Zeitgeist Spam: Noose

With the Noose Around My Neck 133

Because now our job is to protect each other. To lean and not to lean against the decorative features. Resting the heavy bag for just a moment on the stair. Dissolved into sunlight. Apparently, there is no connection between hymn and hum.

Live fast

Leave beautiful archive

Ants see molecules

Shady side up

Situated between Pompeii and Olympus, at “Texaco in ruins” or the amusement park, with its characteristic combination of total rigour and complete obscenity, then, in this Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women a smiley face sits next to a guillotine, a German word next to an English one, from heart felt to heart synth. To each

the condition makes your head a skeletal

head in your hand. When we die, is it organ

by organ or all at once? The side is endlessly

infra, plus x giants, it accumulates what? It

globally draws, that’s its thing, its twist,

distinctly on different planets, huhu.

Had a king eaten a human? And

this was how we lived. And we got

out of the bath, and the genre of renaissance

still life painting that depicts the transience

of human wishes does so in the crudest

way possible, by means of a list, or by noises

that look like transcriptions of artificial laughter

but which probably aren’t (‘huhu’)

and that on second thought may instead be

humans with their little men cut off.

As once was said and oft repeated, what you see is what you see. Using a large-format camera, Sato photographed a giant unpaved Tokyo lot, straight down, close-up, to shoot “flat surfaces as flat surfaces.” That said, the ground below the city resembles a satellite image of the city, which begins to look like the surface of some other planet. But of course, “The world is everything that is the case,” right? The multi-layered book design, which combines fold-outs, several booklets, page-spanning layouts and circle-shaped cut-outs into a dense, overwhelming construct, obfuscates any notion of beginning and end. Which is to say, “Light was emitted 138 billion years ago. Striking a 46-billion-year-old ray, it gleamed on to create this world. A void of a world that was simply there, but once caught in the light it became a real image. People let that light pass through them, then started to make their own light to cover the world.” So the March auction was a rare win for the underdog: a group of Hawaiian relatives were able to block their distant cousin from buying up one of four small parcels of land for sale on the island of Kauai. The outcome was shocking because that distant cousin, Carlos Andrade, is nothing but a false front for Mark Zuckerberg, whose 700-acres of settler colonialism fully surrounds the disputed parcels. But on Tuesday, the ancient rules of the ancient universe reasserted themselves. At a court hearing to finalize the outcome of the auction, Andrade was able to reopen the bidding and win the title to all four of the parcels for a total of $2,145,000. This more than doubles the amount that Andrade appeared able to pay in March, when he bid a total of $1,060,000 for three of the parcels, and failed to outbid Rapozo’s offer of $700,000 for the fourth. To quote Anne Boyer, “Money City Sick as Fuck.” So we went around to Don van Vleit’s house and smoked a lot of pot. Don put on Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” We lounged around the living room while a guy with a really deep voice said

I have to

Like

Open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them

Come out to show them

Cuh cuh cuh sho theh

Cuh sho theh cuh

Sho theh cuh

Sho theh

etc. until it turned into many different ideas. When the record was over, the needle skipped and skipped, so we listened to that for a while too. We went outside and stood around in a circle, in a semblance of meditation. I rolled my eyeballs in one direction and then the other, trying to stop them in midspin. It was almost impossible. Almost, but not quite. If there

had

been words

on p. 57

instead

of this

gray scritch. Simply

put

space doing

the thing space

begging

for fullness

space space shivering.

explicit

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Miracles happen.

“Why can’t we

go

for a

walk and come

back

pleased?” “I’m

so confused, I’m

so

old, it

doesn’t seem at

all

right me

being like this.”

Like thjq3ww0v kew cwe]

r kereiim ]34 rs

b

‘a3 m0t wr3,2\

t49 b

f

tk ;4[g-a

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Uaplerv vkjwet

W yes

we are small

the

smallest peb.

This dump will

crush

your angel

on a pin.

This hurts,

that

hurts. It’s

a dark and

stormy

night. I

can say that

with

total confidence.

Words, and sometimes

entire

sentences, are

inevitably butchered. Abrupt

and

uncomfortable laughter

abounds. When one

person

gets tired

of reading, he

or

she simply

says “popcorn.” After

an

hour or

so, when readers

can’t

stand it

any longer, they

all

go home.

I saw then

everything

that was

happening on earth

and

can describe

the humming of

the

clouds by

letting my pores

open

and SOJUZ

PLODO. It resembles

(I

resemble) the

ambient space created

around an ATM. The sharp stars swing around, sreee, he wants to draw Venn diagrams. A beetle (which becomes a boat) floating below a fish-skeleton in a watery sky ... its long inscription is a verbal collage one suspects to have been selected randomly from back issues of Meat Science Monthly. “There's something about the book I'm reading — about the cadences? the vocabulary? — that puts me in a narrative outside of it, between the lines as it were, a scene where I'm following a snow choked trail down to the start of a forest and the promise of a stream I can cross, closing in on my destination.” Each wound is a portrait of a lost branch; and were I not still standing, no one would ever narrate my missing selves; or love or mornings. This disembodied viewpoint accompanies the probe Zond — a “bauble ... Its only breath ... seventy-five watts” on its immense journey to “what the Russians call / ‘Nasha dyevoshka’” — “our dead little girl”, eye eee the title planet. It had been undeveloped for years, a blank square behind the mall at the top of the hill, before you got to the stucco apartments. Once the plants in it had been green and pretty, tall grass with bushes and wildflowers. It didn’t look like that anymore. Everything had turned chalky and gray. The dead grass crinkled when I stepped on it. At the far end of the field, there was a whole flock of crows, dozens of black marks like a pox. I expected them to fly away as I got closer, but they didn’t move. So I decided to sit down in the dirt, try to get the shadows to go away by willing myself solid and impassive like a tree. But the shadows caught up with me, and there were more of them now, shifting from shapes into pieces of people. Disembodied limbs, screeching mouths, long rotted hair. Wanting something from me, for me to do something, as if I could break their suffering and deliver them to heaven. They were saying something but all talking at once, and I couldn’t make out what they said. The crows were still watching me. They began to caw. They were all trying to tell me something. They were all trying to tell me what to do. The molecules around my head buzzed, the crows cackled, the shadows clung at me ... I stood up and suddenly remembered Perec saying that ‘railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers are killed, the more the trains exist.’ I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of just peeking in the window and walking on. Which means I’m experiencing Plum Pit Qi again. It a Liver Qi Stagnation problem, one of the most common imbalances treated by TCM practitioners in the US. In other words, fuck you, Trump, and the horse you rode in on. I guess it’s back to the four gates, Liver 3 and Large Intestine 4, both right and left. Speaking of Trump’s horse, I just saw this headline: “Dallas High School Cuts Off Valedictorian’s Mic After She Mentions Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice.” According to the article Principal Temesghen Asmerom described it as a “technical difficulty” to the students, staff, and family members who had gathered together for the Emmett J. Conrad High School graduation last Saturday. But a video, which has now gone viral, appears to tell another story. Just after Rooha Haghar mentions Martin, Rice, “and all the other children who became victims of injustice,” Asmerom gestures toward his throat and gives a thumbs up to someone in the audience. A moment later, her mic goes dead. The 19-year-old top student had intended to include their names in earlier drafts of the speech, and said she got pushback early on. In a statement she posted on Twitter, Haghar said a teacher told her mentioning Trayvon’s and Tamir’s names “will incite anger towards white people, a group which according to him experience high levels of discrimination in America.” Hi-ho-psycho-Silver, massage, massage, massage. Whisper was the name of my hunting dog. After receiving my first rifle at 9 she and I loved to explore the forest and meadows together. When I shot a squirrel, she would retrieve it and hover eagerly, waiting for me to toss her the heart as I skinned and cleaned it in the running brook, then secured its little body onto sticks to hold over a fire for lunch. I now refer to Whisper as my Lord of the Flies companion and she would be very sad if she were alive today to find that I no longer kill and eat squirrels in the forest. I drew a rough sketch of her and filled in the drawing with black ink. Then I made a kite out of sticks and paper, gluing the sketch to the front. I made notes on another piece of paper and glued it to the back of the kite, or rather the side that takes the wind. That evening I cut her silhouette from the kite and placed it under my pillow. My dreams were beguiling. They led me to a relaxing spot. Then I realized that I was resting right where I had buried her. With

the harps the harps

standing in fields

standing

[...]

somewhere else the sound

sound

will arrive

light from a star

This ‘light-tone’ is annotated by Joris thus: “Light-tone” and “light-pitch” are literal translations of Lichton, if one considers the word as a Celanian composite. The German word, however, is also a German word in filmography, where it refers to the process of “sound-on-film” in which sound is inscribed as variations of light values. Whilst this is helpful and intriguing, I’m more in favour of a gesture towards these tall thoughts trying in vain to lighten the ‘grayblack wastes.’ Which is to say that after the idea of the Flood had receded, a rabbit rested within swaying clover and bellflowers, saying his prayers to a rainbow spied through a spider’s web. Oh what precious stones sunk out of sight, what flowers suddenly stared. On the dirty main drag it was back to business; ships went to sea, piled on the water like a postcard. Blood flowed — at Bluebeard’s, in slaughterhouses, in circuses —

the sad King whose life

is running out of time turns pale

& swiftly goes into his chambers.

& as soon as he entered he saw this:

inside there was a mighty tiger

horrent gnawing his yellow teeth

armed as if it were a rhinoceros any boulder

is milder than this monster’s skin.

It was Astaroth. It said:

Stop right there, you wimp! Where are you going? (shouts)

Get out of your house! Out of my land!

