This poem too opens in diary prose: “On the fourth day of my sickness I lay in bed getting more and more freaked out by the status of a memory I couldn’t shake ...” You know the bits I mean. The father has just been shot dead. They have yet to reach the wasteland. Great gusts of silhouette. No shelter to be found. The countryside a splinter of spiteful knives. Blah blah. It put me in mind of the mass incineration of farm animals that happened in Britain, in 2001. Bang Bang. All of it compressed and spun, baked and loaded, until it was transformed in its sleep into incinerated invisible villages. That type of thing. New bombs squealing. New reasons to be fearful of the stars. Oh blah blah. To hate the stars. To dream that one day you will go out into the streets of this quite possibly non-existent village, and it will be very quiet, and there will be new constellations in the sky, and you will know they are new because they will already have names. The Body Fluids of the Electorate. The Kids Who Jumped Into the Fire. The Boiling Bones of Boris Johnson. The Blood of Horses. The Strangled Bird. The Broken Strings. The Incineration of Pigs. The Deserted Houses. The Marriage Feast. The Defence Speech of Émile Henri. When people tell me I am losing weight I say so what the sun, the sun too is losing weight. It is the law of the cosmos. I actually do say that. After I say it I start to cry. Someone puts their arms around me. I rarely care who. I think about the wind and the insects that live there and I go crazy again and start to recite poems. The ancient poems known to all of us. The ancient poems that could kill us if they wanted, each single syllable. I fall asleep in the bar. I don’t go home. I think a little about the moon, its relation to Marxism, to the riots of five years ago and the predicament we find ourselves in now. It’s a full moon. It hides very little. There is great pain in my chest,
for no-one is the radius of everything we
are, reinforced steel artery in the very integument
to be burst asunder by reason of innately shattered
strobes as soon lived as burnt out, ramming an unplanned
crack into the door mechanism; who the fuck I am
now speaking to or at or for or not at this moment
is compensation for being completed into a circle
resigned to resume the first square, the first on the
entire board, and is listening there, afloat and spent yet
lost in streaks to the opening night whose primitively
explosive starlight is progressively nit-picked from a
lately impatient and fidgeting sky, not far too far or fast
too inquisitively squinted at, its cartilage of crudely
lubed-up open access sex arcs scraped out piecemeal
and in single-file, and once there inaudibly ask yourself
why; inside it is the fundamental sky of shining fact:
the abolition of capital is the social revolution;
or, as ol’ Doc Rossiter told us: “ElectroSkin is an important step toward soft robots that can be easily transported, deployed and even worn. The combination of electrical artificial muscles and electrical gripping replicated the movements of animals like slugs and snails, and where they can go, so could our little buds!”
In this place there are no cities or noises
Once a year there is a parade.
It is compulsory for the dead to attend.
for we’ve been dead before and we’ll be dead again
And then there are those who cannot move without shitting bone, standing in the freezing back rooms, breathing inside other people’s deaths. You can see them in old photographs, as if birds had scratched them, and those scratches are what fascists call history and hammered nails and human hunger and other words they use to express pleasure. The night of the earthquake. The 300 houses destroyed. The mouths scratched to pieces. The graphic shows three figures sketched in light blue against a white background: a gigantic cow towering over a medium-sized, faceless human to its left, both of them facing the viewer while dwarfing a miniature rhinoceros to the right of the cow’s hooves, caught in motion as if about to scamper off the right-hand side of the page. The figure’s heading explains the not-to-scale sizes: “Of all the mammals on Earth ... 60 percent are livestock ... 36 percent are humans ... 4 percent are wild.” But what does this look like closer to the ground? What if we zoom all the way into a 6.5 square kilometer nature reserve in Borneo that houses a wildlife centre and a couple dozen-plus orangutans? I don’t know where I was. But the imprint of cherry blossom has stayed with me, articulating transitions with its chalky fingertip. The drawing of a tree or a flower in the condensation of a windowpane, or ... Oh, Sara Vaughan is singing “Lullaby of Birdland” ... and just now, as I wrote those words, the first bars of “April in Paris” fill the room. Here, a beam of light cuts through the radioactive atmosphere to replenish the corollary beam, the laser or scalpel, that is cutting through the flesh of her brother’s skull to reach the brain, “ancient uprising tree connected to roots.” Then to the right, lower down, balanced in the oily, pulpy Autumn mud packed and soft around those roots I draw something I see in my mind as a bright yellow gold. I elaborate it a bit, thinking: is it a fish? Moses’s midrash on this phenomenon was from the very beginning famous in Canaan, because it was known before being read; he had thought what he said, and what he thought, they couldn’t say. I am slick with butter. Abraham woke up in Egypt. I have an empty head. What was Canaan? He knew the East was Set’s crabshell, South was amber. North he could surmise from the will-o-the-wisps. My God, this is all made up. Where is my mascara? None of the sorcerers will fear me. Toad shapes in smoke, embers, gas, black snake particles, bronze husks around snake eyes, mote, smoke, east of her mountain. The piss stench of mules drifts through the alleys. Trash covers the wilderness.
