But what can I say?
See here how everything
Lead up to this day
And it’s just like
Any other day
That's ever been
Sun goin up
And then the
Sun it goin down
Shine through etcetera?
This is the day when the ordinary grows enormous oozing slime
around the edges when aliens roam the streets with too many
legs and eyeballs or not enough when physiology swells within
you rendering the flesh flimsy as tissue paper there is no stopping its
inevitable implosion?
I don’t know what I can say. Saint Angel seems to be a mythical place, perhaps near Fenario. Whenever his wife would peek around the corner we’d freeze — his German lips pursed, me fiddling with a slice of cheese and a Triscuit. If it is actually a novel at all, it is a collage-y one — of quotes, emails, letters, texts. Its format is elliptical, with three Volume Ones, each retreading and then fragmenting the same story. There are two endings, two love interests, the central role alternates between two professions, the child of the narrator alternates between two genders. Mr. Tivy, the title character believes he has the unique ability to speak to animals. His ideas on how to employ this talent, however, are rather less profound, first wanting to make a “successful film” about his powers, and then attempting to impress a masseur (who has just jerked him off) by speaking with the parlor cat, Gross Out. Gross Out does not comply, and after the masseur leaves the room, Mr. Tivy says, “I thought you wanted to help me out.’ To which Gross Out replies, ‘You know what you’re asking can never be ... On the other hand, you’re a remarkable person! A precious gift was given to you. Go to Lincoln Park and spend some time at the large-mammal house Gain the wisdom of the elephants!’ Mr. Tivy had heard all this before. ‘You talk like my dog.’ That’s when Allison is visited by Jacqueline Bisset, who floats in through the young girl’s bedroom window at night to give her life advice, “Until you blossom, concentrate very hard on your schoolwork. Then, as soon as this process is finally completed, compare yourself with the other girls.” And what if Allison never blossoms? “Simply admit this to yourself. Then decide if you might be someone who is skinny but with a lot of pizzazz to make up for it.” As for George Henry, he’s a burned-out ex-ballplayer whose own face gets stuck after warning his daughters that their faces might get stuck if they make chipmunk faces. Tokyo Lipscomb, a third-year student at Penn, is assigned to write a paper about George after seeing a news report about him but now more and more people’s faces are getting stuck — all except Tokyo Lipscomb’s. When the dust settles they’ve both been transported back to prehistoric times. They have to get back to the present using only their cell phones. Then all hell breaks loose. An army of alligators comes out of the sewers, which is explained by a flashback to 1959. People could send away for live baby alligators advertised on the back of comic books, but then they flushed the alligators down their toilets and the alligators multiplied. In any case, he is a bee expert like the guy in Jaws who was a shark expert. But perhaps all kinship is wounded, incomplete, short of its ideal, but the more blatant breaches of connectedness and fellow feeling seem especially salient. The conclusion of Mississippi Masala, a movie about nothing if not lesion, displacement, and conflict, with its implication that music can, if only for a time, heal division, is one of numerous examples of what’s long been a commonplace notion. Albert Ayler’s “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe” is another. There’s a story about Lester Young I’ve cited before in which he calls the keys and pads of his saxophone his people. But I wasn’t talking about prayer per se in that passage. I was using prayer as a foil, playing it against and folding it into a musical performance that doesn’t sound or seem as obviously related to prayer as does Coltrane’s “Dear Lord” or “Alabama” or Pharoah’s “Morning Prayer” or “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord” or any of a number of others. I was trying to talk about something I heard in the circumspection Pharoah starts that solo with, the probity of his sotto voce tack or what wants to be probity, a kind of trepidation, it seems. I was trying to say something about the fury this gets into, a pitch of complaint that would be hubristic in the context of prayer, and I was trying to talk about what I heard as prolixity and obstructed speech consorting, Pharoah seeming to’ve been gathering himself all along for that halting, hesitant statement of the melody toward the end. It was a numinous extremity I was trying to get at. Rudolf Otto’s examination of the numinous experience in The Idea of the Holy had a strong impact on me when I read it in my late teens, and his notion of the sense of one’s creatureliness as a part of that experience is at work in a later letter in Bedouin Hornbook that relates to the passage you cite. In that letter, N. dreams he’s in North Africa with a group of Sufis who practice a form of prayer in which they mimic animals — bray like horses, bark like dogs, meow like cats, and so on — so as to humble themselves before and acknowledge their separation from Allah, the fact that to God, they’re only as animals are to