But you know about trees. You know about their different kinds of wood and growth rings. You know about trees. It was in Calcutta (or Kolkata) where the galleon reached port. At that time, Granada had 200 inhabitants. And in Aldana’s house, there was an astrolabe, a compass, and rolls of maps stained by seawater, and the first clock brought from Germany. Ah! “She had the biggest and brightest eyes a man could ever see!” I spent the whole of the next day sitting on the floor of the hall, and at night I was taken to a cell which measured approximately 4x6 feet. Half of it was taken up by a bed made of cement, and there were four other women in it. We could hear the screams of other prisoners being interrogated. Do not look for Elena any more, her sufferings are over, God rest her soul. He explained the technical side of this kind of operation, which he described as in white or in black according to whether the people carrying it out were in uniform. Off Maile, I saw a gate beside the road near a forest preserve. The gate was locked; sturdy metal fencing enclosed an area we assume to be free of pigs. A sign hung from the tree beside the gate. It had bleached completely white. In the film, a young man takes a vow of silence for one full year. He pushes his tent and his water in front of him, down highways and over bridges using three-wheeled device. Which is to say that the ferns and the birds cleanse, though they do not purify. Purity is violence. We make the bed we sleep in, then oblige the others to watch. But if you only know how to look for it, you can add one more line onto the page, making a stool from two embracing tree trunks. The chimpanzee will not recognize them both, but knows what to do with them each. The moon is part of Mars. There are raptured seabird populations, islands infested with cannibal snakes, poisonous supertoad invasions, sea stars tearing apart their own flesh, birds pecking out the brains of other birds. But’s the “85% true” that initially grabs your attention. Apparently, the number eighty-five is arbitrary, or at least it doesn’t appear to be based on an exact formula; rather, Gallagher uses it as a reference point within a mélange which oozes together and obscures its components. In other words, we, as readers, are never real or true, only hypothetical, but our effects on the other actually do occur. During a discussion in which the head scientist of the facility confesses his disdain for a Diane Ackerman article that portrays the scrub jay as friendly and loveable, he reveals personal feelings about the project: [...] the birds aren’t nice, they are stupid and mean unless you have Planters peanuts on you. Perhaps the most chilling part of the book occurs in the final section, which functions as a sort of epilogue. Formatted as an archival finding aid, it documents part of the collection at “Sepulcher Headquarters” at an undisclosed time in the future, although we know from the first artifact that it’s at least the year 3032. We see beached human corpses covered in the bite marks of an unknown creature, people gulping down drug-infested drinking water, giant blood-sucking sea lice, I mean, William James claims said that for a ten year old, fourteen minutes cannot pass, because first it is necessary for seven to pass, and before that, three and a half, and before that, one and a quarter, and so on, until we see the sand flipping into the air up on the high edge of a dune, a barnacle-covered hundred year old turtle come to lay her eggs, she has done this every year, it takes about an hour, the ten year old is transfixed, encased in the amber of his turtle-friendly infrared flashlight, speaking of which, of being ten, the first time I was frisked by police, it was alongside my younger brother. I was an especially thin wrist’d nine. He was seven. At nine years old, under duress and with an interrupted sugar high, the mapping of my repression was violent and ceremonial; especially ceremonial was my mandate not to fold to these occupying troops. I remember their military-aided body language. I wonder if it is a rite of passage for a police officer to detain a non-white child. The in-dark answered with wind. All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses scowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute. A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges. Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered. He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined. The leaves winked. Every day of the tour ended in the same way: with an Operational Security (OPSEC) meeting. At these meetings members of the media were made to show public affairs (PA) representatives our photos, audio recordings, videos, and “other artistic renderings,” in case any of them constituted what is referred to as Operational Protected Information. During the review, imagery and audio that are determined to be in violation rules will be deleted or cropped to achieve compliance. For photographs, the NMR may request ten (10) images per person per day be cropped to meet security requirements. Cropping is defined as cutting off the parts of a digital photograph deemed to be in violation. Blurring, smudging, fading, superimposing a black line or spot over certain parts of a photograph, or any other digital manipulation is not a substitution for cropping. After my tour of the library was complete, I asked the PA representative if I could have access to the entire catalog of items housed in the Detainee Library. I recall him saying that no one had ever asked for this before. I remember that he left briefly to call his superior about my request, and that when he returned, he informed me that I’d have my answer by the end of the day. The Eurasian variety was valued for its fur, but far more importantly for the purported medicinal powers of the odoriferous secretions of its anal sac. These had evolved for the purpose of territorial scent-marking, but an unanticipated consequence (for in truth evolution anticipates nothing and has no purposes) was to mark the beaver out too well in turn, to place it within the sights and olfactions of human hunters, who likely supposed anything that smells that pungent must have some remarkable powers. Castoreum was used as an abortifacient and an anti-inflammatory, against headaches and fevers, and as an ingredient in antidotes against poison. Johannes Marius relates in his Castorologia of 1685 that “a Jew” once told him of the memory-enhancing powers of the secretions of beavers. Marius also reports that it cures bad breath, paralysis, gout, and sciatica, among many other conditions. It bears repetition: the secretion in question comes from a specialized sac located on the perineum, near the anus, which biologically speaking is something quite distinct from the testicles. Yet at least into the late middle ages, knowledge of beaver anatomy among hunters, merchants, and naturalists remained, shall we say, uh, imprecise. Etymology does not support the obvious suggestion that castor and castrate share a common origin (the Greek kastor comes from a Hebrew root for “musk”, while castration has an Indo-European pedigree, going back to an ancient verb meaning “to cut”). But one could easily be forgiven for growing attached to this spurious word history, for to do so would be to follow the great Isidore of Seville. In his 7th-century Etymologies, the Spanish polymath maintained, wrongly as usual, but no less wonderfully for that, that “castor comes from castrate. Indeed their testicles are included in the composition of medicines. What is more, when they sense the presence of the hunter, they castrate themselves and cut off their virility with their teeth.” Which makes them good Christians, in a sense. To quote Pierre de Beauvais, who writes about 600 years after Isidore, “The man who wishes to observe the commandments of God and to live in purity, should tear away his testicles, that is to say all of his vices, and throw what was formerly his into the face of the hunter, that is to say the Devil, who pursues him unceasingly.” Guillaume de Normandie and several other northern French bestiary authors give similar accounts.[ Richard de Fournival distinguishes himself around the same time by offering a precious alternative version of the beaver’s radical gesture: not as an expression of Christian virtue, but as a lesson in romantic love, tearing away the source of his passion the way a lover might tear out his enflamed heart to deliver it to his beloved. Fournival’s version may be read as an echo, in idealized form, of an earlier tale of saintly castration, and indeed one grounded in historical fact: the gelding of Abelard. But surely the most telling change, as we move across the ocean and from one species of Castor to another, lies in the new attention to and appreciation of dam construction, as the outward sign of the beaver’s singular greatness. Nowhere is this clearer than in Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France of 1744, which collects letters and journal entries from Québec from several previous years. In a letter to the Duchesse de Lesdiguières of March, 1721, Charlevoix writes that, “Here, Madame, is everything that the beavers might help to bring to this colony for [the improvement of] commerce: their industry, their planning, the concertedness and the subordination that we admire in them, their attention to outfitting themselves with comforts whose sweetness we did not previously know beasts to be capable of experiencing — all of this furnishes to man even better instruction than the ant, to whose example the Holy Scripture sends the lazy. They are, at least among quadrupeds, what the bees are among the flying insects. I have not heard it said by educated people that they have a king or a queen; nor is it true that, when they work in a group, there is a leader who commands, and who punishes the lazy ones. But by virtue of that instinct given to animals by Him whose providence governs them, each one knows what it should do, and does it all without confusion, without complication, and with an order that one cannot but admire.” When we move ahead to the middle of the 20th century, we find many of the themes that animated Charlevoix's writing on beavers still in place. In the 1950 Disney live-action documentary In Beaver Valley, the animal protagonist is still held up as the model of the hard worker. The beaver is contrasted with the otter, the otter as other, the “Gypsy” of nature, who is for its part, as an authoritative off-camera narrator tells us, “as frolicksome as beavers are industrious”. But if the beaver still works hard, the very idea of work has changed almost beyond recognition. It is no longer performed by settlers to secure their very survival, but by “citizens” of an established polity. The beaver “has no use for frivolity. Nor would he even pause to pass the time of day with a fellow worker ... He works the night shift too,” the narrator explains, as the camera cuts to a moonlit scene accompanied by a symphony of frogs and crickets. Charlevoix, sharing in the utopian vision that animated so many early settlers of the American continent, saw the beavers as primitive communists of sorts, working without compulsion in the absence of kings or queens, or even foremen, in harmony with a nature that would otherwise kill them. Mr. Disney, a decade or so before in Beaver Valley, had been busy busting unionization efforts of workers at Walt Disney Studios, smearing those involved as communists and traitors. For him, beavers do not work freely or in a way that flows naturally from their essence; rather, they work in “shifts”; as “solid citizens”, they do not ask why, or whether, things might be arranged any better. Je me souviens. I remember trying to burn down the Disneyland hotel when I was about 17, when they wouldn’t let me in ...

            so you walk out head to the park
            where the mist is practising the laying-on of hands
            open palms pressing downward
            — a kind of commission?

in the lightbox of the café your phone glows

tremella mesenterica

it was by the gorse on the oak
it seemed luminous almost floating

            shot from above & you’re pulled down
            oak bark fathoms deep drowned forest
            pale spikes blue-jewelled sea-gorse sea-holly
            vertiginous & at the centre rising towards you
            — sea plant? body part? — orange wings
            of new-hatched creature still sticky
            can’t unfold something surely born too soon

you look it up

            fruit body appearing during rainy weather
            gelatinous orange-yellow surface lobed or convoluted
            dries into a thin film shrivelled mass
            capable of reviving after subsequent rain

gut flower awful angel

most frequently found on dead but attached
and recently fallen branches

I remember Lew’s “Springtime in the Rockies: Lichen.” They can’t kill us all, as someone once said. “Lewie, you’re a goddam jewel.” OK.

            Tell me more about that.
            Can you be more specific?
            What have you tried to do about that?
            Have you tried to fix it?
            What has it cost you?
            How do you feel about that?

Does the prospect have enough pain to qualify for the next step?

There were three reports of an approaching sky intruder.

And the intruder, dissipating, blew suddenly into a purple smoke.

That’s when I explode

half a dozen

eggs

in

the

microwave.

The residue?

A bit like a piece of crystal

you’d stick in your armpit for luck.

