Zeitgeist Spam

Yes, Trump is a racist, and so are ALL his supporters, and so are ALL who remain silent, etc (reposting a portion of Anne Branigan's "Trump Says Racist Nonsense Because He Means It and Because He Knows He Can Win on It"The Root

 

 

Donald Trump, in a series of tweets from Sunday night well into Monday morning, doubled down on his racist, xenophobic criticism of four Democratic congresswomen, Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. After calling on the congresswomen to go back to their countries and fix them, Trump followed up his attack by demanding an apology—making abundantly clear his belief that challenging these women is an effective campaign strategy.

 

[...]

 

Trump stayed on the topic for most of Monday morning, extensively quoting Republican Senator (and favorite GOP foot servant) Lindsey Graham, who said the congresswomen’s proposed policies—policies that include confronting climate change, closing down migrant child detention camps, and increasing the minimum wage—will “destroy the country.”

As I write, members of the political punditry are debating (and no doubt, will continue to debate) whether what Trump has to say about sitting members of Congress is racist racist or just racist lite. And at this point, litigating his personal racism, and those of his supporters, feels both inconsequential and redundant, especially when Trump himself has made one fact very clear: He thinks he can win on racist rhetoric in 2020, and he thinks this because he has actually done it.

The timing of his attack feels important here: shortly after all four freshmen Congresswomen testified about the dehumanizing, barbaric conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Their presence at the border, and refusal to whitewash what they saw, brought new scrutiny to the practice of detaining children and families. The news cycle, even briefly, had shifted its focus to the dangerous cruelty of our detention practices. Trump may not be particularly good at anything, but he knows how to play the hits, and he’s particularly good at pouncing when there’s already blood in water: members of the freshman congresswomen’s own party—most notably, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—had publicly singled them out for being insufficiently loyal to the party line. The way it all played out was almost as predictable as it was shameful. 

Some may be tempted to speculate that all his anti-immigrant, explicitly racist speech is an elaborate distraction from other matters on the horizon: former special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony for instance. This is a mistake. If Trump is erratic in other respects, racist speech and racist policy is something he’s been consistent on, as a candidate, as a president, and before that, as a private citizen.

What’s remarkable is just how effective that specific messaging has been. Take one study from 2018 (h/t Vox), part of a larger body of research that points to racial attitudes being a primary driver of Trump’s successful election campaign.

In this study, researchers paid particular attention to people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, before switching to Trump in 2016:

“We find a much stronger association between symbolic racial and immigration attitudes and switching for Trump and Clinton than between economic marginality or local economic dislocation and vote switching,” Reny et al. write. “In fact, we find marginally small or no associations between any of our economic indicators and vote switching in either direction.”

Tapping into this rhetoric was his lightning in the bottle. He said the quiet part loud, and people roared in response. As Vox explains, Trump was able to make the 2016 election about race in a way previous GOP candidates did not:

Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He vowed to ban Muslims, and described black life in America as a hellscape of violence and poverty. Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was not nearly so overt, which means it was less likely to attract voters who held latent racist and anti-immigrant attitudes.

The results of this racist speech were not limited to the presidential race—research published earlier this year finds racial resentment became a down-ballot issue, impacting local races.

From the Pacific Standard:

“[Political scientists Carlos Algara and Isaac Hale] found a clear pattern of “relatively liberal voters defecting to Republican candidates up and down the ticket when they harbor racial animus.” This effect was extremely similar for Senate, congressional, and presidential races...

“Voters in the hyper-polarized era are well-equipped at assessing candidate ideological positions, and choosing candidates that are closer to their ideological preferences,” the two write in the journal Electoral Studies. But high levels of racial animus, stoked by Trump, led some white voters “to be less likely to vote for Democratic candidates” even when the Democratic candidates’ ideological positions resembled that of the voter.

In fact, racial resentment among white voters is so powerful that those voters will elect leaders who tap into that animus, even risking their own health to do so. (One uninsured man quoted in a recent Boston Globe article told one researcher, “no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” He was dying of liver disease.)

The rhetoric—and the line of thinking that accompanies it—is more pernicious than many are willing to admit, including many of the political reporters tasked with covering this story, and many liberals who imagine themselves to be anti-Trump.

If Trump wants to tout that these congresswomen are “unpopular and unrepresentative,” it falls within the same line of attack that Pelosi herself has directed at the junior reps, whose policies and support she has undermined in an attempt to support more moderate Democratic politicians. Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist who first reported Pelosi’s snide comments about the progressive group, pointed the finger at Ocasio-Cortez for the mess in a recent piece, titled “Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” To many, Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar, and Tlaib are most emblematic of everything Trump isn’t: progressive values, and political agendas that center constituencies Trump voters would prefer to have pushed to the margins, if not out of the country entirely. That the likes of Pelosi and Dowd appear to feel threatened by this, too, is telling. [JBR: before you get your undies in a bundle, just ask yourself why so many POC didn't vote for Dems in 2016. Hmmm ...]

The question of citizenship—and upon whom those sacred rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are conferred—has been up for debate since the founding of the country. The impulse to tell American-born and naturalized representatives to “go back” emerges from the same wellspring as the drive to close our nations’ borders against a certain kind of migrant: one that is black, brown, low-income, or Muslim (it is worth repeating, over and over again that Donald Trump and the GOP have shown no such qualms about immigration from Norway or Ireland).

He has targeted the powerless—migrant families with nowhere else to turn—as well as powerful progressives, in this most recent case, women whose power was conferred to them by the districts they represent. In drumming up his attacks on both (in rhetoric and policy), Trump is reverting back to a tried-and-true pattern of escalation that has been his M.O. since he announced his presidency. Except now, as a sitting president with three years under his belt and a looming election, he has to take the fight even further.

With the Noose Around My Neck 136

So if Zen has koans for folklore, the world has folklore for koans. Proverbs and short poems the world around are of like intensity and suggest equal depths. Though Mr. Shigematsu has chosen to eliminate the Zen phrases under four words long from his collection, it helps to know how they work, and why. What would be the power of a one-word Zen phrase? I think of Harry Roberts' account of Yurok Indian upbringing: if one did something foolish, all that Elder Uncle had to say was

 

            Well!

 

Which is to say, with Schelling, “None of our spiritual thoughts transcends the earth.” Or, with Lew Welch, “So, it’s all come to this,” and “This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.” For how much longer will I entrust those crucial hypnagogic phrases to memory? In the land of neurochemistry everyone is equally fucked. I walk through the high grasses. Some of them are not hight at all, have shorter stems growing over previously trodden-on versions. ‘It turns out maybe there isn’t a cure for this,’ I say to the agent. The agent peels an orange. In order to eat from the broken orange you have to pass an exam on Levinas by shouting the words ‘say’ and ‘responsibility’ for an entire hour. No one knows why this is a test. The agent always mutters something about ‘fractal interiorities and algebras.’ Then the agent wishes me well before telling me I should get this straightened out right now otherwise I might end up like him, peeling an orange at the age of 70, veins lined with metallic adulteration, wishing I had more time. Each self is authenticity sous-rature. This is the second time this morning I came across the phrase “sous-rature.” I can’t remember the context of the first. The administrator warns me that my failure to do so would result in a lifelong illness such as was suffered by a patient who, upon entering the Junction, recited Whitman’s ‘One Hour to Madness and Joy’ for a whole hour and ended up cutting out his tongue. After an hour I have to walk around the pub wearing nothing but price tags. I reverberate with the clouds, those tiny esoteric sacks of tears from the sky. You don’t sit in a barber shop not expecting to get a haircut, right? They take my blood. So I

 

            applied for a job

            about witchcraft

 

            to relax

            I did the crossword puzzle

           

            one of the answers

            was witchcraft

 

            augury?

 

            ceci n’est pas un drill

 

            what is not a drill?

 

            now he

            turns into

            a buzzard!

 

            and flies toward

            the moon

 

            now the hawk

            that he saved in ‘real’ life

            in one episode

            becomes an alien

            in another

            episode

 

            afterwards

            I read about the series

            on appocalypse.co

 

            cloppity clop

 

The other sculptures are equally compelling, their placement perfect. A naked woman holding a hand mirror out to the side looks straight into it, strange bronzed children sitting alone, another naked woman whose exposed back you see as you approach the nook where she sits looking forever out to sea ...