men. N. goes on to say something about this, to call it an inoculation of loss, mourning abandonment as though in advance, only to find that a piece of glass has gotten caught in his throat. He coughs as forcefully as he can to dislodge it, making the yelp of a barking dog. That yelp, taking the place of discourse, is N.’s submission to a certain animal abidance, to being “an angel on all fours,” as Djuna Barnes puts it in Nightwood. I heard and hear a like abidance in the gruff, iterative insistence of Pharoah’s solo, a not always joyful noise but a devotional noise nonetheless, an expectorant noise, as though he would cough up separation if he could. His and Trane’s recourse to an expectorant or would-be expectorant grumble and shriek is an admission of the limits of knowing — which is to say that between cleaning concession stands and burying dead horses, she is expected to a complete one large art project each month. There are additional super-secret ingredients: liquefied frankincense and powdered rotten tooth that belonged to The Host, hand ground with a jade mortar and jade pestle. The Host makes several dozen red frosting roses and calaveras de azúcar and places them on the eight-tier cake. She reapplies her makeup and realizes she did not exfoliate properly, but does not risk proper exfoliation at this time in case guests begin to arrive. “I’m pregnant,” says a guest. “So am I,” says another. “Both of you are? So are we!” “It was a total shock.” “We weren’t even really trying.” “We tried for three years.” “We’re due on the solstice.” “We’re due on the equinox.” “Either Federico, Alejandro, Joaquin, Pablo — after Picasso — Paolo, Swordsman, Phallus Maximus, Everest, or Omnipotence, if it’s a boy.” “Pre-natal yoga and grass-fed steak.” “My doctor said I was the tiniest pregnant woman she’d ever seen.” “Walking every day.” “A big glass of water in the morning.” “The weird thing is I’m not even hungry, just blissed out.” “Lucia Frida, Remedios, Compote Rose, Come Hither, Whirling Dervish, Cosmos, Alma, Lil Cutie, Sexually Desirable, or Simone Weil, if it’s a girl.” Maybe if I could find a good ghost writer or something. It sure seems to me, based on what you wrote, but as I know nothing on the subject, that staying on the teeny dose of Zyprexa is the way to go. The NYC subway freaks me out too, and I have to take it almost every day! But, you know, I really do think I could do the being-in-space thing. Also, a bunch of new monuments had been erected. One was of these statues of animals with famous people’s heads on them. Which reminds me of the bunny man, the elusive figure who buried his hatchet in the windshield of an occupied car two weeks ago in Fairfax County, was reported seen at least 50 times yesterday, police said:
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
event
As she has written in a statement about her practice: “My food projects are always made with an awareness of the dark reality lurking behind each meal.” Most of this recent violence took place across the Spanish border, but not far from Saint-Jean Pied-de-Port is the Roncevaux Pass in the Pyrenees, where Basque guerrillas slaughtered the troops led by Roland, Charlemagne’s general. Did you know that all the soldiers on both sides wore sweater-vests and were pale and had perfectly cubical heads? But that’s not the problem. What makes the Standard so uniquely infuriating is this. Several years ago, a group of skaters were campaigning to halt the vandalism-by-redevelopment of the South Bank Centre, and along the way prevent the bulldozing of its undercroft, a much-loved graffiti and skateboarding space. It should have been hard to oppose them on this: the skate park gave joy to thousands, destroying it would have given money to a few. Not for the Evening Standard. In a short note appended to an editorial column, the paper congratulated the skaters of the successes of their campaign. ‘In this stand-off between culture and counter-culture, the skaters have pulled off some deft moves,’ it wrote. And then, without warning: ‘But it is now time for them to see reason.’ What reason? What are they talking about? What could this possibly mean? The world is full of people making the case for what is stupid and wrong, but the Evening Standard never even makes its case. Here is something stupid and wrong, please agree with it at once. After all, this is what’s reasonable. That sentence contains in its ten short words everything that’s broken in life. The thoughtless appeal to a common sense that never existed. The endless construction of the reasonable conservative subject, spat out in their millions, naked and glistening onto the tarmac as the traffic arrives, reading the Evening Standard. If the world were a rational place, if people really were ever capable of seeing reason, that would have been it: eight hundred and fifty thousand trudging commuters would have thrown up their hands — god, fuck this — and immediately assembled to burn down the offices of the Evening Standard and start building a society in which nothing so blindly meaningless could ever happen again. But people are rude
they won’t open the door after 10
even though you’re disabled & carrying cake
of a kind so great as to transcend any pleasures
to be had in that hotel, in fact there’s
a sign on the doors: NO PLEASURE EVER!