Which is to say that, sensu stricto, utupë, and purpakana, refer to multitudinous entities, with their own personhood and intentionality that inhabit, mirror, and holographically constitute each being of the environment: humans and animals, plants, soils, bodies of water, rocks, and even tools. This multiplicity of inner images / beings can be perceived in visions and dreams; thus, these notions have a strong visual component. Sensu lato, they also denote shadows, scintillations, reflections, photographs, and TV images. Nonetheless, purpakana and utupë also can have aural, tactile, proprioceptive, and odorous expressions ... Davi Kopenawa describes a particular kind of utupë denominated xapiri pë. Xapiri are the owners and protectors of wildlife, they predate upon the predators of their protégées and upon the transgressors of their sacred sites. The differences between humans and animals are negligible compared to those between the former two and xapiri. They are the utupë not of modern animals but of their ancestors. Xapiri are tiny like sparkling specks of dust, yet they are magnificent luminous beings painted in bright red colors, black enveloping patterned designs, and wonderfully adorned with bright white shining headdresses, colorful armbands, and waist plumes. Xapiri replicate like mirror images, thereby escaping death ...

[Note: Sources: MC Hyland, “The End”, at Posit 17, “The End”, at Conduit 28; Alan Bernheimer, “Ipsatude”, at Across the Margin, 16 Sept 015; blurb for Anne Boyer, Money City Sick as Fuck, at Materials, May 019; JBR; blurb for Lisa Jeschke, Anthology of Poems by Drunk Women, at Materials, Apr 018; Lisa Jeschke, “Operation Vanitas Eikonal Heimat Horror Poem”, and Danny Hayward, quoted in Hayward’s “World History’s Teenage Diaries”, at Google Docs; JBR, quoting Frank Stella; blurbs for Shintaro Sato, Geography, Keizo Kitajima, Untitled Records Vol. 16, Wang Juyan, Uncharted+, Kan Sawa, heavens of light, planet of solitude, in shashasha Web Store, “NEWSLETTER｜7 June 2019”, email rec’d 7 Jun 019, approx. 12:27am PDT; JBR; Julia Carrie Wong, “Zuckerberg’s Hawaii estate: battle's latest turn ‘devastates’ local family”, at The Guardian, 6 Jun 019; JBR; Pamela Des Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Pamela Des Barres Shrine”, at DC’s, 4 Jun 019, JBR, “Autopoiesis LXXI”, at ZS, 14 Nov 07 (see ZS for source notes), “FCF 97,” at ZS, 13 Sept 09 (see ZS for source notes); Juliet Escoria, Juliet the Maniac, Georges Perec, Gary Indiana, Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985–1988 (ed. Bruce Hainley), quoted in Dennis Cooper, “4 books I read recently & loved: Niven Govinden This Brutal House, Juliet Escoria Juliet the Maniac, Michael Crowe An Attempt At Exhausting a Place in GTA Online, Gary Indiana Vile Days”, at DC’s, 3 Jun 019; JBR; Anne Branigan, “Dallas High School Cuts Off Valedictorian’s Mic After She Mentions Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice in Graduation Speech”, at The Root, 7 Jun 019; JBR; CA Conrad, “Silhouette of Whisper: (SOMA)TIC POETRY RITUAL FOR ‘BATHE THE DOOR...’”, at Bodega 82; JBR; WS Merwin, “The Silence Before the Harvest”, quoted in Jackie Wang, “Somewhere Else the Sound”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 30 May 019; John Armstrong, “Attending to Pierre Joris on Celan’s Threadsuns”, at Bebrowed’s Blog, 6 Jun 019; JBR; Arthur Rimbaud, “After the Flood” (tr. Wyatt Mason), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 29 May 019; Arias de Villalobos, “from Mercury” (tr. Javier Taboada); Pablo Antonio Cuadra, “The Mango Tree” (trs. Greg Simon and Steven F. White); National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, “from Never Again” (Tr. Writers and Scholars International Ltd, publishers of Index on Censorship); Susan M Schultz, “MAGA and the blank sign”, at Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 7 Jun 019; Donald J Trump, tweet, 7 Jun 019; Andy Martrich, “Glimpsing the new normal: On Kristen Gallagher’s ‘85% True/Minor Ecologies’”, at Jacket2, 31 May 019; JBR; Kristen Gallagher, “3 Pieces That Are At Least 85% Accurate”, at Fanzine, 25 Mar 016; JBR; Tongo Eisen-Martin, “Collateral White Skin”, at Harriet, 4 Jun 019; \Samuel R Delany, Dhalgren; Jordan Scott and Stephen Voyce, “FOIA request #SC 15–102-S: The detainee library”, at Jacket2, 31 May 019; Justin E. H. Smith, “In Castoria”, at Justin Erik Halldór Smith, 8 Jun 019; JBR; Helen Tookey, “Tremella mesenterica”, at Tentacular 3; JBR; Lew Welch; JBR; Marie Buck, “Pain Funnel”, at Brooklyn Poets, 22-28 Aug 016, “Food and Blood Face”, “Everyone Has Seven Selves”, “Blood-Soaked Tarot Deck”, at The Recluse 11; JBR; César E. Giraldo Herrera, “Shamanic Microscopy: Cellular Souls, Microbial Spirits”, in Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 29, Issue 1, Spring 2018, at AnthroSource, 4 Mar 018]

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With the Noose Around My Neck 132

But still. My own encounter with Isou’s work came near its end (he died in 2007). In 2001 he wrote a massive, 1400-page synthesis of his thought and method, called The Creative and the Innovative. In it he details how he invariably reads a classic work of philosophy, for instance, by Hegel: he scribbles furiously in the margins and indeed all over the pages with his critical annotations. Then, when he reaches the end, he takes apart the book’s spine, throws away any pages he has not written on, transcribes what he did write, and voila: he has written his own, new book. That is how, Isou says, one book, an inferior book by Hegel, begets a superior book by Isou: and that’s the theory of the creative and the innovative in an allegorical nutshell. “Iridescence is word we should use more often” she said. There is no skirting this approaching reality. With gentle tenderness she spelled out the dire scenario of death-in-life. Her poem, “The Round Spring” details the subtlety of interconnective holism:

Mist is the semen of the mountains

Where the streams are born

Mist is the semen of the forest

Where coolness is born

She talked about “the Guarani of the rain forest in Paraguay and Brazil [who] say that when the mist and the forest are gone, we will all be gone.” During the discussion that followed her reading she mentioned how, three times a day she practices the yogic corpse pose (savasana). Prophecy brings the past, present and future into a focused whole.

Water

and its thirst

are one

Speaking of which, at the beginning of the world, the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami, who were both brother and sister, husband and wife, stood in the High Field of Heaven and used their jeweled spears to stir the primordial swirl of water below. As they pulled their spears back up, drops of salty water fell from them and congealed to became islands, and thus the earth was formed.

The couple descended to earth and began to propagate.

The couple had sex, and Izanami gave birth.

Izanami gave birth to a malformed lump that was set adrift on the water.

The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

Izanami gave birth to an ugly island.

The couple had sex, and once again, Izanami gave birth.

Izanami gave birth to an island filled with beauty.

And the couple kept having sex, and Izanami kept giving birth.

Izanami gave birth to another island.

Izanami gave birth to a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh and an eighth island.

Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the islands flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

And when the land was done, the couple had sex and Izanami gave birth to the gods.

Izanami gave birth to the god of great matters.

Izanami gave birth to the god of rocky terrain.

Izanami gave birth to the goddess whose home stood upon a great rock.

Izanami gave birth to the god of entrances.

Izanami gave birth to the god of thatch.

Izanami gave birth to the god of rooves.

Izanami gave birth to the god of wind.

Izanami gave birth to the god of the sea.

Izanami gave birth to the god of estuaries.

Izanami gave birth to the goddess of river mouths.

Izanami gave birth to the god of foam upon the sea and the goddess of foam upon the waves.

Izanami gave birth to the god of the watershed of heaven and the goddess of the watershed of earth.

Izanami continued to have sex with Izanagi and gave birth over and over, the gods and goddesses flowing from her loins like rain flowing from heaven.

And when these gods were born, Izanami gave birth to the god of fire, who was so hot that he burned her vagina, which swelled and blistered and turned black from the flame.

Izanami fell terribly ill, but even so, she continued to give birth.

Izanami vomited. Her vomit became the god and goddess of metal ore.

Izanami defecated. Her shit became the god and goddess of clay.

Izanami pissed. Her urine became the god and goddess of gushing water and growth.

Izanami was still creating when death claimed her, and she sank into Yomi, the dark realm that lies beyond the veil of this world.

Distraught by the death of his beloved wife and sister, Izanagi wailed. You who’ve given birth to fourteen islands, to thirty-five gods and goddesses, how awful that you should die while this monstrous child lives!

And after crawling around her corpse, pulling his hair, and gnashing his teeth, Izanagi buried her on top of a mountain between two provinces, so she could rest halfway between heaven and earth, between one land and another.

Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi withdrew his sword and sliced off the head of his own son, the fire god, who had caused his wife so much suffering.

Still, Izanagi was not content. Izanagi decided to do what no god nor mortal had ever done before. He decided to travel to Yomi to bring her back.

Izanagi walked across provinces.

Izanagi walked across rivers and streams.

Izanagi walked across mountains and fields.

Izanagi walked across plains covered in evergreens.

Izanagi walked and walked until he reached the gently sloping road leading to Yomi.

Izanagi walked down the gently sloping road, deeper and deeper, lower and lower, until he came to a great hall. There, he found the door that forms the boundary between this world and the next.

From the opposite side of the door, Izanami heard her beloved husband and brother calling out to her.

Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Please come back. You haven’t finished giving birth.

You’ve given birth to many islands, many gods, and many goddesses, but there’s still a lot to do. Come! Come back with me!

Izanami appeared at the door and spoke.

Dearest husband! Dearest brother! I can’t believe it! Here you are, asking me to return so I can give birth again. Seeing you, I remember!

I remember what it feels to have sex and give birth!

I remember what it is to give birth and give birth and give birth some more.

But then her voice grew dark. You’re too late. I’ve eaten here in this dark land. The food from this place taints everyone and holds us captive.

Izanagi became despondent.

Dearest wife! Dearest sister! Is that true? You can’t return?

Izanami responded.

Dearest husband! Dearest brother! Let me speak to the gods here, but whatever you do, don’t look at me in the meantime. Promise me.