Corrupt politics can’t manage the trash covering the wilderness;
it can only keep the grand hall clean.
So the smoke from burning tires rises from three sides of the temple,
choking the gods inside — they proclaim themselves to be aliens so they should get
respect and protection.
Anxious travelers are smoking in the airport waiting area and no one cares ...
with patience I can sit on this bench
and wait for the ironworks of a previous century
to reverse themselves, or I can lie in the grass,
La vida,
a mess of dominoes
face down,
I feel the density of the humid air in my ears as thrashing molecules. The so-called quiet around me has the low thrum of the refrigerator motor vibrating through the floor. When you open your eyes consider what you heard as the “music.” How does one approach a person, do you go like “Hi”? I mean,
I wanted to tell you all about this
so I opened my phone
I need
to share something at you, and it’s what
you do with them: people get Europe pulled
out of their fingernails, enter a diamond,
And what do we find?
Do you see how already in my account those unremembered features
(of the movie, not dream) are flattening to a billboard
magnetizing your gaze up from some interstate’s white lines
toward a romping airbrushed puppy & beaming
child, if you are to trust me to not bleed you of your
brain’s money
another dream
the name was not Antonin Artaud. Nor was it Sophie Scholl. Not even Walter Benjamin, or any number of others, disappearing backwards into what we once called history. It could be the names of people, or entire countries, planets, paranormal phenomena. All were scooped up, left in secret sites. The invisible, indelible marks of the border where meathook is a tranquil word. The sounds they make are destitute and eerie. The names of the nameless, the holes in their necks, running toward us. Their mouths on backwards. Their language clear. “I wasn’t hurting as much as the lads who were out there but I definitely felt it and I know how hard the boys have taken that. They will be disappointed with the account that we put out but we have got another week to get back on the horse. And take that horse to the water, and you can ask that horse, you can say, ‘Hey, horsey, do you want to have a drink or do you want to swim?’ It’s up to that horse to then realise what he wants to do in his life. That horse, at the moment, wants to go out on Saturday, he wants to clippity-clop all the way to The Stoop and he wants to say hello to those fans. And he goes, ‘I’m sorry about the result last week, but I’m going to give a better performance here at home against Bath’. So we are looking forward, like I say, to getting back on that horse.” Asked if he was personally looking forward to getting back on said horse, Marler said: “I don’t like horses. I can’t ride.” This is why I think the six paintings in the current exhibition represent a breakthrough. They are the paintings of a modern master for whom dissipation and loss of control have become integrated into the work. They are the open declarations of a person who recognizes that he is beginning to fade from the world. Speaking of which, Evo Morales was forced to resign on November 10, in what all but capitalists and religious fanatics know is a coup. The ame day, Morales’ vice president and the heads of both chambers of Congress also quote unquote resigned in the face of threats of violence against top MAS officials unless they left office. The pressure campaign included the burning of MAS officials’ houses and kidnapping of relatives. This paved the way for the ascension to what is now a faux-presidency by a neofascist racist psycho-Christian named Jeanine Áñez on Tuesday November 12. There are — no duh — serious doubts about the constitutional legitimacy of her succession. Without the forced resignations by MAS officials, Áñez would not have had even a minimally plausible constitutional path to the presidency, as she was serving as Vice-President of the Senate, a position that is not in the line of presidential succession within the constitution. Additionally, Áñez, whose party received only 4% of the vote in the most recent October 20 election, declared herself President in a Senate session lacking quorum, with MAS senators who make up the legislature’s majority boycotting partly due to fears for their physical safety. Áñez appears to have full support of Bolivia’s military and police. Over the course of the last week the military and police have engaged in significant