it was the best of times
it was the worst of times
forget about the worst though
we live in Best, NY, right
next to the Best Berry Farm
(HERE THE RECORDING IS INTERRUPTED. WHEN THE SOUND RETURNS, OLSON IS SPEAKING)
— And it isn’t these brown cows of Paleolithic and southern France — [...] I go by square numbers until I go by odd numbers [...] but I could show you some switches, because, like, Pierre Boulez is my man [...] I mean whatever — Fuck that shit. But we ought to treat the whole universe as though it were a [...] ( ? ? ? ? ) — he — he — I mean I still don’t know what it really means, but he says the thing that makes music is the middle voice. And I love it. I got it into that poem where I talk about Tiamat. Oh, and
The wolf had amber eyes
That stared out
The back of a station wagon —
The wolf had amber eyes —
Clet —
Pflut —
Shuzzle —
I repeat myself. Someone laughs. I lift my arm. It’s real. Snap. [snaps fingers] Do you know do you see are you aware that right now you are here? Relax the muscles around your eyes. “Can you die from an overactive imagination?” For it quickly becomes clear that all is not well. It seems Ravicka is ravaged by a crisis that has swept the city. Or it is in the midst of an emergency by turns partially visible and wholly disavowed by the Ravickians. Or Ravicka will be the site of an impending disaster whose signs are already evident in the mood and geography of the city. Whatever the situation, citizens are either silent or at odds or in the know and unwilling to voice the goings-on. Addressing Ulchri, a Ravickian the narrator has met during her explorations, she asks her stranger’s question: “Ulchi, where do people go here to find the truth?” I got the question out but figured it would be difficult for him to answer. I tried the
12 tone scale the
25 tone scale the
200 lb. scale I tried
cat fish ale
This is why Deleuze claims that thought instigates a discordant functioning of the faculties. Where, in perception, memory functions to show how the current experience resembles other past experiences, in the encounter thought is in discord with memory. No wonder he was fascinated with Klossowski’s Roberte novels! In the encounter we discover the immemorial precisely because there is no recollection, no “system of anticipations” as in Husserl, that could converge in a synthesis on this thing that can only be sensed. And this is why the encounter generates the cogitandum, or that which can only be thought: the unprecedented. Thought is not the syllogism, nor subsumption under an established concept, but the invention of that for which there is yet no concept. If thought is rare, then this is because thought for Deleuze is essentially invention and discovery. We can see how this might work in a variety of scientific and mathematical contexts. The irregular orbit of the planet Mercury is a sentiendum in the sciences. It is something that doesn’t fit with the established Newtonian models. The Newtonians attempt to assimilate this orbit to the Newtonian models. Thought is what takes place with Einstein. It is not that we haven’t yet observed a missing mass, but rather that we’ve gotten the theory of gravity wrong. We must entirely rethink gravity in light of this exception (cogitandum). Or again we might think of the Pythagoreans discovering irrational numbers. Here we have a cautionary tale of when thought does not take place and where re-cognition takes precedence. They repress the discover of irrational numbers when trying to find the diagonal of certain squares and even club one of their followers to death when he tries to discuss irrational numbers publicly. Everything, they contend, must consist of harmonious ratios. Where the discovery of irrational numbers should have opened an entirely new field of mathematics, it’s instead brutally repressed. And should this be how we think of the trans person? Not as the person to be assimilated to one sexual position or the other, but as the person that calls us to rethink our entire concept of gender and sexuality? And this, for Deleuze, is what it ultimately comes down to. But can even the most intense encounter generate something worthy of the name of thought? There can be little doubt that the ‘self-conscious brain’ is myopic in the extreme when it comes to the greater brain. Profound informatic asymmetry characterizes the relationship between the brain and human consciousness, a dramatic quantitative disproportion between the information actually processed by the brain and the information that finds its way to consciousness. Short of isolating the dynamic processes of consciousness within the greater brain, we really have no reliable way to quantify the amount of information that makes it to consciousness. Inspired by cybernetics and information theory, a number of researchers made attempts in the 1950s and early 