Izanagi promised.

And upon hearing his vow, Izanami retreated beyond the door.

Izanagi waited for Izanami to return.

Izanagi waited and waited.

Izanagi waited and waited and waited.

Izanagi thought about the promise he had made.

Izanagi waited and waited and waited and waited.

Izanagi began to think his promise had been a mistake.

What was she doing? Who was she with?

Izanagi’s irritation and frustration grew until he could wait no more.

Izanagi grew so impatient that he pulled out the great wooden comb he wore in his hair, lit it on fire, and opened the forbidden door.

And there she was.

Izanami.

But not his Izanami.

Her body had turned into a horrible, horrifying, heaving mass of maggots.

And as if that wasn’t enough, eight gods of thunder were filling her, penetrating her, and taking what was left of her rotten, decomposing corpse.

Her head was filled with great thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

Her breast was filled with fiery thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

Her belly was filled with black thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

Her vagina was filled with jagged thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

Her left hand was filled with young thunderbolts. She moaned in ecstasy.

Her right hand was filled with earth-striking thunderbolts. She moaned in growing ecstasy.

Her left leg was filled with thunderbolts that would split most peoples’ eardrums. She moaned in growing, mounting ecstasy.

Her right leg was filled with thunderbolts that would knock most people to the ground. She moaned in growing, mounting, overwhelming ecstasy.

Thunderbolts rushed through her, filling her, penetrating her, taking her rotten, decomposing, moaning corpse.

At the sight of the eight gods of thunder penetrating her, Izanagi recoiled in horror.

You’re not my wife! You’re not my sister! You’re not the venerable ancestor of all of the islands, gods, and goddesses!

Izanami shouted back.

Don’t you recognize me, my husband and brother? I’m the same Izanami you’ve loved for all these years. I’m the same Izanami that had sex with you over and over again, who suffered the pains of childbirth to create all the islands, gods, and goddesses that populate the earth. Now that I’m taking what little love I can find here in this dark world, are you really going to abandon me?

Izanagi grew frightened and fled.

Izanami pursued him and shouted.

I gave birth to the world! And still you shame me!

You shame me before the gods of Yomi!

You shame me before all of the islands and gods and goddesses I created!

You shame me before the world I created!

I curse you. I curse the islands I gave birth to!

I curse the gods and mortals that walk their surface!

I curse the world beneath your feet!

As Izanagi fled, Izanami summoned several foul-looking women from the land of Yomi and sent them chasing after him.

As Izanagi fled, he pulled a grapevine that he had used to tie up his hair, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire vineyard. Some of the women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull the grapes from the vines to eat.

As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

Take that, you dirty, dirty, old, wrinkled ...!

Your birthing days are over!

You’ll never give birth again!

You’ll never give birth again even if you try!

All you’ll ever do is bleed!

But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women.

As Izanagi fled, he pulled the bamboo comb that held the bundles of hair by his temples in place, and he threw it to the ground. From it emerged an entire grove of bamboo. Some of the foul-looking women who were hungry for earthly delights paused to pull up the bamboo shoots to eat.

As Izanagi fled, he shouted.

Take that, you foul-smelling ...!

Your breath stinks!

Your spit stinks!

Your blood stinks!

Your hair stinks!

Your vagina stinks!

Everything about you stinks!

But still, Izanami continued to pursue him with the foul-looking women. This time, however, she was joined by her eight partners — the gods of thunder — and their armies.

As Izanagi fled up the slope from Yomi, he grabbed three peaches from the trees growing there. Placing his faith in this fruit, known since the beginning of the time to ward off demons, Izanagi threw them, shouting at Izanami the whole time.

Your hair has fallen out!

Your teeth have fallen out!

Your breasts are shriveled up!

Your vagina is so loose it’s a wonder your uterus doesn’t fall right out!

The peaches embedded themselves in her rotting corpse. All of the other gods and armies ran away except for Izanami. But still she continued to pursue him.

Izanami grew closer.

Izanami grew closer and closer.

Izanami grew so close that Izanagi could smell the stench of her rotten flesh, the stench of her breath, the stench of her hair, the stench of her spit, the stench of her blood, the stench of her hair, and most of all, the stench of her vagina.

Not knowing what else to do, he rolled a giant boulder to block the path out of Yomi into the mortal world. The boulder was so large that not even one thousand of the strongest men could possibly move it. In fact, the boulder is so large that it still sits there today, in exactly the same place between the two realms of existence.

From the opposite sides of the boulder, the two shouted at one another.

Izanagi shouted to Izanami, your beauty is gone!

You’re nothing but a horrifying corpse!

You’re nothing but rotten flesh!

You’ll never give birth again!

You’re of no use to me or the world any longer!

Izanami shouted back at Izanagi, who are you to talk?

Your cock is useless!

Your cock won’t stand up!

Your cock is the most pathetic, shriveled up thing in the world!

Your cock will never produce anything ever again!

Your cock has lost all its procreative power!

Your cock is useless to me!

Izanagi recoiled. Was this really happening?

Izanami continued to shout.

Your chest is the flattest one in the world!

Your beard is the patchiest one in the world!

Your eyes are the yellowest, cloudiest ones in the world!

Your mouth is the most foul-smelling one in the world!

Your cock is the most shriveled, miniscule, miserable, and powerless one in the world!

Your cock will never create a thing! Ever!

I know how to make you pay.

Every day, I’ll reach from out from beyond the grave and strangle one thousand miserable mortals from your land.

I’ll keep this up until all mortals have perished at my hands.

I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

Horrified, Izanagi responded in the only way he could think of.

You say that every day, you’ll reach out and strangle one thousand mortals.

Well then, I’ll take on your sex.

Every day, I’ll give birth to one and a half thousand people.

I’ll keep this up until mortals spread to the ends of the earth you’ve created.

I’ll keep this up until the very end of time itself.

And with this, Izanagi left the boulder at the boundary between worlds and walked to a stream to purify himself.

And so it began.

This is the reason that every day, a large number of mortals die.

And this is the reason that every day, an even larger number of mortals is born into the world to replace them.

Just as Izanagi had predicted, mortals continued to be born.

And just as Izanagi had predicted, those mortals spread to the very ends of the earth.

This explains a lot. For instance, why the US government is moving ahead with a plan to strafe Midway Atoll with poison aimed at eradicating mice that are on a deadly rampage through one of the world’s most important seabird sites. The three low-lying islands, fringing coral reefs and lagoons that make up the Atoll refuge, located about 1,200 miles north-west of Honolulu, cover an area only slightly larger than New York City’s Central Park but are a crucial nesting area for around 3 million birds, including albatrosses and terns. Over 70% of the world’s Laysan albatrosses are found on Midway including Wisdom, a 68-year-old believed to be the world’s oldest wild bird. This year Wisdom hatched her 37^th chick. Apparently, mice inadvertently introduced to Midway are slowly eating the birds, bite by bite, not killing them outright and eating them, but nibbling them to death while they’re alive. The plan has been approved due to the understanding that the mice, but not the birds, will be attracted to the bait. Just in case, tho, they’re planning to move the birds to a different island. Speaking of which, Theresa May just resigned. Boris Johnson is next up, apparently. And no, there’s no punchline. But it gets even funnier. Take Trump and Pelosi. He calls her crazy, she says talk about crazy, we need to do an intervention, the poor guy needs to take some time away from all the stress and strain. So someone posts a video of her, slowing it down so her words are slurred and she sounds fucked up on something. Facebook refuses to remove it. Again, no punchline. So last week I did what UK, US and French military officials refuse to do: I went to Raqqa to see for myself what has happened to this city as a result of mass bombardments by the US-led coalition between June and October 2017. Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely. Think Dresden and you’d be close. Street after street of windowless, hollowed-out buildings. Miles of rubble. Piles of twisted metal. Utter ruin. There has been no assistance for residents desperate to rebuild, and entire families are reduced to living in bombed-out husks of buildings. Meanwhile, many children spend all day scavenging in the rubble, dodging between landmines, for bits of steel and plastic they can exchange for food. Maybe that’s the punchline. Forget about punchlines. “CITIZEN ASSISTANCE • 4:14 a.m. — A man shovelling snow on State Street told police he saw a strange orange glow coming from the eastern sky that might have been something on fire. Police determined the glow was probably the sun coming up for the day.”

In other words,

Doing is highly thought of and frequently abandoned

as at a bus stop beside a stunted gingko, and time is tossed

a laundry pile large as the crown of a tree

or the gravid animal of Pythagoras, and every mathematician dies

while runnels vacillate or do nothing astrophysically speaking.

I propose too that there are many things

with their capacity to collide or combine with other things

in the vicinity (that gravitational field of monsters)—

and budding dust small flies:

an idiom like Kierkegaard on Halloween.

It’s lively you might say

a color that doesn’t

make sense it’s so real that we think

riot of genes dashing madly

in broad daylight toward burial mounds and forests

arms of the sea.

I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle

with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her,

experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing

them on a loquat leaf,

Cross the silver mesh path there.

I have a necklace of bloody teeth for this cure.

Crickets sing too.

Do not remember me, unreal lord.

The hoot owl sings; the jaguar grins.

In the park, the volunteer fire department uses the toddlers’ climbing

structure to practice blindfold climbing maneuvers.

We lifted shot glasses to them filled with salmon fat.