and increasing repression against protests, which have been largely. By the night of November 13, La Paz and Cochabamba city center streets were empty of anyone but the police, military, and self-appointed neighborhood militias. In a highly disturbing move, Áñez issued an executive order on November 15 exempting the military from criminal responsibilities related to the use of force. Áñez has said Morales will face prosecution if he returns to Bolivia. And she has also floated the idea of banning the MAS — which is still Bolivia’s largest and most popular political force — from participation in future elections. Equally disturbing has been a resurgence of dangerous and public anti-Indigenous shit over the course of the last week. Shortly after Áñez was declared President, she thrust a massive Bible into the air and proclaimed, “The Bible has returned to the palace!” Three days earlier, on the day of Morales’ ouster, Luis Fernando Camacho, a far-right Santa Cruz businessman and ally of Áñez, went to the presidential palace and knelt before a Bible placed on top of the Bolivian flag. A pastor accompanying him announced to the press, “The Pachamama will never return to the palace.” During the past weeks, the wiphala flag (an important symbol of Indigenous identity) was burnt publicly a number of times, too. Despite increasing violence and repression, diverse social forces have been demonstrating around the country to condemn the Áñez coup. It is important to note that they include not only MAS supporters but also a broad swath of popular sectors. Thousands of largely unarmed protesters, for example, mostly coca-leaf growers, gathered peacefully in Sacaba, a town in the department of Cochabamba, on the morning of November 15. After unsuccessful negotiations to march to the town square, protesters tried to cross a bridge into the city of Cochabamba, heavily guarded by police and military troops. Soldiers and police fired tear gas canisters and live bullets into the crowd. During the two-hour confrontation, nine protesters were shot dead, and at least 122 were wounded. Most of the dead and injured in Sacaba suffered bullet wounds. Guadalberto Lara, the director of the town’s Mexico Hospital, told the Associated Press it is the worst violence he has seen in his 30-year career. If you are wondering about foreign complicity in the coup, there's this, from Common Dreams (12 Nov 019): President Donald Trump celebrated a military coup in Bolivia that forced President Evo Morales, who recently won a fourth term, to resign on November 10. “After nearly 14 years and his recent attempt to override the Bolivian constitution and the will of the people, Morales’ departure preserves democracy and paves the way for the Bolivian people to have their voices heard,” Trump declared. “The United States applauds the Bolivian people for demanding freedom and the Bolivian military for abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia’s constitution. These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail. We are now one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere.” The State Department, as well as the vast majority of the US press, contend Morales was not overthrown in a coup. They describe current events as a “power void” or “vacuum” caused by so-called but in fact nonexistent election fraud, about which more in a minute. For example, and this is yet another why I despise liberals, the New York Times wrote, “A leftist who had served longer than any other current head of state in Latin America, Mr. Morales lost his grip on power amid violent protests set off by a disputed election.” A CNN headline read, “Bolivian President Evo Morales steps down following accusations of election fraud.” Similarly, NPR went with the headline, “Bolivian President Evo Morales Resigns Amid Widespread Protests Over Election Fraud.” The Washington Post, which has made “opposing” the death of democracy in the darkness a part of their corporate brand, attributed Morales’ resignation to a “scathing election report.” “Morales’ stunning fall after nearly 14 years in office came hours after the Organization of American States” [which is funded by the US, not coincidentally, and which toes Washington’s line, something the post neglected to mention] “said it had found ‘clear manipulation’ of the vote last month in which the elder statesman of the Latin American left claimed victory,” according to the Post. But — and this is incredibly important — the OAS never provided even one shred of evidence, much less proof. So what’s it all about, except for the usual? As Common Dreams’ Eoin Higgins noted, Potosí, which has been at the heart of colonial exploitation forever, right, well, Potosí has 50 percent to 70 percent of the world’s lithium reserves. Morales canceled a contract that would basically give it away. Industry players that rely on Bolivia’s lithium were apparently confident that “political calmness” would be restored soon enough, and they would return to business as usual. Put otherwise,