 

                        the festive paper butterflies,

                                    mangled

             in barbed wire

            just outside Le Casino —

 

In other words, a group of people including me are walking through a crypt. Darkish bodies in coffins set in slots, alcoves, with clouded windows sealing each one. People are putting their hands on the windows & something is being communicated. I am growing afraid because if some sequence or number of these windows are touched some very bad thing will happen. It happens. The people have put their hands on the windows and the right formula has come to unleash the thing. Through language evocative of spamdexing, machine translation, keyword stuffing, and pre-emptive domain name neologization, a ‘narrative’ emerges, tied together around obsidian (yet suggestive) nodes like “Clessiexecs” and “Dosepucks”, dollar sign “resuscitation ovens,” etc. This fact feels doubly poignant given that the titles are all specific dates — some of which have been “faked,” as in “it is the duty of poets / to know what year it is [...] / it is the duty of poets / to be uncertain.” The prima materia often becomes transmuted in uncanny ways — spliced, mashed, or perforated — so the idea that all this would someday be absorbed into the content industry — someday mined for unscripted media shows — has been an obvious possibility from the very beginning. Ergo, watching content produced by other people’s doorbell cameras sounds both inevitable and, in a sense, quite, well, at first, we were prompted to “REDUCE SPEED NOW.” Why? I’ll tell you why. Because “WE ARE THE ASTEROID.” There was a “Goodbye” sign next to a waterfall. Why? Because, to quote a machine translation of Masahisa Fukase, “Everyone of the upside-down clan in focus glasses will die.” “In these more local, immediate contexts,” as Marthe put it, “experiences of interconnection — beneficial, destructive, neutral — manifest and can be grappled with in concert with knowledge of large-scale phenomena, each informing the other,” like

 

            ♦     the curves of a snake    ♦    toponym

            with roads cut through    ♦    trails of tears    ♦

            springs, losing streams    ♦    sinkholes, waterfalls

            ♦    stones are bored through by blue-green water

 

Or maybe it is only the coincidence of spring. Or maybe I’m pregnant. The pages hold a curious weight, soaked in liquid paper as they are. Right now I’m working on a dissertation on Nate Mackey, Ed Roberson, and Susan Howe. Obviously, I watch a lot of television. I listen to music on Spotify. I’m an introvert, but as a Leo, I want everyone to love me. My writing and ideas are not copyrighted. The delivery of these alternating pitches can also be seen as an expression of the variously different speeds and rhythms of order and control that are operating on any one group or any individual at once. Take this Deleuzian equation: Things happen to us in different rhythms and at different speeds as they happen in history; therefore we get stressed. What’s insisted on also is that in between the doors there is an airlock.

 

                                    [...] Both doors

 

            in the airlock are paneled and transparent,

            and I watch as one of my colleagues

            appears on the other side of the second

            door. There are two doors and an airlock space

            a meter and a half between us.

 

Then “stars” is heard again. The first star was loose, this one is tethered, its sound is stopped by “and” and followed by nothing. We hear “tie” in another register that pulls the sound back to “too”. Since “tie” is italicised, it might belong to another text, but the door(s), the hand sanitiser, the rota, the message book — the voice of the “service users” — Am I going to be sick? Are you sick? Were you coughing? Do I have a demon in me? Am I going to be sick? The patient is touched, prodded, as don Roberto seeks out the place where the illness is lodged, the magic dart; then he blows tobacco smoke on the place, rubs it to loosen the embedded affliction from the flesh. Then he ceases his singing and begins belching, sucking, gagging, and spitting. He is drawing up his mariri, his magical and protective phlegm, to make sure that what he sucks from the body of his patient cannot harm him; then he loudly and vigorously sucks out the affliction, the magic dart, the putrid flesh or stinging insect, the magically projected scorpion or razor blade. He gags audibly at its vicious power and noisily spits it out on the ground. I watch don Roberto do his work — a synesthetic cacophony of perfumes, tobacco smoke, whispering, whistling, blowing, singing, sucking, gagging, the insistent shaking of the shacapa leaves, the internal turmoil, the inchoate visions. When the healing is done, don Roberto blows mapacho smoke into the patient through the crown of the head, over the place from which the sickness was sucked, and over the patient’s entire body, cleansing and protecting both inside and out. I am watching all this go on, with great lucidity, weak from vomiting, my legs like rubber. I am watching the preliminary effects of ayahuasca — lights, swirling galaxies, interlocking patterns, Van Gogh skies, fleeting images, floating and disembodied eyes. Suddenly, I am no longer in the jungle hut. Instead, I am walking down a street in an urban setting, with no one around, near a vacant lot with a chain-link fence, garbage scattered around. I come upon a vendor with a wooden cart — two large wheels behind, two small wheels in front, a handle to push it with — who has necklaces for sale, hanging from wooden pegs, of the inexpensive kind that are tossed to the crowd at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I buy one and see a small girl, maybe five or six years old, standing on the sidewalk. She is blond, muy gringa, dressed in a pale blue satin party dress, as if she is on her way to a birthday party. In fact, she is wearing a crown on her head, which looks like a cardboard crown covered with gold foil, which I take to be a sort of party costume. I hand her the necklace as a gift, and she stands there very still, like a statue, holding the rosary — that is how I think of it now — raised in her right hand, the golden crown on her head, covered in light on the broken sidewalk. Speaking of gold, the mass of gold flung into a pit fed by the Cyclopeans at the very instant the Grand High Priest frantically ravages a vulture’s throat and drinks its blood does indeed intimate a theory about the alchemical transmutation of feelings into forms and forms to feeling. And an idea of purification, too. It has to do with isolating the very essence of any sensual ecstasy experienced momentarily and individually by the priest, so that this explosion and this rapid outburst of frenzy may return, unencumbered by matter, to the first principle from which it’s been born. Then there are the innumerable rooms consecrated to a single action or even to one simple gesture, with which the underbelly of the temple and its rumbling bowels seem to be crammed. The rite of ablution, the rite of abandon, diversion, renunciation; the rite, in every sense, of absolute nakedness; the rite of the biting power and unforeseen bursting forth of the sun, paralleling the sight of a wild boar; the rite of the savagery of the Alpine wolf and that of the stubbornness of the ram; the rite of the warm zephyrs and that of the great solar conflagration etc; all these rituals, in ten thousand chambers, are observed daily or monthly, biennially — lads, lads lads, hate to interrupt, but how’s your ejaculate? Would you struggle to fill half a teaspoon? And your concentration, please: do you have an average number of little swimmers a millilitre? And how’s that motility? Are they wagging their flagella as if they can’t wait to get to that ovum — or listlessly floating around like dead tadpoles in a poorly executed classroom experiment? Whether or not you are hoping to fertilise a human egg someday and haven’t given much thought to these matters ... well, Big Sperm reckons it is time you did. ExSeed, Yo, Trak and Legacy, are offering next-generation home sperm-testing technology — that said,

 

            You can put the universe          and all the souls that exist         in a cigar box

            It’s all in my two-room apartment

 

            I’m full of their endless lines      they’re full of my care

 

Interconnected acrylic tubes filled with rubber, glass, beeswax, pollen, and shredded government documents, 2 x 165 inches. Nightlight, wire, ceramic, dimensions variable. Thin strips of blue painter’s tape forming of footprint-sized rectangles. In some places, strips of white painter’s tape, with descriptive markings such as “Arctic Circle” and “0° / Equator.” Diffusers dotted with sea snails. Lead, prints, slow dried sand, The New York Times, handmade glass pollen from the index of pollens recovered by Shanxi Agricultural University and fabricated by artist Amy Lemaire, 44x 56 x 3 inches. Foam pads, sprinklings of dirt and minerals. Mini freezer, handmade popsicles with newspaper confetti, dish racks, preserved tropical fruits, frozen cubed fruits, plant lights, 25 x 18.5 x 17.5 inches. Language scraps, sliced and distorted, barely legible. Food scraps. Old food rich in protein smells the worst. The stench of fish heads, entrails, and chicken bones is unbearable. Liquid leaked from the bags and flowed down the asphalt and hardened in chunks. Hough had become interested in a series of ancient Native American rock carvings in the Southern California desert and along the Eastern Sierra. They show wavy lines, discombobulated human forms, and eerie serpentine figures that perhaps represent gods. The sites of these petroglyphs often directly overlap with known seismic faults, raising the possibility that they record earthquake activity. In other words, the 395 is a geologic master class disguised as a road. In other words, from the beginning, mankind has known that destiny is controlled by cosmic entities. Esu is the first.