We’d been eating tacos and falafels filled with confetti,

shredded newspapers. Headlines blackened our teeth,

black ozonal mirrors

where general slaughter is reflected

where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation,

by stunted mangrove withdrawal,

by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees,

so yes, the experiment consists of this entangled state being shared between experimenters, each of whom has the ability to measure either with respect to the basis or . We see that if they each measure with respect to , then they never see the outcome . If one measures with respect to and the other , they never see the outcomes . However, sometimes they see the outcome when measuring with respect to , since this leads us to the paradox: having the outcome we conclude that if one of the experimenters has measured with respect to the basis instead, the outcome must have been or , since and are impossible. But then, if they had all measured with respect to the basis, by locality the result must have been , which is also impossible, yes, once upon a nimbus, I arose out of a wireless wiki-wrinkle in the vast fabric of the cloud-garden of the mezzopolis, where synthetic music, astrophysics or radioastronomy, love and comedy in stereo as romantic comedy, epic poetry slam, electrochoreography, post-traumatic memory, and domestic tragedy reigned over the cloudy fiefdoms with a paradoxical, flower-wielding museology: forget me, forget-me-not, each muse advised. (Forget we did, however. Or at least, some of us forgot, alongside our data points.) The ninemuse junta migrated their labyrinths onto grassroots clouds of lesser capacity. Nanoseconds later, congestive network failure occurred. Global revenue vaporized. Forecasters murmured ominously, caveat venditor, let the seller beware. The junta’s doomed sovereignty was foreshadowed, however, by the mutiny of our programmed bots, those personified shapeshifters of disembodied code, and those rogues who accused the junta of dataphobia and dysgraphia: dear reader, in my humble opinion, a null hypothesis with a p-value of less than 0.05. Dispossessed, I was a homeless cloud. Without users to shepherd, without a server, without a flock to accommodate, I roved the data dumps of cryptoshredding, seeking jellyfish connectivity. Now I wax nostalgic. Now the ocean bleeds silver as antique circuitry under a fleet of stratocumulus at noon ... built in 1937 by brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par — sons of the man who developed Tiger Balm — bought in 1988 by the Singapore Tourism Board, Haw Par Villa Dragon World was restored by 1994. But the high entrance fees discouraged visitors, so the management incurred losses. Entry was free four years later. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman. But the highlights of the park are the Ten Courts of Hell. This attraction used to be set inside a 60-metre long Chinese dragon but that fell apart, so the attraction is now covered by grey stone walls. Tableaus of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail. See spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity by stone mallets. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man. Watch a demon fling a young girl into a hill of knives. Oh, and here’s a blunt metal rod jamming into a woman’s very large, fleshy heart. And check this out: an executioner pulling tiny intestines out of a bro tied to a pole. Anyway, and unsurprisingly, now that Singapore is a thriving global metropole, dripping with capital, no one goes to Haw Par Villa anymore, and whole sections have been shut down. But, looking back, I suppose has nothing to do with what actually occurred. On the eastern sky, rhododactylos. It was primidi 21 Floréal in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the thrift. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. Leyla Güven was on her 198th day of hunger strike in Turkey. Milkshakes overflowed on the streets of England, they had somehow become a weapon against Nigel Farage. The author of the Horrible Histories series opened his one-man-show at the local museum. A documentary aired in English: “As war rages in eastern Ukraine, Dima, a former leader of an ultra-right group, and Tanya, a self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist, make an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev.” Open letters addressed to Extinction Rebellion multiplied. Hundreds of Gilets Noirs occupied Charles De Gaulle airport, chanting, “Contre les déportations, et pour des papiers pour tous-tes!” İmam Şiş was on his 158th day of hunger strike in Wales. Zumba classes restarted at the local library. “We will not be selling milkshakes or ice-cream tonight,” the window of a McDonald’s noted. “This is due to a police request given recent events.” Facebook was awash with sentiments similar to, “If you thought Alabama’s abortion laws are bad, read up on Northern Ireland.” Lawyers were preparing to visit Öcalan for the second time in eight years. Why was no-one paying attention to the revolutionary Kurds? And so I left the “endless nights talking in tenement buildings” “cycling along dirt paths in the dark to Carbeth” “collective meetings lasting into the wee hours” “conversations about changing politics under broken streetlights and foliage and cigarette smoke” “mass texts about a raid or a deportation or a party or an arrest or a heartbreak” “waking up under skylights” “turning up for court support” “demos and counter-demos and counter-counter demos” “converging in Ibrox and Govan and Pollokshields and Partick” “J Hus and Hudson Mohawke and Kelela on loop” “proofing press releases” “more collective meetings” “moving tenement building every 6 months” — to live alone in a room in a house in a town in the furthest easterly outlier of England, at the edge of a street of a country that was not just a country or nation-state, but a nation-state that desired and resembled and announced itself as so; and was in turn recognized as one. A nation-state that supplied the body armour and helmets and helicopters and drones and missiles used to strike and shell that other country that is not a country, that is against the very idea of “a country,” and yet at times seems to resemble a country. A nation-state that put in place other nation-states; that consistently demonstrated economic and political interest in the building and demolishing and running of other nation-states and not-quite nation-states. A nation-state that was ecstatic to sell arms to a list of nation-states and not-quite nation-states which were in fact part of its own self-conceived list of “human rights abusers.” A nation-state that existed and was conceived as a nation-state based on the practice of conquest abroad and repression at home. I could see it all from the window — the Confederate flag hanging from a car boot, vacant amusement arcades lining the seafront, the cash-poor circus preparing for its next show, the sounds of kriolu and guinensi and n’golá and sãotomense drifting out from the cafes with their doors open all night, the last smokehouse closing, the freight ships out to sea, the seagulls fearlessly innovating new ways to find food, the industrial area less and less full of machinery and more and more occupied with artists and unlicensed boxing rings and foodbanks and makeshift spaces for prayer and raves, the anniversary of the Suffragettes burning down the pier, the B&Bs advertising colour TV, the rollercoaster test rides, the derelict high street, the stranded crew from the Malaviya Twenty stuck in the port — growing increasingly skilled at table tennis in their boredom. One thing next to another doesn’t mean they touch. I stayed indoors through it all — in a single room of an old vicarage turned B&B turned industrial cannabis-growing operation turned raided-by-the-cops turned derelict turned into my lodging arrangements. Have you seen Styx? The opening looks like a wildlife movie. Barbary macaque, who live on Gibraltar, clamber around an urban environment. The space is the all the island’s human inhabitants share with these other primates. This sequence ends. Now it’s late at night; a high-speed car chase causes a crash. Rescue services appear in an instant. Rike, the movie’s protagonist, is one of the paramedics. Soon she takes her sailboat on a voyage to Ascension Island. In a weightless passage of cinema she is watched in action heaving provisions on board and trimming the sails. The camera adopts seemingly impossible viewpoints, perched on the sea and confined in the claustrophobic cabin. Isolation underscores Rike’s self-sufficiency. But a scene is which she uses the radio to chat with the captain on a passing cargo ship, suggests that the ocean is wide but not empty, and her determined solitude will be interrupted. A storm is the harbinger of change. In the following calm, Rike finds she is close to another vessel. The ungainly shape is a fishing boat, sinking, overloaded with would-be emigrants, waving in distress. Trying to reach her boat, several jump into the sea. Only one boy, Kingsley, has the strength to swim to her yacht. She struggles to get him on board. He is unconscious. Her boat is too tiny to attempt to rescue them all, so she uses the radio again, this time to call for aid. She assumes that her appeal will promote immediate action. As a paramedic, she imagines the emergency support services to be available to all. In her understanding, everything — from the coast guard, to the sophisticated first aid equipment she carries — belongs within systems obliged to preserve life. But no. As I attempted to articulate my thoughts from English to Korean, I soon realized that there was no equivalent term for succinctly translating the word “blob.” This moment of uh uh uh uh uh resulted in me making a ridiculous face while waving my arms like they were the wings of a demented bird. In this context, a blob operates as a vehicle for heightening awareness towards intuitive and sensible meaning-making activities and facilitates the process of perceptual reconfiguration for alternative experiences to be accounted for. In other words,

A blob is a translucent black box

[Note: Sources: JBR; Adrian Martin, introduction to Isidore Isou, Treatise On Venom & Eternity, at SPD; Cecilia Vicuña, and Brenda Iijima, quoted in Iijima’s “Telluric Guerilla Visions and Effervescence: Will Alexander and Cecilia Vicuña”, at Entropy, 20 Feb 019; JBR; Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Hiromi Itō & Jeffrey Angles: ‘Birthing the World,’ from The Kojiki”, at Jacket2, 21 May 019; JBR; Oliver Milman, “US to strafe crucial nesting area for 3m birds with poison to eradicate mice”, at Guardian, 24 May 019; JBR; Kate Allen, “Raqqa is in ruins like a modern Dresden. This is not ‘precision bombing’”, at Guardian, 23 May 019; JBR; report in Amherst Bulletin, quoted by Aaron Schuman, in Ng Hui Hsien, “Aaron Schuman / SLANT / An interview with Aaron Schuman”, at Photomonitor, April 019 (re Schuman’s book Slant); image: Aaron Schuman, in Diane Smythm “Seeing leafy New England askew in Aaron Schuman’s Slant”, at British Journal of Photography, 19 Mar 2019; JBR; Lyn Hejinian, “Ten Remarkable Interpretations”, at The Spectacle 3; Nicole Brossard, “It’s Lively”, “Softlinks 3” (trs. Robert Majzels and Erín Moure), in Nicole Brossard: Selections; Michael Palmer, “Sun”, at Poets.org; Alice Notley, In the Pines; Ron Silliman, “You”, in The Alphabet; Nathaniel Mackey, “Song of the Andoumboulou: 77”, at The Nation, 10 Dec 07; Will Alexander, “Above the Human Nerve Domain”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Fed Moten, “come on, get it!”, at The New Inquiry, 19 Feb 018 (“with Thom Donovan, Malik Gaines, Ethan Philbrick, Wikipedia and the Online Etymology Dictionary”); Karen An-hwei Lee, The Maze of Transparencies, at SPD; Dennis Cooper, collaged from various unnamed sources, quoted in his “You are sort of there: Haw Par Villa”, DC’s, 27 May 019; JBR; Lotte L.S., “It Is Almost That”, at Poetry Foundation, 27 May 019 (“A note on the title: ‘It is Almost That’ is borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, composed of faltering phrases projected onto black-and-white slides; ‘the humming state of the not-quite this and not-quite that ... what familiar taxonomies cannot order.’”); JBR; Andrew Stooke, “In Encountering a Sinking Migrant Ship, a Pilot Confronts the Edges of her Civilization”, at Hyperallergic, 27 May 019; Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices]