the rats are in the corner
the baby’s in the sack
they took them to the lost and found
they’re never coming back
the rats are on the table
the baby’s on the sill
they’ll stay that way forever
till we do the fascist’s will
the fascist is the ferryman
from the stolen to the lost
it knows the words for everything
the baby knows the cost
the fascist is the ferryman
its boat is going down
into the seas that bind the world
of the living to the drowned
says Mother Goose to the Fairy Mab
the whole damn planet’s a Frankenstein Lab
that feeds the greedy and shelters the rich
and burns the poor and I can’t stand to finish this
but I can’t stand a lot of things. There’s no point in stopping now. But this makes me sad. I don’t relate to the clown. It’s sad that he’s doing that to himself. This exhibit as a whole makes me sad because this is what scares people. It makes it hard for me. And yet, and yet, tho I’ve read my Federici, I love the tale of ‘a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch.’ How sick [in the good sense of sick] is that?” So yes, the same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain machine, as described by Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his ... you know. That, however, was not the question at hand. “The shock of the hammer and the anvil broke his arms and legs at the elbows and knees, which until that moment he had not possessed ... All this activity involves hundreds of chemical reactions. But ultimately, it produces a limited number of small compounds, a few dozen at most. At this point the audience denounced the numerous misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and even misappropriations in the professor's presentation, despite the authorities he had appealed to, calling them his “friends.” Even the Dogons … And things would presently get worse. He (?) claimed to have invented a discipline he referred to by various names: rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities. Yet no one clearly understood what the goals, method, or principles of this discipline were. Young Professor Alasca, Challenger’s pet student, tried hypocritically to defend him by explaining that on a given stratum the passage from one articulation to the other was easily verified because it was always accompanied by a loss of water, in genetics as in geology, and even in linguistics, where the importance of the “lost saliva” phenomenon is measured. Not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers. To keep the last of the audience from leaving, Challenger imagined a particularly epistemological dialogue of the dead, in puppet theater style. Geoffroy called forth Monsters, Cuvier laid out all the Fossils in order, Baer flourished flasks filled with embryos, Vialleton put on a tetrapod’s belt, Perrier mimed the dramatic battle between the Mouth and the Brain, and so on. Admire the Tortoise. Its neck requires that a certain number of protovertebrae change position, and its front limbs must slide 180 degrees in relation to that of a bird. Challenger admitted having digressed at length but added that there was no possible way to distinguish between the digressive and the nondigressive. So yes, trees bleed and cactuses lactate in this parallel view of the cycles of life and death experienced by human, nonhuman and plant beings. In a study of a form of speech known as ‘ancient words,’ Miguel León-Portilla argued that Nahuas were trained to wear a wise countenance and to make the ‘heart firm.’ Attributed to a father, the following quote was recited to a noble daughter (and what daughter isn’t a noble daughter?) when she reached six or seven years of age, to prepare her to confront with fortitude the challenges of life:
Hear well, O my daughter, O my child, the earth is not a good place.
It is not a place of joy, it is not a place of contentment.
It is merely said it is a place of joy with fatigue, of joy with pain on earth;
so the old men went saying.