 

            Sekiri Alagbaja,

            Tefii alaalaagbaja

 

            They are the names that Esu Odara is called in the city of Ife

            Esu whose name spans across cities

            The warrior living outside

 

            Laroye Agongolago

            Alamolamo bata

            O fe bata ku jo lamolamo

            Sekete peere

            Sekete peere

 

            The man who resides in the open ground

            He walks like whirlwind and swoops in with a thud

            He met a man who was grieving

            Weeping more than the grieving

            The grieving person was crying tears

            Laroye was crying blood

Which is to say that, given that Comcast and AT&T were already the only local choices for broadband and cable, the move felt like an ominous sign of even more industry consolidation. I took to Twitter to air this worry. “It’s nice that Comcast is offering mobile phone service now,” I posted. “But until I can get Comcast delivery pizza I will remain empty inside.” The company saw my tweet and responded: “Hey Ian, you rang? DM us the address where you would like it delivered & we’ll make it happen.” I thought I was calling Comcast’s bluff by answering that I wanted gluten-free mushroom pizza, and that because I was a customer, the company should know my address. “Do your brand thang,” I told them. Then the pizzas arrived. Ten of them, from a local place that delivers gluten-free pies. Which brings us to the case of the Kit Kat marriage proposal. This spring, Haley Byrd, a congressional reporter at The Weekly Standard, posted a tweet mocking her boyfriend, Evan Wilt, for eating a Kit Kat bar by biting across its entire width rather than breaking off the individual wafers. Hershey’s (which makes the candy in the US) sent the couple a box of Kit Kat bars with eating instructions, a cute gesture that Byrd thought was the end of the matter. But her tweet had gone viral, and behind the scenes, a Hershey’s brand-publicity representative, Anna Lingeris, conspired with Wilt to design a Kit Kat-shaped ring box, which Wilt deployed for his proposal in July. The result: a happy couple, and a haul of cheap publicity for Hershey’s. That’s when I threatened to kill Mr Peanut. To be fair, this wasn’t my first time menacing the Planters mascot. Or my second or my third. By the time I was banned, I had been systematically harassing the peanut man for about four months. Sometimes, I promised to destroy him. Other times, I’d doctor a tweet to make it look like he'd done something you’d expect from someone super bourgeois or elitist — I once photoshopped a tweet suggesting that he would use his peanut empire money to avoid a military draft. I targeted Mr. Peanut because I thought replying to a brand as though the brand were a real person was funny. Brands already act like real people on Twitter, so I decided to give a brand the same treatment almost everyone else receives on that platform: Strangers sending them death threats. @MrPeanut only responded to me once, fairly early on, when I’m guessing whomever runs the account hadn't yet been briefed not to engage. It makes sense they didn’t keep responding. If I were them, I definitely wouldn’t have responded to the crazy person threatening to kill their fictional peanut monster either. But otherwise, my game was going off without a hitch. That is, until May 31, when the monocled legume tweeted a nut-themed take on the phrase that made Bhad Bhabie famous. It read, “Cashew in the snack aisle how ‘bout that.” Putting aside the fact that that particular reference was a few years beyond its expiration date, it was my duty, as ever, to take the nut man down. I replied, “I will fly anywhere in the world to kill you. Just name the place.” But then, a strange thing happened. Bhad Bhabie replied to my tweet with a quick “thank you,” and soon over 1000 people had liked my post. A day later, I received a notice from Twitter that I'd been banned. So I hiked along the fault line for hours, eerily stepping over dozens of tarantulas that had come out to breed, and I watched in genuine awe as the fault seemed to emerge before me. It was a black line of shade that seemed to pull itself across the fractured ground, slowly, widening every minute like an abyss. I should add that I watch a lot of horror movies, and the feeling was not lost on me that day, that something dark and ancient was coming into view, a shadow-Earth infested by an ever-increasing number of huge spiders. When I checked into a motel later, I did some Googling: I was traveling in the midst of a “tarantula boom” and what I had seen that day suddenly made sense. The full manuscript also contains a section on “high-fidelity simulants” — another great phrase — as well as ones on metallic glass; inorganic-organic hybrids; self-propagating high-temperature synthesis; shape memory-alloys, ceramics, hybrids, and polymers; and artificial crystal-growth techniques in space. Here, the ideas themselves are architecturally evocative: “It is envisioned that fragments of bio-like materials could be launched in an inactive state during space flight, and once landed at the Moon or Mars, would start to grow into construction materials or even pre-engineered habitats,”

 

            ... IU IIIUUU IU ...

            SCREECH OF THE EGYPT SPHYNX

            WITH GUTS AND WITH BLOOD OF BEASTS AND OF MAN

            Lullaby melodies

            All this now costs no more than a dollar

            ... IU IIIUUU IU ...

            Balancing on the cables

            YOU HAVE TO STAND ON YOUR TOES AND KISS THE SUN

 

            Don’t cry, child,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            There’s one slice of snail,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            You’ll have one half of the slice, I the other;

            we’re going to eat snail.

            There’re two slices of snail,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            You’ll have one slice, I the other;

            we’re going to eat snail.

            There are three slices of snail,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            You’ll have one-and-a-half slices,

            I the other one-and-a-half;

            we’re going to eat snail.

            There are four slices of snail,

            we’re going to eat snail.

            You’ll have two,

            I’ll have two;

            we’re going to eat snail.

 

These include a profile of Pasolini’s head taken in the morgue, an anonymous figure falling through space, scanned from a police instruction manual, and David Scherman’s photo of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub. They’ve been reproduced on the backs of unfolded cardboard boxes. For the duration of the show the AI will continue their unfinished game, simulating moves by both Brecht and Benjamin, and presenting various possible conclusions, the birth of the universe, the miracle of life, the planetarization of consciousness, consciousness itself, what she eats for breakfast, Pluto and the underworld, the above-ground world, how she thinks about spring, and suns as they traverse the ecliptic. But as time is a certain kind of wave structure, which can be heard on my podcast, I cannot properly illuminate here the angular zap of its magnetism. The light isn’t the same anywhere on Earth. I lived in LA for a while and I got reborn. I got into Kundalini Yoga. My job is to go into many worlds so it’s always nice when you run into another traveler. But also, these times are like that. I mean, everyone has had the experience of erotically communicating with the language that you choose and the rhythm of it is heavy with this energy of somehow wanting to get it right. The way that it is doing itself to you and the person you’re in dialogue with — that’s a mass experience now. Slippery? Too slippery, yeah. It’s maddening in a way, and slippery too, but it’s a confined space, and it works. Because there are mystery traditions in every culture. But the American New Age as we know it, in my opinion, comes out of the Great Depression. I tend to like the mediums that throw up some kind resistance to what’s coming through — mediums who play, who kind of throw down, the way Jacob did with the angel. I just opened it to this page. What’s this symbol? On page two-hundred. I kept thinking about geomancy and the science of the sand. Throwing something up in the air and divining the situation based on where it lands. It’s exciting when the two lines of the X meet, when there’s camera work being done. I mean, I can tell you that for the final section, I was sitting on a bench on Allen Street facing Delancey and there was traffic going by on either side. You might know that spot. I was sitting on the bench and the thing started happening. I was sitting there with a stupid look on my face filling up with bliss. And then the thing started talking. You know how there’s an invisible river around every river and the health of the invisible river has to be amazing in order for the ecosystem of the river to function properly? I felt it reorganizing my apparatus. I grabbed my notebook and I started to write and I looked down and realized I was writing right to left. It’s just a little to the right of where a proper unicorn horn would be. It feels good to press there. We are just pressing on our heads at this point. It’s such a teacher because it means that in order to understand the true structure of the universe, we have to understand what the suffering of woman really is. Above joys, and above agonies, above desires and effusiveness, lies an immense stretch of ash. If some prominence, some peak appeared, it would not be able to last; scarcely emerged, they disappear in little folds, folds in a shudder, and everything becomes smooth again. It is still only a little let’s call it a halo, no one sees it, but we know that fire will come from it, a giant fire will come (How’s it going? Fine, and yourself?). When a fish in the great depths, having gone mad, swims anxiously toward the fish of his family three hundred fathoms down, hurtles into them, wakes them up, accosts them one after the other: “You don’t hear the running water?” “You mean you can’t hear anything here?” “You don’t hear something that goes ‘che,’ no, softer: chee, chee?” The wolf is afraid of the violin. The elephant is afraid of mice, pigs, firecrackers. And the agouti trembles while it sleeps. If it is cold, it is without being cold. It is hot without heat. We often speak of flying.