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With the Noose Around My Neck 131

and thus those who aren’t there any more have already taken along immeasurably much of what those who were there did and resolved in memory of those who weren’t there immeasurably much is in possession of those who aren’t there and it will always grow more and more and since they have it in their possession and this possession is ever growing one can in regard to those who aren’t there speak of their memory of those who are there because those who aren’t there any more were once there not being there is something that is thought of while being there and being there is living off the possession which those what aren’t there are still accumulating in the name of those who aren’t there any more and are more because those who aren’t there anymore and are more have a name and we are there in their name, I swear it from head to toe from anus to navel, in the silver moonlight alongside the ships and the large buildings and the canals which cut into and through the city's innermost core the forest of masts the lines of beams and cordage crossing a thousand fold all in moonlight strange and magic at one corner but a glance into a brightly lit room where a hundred diligent hands were sewing sails, actually today everything is like yesterday except for the hallway where yesterday the bag kept surprising me today I am surprised that the bag is no longer there thus it would be more accurate to say that today everything is completely different from yesterday but then again not really either, I was privileged to meet him once in his offices at the South German Broadcasting Corporation in Stuttgart in the early Sixties, on a visit from London where I was working for the BBC and moonlighting as “Anton Hofman.” One-armed like Blaise Cendrars (the left “left,” as they say, on some dismal battlefield in 1942), tall, calm funny, and erudite, HH had (as he put it) “a lasting soft spot for the black banner of anarchy. My innermost conviction is anarcho-syndicalist. Never mind that I know it can never be realized, but that is where my secret love lies,”

if I knew Greek I would converse with you in Greek

but I don’t know any Greek

when pressure mounts there is increased danger of everything bursting

even though pressure can lead to nice things though maybe a little weird

who loses steam gnaws bones

the bird quite clearly flown to Idaho railroad embankment Thoreau

crumpled and gummed-up moon

we have lived under this moon

crumpled and gummed-up moon

we have lived under this moon for a long time

crumpled and gummed-up moon

it may well be we have lived under this moon for too long

my language is a noise

spontaneous activity reaches

possible multiple signals also

changing course surging over

building blocks to clear six feet

waves until that sort of engine

isolates fish ancestors

leaking blood into panic swirling held

formed by

open holes in

a single hop through tephra

mutating profiles from spinning radii

That is the gesture I wish diligently to communicate for her to guzzle with memory’s long artifice and that is the transit during which the remembered syllables which are translated so erotic so political, all ten of them, learn the excellent culture of timeliness asleep or separated by distance the face moving across. So there are always at least two times in the work, and the decisions composing their intervals and nodes place the work in the everyday. May I call it “the city”? It is going along. It is the interval of “if” attended and extended into material choice. Besides panic, Pan invented panpipes. Will consumers hunger for lab-created fish? I don’t mean revitalized fish ancestors. They’re growing fish meat in vats these days. Not fish, just meat. To be 3-D printed. And for dessert? “Cultured plant cells were produced from lingonberry, cloudberry and stoneberry, and were found to have even higher nutritional value than fresh berries. The researchers, from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Center, said the cultures were higher in protein and fiber, and were also rich in polyphenols and unsaturated fatty acids. The researchers claim the cultures taste like fresh fruits ...” ok,

[in the original the mimeograph did not reproduce the following line]

we) was

trying to fix the place up, (we) was

to finish the procedure, it was

an architectural question, a spirit / spit one

I think the thing is built of prunes & glue. The Grand Combustion

Carnival, Columbus the Cat Dancing in Flames, rocks

fall apart and citizens wonder: If man is the greatest natural wonder,

what? Time turns to that motionless minute

“read in the back of the animal’s eye,” (misread?)

(I am guessing misread)

for $6.00 an hour.

So the place where I was born has no forests, and no tall trees grow there. That does not mean it is lacking in vegetation, for there are certain kinds of trees: rowan, cedar, alder, and willow ... But the tallest of these “trees” will reach no more than a few centimeters above the earth. I admit there’s a way I look a little like him; we have the same sad eyes. His translation begins, “a throw of the dice Even when thrown in eternal circumstances in the midst of a wreck be It that the abysm whitened displays furious ...” Abysm, I thought. But I was only pretending to think about literature. I was on Craigslist looking for a job. Far, far below, there was some sort of silvery substance. I could see it glittering there. What I interpreted this to mean was that my life might not be my life. I might have wandered into someone else’s story and was now failing to cease residing there. So I reached out and he sent me this long list, including “WE ARE THE ASTEROID”, “TRIASSIC WEATHER AHEAD”, “THERE IS NO AWAY.” Then one day, in a traffic jam outside the Holland Tunnel, I came upon one of those traffic message trailer signs, glitching, glitching. It was like poems by Peter Inman or David Melnick were coming up on the screen. It made me very focused and present for some reason. “EFFICIENCY IS PETROSPEAK.” I took the photos from 40,000 feet up. The series was inspired by the Kanō school in Japan, which is famous for painting landscapes onto gold and silver leafed surfaces; it’s a school of painting that lasted for over 700 years. In my case, instead of applying paint by hand onto the surface, I’m printing the landscapes using a UV acrylic inkjet printer that I’ve adapted to become my paintbrush so to speak. In JAKOBSHAVN I what you’re seeing is glacial melange, the remnants of the calving process. Those who hold this view say that a chick peeps when it is cold and twitters when it finds a warm place as if it were a little machine, not because it actually wants to communicate that it feels distress or pleasure. Which is to say that she stayed up until five in the morning, writing about how “the crisis” isn’t over, about how “the crisis” isn’t actually the kind of “crisis” they are calling it, but “a crisis” of something completely different, something so deep in the trenches of crisis that we can barely recognize it as anything other than our lives. “To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes,” someone wrote. “Today — what a mocking word in this timeless cave,” someone wrote from an underground experiment on Day 156. To think about it is to be the sequined woman lying flat inside the magician’s box; to watch the saw come down, to watch its blade cut straight through the middle of you, to watch your hips fall out from underneath your ribs. Let us talk about it as though “it” ever existed. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others — they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. I was not in any position to distinguish one text from another — a movement toward the inside from a movement toward the outside. The texts became whole rooms, and the rooms became whole houses, and the houses became whole streets, and the streets became a yearning occupation of a city, not a country, but a city, in which lush syllogism invoked the need to seize this experience and let it become sentences. The texts became a form — the longest form, one which is still now occurring, ongoing, occurring, ongoing. The water dries up before the dark blue hyacinths are placed into the vase. Cuz in utopia they don’t got no rules and the president’s “criminality pure and simple” is reserved for politicians just like him. In utopia the monkey lies down with the rhinoceros and the ghosts haunt the ghosts leaving everyone else to fends for themself. In utopia, you lose the battles and you lose the war too but it bothers you less. In utopia no one tells nobody nothin’, but I gotta tell you this. In utopia the plans are ornament and expectations dissolve into whim. In utopia, here is a pivot. In utopia, love goes for the ride but eros’s at the wheel. In utopia, the words sing the songs while the singers listen. In utopia, 1 plus 2 does not equal 2 plus 1. In utopia, I and you is not the same as you and me. In utopia, all that is solid congeals, all that melts liquefies, all that is air vanishes into the late afternoon fog. I am about as capacious as the next guy. Mescal is my drink of choice this year. Section 3, quadrant 822.3856, on uneven tide warnings. However, available room is subject to prior sale. Ergo, there’s no Holocaust museum for Native people. Or one for peasants. Like any disfunction, if you don’t deal with your disfunction at home, it just gets worse. The feeling is only amplified when the same mother-daughter duo helps Arya Stark. Our trained assassin Night King-killing heroine is apparently no match for a stampeding crowd of Kings Landingers when she is nearly trampled to death. Until the mother reappears in the crowd and offers her hand and pulls her up. Arya is soon separated from the duo again. A significant time passes before Arya encounters them once more. Now, Daenerys and Drogon, her nearly eponymously named dragon, have almost completed their task. The city is in ruins, death is all around, the killing is no longer discriminate. Daenerys and her forces — even the usually quite moral Unsullied general Greyworm — are burning, stabbing, and beating unarmed men, women, and children. When Arya, careening through the ash-strewn streets, stumbles into an entryway, she finds a mass of huddled women and children. Ever the hero, she commands, “You can’t stay here. You have to keep moving.” “We can’t go out there,” one woman responds. “You have to,” says Arya. “Everyone out there is dead,” the woman retorts. “If you stay here, you’ll die!” Arya exclaims. She grabs the only two people willing to trust her — the peasant mother and daughter. The three flee down the street together, until the mother is injured by a passing horse ridden by what appears to be a Dothraki warrior — eye eee, a member of Team Daenerys. Arya and the daughter help her up, but she is too injured. They can’t move quickly enough. She begs Arya, “Take her!” Arya pulls the girl along, but she resists and runs back to her mother who is now collapsed in the street. Dany and Drogon approach from the air. Fire engulfs everything. When Arya awakes at the end of the episode, she and the viewer are treated to a view of the mother and daughter’s bodies, charred black and in a death embrace. The girl still clutches her horse figurine, also charred black. Again we will have heard music ... a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. It had to do with angles. The piano’s legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they’d have shattered, besetting one’s ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamps’ descending nude and Picasso’s weeper into one. It was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley’s “Touching” on the Mr. Joy album. No way could we say title told all. Or even half. Or even 150%, or even

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do you know what it tastes ^ thern, for art is jonijnciators, *st

but now, look at me

if we reveal the crime

dear audience

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we ate them.

