeated, comingling with confused shrieks, syrupy trumpets, saxophones and violins ... set off by silly horns beeping in the background ...
35 adjectives
7 adverbs
1 conjunction
0 gerunds
0 infinitives
217 letters of alphabet
6 mathematical symbols
A number of nouns
29 numbers
G participles
3 prepositions
0 pronouns
3 words capitalized
0 words italicized
And l have gone further than any Roman mercenary
I have gone further than Ibn Battuta
But yesterday when I wanted to take the subway downtown
To go and see you
I couldn’t change my ten-dollar bill.
So I hid under the eaves by the window of Nelly Bloomgarden, the typhoid carrier, and wow. She’d been in that room since 1897. I could see her through the barred window lying on her side and watching the TV a generous party had donated. She didn't like football. It was a first down with the ball on the thirty. How had they done it? The wind up. The pitch. From behind a tree she tosses a mudball at me. “That’s no way to do your hunting,” I call, whoever she is. What a stupendous idea. For example, in his reflexion on omega, the first infinite ordinal, Badiou extracts a typology of infinities: the infinite as point, as place, as horizon, and as repetition. He then turns to poetry to “explore the labyrinth of the different forms taken by the couple finite / infinite”, admitting explicitly that this turn is metaphorical. But that’s cool. It reminds me of Charlemagne Palestine and the Grumbling Fur Time Machine. It’s a highly personal universe, in which teddy bears figure as powerful shamanic totems, which he fondly calls Divinities. In short, the system is based on three germ intervals, that are multiplied and stacked on top of each other. Many multiplications make a “scale”, few multiplications give a “chord”, which is a subset of the “scale”, just as the C major triad is a subset of the C Major scale. One big difference is that the Crystal Chords do not repeat themselves at the octave, but evolve in unpredictable ways through them. Which is to say that indestructible good fortune is singled out in each here-and-now of the pure feed. The solution to everything, everyone, every day, and now, is the reemphasising of the pure feed. The pure feed is the heartfreak. All of this is also assuming that we ourselves are clear about what we are communicating, which is often not the case if we find ourselves reifying data about the situation in mind. Remember Lady Gaga? Remember her meat dress? This is because you cannot release yourself from the element of the claim you are still moving in. There are effects like that, like peaks of data almost reaching up to the other side. You can find the pure feed in GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt. There is stellar acid because stars leak. How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it. The form would be monstrous. That kinda romanticism doesn’t help much either.
So I’M GONNA
cuddle HULKMANIA ON YOU AND YOUR
SPINE. More feelings. MORE ‘ROIDS. Must THROW
stroke a arterial rage
001011001000110010101101111001 arbitrary line break
00000011001110110000101 arbitrary line break
10110101100101011 arbitrary line break
10011
(I PLAY VIDEO GAMES)
The six hour toy commercial
I, II, II —
u m a n m u m
u s t u p
f a s t a n d
a n d a
c c o r d
e o b s e r
a t r I x o n
r n e t a n d
o t e s
And said chicken claw devices
And said dragon con
Pencil Eir
Nagnilum
Lyle, Lyle, Croodile [sic; if I had wanted to type crocodile I would have]
Zip zam
Oochie walla
Zip zam
Zip zam
Zip zam
PIFF
Zooo, zooo, zooo, zooo, zooo, zooo, zooo
So yes, Jerry’s ‘I’m privileged to be here among you, from now on we live on borrowed time,’ does seem to have become more apt with every passing hour. So what if
I haven’t even left
the house — I just know!
Call it infinitely gendered telepathy.
Call it specialesqueish.
Speaking of, check out the inner
red folds of my robe ... I know!
Right?! That’s deep! Oh,
Chipping Norton, crêpe paper, 57% of adult men.
Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else ... Which is simply to note that while the equine motif relates to the animals which pull Parmenides’s chariot, Kung-sun Lung’s proof that ‘A white horse is not a horse’ appears also to advertise fidelity to a specifically Chinese dialectics that accords in certain respects to Mao’s position; but what Lukács actually argues, citing as evidence a particular passage concerning Darwin in one of Marx’s letters, is that, at any particular time in human history, the conceptual apparatus of scientific knowledge is “determined by the economic structure, by social being.” So who does stand under the clouds and above the ants, source of the contaminants, forgiveness and pity?