 

            Finally the plane lands without folding its wings

            And the sky is full of millions of swallows

            Crows falcons owls come in full flight

            Ibises flamingos storks come from Africa

            The Roc Bird made famous by storytellers and poets

            Soars holding in its claws Adam’s skull the first head

            The eagle swoops screaming from the horizon

            And from America the little hummingbird comes

            From China the long agile peehees have come

            They have only one wing and fly in pairs

            Now here’s the dove immaculate spirit

            Escorted by the lyre-bird and the spotted peacock

            The phoenix that self-engendering pyre

            For an instant hides all with its burning ash

            Sirens leaving the dangerous straits

            Arrive singing beautifully all three

 

 “If I’m not home, come in through the window, everybody does.” You’ll find

 

            Michael Angelo down

                                           on all fours mixing

                                           the Sistine ceiling with

                     universal dirt,

 

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

            ‘e ‘e. ‘e. ‘e ‘e. ‘e.

 

            Aeee ahheah aheeah

            eeah eeah eeah aheeah oohee

            Tralalee

            Lalee lala

            Ahruahru

                        urulinary

            Laleela

            Ecocokoo coo ecku

            Ooheeahyah zobbinary

                                                laleela

                                                       laloloo

            Trierrasun and trillolin

            Ahee ahee

            Luxponsive solinary

            Raraurora ecoplaining laleela

            Ndanark

            Antiquash

            Miterdent

            Miterlipsis

            Miterslonga

                              matrimocean

            Roceaning tradocean laleela

            Equinaut

            Lucinary shooping astrasphere

            Eeah eeah

            Larymbimlam

            Larymbimbamastraplan

            Larymbimbamastramur

            Lyralibrarcrystramour

                                             larylyra nx

            Ahee ee ah

            Temporarr

            Ahee ahee aheeah

            Ululayou

                        lullayou

                                    layou you

            Ulalayou

                        ulayou

                                 ahyou you

            Moonaluning

            Sensiwooned infirmament

            Ululayo ululament

            Pliasounding

            Chanteloping ululaissance

            Hallenujah you you yo

            Tempolary

            Infilite and infinaut buziety

            Quaginary uruahyou

            Sierratuning faraprair

            Ululascent aurorarary

            Livfrever

                        lefdalafda dadeedah

            Campellationed lalalee

                                                auricental centauroral

            Lalalee

            Eeoh eeah

            Ee ee ee oh

            Ahee ah ee ahee ah ee ee ee ee ee oh eeah

 

Her case is extreme, but many people are suffering from what could be called “climate despair,” a sense that climate change is an unstoppable force that will render humanity extinct and renders life in the meantime futile. As David Wallace-Wells noted in The Uninhabitable Earth, “For most who perceive an already unfolding climate crisis and intuit a more complete metamorphosis of the world to come, the vision is a bleak one, often pieced together from perennial eschatological imagery inherited from existing apocalyptic texts like the Book of Revelation, the inescapable sourcebook for Western anxiety about the end of the world.” And just a few miles up the road in Penville, Georgia, is the onetime abode of St. EOM (aka Eddie Martin), sole adherent of the homegrown denomination of Pasaquoyanism, whose church-compound consists of Day-Glo pagodas, smiling totems, and cosmic serpents. This odyssey described in Walks to the Paradise Garden passes through towns with names like Whynot, Zetus, Prismatic, Faceville, Flippery, Ty Ty, Arm, Chicken Bristle, Monkey’s Eyebrow, Skullbuster, Hot Coffee, Smut Eye, and Sublimity City. Another thing preserved here is Williams’s voice: I still cast my lot with the clump of Shortia, the pileated woodpecker, the timber rattlesnake ... not to mention the

 

            Catalpa the
            Kentucky coffee tree the
            Inkberry the
            Spreading English yew the
            Judas-tree the
            Maidenhair the
            Canada hemlock

                        human seeds sprouting stones

                        heart pillow wrapped in a plastic grocery bag
                        Hello Kitty sticker that says smartfit
                        knock-kneed mummy with green teeth
                        Puerto Rican flag fuzzy dice
                        wrestling Dalmatian puppies figurine

                                                    a dry sea, fragile
                                                               from “to cut with a sharp point”

[Note: Sources: Gary Snyder, foreword to Sayings of the Masters (ed. and tr. Soiku Shigematsu); JBR; Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, letter to Eschenmayer (1812), one of the epigraphs to Jason M Wirth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild Time, Art, Imagination; JBR; Lew Welch, “Small Sentence to Drive Yourself Sane”, “The Song Mt Tamalpais Sings” (memory quotes); Colin Lee Marshall, epigraph to Erotoplasty 4; Azad Ashim Sharma, “High Modernist Relapse: A Neuroscience-Informed Prosepoem”, in Erotoplasty 4; JBR; Nicky Melville, “From apisodes”, in Erotoplasty 4; Sascha Aurora Akhtar, untitled, “I Am Not A Prose, Poem”, in Erotoplasty 4; JBR; Helen Dimos, “From Intermissions and Things”, in Erotoplasty 4; Colin Lee Marshall, “revicules” (and some of the books under review), in Erotoplasty 4; JBR; Geoff Manaugh, “Neighborhood Watch”, at BLDGBLOG, 4 Jul 019; JBR; Maria Morkas, “We Are the Asteroid III: More than a Mere Traffic Sign”, at The Buzz Magazines, 2 Jul 019; JBR; Masahisa Fukase, blurb for Kazoku (tr. Google), at shashasha; rob mclennan’s blog, 5 Jul 019; Holly Pester, and Verity Spott, quoted in Pester’s “The Politics of Delivery (Against Poet-Voice)”, in The Poetry Review, 109:2, Summer 2019, at The Poetry Society; Stephan V. Beyer, Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon; JBR; Stephen Barber, introduction to Antonin Artaud, Heliogabalus (tr. Alexis Lykiard), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Please welcome to the world ... Antonin Artaud Heliogabalus or, the Crowned Anarchist (Infinity Land Press)”, at DC’s Blog, 6 Jul 019; JBR; Richard Godwin, “The rise of Big Sperm: does the tech world have the answer to our semen crisis?”, at The Guardian, 7 Jul 019; JBR; Alice Notley, “All the Souls in the Cigar Box”, in Undo; Hyperallergic, 6 Jul 019; JBR; Ha Seong-nan, Flowers of Mold, quoted in John Yau, “The Unreality of Everyday Life”, at Hyperallergic, 6 Jul 019; Geoff Manaugh, “Move Over, San Andreas: There’s an Ominous New Fault in Town” at Wired, 18 Apr 019; JBR; Awódélé Ifáyemí, “Who is Esu”, at Ilé Ifà; image, Cristina de Middel and Bruno Morais, Midnight at the Crossroads, at Magnum Photos, 6 Jul 018; JBR; Ian Bogost, “Brands Are Not Our Friends”, at The Atlantic, Oct 018; Luke Taylor, “I Was Banned From Twitter for Threatening to Kill Mr. Peanut”, at Vice, 8 Jul 019; JBR; Geoff Manaugh, “Rocks, tarantulas and the subtle poetry of a walk along the San Andreas fault”, at Los Angeles Times, 19 May 019; Geoff Manaugh, “Folktales for the Offworld”, at BLDGBLOG, 8 Jul 019, and M.Z. Naser, “Extraterrestrial construction materials”, in Progress in Materials Science, Volume 105, August 2019, at Science Direct; Kyn Taniya, quoted in Brian McLaughlin, “Invisible Currents: Kyn Taniya’s Radio, Translated By David Shook”, at Reading in Translation, 9 Feb 017; “3 Songs from the Fang” (tr. David Shook), at Sin Zona; “Bandage the Knife Not the Wound”, “Bertolt Brecht vs. Walter Benjamin”, at Broomberg & Chanarin; Emmalea Russo, “Poets Are Time-Travelers: Ariana Reines & Emmalea Russo In Conversation”, at Fanzine, 18 Jun 019; Henri Michaux, “Excerpts from La Nuit remue”, and Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone” (both tr. Charlotte Mandell), at Charlotte Mandell; Stephen Jonas, quoted in Ammiel Alcalay, “Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader”, at BOMB, 10 Jul 019; JBR; Stephen Jonas, “Dilemma II”, at EOAGH 3; “Ayahuasca Sound-Poem (Cashinahua—Eastern Peru)” (version by Jerome Rothenberg), in Alcheringa Issue Three, 1971; Vicente Huidobro, Altazor (tr. Eliot Weinberger); Mike Pearl, “‘Climate Despair’ Is Making People Give Up on Life”, at Vice, 11 Jul 019; J.W. McCormack, “Walks to the Paradise Garden”, at BOMB, 10 Jul 019 (a review of Jonathan Williams, Guy Mendes and Roger Manley, Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Lowdown Southern Odyssey); JBR; Allison Cobb, Green-Wood, quoted in Tracy Zeman, “‘Not Flowers but Bone’: The Post-Pastoral in Allison Cobb’s Green-Wood”, at Kenyon Review, Jul/Aug 019]