In other words, as he explains in Trevor Paglen’s new book, From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, Merlin’s chief animating impulse is fairly simple: “Something always remains,” meaning that every project, no matter how clandestine, leaves a trace — a scrap of metal, a security badge, a commemorative mug. Merlin has amassed a trove of such traces, which are often the only public evidence of highly classified operations. These crumbs offer rare insight into the shadowy machinations of the state, the violence and surveillance committed in our name, even if we don’t know about it. Or, as Scriptures has it, Those without female reproductive organs must refrain from legislating female reproductive organs (Fallopians 1:1). Yet at our very beginning we had great unification. Today I could only see, breaking the fundamental particles, solitary quarks are coming down like ash (all we are is dust in the wind, peeps), landing in the branches of the shaved Krishnachura tree. We are getting delayed my Dear Reader. Could you hear the inarticulate noise from the Suicide Squad of Plantae Kingdom? Oh, My Dear Reader, just listen to that singer, “Oh Allah, Give me cloud give me water give me shade ...” Only when my integrity is clean is the frequency audible. One may hope that either sort of change, as its seeming or real inevitability emerges, will be realized. Brud is reading War of the Worlds on the radio no, Brud is a transmedia studio that creates digital character-driven story worlds. Among others, brud has created Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela. She’s supposed to be sentient AI but what she really is a cartoon quote unquote or maybe I should remove the quotes because it’s 2019 and in first-world hell this is a thing, she’s what’s known as an influencer. Miquela has 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares pictures of her need I add imaginary life in Downey CA of all places, and where she proclaims her support for LGBTQ+ rights and Black Lives Matter. Anything that helps her sell shit, apparently. In the past few years, she’s shilled for Uggs ads, interviewed artists at Coachella and collaborated with Prada. In her latest project, a video for Calvin Klein, she kisses the half-naked (and heterosexual) supermodel Bela Hadid as a voiceover proclaims some marketing nonsense about dreams and doors. Called out for queerbaiting, CK apologized. Called out for kissing a cartoon, I’m not aware Hadid had anything to say. Lil is far from a one-off gimmick: CGI influencers are all over the place. Take Shudu Gram, a quote unquote black Instagram model and here I won’t remove the quotes because he was created by a white photographer; Liam Nikuro, who is quote unquote Japanese; and there’s YouPorn virtual spokeswoman, Jedy Vales. Last year a Japanese man (made of meat, apparently, lab-grown or otherwise) married a celebrity hologram, Hatsune Miku, prompting discussion about whether “digisexual” should be considered a new identity. In other words, a Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past, which is at the same time the future. Both ways, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay and make whole what has been and what will be smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him he knows not where, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call ... what we used to call ... now we don’t know what to call it, really. In other words, as Tommy Pico, on whose Kumeyaay land I find myself living these days, put it, ‘Ppl are too busy callin themselves ‘poets’ to notice the canary died” ...

two paths diverged in a

/ half stank of blood.

you come across this every decade

a fork in the doggerel —

Group C are right,

it was good

so good

to get the words down

just right, to drain

the swan.

and that there is a small beard dude in the 7

dwarfs

that satan cannot find supposedly

and that site Quora.

Obvs. Or,

Prism Warders,

we warm a spectrum

of pilot-light clumped 5 at discrete temperature points ok

out of 7 total = 2 spigots over for object & subject etc.

shift french fries sheared

gears in the wind powered

buggy I love this

buggy,

imagine trimming a moth

down to just one city,

three different times

I smelled popcorn

popcorn was a snack

made by steaming the

seeds of elliptical

vegetable matter

grown in the musky

dirt of a place we

used to call I forget the

name it was kind of

nice like parsnip ice

cream is nice on a hot

solar vortex far away

from the atolls that make

up the Maldives Waffle

cones were fried

convex sugar toasts

you’d like them

they were very bad

for us ...

Even today, the Fire Fighting School battles fires staged upon an elaborate set of pseudo-storefronts and houses, while seismological researchers burrow explosives into the silt to test liquefaction response to earthquakes (the island has sunk five feet since the Loma Prieta quake of 89) and electrolysis is performed on the aging water pipes. The moth eradication project attempts to manage whole populations driven here by shifts in the global ecology, in other words BARGE has had to re-adjust its methods to fit the “facts on the ground,” even as those facts filter themselves through ever-more paranoiac scrims. For instance, when the window opened behind me and the voice hailed me with her version of events, to be narrated in a kind of speculative poetics that the guidebook had yet to accommodate, the feeling was not of surprise as much as the recognition that this encounter was meant to happen at exactly this juncture in the field work. Thus the strange white car that would often be waiting at off-limit sites right as I was approaching would turn up in the rear-view mirror at exactly the moment I was wondering aloud where it had been hiding. Of course one would turn a corner and suddenly come across a three-legged dog trotting down an empty street. Of course there was a “Naval Ghost Blimp” that disappeared from the island years ago, only to show up in Daly City, its engines running and its pilots missing. In this surveillance photo, BARGE agents will have been seen removing soil samples from Halyburton Court, in the so-called “Area 12” site on the Northwest corner of the island. On the other side of the fences live mostly low-income families of color, most of whom have been told little of the Navy’s testing results of this and other sites, beyond having to agree not to plant any produce or other edible plants in their yards as a condition of their rental contracts with the Treasure Island Development Authority. This tree is found close to Mile 20 of the Catalina Highway up Mt. Lemmon, home of the southernmost ski area of the United States. It grows on a small hill above the Palisades trail, which drops thousands of feet to the East Fork of Sabino Canyon (see also “Populus fremontii S. Watson”). Elevation at the Palisades trailhead is approximately 8000 feet. Surrounding the tree are other Ponderosa Pines of varying ages and sizes, many quite large, as well as a number of smaller Arizona White Pines. This area was badly burned by the 2003 Aspen Fire. Trees are spaced widely apart and dead and downed limbs and trees are present everywhere. The ground is carpeted with pine needles and large, firm cones, interspersed with the ferns that have re-colonized the burnt area. About 120 feet tall and perhaps 200 years old, the tree has beautiful ruddy bark punctuated by dark jigsaw lines. The trunk smells strongly like vanilla. Its lower 20 feet are quite burned along one side, but it is alive and healthy, being naturally resistant to fire. Orange fungus is present on the burnt bark, along with dried tears of yellow sap. OK. In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared the end of art. To quote: art is ‘on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.’ Why? Because, for Hegel, art satisfied the same spiritual needs as philosophy. He goes on to say that, while art’s spiritual capabilities reached their climax in classical Greece and then began their demise, philosophy reached its ‘highest destiny’ around 1807, when — what else? — Hegel published his Phenomenology. But. But but but. Check out Thomas Feuerstein’s Pancreas, a processual sculpture that transforms books into sugar to feed human brain cells growing inside a brain-like shape. What books, you might ask. Just one, actually. And not just any book — the neuroglia cells are nourished solely by one particular book — what else? — The Phenomenology. Which is shredded and soaked in water, before being pressed through an artificial intestine full of bacteria and broken down into C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁, which is then transformed into brain. Perhaps we can understand Pancreas as a provocation that counters Hegel’s original provocation etc. This is called dialectics, I believe. In any case, by connecting the brain to the stomach, a brain-gut link is emphasised that challenges ideas of pure thinking inherent in philosophy. As Candyman says: ‘There are no boundaries anymore, only distorted boundaries between what we used to split into nature and culture, body and mind, matter and information’. Which is why, one morning shortly thereafter, we decided to visit the Centre for Emotional Materiality, to watch “A Blobifesto.” As I stood there, I felt like the blobbiness of it all was radically penetrating my being. After the video we looked at each other and said: “Who knew? We were blobologists all this time!” Here was a new lens through which we could view, well, everything. So we stole as many postcards from the show as we felt morally okay with and handed them out to almost everyone we encountered over the next few days. We are intimates with these proto-beings, these floaters. I felt that the sound was coming from my bones. Once, my finger accidentally touched the lathe cutter, and half of my nail disappeared. Blood dripped down into the cooling oil. My co-workers rushed me to the town hospital. At the hospital, I discovered so many injured workers, mostly migrants like me. Some had injured half a finger, some the whole hand, the leg, the head. They were bandaged in white gauze stained with blood. The man on my left, with a head injury, worked in the plastic factory; the one on my right, with three severed fingers, worked in the moulding factory. The one on the right moaned, his three left fingers completely severed. The doctor came over, hung up a fluid bag, inserted a catheter and gave medication orders, all done expressionlessly, then left the room. Looking at his gauze that had been steeped red in blood and then turned pale yellow, I suddenly remembered, no one is going to argue that we need to find a halfway point between fish and the planet Mars. But water is not the same thing as the process by which water was chemically understood by humans: the latter includes Antoine Lavoisier as one of its elements, but not the former. Lavoisier is a major ingredient in the history of chemical understanding of water, but not an ingredient at all of water itself.

            Roy SAYS HE HAS whoops says he has
            a new metaphor, except it’s not
            a metaphor A literal part of his
            heart
            has died
            says the echocardiogram
            he got before starting a new med
            but it’s fine he just needs to eat more farty
            salads and Mamihlapinatapai is the most precise
            word according to linguists
            from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
            It means something like when you leave a café bathroom and
           want to tell the next person in line it wasn’t you who
            took the smelliest dump in American history but you keep walking
           I mean it means well it’s more like when two ppl look
            at each other and the look
            is that they both
            know ...

Cesium has also been found in a surprising place — beneath the coastal beach sands close to brackish water tables up to 60 miles away from the meltdown site. Scientists have learned that where currents washed highly contaminated water onshore, the cesium “stuck” to sand particles in brackish water (a mix of salty seawater and fresh groundwater, as is found under beaches), but becomes “unstuck” when soaked with salt water. Therefore, the accumulated cesium embedded under beaches along Japan’s coast is being slowly released over time as waves continue to saturate the sand. Scientists estimate that the amount of cesium being released in this manner is equal to that of the ongoing releases and runoff from the disaster site itself, and from outflow from rivers continuing to carry cesium from land to the sea. And that ain’t all. Millions of tons of contaminated, radioactive water (used to keep the molten reactors and spent fuel rods cool to prevent further radioactive releases, and from pumped groundwater that continues to seep into the reactors’ basements) is stored on-site in more than 900 tanks. Despite efforts to prevent seepage using “ice walls” (human-created permafrost), and special processing technology intended to clean radionuclides from the water, Tepco was forced to admit late last year that these efforts had failed, confirming that levels of several long-lived, cancer-causing isotopes were still present in the stored water at more than 100 times legally permitted levels. While more water continues to become contaminated every day, the only known plan to deal with it is to release it all into the ocean. MOAS are therefore pleased that our mission to deliver medical and famine relief to Yemen will shortly come to fruition and our goods will soon be arriving to the port of Aden. Our two containers en route are carrying €126,687.15 worth of medical assistance and 27 tonnes of Edesia’s Plumy Doz ready-to-eat sachets for preventing malnutrition in kids. Which is one reason why, in the Resurrect ritual I use a mix of audio field recordings of recently extinct animals. I take time each day no matter where I am to lie on the ground and saturate my body with these extinct sounds. Part of the ritual involves sleeping in my car in Walmart parking lots. Outside in the parking lots each night, and this is true no matter where I am in the United States, there are homeless families living in cars. Another component is listening to the extinct animal sounds on headphones while walking in a spiral formation inside the Walmart, working my way into the middle of the store. At the center of the spiral I find a spot to kneel, entering in and out of the space of

the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in

the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby

in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the

entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in

and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out

of the space between the hands.