60s, arriving at numbers that range from less than 3 to no more than 50 bits per second. More recent research on attentional capacity, though not concerned with quantifying ‘mental workload’ in information theoretic terms, seems to confirm these early findings. Assuming that this research only reflects one aspect of the overall ‘bandwidth of consciousness,’ we can still presume that whatever number researchers ultimately derive will be surprisingly low. Either way, the gulf between the 7 numbers we can generally keep in our working memory and the estimated 38 000 trillion operations per second (38 petaflops) equivalent processing power possessed by the average human brain is boggling to say the least. My mother, greatly impressed by such obvious sincerity, said in her most charming manner that Mr Spitzer would undoubtedly make his appearance in time if not in space and had given to the insouciant and gold-turbaned and white-sheeted Egyptian her obscure but explicit instructions as to how he should conduct himself to a morning tower room where he might wait forever if he was sincere, her advice as to his procedure being as complicated as for some long, intricate journey more fearful than the voyage he had just made, and she had described a landscape shifting like water, the schools of faceless dolphins which should follow in his wake, the great birds with teeth, the stars not in their places but in another place, and had warned that he must remember each step, for there would be no one to show him the way through the dark and golden house. She had given him the exact chart of her memory which was so vague, perhaps remembering some other house, perhaps one where she had lived long ago, showing him the inscrutable painted doors he must pass and their illusive dimensions, how he must turn to the right, turn to the left, circle back the way he had come, climb the stairs he had already descended. He should not be afraid of the minotaur, for the minotaur would be afraid of him. He should not be afraid of sleeping lions in his path, of buried houses, of sleeping beauties under the sand, of swan boats and dead servants, and when he arrived at his destination, either the hostess or Mr Spitzer should come to greet him in the evening light, though it should be the morning tower and not the evening. She had added other instructions, some quite different from those she had already given, for now there were rooms between the rooms, and now the doors had changed their places. That the gold-turbaned and white-sheeted Egyptian might be assured he followed the right way and thus would not be lost again, would not be blown athwart by every wind or would not mistake the mirage for the place or the sand fountains for the sea, she had been most explicit and most patient, assuring herself by every means that he was real. Perhaps all this is why the invention of the conditions for new inventions is the condition for the invention of new conditions and yet the conditions for the conditions of the creation of new conditions looked as if they would fade into significance slash but (and?)
the mouth kisses the extinction of the world
1, 2, 3
1, 2, 3
kisses alone without a tongue
endlessly along the edge
of all life-non-life breathing the pheromones
e ◎[‿]◎ d
1, 2, 3
1, 2, 3
grooooooooor yahh-yort gahhr
By the time the plane lands in Mexico City there is little doubt left. In the airport the sadness of all of everything strengthens me. Soon, we are driving across the desert stopping to look at roadside botany. Hours later, we turn off the worn asphalt and enter the mountains. In the early afternoon María Sabina allows us into her chanting ceremony. A year or two later, Bruce Conner and I go to the San Francisco Zoo to record lion roars and snow leopard growls for a sound-play I have written. I yell this Tantra. The lions roar back at me. The five of us are deeply pleased. So if there is an “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOH” simply say a long loud “oooh”. If there is a “gahr” simply say gar and put an h in. Everybody knows how to pronounce NOH or VOOR-NAH or GAHROOOOO ME. Speaking of the afterlife,
I can locate it. Past a low ridge
in the cliff face of a limestone dale
there’s a cave in the bushes.
When the old tigers
were long since gone, leaving their
teeth, the valley people
would climb there with the dead
they thought most useful;
push them well in,
take them out again,
walk them around:
We hire a band that comes
in a van. Again
with liquefaction almost done
we hold our cherished ones
in our arms. From the grave-clothes
they fall in gobbets as dog-food
falls from the can. We wrap them
in fresh dry linen. They
bless our lives with their happiness.
Walk them around the valley. Drop
here a finger
for the god that is a rat or a raven,
here a metatarsal
to set under the hearth for luck.
And what was luck?