A Game of Chess

[JBR Note: Image found at Broomberg& Chanarin. To quote:

BERTOLT BRECHT VS. WALTER BENJAMIN

Three remarkable photographs record Brecht and Benjamin playing chess. They were taken on the outskirts of Svendborg, on the island of Funen where Brecht lived during his six years of exile during the second world war. Benjamin visited him in 1934, 1936 and 1938, and the photographs record one of their games under a pear tree in Brecht's garden. These are the only photographic evidence of their productive friendship before Benjamin lost his life on the boarder of France and Spain, where he is thought to have committed suicide rather than surrender to fascist Republican forces. 

Commisioned by the Akademie der Künste, Broomberg and Chanarin will present a series of 32 photographs of the original pieces in Brecht's chess set (Tactics of Attrition, 2017), meticulously recorded with forensic photographic detail. With their piece "Bertolt Brecht vs. Walter Benjamin, 2017" the artists will re-stage the famous encounter recorded in this photograph, using an automated chess board powered by artificial intelligence. The machine can predict the precise sequence of moves from the start of the game up until the moment the photograph was taken. 

For the duration of the exhibition the computer will continue their unfinished game, simulating moves by both Brecht and Benjamin, and presenting various possible conclusions to their game. Viewers are therefore offered a prediction of the past, albeit within the narrow confines of an algorithm ... ]

Litia Perta, “Xicanx (after Zoe Leonard)”

Yo quiero unx __________ for president. Yo quiero unx Xicanx for president. Xicanx por lo que Amy Sanchez-Arteaga me ha dicho, que “Xicana is the radical indigenous version of Chicana. BUT! Xicanx is the radical indigenous/gender inclusive version.” Por eso y mucho más: Yo quiero unx Xicanx for president. Yo quiero unx anti-racista, feminista, Black Lives Matter, colectivx trabajadorix, bruja radical for president and someone quién aprendió inglés como segundo, tercer, cuarto idioma for vice president so we can finally have someone in that office quien entienda bien que el inglés isn’t the only language of “America”––and how intimately tangled up language can be in history’s horrors: colonial, neocolonial. (Recuerda bien lo que dice M. NourbeSe Philip que “English is a foreign anguish.”) Yo quiero lo que Gloria Anzaldúa ha descrito as: “a composite, amalgama de culturas y de lenguas––a woman who loves women” for president. Someone who might say, as she does, “Call me de las otras. Call me loquita, jotita, marimacha, pajuelona, lambiscona, culera” and also “una puta mala, a tejana tortillera”––words nearer to “dyke” like Zoe Leonard uses in the piece that gives this piece its breath. I want all them for president too. Yo quiero una president que nunca haya estado on the right side of the border and so knows at the level of the flesh que las fronteras de todas partes tienen una sola intención y es la de dividirnos, conquistarnos. Yo quiero alguien que necesite refugio for president, someone whose body has huddled long hours in cold, crowded boats with hundreds of other bodies buscando un modicum de paz, only to find gates, barbed wire fences, and the racism of diplomatic stalemates. Yo quiero una presidente criada sin agua potable, someone crisped by the sun or the wind from standing outside hardware stores or nightclubs esperando trabajo, someone who came here from somewhere else para escapar war, famine, drought, violence to their bodies, violence to their minds, and found instead “America.” Yo quiero someone who understands que ni la tierra ni el medio ambiente tiene borders y mientras estamos protegiendo lxs borders, people of the earth are suffering, dying because of la mentira de fronteras y todo lo que protegen––y todo lo que no pueden proteger. Yo quiero alguien que entienda lo profundo que es lo que dice Douglas Kearney that I read in that essay by Dawn Lundy Martin that made me get on my knees and weep for skin: “GOD we cry / because nobody do us like the body.” Yo quiero alguien whose desire is unruly, whose body has never fit, who feels outside even with outsiders, alguien como Jess Arndt describe que tiene––que es” ––a body that is an antitoxin, a counteragent to every shade of sex abuse slinking back for generations,” ”with two dicks and five pouches and three holes...that no one can kick out of bathrooms”––” a body that spurts fountains,” a body that feels deeply that we are these fleshthings together and that “compartmentalizing and alienating each other” like “Tepepunk, el nepantlero espectral” said is just another kind of border, and so another kind of lie. Yo quiero alguien así for president. Y quiero también una persona who has defaulted on their student loans, hospital bills, their mortgage payments, credit cards, someone who drank the water in Flint and knows what all these forms of intentional government poisoning taste like. And I want someone who has been in jail, who is not allowed to vote, who has been in the hold and who has been in the hold too long––I want them all for president too. Y quiero alguien que pueda tejer entre nosotros un superpower de crear “refugios de placer ante el desastre” como nos dice lx colectivx feminista Invasorix. And twenty-four years after Zoe wrote what she did, I want someone for president who unmakes what “president” even is, who messes it up so bad they tear it down, because what is a president anyway but someone who presides over and who sits before? Y lo que yo quiero en este momento no es alguien que pueda sentarse ante nosotros but someone who instead is finally ready to stand up with us, to fall with us, to get down with us, to march with us and move with us, and dance with us and sing with us and laugh with us and change...And if there is any sitting to be done, let it be done together and among and not before.

Eiko Yamazawa, What Am I Doing

What I am doing No, 24_1982 Cibachrome.

What I am doing No, 74_1986 Cibachrome.

What I am doing No, 72_1986 Cibachrome

What I am doing No, 77_1986 Cibachrome.

Happy birthday, America (as Lew Welch put it, "So it's all come to this")