This is and must be the thought of nothing that
cannot be apart from what is, neither as or by cause, what it is
to be, relentless and unsame.
Then the door to the plane is closed by an attendant and it slowly taxies down the field. Suddenly a speeding car comes to a stop outside the hangar. Strasser alights from the car and runs toward Renault.
STRASSER: What is the meaning of that phone call?
RENAULT: Victor Laszlo is on that plane.
Renault nods toward the field. Strasser turns to see the plane taxiing towards the runway.
STRASSER: Why do you stand here? Why don’t you stop him?
RENAULT: Ask Monsieur Rick.
Strasser looks briefly at Rick, then makes a step towards the telephone just inside the hangar door.
RICK: Get away from that phone.
Strasser stops in his tracks, looks at Rick, and sees that he is armed.
STRASSER (steely): I would advise you not to interfere.
RICK: I was willing to shoot Captain Renault, and I’m willing to shoot you.
Strasser watches the plane in agony. His eyes dart towards the telephone. He runs toward it and desperately grabs the receiver.
STRASSER: Hello?
RICK: Put that phone down!
STRASSER: Get me the Radio Tower!
RICK: Put it down!
Strasser, one hand holding the receiver, pulls out a pistol with the other hand, and SHOOTS quickly at Rick. The bullet misses its mark. Rick now SHOOTS at Strasser, who crumples to the ground. At the sound of an approaching car both men turn. A police car SPEEDS in and comes to a stop near Renault. Four gendarmes hurriedly jump out. In the distance the plane turns onto the runway. The gendarmes run to Renault. The first one hurriedly salutes him.
GENDARME: Mon Capitaine!
RENAULT: Major Strasser’s been shot.
Renault pauses and looks at Rick. Rick returns Renault’s gaze with expressionless eyes.
RENAULT: Round up the usual suspects.
GENDARME: Oui, mon Capitaine.
The gendarmes take Strasser’s body away and then drive off. Renault walks inside the hangar, picks up a bottle of Vichy water, and opens it.
RENAULT: Well, Rick, you’re not only a sentimentalist, but you’ve become a patriot.
RICK: Maybe, but it seemed like a good time to start.
RENAULT: I think perhaps you’re right.
As he pours the water into a glass, Renault sees the Vichy label and quickly DROPS the bottle into a trash basket which he then KICKS over. He walks over and stands beside Rick. They both watch the plane take off, maintaining their gaze until it disappears into the clouds. Rick and Louis slowly walk away from the hangar toward the runway.
RENAULT: It might be a good idea for you to disappear from Casablanca for a while.
There's a Free French garrison over at Brazzaville.
I could be induced to arrange a passage.
RICK: My letter of transit? I could use a trip.
But it doesn’t make any difference about our bet.
You still owe me ten thousand francs.
RENAULT: And that ten thousand francs should pay our expenses.
RICK: Our expenses?
RENAULT: Uh huh.
RICK: Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The two walk off together into the night.
FADE OUT. Now swap / buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck ... Things spin away upwards ... There are no drains in this world of men ... So upwards! Upwards!
remains are handled
in a culturally sensitive
and religiously appropriate manner
hey, do bone face
may art stare?
thanks, Donna,
nice Sigmar Polke postcard
thus to this day
it is said
that they said
that god said
that
he made them
and in his own
image
a sparrow’s
dust prints
oompah band
They say: Man, listen to these prepschool motherfuckers. They think they’re gonna walk all over us with their bone china taxonomies. Dolores says: Wha? Someone screams Bedbug! and everyone goes running out of the restaurant to their rooms. It later turns out to be a raisin. The kitchen staff puts it in a jar and shows it to people. So I began thinking about pain and parentheses when I came across the following question: “What does this act of meaning (the pain, or the piano-tuning) consist in?” The passage refers back to an earlier one: “Imagine that you were in pain and were simultaneously hearing a nearby piano being tuned. You say ‘It’ll soon stop.’ It certainly makes quite a difference whether you mean the pain or the piano-tuning!” Were such parentheses common, I wondered, and if so, why? Note that for Kant those, the rose and the bird, are NOT art. They are negative examples. And so. All of it to legitimate the state form from a place outside the state form, which is the Colonial form. Oh, that’s where that gif came from. I remember that movie. Being your headspace exit or, I don’t know, smoking area (?) is super interesting. This is what I mean when I say loose. How many calories are in those sutras anyway? I’m still interested in how the revision treats ‘culture’, of course, but I’m also keenly interested in the discussion of ‘intrastate war’ and insurgency, the direct incorporation of air power (which was relegated to an appendix in the previous edition), the attention paid to intelligence in its multiple guises, the role of biometrics (biopolitics again!) [Weirdly, this seems to reconcile the band and manager and they all run gaily to the helicopter to the strains of “A Hard Day’s Night,” Paul’s Grandfather somehow already cuffed to the door handle.] Hairy Who? A multi-colored palm tree grows out of the tip of a large pink finger. We’re talking “crème de la phlegm”, Pooh Rass, baby. A glowing sacred heart, pickle shaped penises, and white, empty eyes. Because this is Cythera.