In order that we may not go weeping forever, may not die of sorrow,
We were given laughter, sleep, and our sustenance, our strength, our force,
and also carnal knowledge in order that there be peopling ...
And now, O my daughter, hear it well, look at it deliberately;
for behold, here is thy mother, thy noble one.
From her womb, from her breast thou wert chipped, thou wert flaked.
It is as if thou wert an herb, a plant which hath propagated, sprouted, blossomed.
It is also as if thou hadst been asleep and awakened.
See, hear, and know how it is on earth ...
They say the earth is a dangerous place, a fearsomely dangerous place,
o my daughter, O dove, O little one,
diagonal line of cloud in pale blue sky above ridge,
motion of bamboo leaves in wind above redwood fence.
“How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby
unaware of ‘Green’?”
Then there were two huge, extra-turkey size brown condors at the point tip peak of Machu Picchu — one circling around sailing on the air currents as I mounted the stone steps toward the top — now as I came up to the last platform, saw this huge brown heavy bird — all brown, with very clean soft smooth feathers, nearly bald but furry & not ugly neck, & dark brown eyes & beak — cleaning its breast feathers with trembling birdlike delicacy, & plucking a crude red blossomflower weed out of rocky studden earth by its roots — eyed me, and did not move. I didn’t move — stood silent — and slowly began activity, turning round to look at view, down on Picchu city fanlike way down below, north, and the classical terraces on the peak of Hyuna — They are now standing 10 feet from me facing into the wind which ruffles their righthand wing-feathers. Heads can turn 180 or 360 degrees & see all thru beady eyes, but I am sitting on a rock a few feet above them — they don’t move much (the second circled around the scene for a few minutes before joining us) — the air is clear, blue and hardly any haze — Looking at the birds I also with the same eyes look down now (I am seated on the crumbling highest wall) on the city under the shadows of a noon sun directly overhead in the blue space of heaven. A white flash that gives blinding weight to the eye when glanced upon, up in. “Are you guarding something? Eggs? Nothing to be afraid of — I’m only another butterfly — albeit I am the King of the Dead. I feed you,” and more conversation with the condors, who lead very philosophic, airy, panoramic lives. “Would you like some more bread?” —. Coming back down, slowly, sun setting behind first clouds — saw a Vibora in the woodsy part of the trail; and a walking stick insect; and hummingbirds that clicked & swooped like fish; and yesterday a rabbit in the prison area, & prehistoric little lizards on top of Huyna Picchu — as well as numerous centipedes — one which had its head cut off —
The wheel itself might be the spinning wheel as turned by the Fates; or the discus, thrown by Vishnu to cut Satī’s corpse into 50-or-so pieces; or the wheel used for raising water from a well; or the sun god’s chariot as it rolls over his dominion; or a potter’s wheel; or the circle of a peacock’s tail; or the belly-button, as used for mystical purposes. Before counting your luck, remember that the wheel of fortune is sometimes regarded as a weapon; a weapon without rule even for the ones that wield it; it chops, it drags, it turns, it turns. Beginning again, the goddess is rendered susceptible. Her body sets the coordinates of the whole wide world, but she herself is stuck: believing in the reality of worldly objects; watching the news; falling in the direction of the wound. She falls upon the raised arm of the corpse. A tree trunk stops five arrows.
I think of my friends as blackbirds
screeching from rooftops
There are those who never appear in mirrors, but only in police cameras. There are those who are the opposite. I don’t know which I am. I’m told I was last seen on the border. I’m told I was wearing a pearl necklace, a red and black sweater. You ask was I setting fire to cars. In return I say thank you, thank you very much. These sorts of techniques are ubiquitous, so much that there are essentially no technically-mediated sounds that are not filtered in some way via perceptual coding. Perceptual coding helps with compression. James makes much of this, describing compressors as a kind of disciplinary regime. To compress sound is to “discipline” it to a normal range, she claims, just like when certain social groups are disciplined by capitalism. While such analogies might seem far fetched, her argument is in fact grounded in the actual science of sound compression, which, as Sterne and others have shown, was designed around specific kinds of voices, typically male. (Mara Mills’s work on sound and disability is also instructive here.) But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere. The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant. Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from saltwater. The sea continuously jerks off. Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish. The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its guts.