With the Noose Around My Neck 135

Listen, and I will explain it well. During that time, there was a little bird called jolbu chokchung that lived in the growth of a great sandalwood grove. Its plumage was blue-green with two white wings like half-moons, and a tail of five flat feathers the nature of the five primary colors. Its feet were equal in color to mother-of-pearl, and its claws and beak were white. It had red eyes, and above the neck the colors of its head were similar to the colors in the eyes of peacock feathers. On its head it had a crest of three plumes of red that shone with multicolored light. It did not kill insects, and it did not set foot on the ground but always lived in the openings of flowers and shrubs. It constantly made an extremely sweet sound translating tare and tuttare. It lived on the various kinds of very fragrant medicinal substances such as those found inside camphor and in the stamens of fine flowers. After it made its resting place inside the stamen of a flower at the top of a camphor tree, its desire was satisfied by the breath of its own two beaks meeting. Two eggs came up into that little bird’s mouth, and it placed them inside the camphor flower. A male and a female bird developed in that nest. These were birds blessed by Exalted Tara. Some people say they were even emanations of Tara. In any case, they were certainly not ordinary birds. If you take the droppings of those birds and ingest them, it will overcome and cure all 404 kinds of disease. If you smoke them, the eighty-thousand kinds of bad spirits can’t penetrate. If you rub them on the body, all kinds of skin diseases will be cured. All beings that live and breathe in the mountain forest or an area with those birds will not experience misery for a whole lifetime. Those birds are few in number and very rare. Anyone who does not have good fortune and karma, no matter who they are, can never see them. Those two birds had the auspicious connections and karma to make a dharma connection for the insects, other birds, and many animals that lived in the forest, and establish them on the path to liberation. Once the hatchlings of their two eggs each had the wing strength of fledglings, the mother and father birds felt no attachment to the nest or to the two fledglings or to that area, and they took off in opposite directions, like east and west, or south and north. In turn, the two fledglings made a nest and had two eggs that developed into two fledglings. The male and female then took off alone in their separate directions and henceforth did not desire to nest. The species lineage of this creature chokchung is that of one-time nesters. Obscured people don’t see these two birds. Only a holy person with good karma and fortune can see them. The size of the chokchung can be compared to that of the bird called joldzinma that we have here now. It is light yellow with white eyebrows. It’s about the same size, but the throat is a little longer. The shells of the chokchung’s eggs are white with a hint of red rays and are radiantly glossy. They are without blemish or covering, like a clear crystal. Light rays that can illuminate the darkness for four fathoms shine from them. Inside the egg, the outer layer is white and inside that is red. Inside that is yellow, then green, and then light blue. Inside that is a dark-blue vital-essence drop, the size of a pea. In the center of that is a drop the size of a mustard seed highlighted by multicolored moving lights. Now then, this is how you should visualize the transference, so listen. Sit on a comfortable mat and settle mind and body into an alert, relaxed state without wavering. Assume the seven-point posture of Vairocana and exhale three times. Imagine that the sins and obscurations accumulated through body, speech, and mind, along with all the inner filth, are exhaled in the form of breath. The body and mind, everywhere outside and inside, are purified of obscuration and become sparkly clean. Imagine the inside of the body from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet to be empty, like a balloon. Visualize yourself standing up with your two anklebones touching. Your two hands are in the dharma-source mudra on the crown of the head. Visualize a red drop on the sole of the right foot and a white one on she left. Imagine them the size of a barley grain or a pea. Then draw up the breath and shout p’e thinking that you are calling them up. They rise up and join in the lower cakra, the white and red drops blending into one drop the nature of light, about the size of the new egg of a hen. Imagine that it is throbbing and flashing with potential movement as if about to take off. As you shout p’e it moves to the navel, the heart, the throat, and then the crown. Then it is expelled out the hole in the crown and becomes a shining, blue-black syllable ha in the space about one cubit above you. Measuring a breath as one exhalation and inhalation, remain in that equipoise for twenty-one breaths. Then, whether you do the instantaneous transference described below or this one, in any case, do the mind transferring into the sky, then mixing, then settling in equipoise, and then again transference — in that way a total of twenty-one times for one session, twenty-one times during the day, and twenty-one times at night. A night-blooming cereus white  

 

                                                            this could heal you

            Or decorate the new abyss turn the year backwards un-

            Fasten its manacles we have a different year on Jupiter

            So say to your harmless dogs in the halogen faintness

            On the street corner behind broken ice on the pla-

            Net of brutal futile actions and I left home oh and

            Stumbled over a sack of inedible pebbles an empty snake-

            Skin the nothing that loves me grins like a bat though

            The rubies be hemoglobic spidery or unilinear like

            Scabs of scratched drawings sores or breaks in nacre

            There can’t be any real light what would be real light

            The airplanes in the letters spelling pick up the receiver

            Falling away so you can remember all words ever spo-

           

ken in any language. However, these monuments were, and still are, more than just the sum of their parts. Within this new country, Tito envisioned a diverse utopian society unified around its own internal sense of progressive optimism, which itself would be held together by a firm grasp on its own shared future and by a collective righteousness in their victory against fascist aggression. The construction of this vast array of spomeniks was part of that plan. As such, these monuments operate not only as surreal and abstract structures memorializing a horrific past and arduous victory, but additionally, they function as political tools meant to articulate the country's vision of a new tomorrow. This is most visibly evidenced by the fact that a central feature at a significant number of these memorial complexes are large amphitheatres. These were to act as outdoor classrooms. Tens of thousands of school children were brought to them each year. So, from the 1960s to the 1980s, hundreds (if not thousands) of these spomeniks were built across the Republic of Yugoslavia ... from big ones as big as a 15-story building, to smaller ones the size of a refrigerator. It was a colossal effort in monument building that is to this day unparalleled in Europe. The show begins in the then-future year of 2015, in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event which killed billions and induced catastrophic climate change. To compound humanity’s troubles, giant creatures known as “Angels” have since begun to emerge and wreak devastation in pursuit of who knows what. To combat this threat, enormous mecha called Evangelions are produced and deployed, the catch being that they can only be piloted by teenagers. The main pilots featured are series protagonist Shinji Ikari, the enigmatic Rei Ayanami, and the headstrong Asuka Langley Soryu. Evangelion‘s first half follows a monster-of-the-week formula: A new Angel attacks, and the characters have to strategize around whatever its special abilities are to destroy it. Along the way, cast members are introduced and given their own spotlight episodes, with the details of the setting filled in bit by bit, a larger story arc forming around the true nature of the Angels and the secret plans of Nerv, the organization fielding the EVA units. Then, the tone changes drastically. The Angels still come, but less frequently, with more episodes instead given to the characters interacting and reflecting on their circumstances. The focus moves from the logistics of defeating the Angels to the toll fighting them has on the protagonists. Action scenes are cut down in favor of dialogue. Backstories are laid out, with characters’ psychoses revealed and shown to be rooted in myriad traumas. Every character is revealed as an emotional wreck. The shift from action to psychological drama culminates in the last stretch of episodes, in which one by one, each lead suffers some kind of breakdown. This peaks in the infamously divisive final two episodes, which take place almost entirely within an allegorical mindscape and feature heavy philosophical discussion amongst the cast. Told mainly through the reuse of previous footage, line work rather than full animation, it has no action and no apparent resolution to the show’s overarching plot. It takes time, once inside, to adjust. What you begin to glimpse looks something like an apothecary shop abandoned on a busy day — jars and vials of various sizes on rows of shelves, tools and curious devices in glass cabinets. At the same time it feels a bit like you are drifting underwater in a grotto or aquarium. You stare at things in the jars — powders and what are probably gruesome objects, cheap toys and computer chips and gears and gadgets. You peer closely at the labels on the jars, bristling with instructions, recipes — and more than a few made-up words, it seems: “solar pap” ... “red hairy profits” ... “an inquiring frost” ... “singing teeth” ... “purpureous gravities” ... a “fillerstein’s ear.” Then you notice the faint layer of dust over everything. Somehow you know it’s not just dust. It’s “breeding dust.” If I could only gather the flesh into a mercy pond I would, but a masculine estrus hoses down the cement. And such as that for years and years. This is not wonderment. There is instead too much horror compacted in the greasy coagulant my family calls wind. Ronnie will lean against the refrigerator and say that just about everything is killing him. Larry has a masterful forelock and a huge album collection. Rita raised finches and knew some Spanish. I mean, first we went to the monastery but they didn’t have any ham. Then we went to the service station but papyrus they had none. Then we went squealing through the streets, which were a disservice to the remote stillness of the stars. Then we went to the supermarket but identified no readily available forms of human sacrifice. Then we went into the forest and unearthed some hot takes on an unreleased Beastie Boys album, “....” for untranslatable fragments, “++++” for missing sections, “(?)” for variant readings, and “[  ]” for clarificatory portions. Tree Talk. Motz el Son:

 

grryook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmrnmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmm gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook             mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmm gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook gnyook mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmm             mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMM MM MMM MMMMMMMM    M MM M M M M M MM MM MM M M M M mmmmmmmm m

 

            “[[plus sign enclosed in a circle]]”

            “will-would-might-have-can-change”

            “was / will-be / is / is-just-about-almost”

            “I do not know who I am when I read this. How magnificent.”