The afterlife back then
was fairly long:
nothing demented like for ever,
a cracked city, cubes rising
above, tangled trench
hazy gray, lemony
artery of a
they come
down to
fish in it, not really fish
address maybe, new Altamira, “Hamburger Hill,” Buchenwald
down the street, I know, they make rubber. Well of course
“they don’t exactly make rubber”
they recycle it. It’s a huge complex indeed
bulldozers and everything
So yes, I was in a coven for two years in the 90s. Well, everybody was in a coven in the 90s. We never hexed, but we divined. The meat locker doors to our hearts were open, and the chains of the law were broken. I believe that all that witchy work was the main practice that opened my nadis [network of yogic energy channels] to Flarf. That, and the czarnina [duck blood soup] my Polish grandmother used to ladle out when I was a kid. But I’m a deep believer in the via negativa. T.S. Eliot nicked that from St. John of the Cross. But good modernist poets steal from transcendent medieval saint-poets. (SJC sounds like self-help from the past, especially as Rough Orange Beast, his hour come at last, in our end is our beginning? Eliot stole that line from Mary Queen of Scots, you know. Mesmerism later became known as hypnotism. Felix was the first image ever broadcast on TV! Do what thou wilt, kitten, is the extent of the law. And every second, 600 billion neutrinos penetrate our bodies. The I Ching says, “Everything serves to further”; but
I swear to god, if I were Jesus,
I would have killed that unicorn every time he directed
An episode of the A-Team.
Together we met Peter Tork.
A consummate shoplifter, she painted her apartment
Black by splashing paint from the can.
Did you know that the FDA allows “only” 136 insect fragments and 4 rodent hairs in a jar of peanut butter? Anagrams = Ars Magna. Does this guck gush straight from your Orphic maw? Brandon, whose work I really like, will no doubt agree with me when I say that remaining at ease with one’s preoccupations requires a constant friendship with the Odradek-of-one’s-own-being. Meersman writes in four languages, including Morse Code.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, “Black Peter”; JBR; Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker; JBR; David Dodd, “The Annotated ‘Black Peter’”, at The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics; Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker; Juliet Escoria, Thomas Moody, Mitch Sisskind, Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Deagler, Jen George, Dennis Cooper, Steevee, Misanthrope, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “4 books I read recently & loved: Elizabeth Ellen PERSON/A, Mitch Sisskind Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight, Nathaniel Mackey Late Arcade, Jen George The Babysitter at Rest”, and appended comments, at DC’s, 25 Mar 017; JBR; Ed Baker, POINTS / COUNTERPOINTS; Thomas Micchelli, “Field Report on an Artist and Her Pigs”, at Hyperallergic, 25 Mar 017 (re Elaine Tin Nyo’s This Little Piggy, a “project documenting life and death in the food chain”); JBR; Sam Kriss, “Against the Evening Standard”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 21 Mar 017; JBR; Bernadette Mayer, “These Windows Do Not Open”, “The Flooding”, in Poetry State Forest; Zoe Brown, and Charles Olson, Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley (as transcribed by Zoe Brown); Joanna McClure, “Wolf Poem I”, “Sound Poem”, in Wolf Eyes; Sophie Seita, “just pick a line”, in Fantasias in Counting; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T Elkins-Tanton, Earth, quoted in Catherine Ramsdell, “Science, Creativity, and Imagination (and the Earth)”, at Pop Matters, 20 Mar 017; Andrea Quaid, and Renee Gladman, quoted in Quaid’s “Renee Gladman’s “ Event Factory’”, at Jacket2, 22 Mar 017; JBR; Ed Baker, POINTS / COUNTERPOINTS; Levi R Bryant, “Deleuze: What is Called Thinking?”, at Larval Subjects, 20 Mar 017; JBR; R.S. Bakker, “The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness”, downloaded from Academia.edu; Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, HOX WORK IN PROGRESS; JBR; Jonty Tiplady, HOX WORK IN PROGRESS; Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Michael McClure: Introduction to ‘Ghost Tantras,’ the 2013 edition”, at Jacket2, 11 Feb 014; JBR; Roy Fisher (RIP), “The Afterlife”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Jared Schickling, “(lock #35)”, “(716)”, in Aurora; JBR; Sharon Mesmer, and Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, “She Makes the Dirty Work Look Like a Degas”, at Hyperallergic, 26 Mar 017]