[Note: For Sean Bonney on his way thru the Bardos ... Sources: Keston Sutherland, and Sean Bonney (RIP), quoted in Sutherland’s “Sean Bonney’s Hate Poems”, at Post45 2; Keston Sutherland, Odes to TL61P, quoted in John Armstrong, “Starting to pay attention to the Odes to TL61P”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 1 Oct 013; JBR; “Soft skin-like robots you can put in your pocket”, at Science Daily, 20 Nov 019; JBR; Sean Bonney, “Antimatter”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 21 Nov 019; Rosemary Collard, “Resisting the Reordering of Life on Earth”, at Society + Space, 20 Nov 019 (re Juno Salazar Parreñas’ Decolonizing Extinction); Bhanu Kapil, “Om Eem Shreem: A Vortex Opens Beside A Muddy Field”, at THE VORTEX OF FORMIDABLE SPARKLES Bhanu Kapil's always-never: blog, 16 Nov 019; Joel Newberger, Hexateuch, at Poems and Poetics, 30 Oct 019; Xi Chuan, “January 2011 in Egypt”, quoted in Lucas Klein, “Xi Chuan’s ‘January 2011 in Egypt in Kenyon Review”, at Notes on the Mosquito, 11 Nov 019; Gillian Conoley, “The Patient”, at Spacecraft Project; Pauline Oliveros, quoted in an interview with the Mothership, at Spacecraft Project; Daniel Poppick, quoted in Emily Barton Altman, “Thus I am inwardly my police: A review of Daniel Poppick’s ‘The Police’”, at Jacket2, 18 Nov 019; Sean Bonney, “Antimatter 2”, at Abandoned Buildings, 28 Jun 019; Joe Marler, quoted in “‘Hey horsey!’: England rugby star Joe Marler bucks trend of dull sporting interviews”, at Guardian, 22 Nov 019; John Yau, “Brice Marden’s Latest Breakthrough”, at Hyperallergic, 23 Nov 019; JBR, “‘Repressive violence is sweeping Bolivia. The Áñez regime must be held to account’ (an open letter reprinted in the Guardian. A list of signatories is as the letter’s end)”, at ZS, 24 Nov 019 (the post includes other sources besides the open letter, which I got from The Guardian); Sean Bonney, “Antimatter 2”, at Abandoned Buildings, 28 Jun 019; JBR, some bits of which are from In the House of the Hangman; Penelope Dransart, “Appendix: Modes of Being and Destinies of Living Beings in a Mexican Book of Fate”, in Living Beings Perspectives on Interspecies Engagements (ed. Penelope Dransart); Stephen Ratcliffe, “11.25”, at Temporality, 25 Nov 019; Stan Brakhage, Sam Stephenson, “The Big Book”, at The Paris Review, 11 Apr 014; JBR; Allen Ginsberg, South American Journals: January-July 1960, quoted in “The Travel Diaries of Allen Ginsberg in South America”, at Literary Hub, 22 Nov 019; Mihrigul Turson manga: Shimizu Tomomi, “What Has Happened To Me”, at Wapipi.net, via Justin McCurry, “‘What has happened to me’: manga depicting Uighur torture hits 2.5m views”, at Guardian, 25 Nov 019 (hat tip Richard); Nisha Ramayya, “The Wheel of Fortune”, quoted in Ignota, “22 Moons: The Wheel of Fortune”, email rec’d 26 Nov 019, approx. 2:08pm PST; Sean Bonney, “from Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou”, at Tripwire 14; Alexander R Galloway, “Acoustic Resonance”, at Alexander R Galloway, 27 Nov 019 (re Robin James’s The Sonic Episteme); Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus”, at The Anarchist Library]