Walking toward the center of Cythera,
down its one path, whose dust chokes me,
I see a sad procession of headless lovers,
a few of them beating with pool cues
on tattered tambourines.
As the music grows more intense,
I find a scraggly pine tree to hide behind ... and just in time!
At this point, obviously, I really wish I could think of something to say that was hopeful, that was useful, that was not simply a net of rats blocking the force of the sun, till it crawls on its fists and knees, screaming like a motherfucker, sarcastic and wrathful, boiling the mountains as if they were scars. Godzilla represents nature here. Godzilla is the ecosystem fighting back. Which is great because tedious, numbing office work and near total isolation make my day — five days a week. To be honest, I really like office work. Like so much of social life, it’s a lot like acting. It’s repetitive and I know exactly what I’m going to get if I behave a certain way. Besides that, I like to copy people and the things they do. I make awkward postures all day. When someone asks me how my day at work was I always say the same thing, “I don’t remember.” That’s what makes office work so great. I don’t remember any of it. I mean, I do remember some things like where I put my stapler, but I do the same thing everyday. I hear people say that office work is so boring but it’s not. When I’m at the office I daydream a lot and I always think of things to do that are bad. I really like office work. The site for this practice is an area around my home, its boundaries defined by the time it takes to walk from my home and back again within the daily timeframe, incorporating resting times of any duration and walking routes that may turn any which way. The objective is to cover the entire available public space. It is perhaps significant that Horkheimer makes a mistake, at least an apparent mistake, in referencing this image, for he writes of a night in which all cows are grey. I mean, I had a bunch of very strange dreams last night. They included some really weird detailed unspoken conversations — conversations that were understood to be taking place but in which no words were used — and a meeting with a cloudgod. Oh, and just before I awoke I was washing up: all of the things that needed to be washed up (that included saucers filled with tea) had been transformed into knives and the only things I could use to wash them were more knives. And then there was something about Heidegger, my head was being squashed between the axes of “Being” and “Time”, which became giant metal compass legs. When I woke up I immediately drew a graph. Which is to say, “When we are long gone, there will still be plastic clown masks circling in the Pacific Ocean. This, and not the ‘two vast and trunkless legs of’ Haribo Ozymandias, will be the last remaining relics of human life.” And yet, and yet. At .45 seconds an F tone (after tone), takes flight from C, and sounds as G — in echo, within F (that’s within C), so that when the one octave higher C (at 1.2) resounds (for .05), the succeeding A — lightly, and almost inaudible, nearly crushes the E above it into the pith-seed, or, “seed-pith” ... 153 years later, that situation has not ended: it’s been extended to everyone. Mommy what’s this fork doing? What? It’s being Donald Duck. What could I eat this? Eat what? This cookie. What do you mean? What could I eat it? Does he bite people? That fish is dead. That fish got dead today. That fish gets dead today, right? These are my silver mittens Mommy, Daddy, the doctor did put a wart on you, right? I touch the purple petals She says Hey! The flower says, we are purple, together they touch purple it keeps purple. It pulls me up and leads me about the house. It’s got the sun in the morning and the moon at night. Can you pay homage to a box?
Then I had a near
death experience during
which I nearly died then
she came in laughing his
shit’s blue and red today those
wax crayons he ate last night ...