 

Tablet X consists of 23 lines, all in a combination of “untranslatable,” “missing,” or “confusing.” The Scholar / Translator has, in the exact center of this tablet — eleven lines preceding, eleven lines following — suggested that the two missing words would read, “the the.” The the the immigrants arrive, grave and with torches, a billion of us. In dreams you’re compelled to be in the drama you’re in. I am an earthling, aren’t I? Where does it come from? I don’t — I wasn’t born to make sense. You once did this too, remember? The soul submits to no one, thus is often denied by its face. The people were litters, magnets, and tentacles. Lightning surrounded us, comprising the four walls of the surrounding desert. What are you allowed to see in the exposure of opaline cracks? These archaisms will be around for a long time. Meanwhile, a small white horse from another planet wishes to talk to me. It is only a few inches in length. Its skin is composed of white beads. White-beaded it speaks, hesitantly, in English It has vocal chords. It has a pink mouth and tongue. Heavenly seedpearls for horsehair? Oh one cannot go back on a planetary promise, these passionate black-winged moths. Listen to the horsie, the superior man had said. Look at these white we’ve painted. I can’t stay, I said, I have a problem. The moving houses are very moving as they move slowly into the sea. It was by design. An ASMR whisper chamber, but splashed with rare art, long eruptions of natural light, and a socialized security system. He fired me before I saw his ferns. But not before he left an Aeolian window open on his computer through which the wind blew silver, and it chimed. This isn’t a rational decision he said, it’s an emotional one. This was the first I’d heard of toilet glitter. In “miki endo as flint marko (a.k.a. sandman),” we encounter the disembodied voice of the 24-year-old woman credited with saving many lives by tirelessly broadcasting warnings from her station at Minamisanriku City Hall during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, an act for which she ultimately paid with her life:

 

            after the tsunami took me

            I was both here and not here

 

            I mean I was everywhere

            but also nowhere all at once.

 

            Does this seem strange to you?

 

            It used to seem strange to me

            but now it’s just how things are.

 

            I concentrated very hard

            on trying to see my feet, to know

            if I was a ghost or not, but when

            sneakers filled with foot bones

            began to surface in the Pacific,

            I stopped thinking these thoughts.

 

                        For we’ve crossed the blood-brain barrier,

                        where will you wait when the world is water, the water dust?

 

                                    The event horizon is so loaded, the horizon’s everywhere. 

 

Apparition is a congealed form from which someone has already withdrawn, whereas in language there is accomplished the unintermittent afflux of a presence that rends the inevitable veil of its own apparition, which is plastic like every apparition. Hundreds of microclimates mushroom inside this. Which is to say that Martin Heidegger knew nothing about Mitsein. Forget he was a Nazi for a moment. Martin Heidegger knew nothing about Mitsein because he never had the chance to see Lionel Messi “being-with” his fans after that miraculous, come-from-behind Champions League victory in 2017 versus PSG at Camp Nou. Heidegger knew nothing about Mitsein because, unfortunately for him, football fan that he was, he died more than a decade before Messi was even born. In his final years Heidegger was (unsurprisingly, given his reputation for discipline) enamored of his countryman, “Der Kaiser,” Franz Beckenbauer. In 1974 Beckenbauer captained the West Germany to World Cup victory. On home soil, no less, with a 2–1 win over the Netherlands. In 1990, as manager of the last divided German team to play in a World Cup, Beckenbauer coached West Germany to victory. On a train ride one day, Heidegger, who was “full of admiration for Beckenbauer’s delicate ball control,” according to his biographer, Rüdiger Safranski, “actually tried to demonstrate some of Beckenbauer’s finesses to his astonished interlocutor,” who happened to be the “director of the Freiburg theater.” One can only imagine it. The now venerable philosopher, in his declining years, trying, as the keen Meßkirch amateur left-winger he’d once been, to make like Beckenbauer. On a moving train, showing no appetite for talk of the theater or literature, there, for all the world to see: Martin Heidegger, footballer. The philosopher, exhibiting, in a moving train, his best football moves. The philosopher giving us a glimpse of what the philosopher as footballer looks like. The old philosopher retrieving, as if from gilded memory, the young footballer he once was. The old philosopher recovering, if only for a moment, the footballer in him. The footballer he imagined himself to have been. Among philosophers, Heiddeger wasn’t alone in his love for the beautiful game. Camus was a keen amateur goalkeeper. Derrida loved playing football as a boy in El Biar. And how could we forget Sartre’s insightful analysis: “In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.” How many philosophers are nothing but insufficiently talented footballers or underemployed color commentators? In the case of Heidegger’s Mitsein, then, what we encounter is nothing other than the philosopher’s (true ... truest) desire: to be-with a great footballer. Heidegger could not know Mitsein because he was (physically) too far removed from Der Kaiser. So he did the best could: he tried to be-like: zu sein wie. To be-like Beckenbauer. Unlike at Camp Nou, where all the partisans were free to be-with their idol. Messi gave himself freely to them, and they, in their turn, gave themselves utterly to him. Heidegger did not give himself to Beckenbauer. Nor would Beckenbauer ever have imagined the possibility of Mitsein with Heidegger. You know what this reminds me of? About 20 years ago, Kathy, Rose and I were on a train from Edinburgh to London. A few seats away a sleeping man was curled up on a row of seats. The ticket taker came by and woke him. The first thing out of his mouth was, “You should have let sleeping dogs lie.” He was obviously drunk, and just as obviously hadn’t been sober for decades. The ticket taker left, the man stood up and wandered around a bit, talking to people, complimenting the women on their beauty, etc. When the ticket taker returned, he had another guy with him. The old drunk took a boxer’s stance, and challenged them. The larger of the two train men said, in a very calm voice, “That’s not a good idea, my friend. We’re bigger than you, and a lot younger. Do you know Berwick-upon-Tweed?” “No.” You will, mate, you will.” The last we saw him was through the window, on the platform there, escorted by uniforms. Little did we know they had dropped him in a war zone. I read an article about it in The Daily Beast. For decades it appeared that all 12,000 residents of the Berwick were excluded from the 1856 peace treaty between Russia and England that Queen Victoria announced after the Crimean War. This omission was made possible by a 1502 treaty between England and Scotland that succeeded in ending hundreds of years of land arguments over the place — it had already switched sides 13 times. But the agreement also greatly confused its classification by defining Berwick as “of but not within the Kingdom of England.” So, throughout the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Berwick-upon-Tweed, along with Wales, was considered a quasi-sovereign area under the jurisdiction of the British kingdom. Royal decrees were forced to specifically include Berwick by name otherwise the town would be exempt. This practice ended in 1746 with the Wales and Berwick-upon-Tweed Act, which declared that any proclamation would automatically include both regions. But the confusion didn’t end there, and the town continued to be called out in official documents — including, residents came to believe in the early 1900s, a mention in the declaration of war that launched hostilities between England and Russia. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except then a rumor began that while the war included Berwick, the peace treaty did not. In April 1914, a small article about the discovery appeared in a New Zealand newspaper. “A well-known economist, Archdeacon Cunningham, has just discovered that the town of Berwick has been at war with the Empire of Russia for nearly sixty years,” it reads. “It seems that on the outbreak of the Crimean war, Berwick, under some old custom, declared war independently of the United Kingdom ... the city on the Tweed has never formally concluded peace.” Ergo, omission from the Treaty of Paris had left the town in a long-running state of hostilities. A few decades later, the Western Daily Press reported the conflict as “nothing to get alarmed about.” This was investigated by the British Foreign Office in the 1930s and again in 1965, but both times confirmed there was no written evidence to support the stories. Adding to the local lore is a tale that in the 1960s a Soviet official came to visit Berwick and finally signed the long-forgotten peace treaty that ended the century-long war. Then-Mayor Robert Knox was said to declare: “Tell the Russians they can sleep easy in their beds.” So now it feels as if the only inhabitable places left in the city are its songs. The sounds they begin to make when listening has been made impossible. The sounds they make are poor and weird. There are people with holes in their necks, running toward us. Their mouths on backwards. Or, for that matter, imagine a nineteenth-century architectural theory suggesting that all works of civil infrastructure — prisons, libraries, courts of law — had to have both a positive and negative version constructed, an aboveground world and its subterranean reflection, and that, over the course of the novel, more and more of these underground spaces are discovered in the humid soils of the American east coast. And that it ends well for no one involved. It raises the question, “What is a piano?” When I discovered a ruined piano in a tractor shed on a West Australian sheep station, my passion for prepared piano and its contrivances gave way to one for pianos prepared by a disinterested what can most easily be called nature: by searing heat, flash floods, and far off stars. For me “ruined piano” belongs with those other dead-end metaphors: the stringless lute, the iron flute with no holes. The ruined piano may be evocative of emptiness, but each ruined piano is, at the same time, utterly unique with respect to action and tuning (if we can talk of tuning at all). An F# one-and-a-half octaves above middle C on a ruined piano in a semidesert environment differs radically from the same note on a piano in a flooded studio in Prague. It’s like cooking carrot soup

 

            with slow carrots  thees ar

            veree slow carrots

 

            sew i put them in2 th blendr

            2 speed them up  i almost

 

            brek th blendr  sew th slow

            carrots go back in2  th pot

 

            i keep having 2 replace th

            watr  its all boiling away

 

            n th carrots arint dun yet

            ther may b a leek in th pot

 

            or thees ar th slowest carrots

 

            th salmon  thats going with

            them  was dun long time ago

 

            if th carrots  nevr get dun

            ium going 2  eet th fish

 

            its bin redee  4 hours

 

            if yu get slow carrots

            by mistake  coz yr 2

 

            baked or groggd whn yu

            get 2 th store  2 ask

 

            4 th fast wuns  it can b

 

            a long nite  cooking

 

            carrot soup

 

            it can be a long time crossing

            the bridge of sighs ...

 

Happy Asteroid Day! I’m older than Baudelaire when he said he was a thousand years old. And it was a regular horse but for the eyes: they were in its nostrils. I’m gonna take that horse to the old town road I’m gonna ride til I can’t no more, I’m gonna, excuse me

He had limping blue forelegs. He was a balding comb-over’d Don Juan. Around his hut were shackled cemetery birds shitting into his eardrums. By the following afternoon splotches appeared on his gut. They were green and blue. Apocalyptic sulphurs flooded his soul, assuming he had one. He began to groan. He swayed from side to side like a twenty-ton jellyfish. A twelve-pointed light began to unchain his forehead. The gas that passed for thoughts began to drift, and at the instant of this drifting the secretary birds were blown into blood. He then began to walk, two steps forward and two steps back, like a human infection. He remembered something. He was both King of the Pigs and he was / I am the President. I sat at my desk and contemplated all I had accomplished this year. I had won the hot dog eating contest in Rhode Island. No, I hadn’t. I was just kidding. I was the arm-wrestling champion in Portland, Maine. False. I fell off Mt. Everest. Nope. I married the Princess of Monaco. Nope. A trout bit me when I was washing the dishes. But I couldn’t catch him. I flew over my hometown and didn’t recognize anyone. A policeman stopped me on the street and said he was sorry. He was looking for someone who looked just like me. What are the chances? The next moment, the waning light expired, and with it the waning flames of the horned altar, and the waning halo round the robed man’s brow. It is not hyperbole. The Conversions begins with an impenetrable ideogram, a circular maze sealed off completely, no way in or out. From the start, the prose exudes an eerie and compelling calmness. In quick order, the narrator relates a racing competition of Rousselian strangeness (an intricate affair combining woodwinds and worms) and then meets a novelist who provides a summary of his book The Sores, in which three early music enthusiasts try to survive a polar plane crash. Throughout the book, Mathews is able to let his narrator recede and interpolate texts from other hands, such as a chapter from a book entitled The Otiose Creator. (What I love is that the full text of this quote unquote found chapter is repeated in an appendix — in German.) He walks us through weird science (a character’s discovery and unsuccessful promotion of a sex position that not only prevents conception but provides intense mutual pleasure), doomed, esoteric plots (such as the one involving hypnotized hockey players), and the language spoken by two strange brothers (“Lop oh oh kop ... yoppo you boploppo oh dopyop foppo ohlop ...”).

 

            e as no s ex rex noth Syl i

 

Early in his quest, the narrator is presented with three riddles When was a stone not a king? What was La Messe de Sire Fadevant? Who shaved the Old Man’s Beard?” To which he thinks, helplessly: “When was a stone ever a king? Who was Sire Fadevant? What old man?” The trail led to two snails fucking in the rain; they were quote unquote invasives. These are the snails that other snails were brought in to kill, but the newest invaders preferred indigenous ones. True or false: children will be moved from the US mainland to Gitmo, where no lawyers or reporters or members of Congress can see them. Nothing seems without its smooth transition now. “Hope and Healing” was found by googling “Chanel and Fallujah.”

[Note: Sources: Machik Labdrön, quoted in Machik’s Complete Explanation, expanded edition (tr. Sarah Harding); Alice Notley, “Malorum Sanatio”, at LitHub, 10 May 017; “Introduction”, at Spomenik Database; Dan Schindel, “One of the Most Controversial Anime Ever Comes to Streaming for the First Time”, at Hyperallergic, 21 Jun 019 (re Neon Genesis Evangelion); Daniel Tiffany, blurb for Tim Earley, Epigrams Both Ludic and Regicidal, at Delete Press; Tim Earley, various, in Epigrams Both Ludic and Regicidal, at Delete Press; Andrew Zawacki, “Review: The Tablets”, at Boston Review, 1 Oct 000 (a review of Armand Schwerner, The Tablets); Wendy Burk, Tree Talks; Anselm Hollo, “Motz El Sonh: The Little Lovers”, in Fish-Sheet One (ed. Ian Hamilton Finlay); JBR; Alice Notley, various, in Eurynome’s Sandals, at SPD; Armand Schwerner, quoted in Andrew Zawacki, “Review: The Tablets”, at Boston Review, 1 Oct 000; Anselm Hollo, “In the Long View of Human History Man’s Reliance on Fossil Fuels Can Be But a Short Episode” (memory quote); Daniel Poppick, “A View of Vesuvius”, at BOMB, 25 Jun 019; JBR, but see Guy Schaffer, “Camp”, in “Discard Studies Compendium”, at Discard Studies; Lee Ann Roripaugh, “miki endo as flint marko (a.k.a. sandman)”, quoted in Shoshana Olidort, “Ghost or Not: On Lee Ann Roripaugh’s ‘tsunami vs. the fukushima 50’”, at LARB, 21Jun 019, and “Miko Endo”, at Wikipedia; Gillian Parrish, Cold Spell; Leslie Scalapino, quoted in Michael Cross, “Horizon”, at Jacket2, 27 Jun 019; Liz Kinnamon, “United States v. Scott Daniel Warren”, at The New Inquiry, 27 Jun 019; JBR; Grant Farred, Entre Nous: Between the World Cup and Me, at Duke University Press; JBR; Nina Strochlic, “Berwick-upon-Tweed, the British Town at War With Russia”, at The Daily Beast, 26 Feb 015, updated 14 Apr 017; JBR; Sean Bonney, “Antimatter 2”, at Abandoned Buildings, 28 Jun 019; Geoff Manaugh, “Shadow Cell”, at BLDGBLOG, 27 Jun 019; Ross Bolleter, Dongshan’s Five Ranks; JBR; bill bissett, “cooking carrot soup”, at bill bissett; JBR; Robin Trower, “Bridge of Sighs”; JBR (30 June is the anniversary of the Tunguska meteor event); Jean-Marie Straub, “My Key Dates”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 30 Jun 019; Pentti Saarikoski, “The Madman’s Horse”, in Helsinki (tr. Anselm Hollo); Lil Nas X, “Old Town road”; JBR; image: Michael de Adder ( CNN, 1 Jul 019; Will Alexander, “The Neutralized Sore Of The Unshackled Bear”, in Vertical Rainbow Climber; JBR; James Tate, untitled, quoted in Dan Chiasson, “The Last Poems of James Tate”, at The New Yorker, 1 Jul 019 (the epigraph by Dara Wier, Tate’s wife: “Jim’s final poem, in his typewriter July 2, 2015”); Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, quoted in Roy Scranton, “The Curse of Coherence: Cold War CIA Funding for Oulipo’s Confidence-Man”, at The Appendix, Oct 013; Ed Park, “Hymns To Misunderstanding: Harry Mathews’ First Three Novels”, at Quarterly Conversation 29; Susan M Schultz, “Hope and Healing”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 1 Jul 019]]