[Note: Sources: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; JBR; Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph” (tr. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni “in collaboration with the author”) (with a little Beckett, a little Bladerunner tossed in ...); JBR; Lance Olsen, “kathy acker: queen of the pirates”, at Lance Olsen; Bryan J Cuevas, Travels in the Netherworld Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet; JBR; Jaan Kaplinski, quoted in Richard Lopez, email rec’d 22 Jan 017, approx. 12:28am PST; JBR; Carter Ratcliffe, “You Need Not Be Present to Win”, at Extensions 1; JBR; Dan Graham, “All You Need Is Love”, at Extensions 1; Dan Graham, “[Schema for a set of poems whose component pages are specifically published as individual poems in vanous magazines ...]”, at Extensions 1; Joachim Neugroschel “Life/Lines”, at Extensions 1; JBR; Joachim Neugroschel “Life/Lines”, at Extensions 1; JBR; Steve Katz, “Mythology: Diana”, at Extensions 1; Terence Blake, “AGAINST THE PATHOS OF THE COLD EQUATIONS: the ideology of mathematical reductionism”, at Agent Swarm, 22 Jan 017; JBR; “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt / Charlemagne Palestine / 29.01.2016 – 08.05.2016”, at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art; Rolf Wallin, quoted in Phil Legard, “Listening for the Voice of Fire”, at Larkfall, 20 Jan 017; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, Pure Feed; JBR, but see Jonty Tiplady, Pure Feed, “GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt / Charlemagne Palestine / 29.01.2016 – 08.05.2016”, at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Jeroen Nieuwland, “Charles Fenckler, Stellar Acid >”, at a poetics of confusions, 22 Jan 017; Sean Bonney, “Letter on Poetics (After Rimbaud)”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; Michael Cannon, “Hulk Hogan’s love poem”, “001011001000110010101101111001000000110011101100001011011010110010101110011 (I PLAY VIDEO GAMES)”, “The six hour toy commercial”, “S t u p i d H 01010011 01110100 01110101 01110000 01101001 01100100 00100000 01001000 u m a n m u m 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01101101 01110101 01101101 a n d d a d 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100100 01100001 01100100”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; Ulli Freer, “from Recovery”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; JBR; Joshua Strauss, “garbage plate pannini (title)”, “zip zam (title)”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; JBR; Ellen Dillon, “Conference Report: ‘Outside-in/Inside-out,’ A Festival of Outside and Subterranean Poetry”, at Poems and Poetics, 22 Jan 017; JBR; Jennifer L Knox, “No Mono No Aware, I Mean Bitch Better Have My Money”, at Poems in Which 10; Jane Yeh, “Poem in Which All the Questions Are Answered”, at Poems in Which 10; Samuel Beckett, Molloy; JBR; Robin Purves, and JH Prynne, quoted in Purves’ “Uncertainty and Contradiction in J.H. Prynne’s Kazoo Dreamboats”, at Academia.edu; JBR; Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, Casablanca; Keston Sutherland, Hot White Andy; JBR; Mahmoud Elbarasi, “[I still may talk to you ...]”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; Tom Raworth, “Crowd Hunters of Images”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; Ian Heames, “Tele Carbon Rod ‘A’”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; JBR; Donna Fleischer, “God’s Tongue”, in Intimate Boundaries; Donna Fleischer, “[roadside ...]”, in Twinkle, Twinkle; Peter Manson, “from Sourdough Mutation”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; Jonathan Redhorse, “Micromachines! (#S 1, 14, 17, 29, 37, 56, 61, 73, 129, 231)”, at International Egg and Poultry Review, July 011; JBR, bits from In the House of the Hangman 1673-81, in reverse order (because K came upon an old folder while cleaning out the desk and said, “What’s this?” and in trying to figure it out, well, sampling this sampling just seemed right); Tom Raworth, “Morning” (one of my favorite poems ever, included here in homage because of what TR posted this morning: “Please suspend any donations. Last Friday after two days of tests, scans, bone-marrow extraction and so on, our Doctor came in the evening to say the cancer had badly metastasized ... to bone marrow, liver, right lung, kidney and small bowel. Nothing to be done except palliative care and that I had at most two weeks to live. So that’s it. I can’t see I shall ever get back here. Emails will reach Val val.raworth@gmail.com who obviously will pass along to me whatever she can. Bits of it all have been fun and it’s been a decent run.” I only met him once. He and K and I spent an hour chatting. A good time. I liked him ...)]