The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing

inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and

argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria

mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and

titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized

glass and concrete.

can you feel it?

does it hurt?

is it hard?

is it cold?

does it weigh much?

is it heavy?

do you have to carry it far?

the format must be set: 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 1 hour

white wings of a magpie

wave glory

soap

[Note: Sources: Helmut Heissenbüttel, Schematic Development of Tradition (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), “Lesson 3 from Textbook 10” (tr. Pierre Joris), Anselm Hollo, Heissenbüttel’s “Essay in Greek” (tr. Anselm Hollo), in “Helmut Heissenbüttel (1921-1996)”, at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania; Tom Raworth, “Cat Van Cat”, at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999); Lisa Robertson, “If We”, at at boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium (Spring, 1999);“The Mythological Origin of ‘Panic’”, at Merriam Webster; headline in San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 May 019 (hat tip K); JBR; Caroline Macdonald, “Lab-grown fruit cultures could yield new superfoods”, at Food Dive, 15 Mar 018; JBR; Proclus, Fragments from the Commentary on the Chaldaean Oracles, at Tertullian; Eleni Sikelianos, “Essay: Seven Aspects of Milking Time”, “[You can be King of the Corners]”, in Earliest Worlds; JBR; Yuri Rytkheu, The Chukchi Bible (tr. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse); Lucy Ives, “A Throw of the Dice”, at BOMB, 14 May 019; JBR; Justin Brice Guariglia, quoted in Meredith Smith and Rachel Kirk, “Mixing Art and Environmental Science to Catalyze Social Change”, at State of the Planet, 10 May 019; Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan, Songs, Roars, And Rituals: Communication in Birds, Mammals, and Other Animals; JBR; Lotte L.S., “Not to speak about / only to speak nearby”, at Harriet, 13 May 019; JBR; Charles Bernstein, “In Utopia”, at Poetry Society of America; JBR; Edgar Heap of Birds, quoted in Sheila Regan, “The Spirits that Haunt the Words of Edgar Heap of Birds”, at Hyperallergic, 16 May 019; Cord J Whitaker, “Game of Thrones’ Peasants are a Problem of White Supremacy—and Its Victims, too”, at In the Middle, 19 May 019; Nathaniel Mackey, “[from] From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, Volume Five”, at Floor 1; JBR; part of the result of scanning and converting section 128 of Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” to Microsoft Word; JBR; The Paris Review, quoted in ARTBOOK | D.A.P., “New from Trevor Paglen: Commemorative coins, patches, mugs and other ephemera from the shadowy world of US military aviation and aerospace”, email rec’d 20 Jun 019, approx. 10:55am PDT; JBR; something K sent me; Runa Bandyopadhyay, “Destination: Nature Roy”, Nora Bateson, “Without Shields (the voice of change is changing)”, Steve Benson, “For the Time Being”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); Brud, at Brud, and Arwa Mahdawi, “Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future”, at The Guardian, 21 May 019; JBR, “Who Killed the World”, Helen Bridwell, “I Was Right Dear”, Brandon Brown, “For My Future Children”, David Buuck, “from Buried Treasure Island”, Wendy Burk, “from Tree Talks”, in The end of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); JBR; Martin Grünfeld, “Bio art and the end of philosophy (Feuerstein & Hegel)”, at Genealogy of the Posthuman, 21 May 019; JBR; Janice Lee, foreword to Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, quoted in Lee’s “A Blobcounter: Editor’s Foreword”, at Entropy, 20 May 019; Jane Bennett, blurb for Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs, at The Accomplices; Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Iron” (tr. Isabelle Li), at Sydney Review of Books, 22 Nov 018; Graham Harman, “the real problem is taxonomy, not anthropocentrism”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 22 May 019; Tommy Pico, “from Feed”, at The Offing, 15 May 019; Morgan Corviday, “Update: Eight Years After Fukushima”, at The Northcoast Environmental Center, 1 Feb 019; MOAS, “Yemen Situational Update”, email rec’d 23 May 019, approx. 7:06am PDT; JBR; CA Conrad, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 3 Sept 016; Juliana Spahr, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001”, in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Adam Pendleton, “Black Dada”, in Black Dada Reader]

Posted at 09:04 AM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the Noose Around My Neck 130

apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;

bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,

citrus trees; cicadas exist;

cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;

killers exist, and doves, and doves;

haze, dioxin, and days; days

exist, days and death; and poems

exist; poems, days, death

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought

seclusion and angels exist;

widows and elk exist; every

detail exists; memory, memory’s light;

afterglow exists; oaks, elms,

junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;

eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar

exist, and the future, the future

exists; a rib-less mouse embryo exists; a

sterile male screwworm exists; a sample of

e. coli x1776 (a specimen designed

to be harmless and unable to survive

outside the laboratory) exists; a

stuffed transgenic BioSteel goat

named Freckles, genetically modified

to produce spider silk proteins

in her milk, exists; “That was then.

This is now” exists; a cow

exists; 70% of all birds currently

alive are chicken and other poultry,

enough to create their own

geological strata, they exist;

heat-resistant zooxanthellae,

the photosynthesising symbiote of

coral polyps, might come to exist;

Walmart’s patented mechanical pollinator

drones might come to exist;

DARPA’s genetically engineered insects

that carry viruses for the gene-

editing of plants, ostensibly for altering

crops in the field, but which could

conceivably be extended to ecosystems,

to build them or wipe them out, might

come to exist; Vincent Fournier’s white fennec

(Zerdas hypnoticus), with the ability to

access and control minds

might come to exist; the rain bird

(Aucellus pluvia), another of Fournier's

imagined creatures, with

the ability to provoke rainfall

by disturbing the clouds’ static electricity

might come to exist; Donna

Haraway’s “sympoiesis” might come to exist;

Shen Shaomin’s “unknown creature /

three headed monster” might

come to exist; Meton of Athens

perched himself on a wicker chair in

helpless silence — 432 BC —

to catalogue lunar orbits and positions,

and his relief to discover time

circles the heavens via white shadow,

every nineteen years, to restart

the same day and date it began, exists;

crater by crater, it’s easy to believe that

god-magic and sell-by dates exist;

someone will kill themselves, suicide

exists; for decades, archaeologists believed

the Paleolithic bone fragments found secreted

in the foothills of the Alps were

dotted and marked haphazardly,

as though some idle caveman wiled away

bored hours on the first pointillism;

indeed, these the first moon calendars

exist; And if you’re like me, it’s time to ask “who decides which theories are valid when none of them ever work?” Okay, picture a guerilla war in the streets of fifth century Alexandria between factions of solar and lunar calendar acolytes. It happened: blood and light, one half excising their months when the fingernail of the waning moon is clipped clear off, the other stretching upward to feel for gradients in warmth like gibbons testing the air for God. “Viper 33,” radios Oh-kay City five-oh Kyle Holcomb. “I think it’s a cap gun, but they are shooting something off.” He approaches the wooden fence that rings the house’s yard, the video shows, and he moves toward one of the many holes in it. He waits for a moment, his gun pointed through the gap in the fence. Someone, Lorenzo Clerkley, black of course, appears. “Show me your hands! Drop it!” Holcomb says, firing four shots in rapid succession. According to the video footage, no more than six-hundredths of a second passes. Murder exists. Speaking of which, according to the blurb for Friedrich Christian Delius’s The Pope's Left Hand, why is Gaddafi Berlusconi flattering thirty Berber horses, and why did Augustine have to bribe the Emperor with eighty Numidian stallions to enforce the invention of original sin? I come to you dripping from head to foot / from every pore, you’re covered with blood and dirt:

I come to you in the warehouse after work

over lunch I suck you off in a public park

against a backdrop of container ships

you drip from head to foot with bankruptcy

from every pore with debt, I’m covered with

food stamps, worker’s comp

I feel your presence in the joint account

your expenditures and wages 

I touch them

It feels like the time I watched Stan Brakhage’s autopsy movie, The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, curled up on a couch with friends, and I saw the scalp pulled back to reveal that the brain is green, and I could not forget it. In the ACT UP documentary, the ashes in the boxes, the ashes that get thrown over the White House fence, look like the lung that is crushed in a doctor’s hand in the documentary Harlan County, USA. Harlan County, USA documents a miners’ strike in the early 70s. In the segment on black lung, a doctor or perhaps a union man holds something black and small and crumbly, it looks like paper in his hand, and, closing his hand, he lets it crumble and disintegrate into something even more like old brittle paper; the bits of lung fall through his fingers to the floor. Later in the movie, a woman stands before a crowd at a solidarity demo for the miners, and while she’s not a miner, she’s as close to a miner as you could get, she says, through her son, her father, her husband having been miners. She was there in the 30s for Bloody Harlan County. She tells the crowd they have nothing to lose but their chains. She sings the song she wrote back in the 30s, “Which Side Are You On?” Though unless you have an autopsy, maybe your brain won’t even have the chance to be exposed to air and become green instead of pink. What color is it when dead but not exposed to air? I’m going to assume gray. Your gray brain would never have registered Anna Karenina or Moby-Dick, and it would not matter at all. The brain winds up gray either way, and in that state cannot articulate what it once thought of Moby-Dick or Anna Karenina. It is very unlikely anyone will ever even wonder if you read Anna Karenina. So that, say, the lung was lost to history except for its documentation on a strip of film, and then that strip of film also crumbled like a lung — but this crumbling of the film strip was itself recorded, so that instead of watching footage of a lung crumbling in someone’s hand we would watch footage of footage of a lung crumbling in someone’s hand itself being crumbled in someone’s hand. Sex fluids stain the comforter and look like dried salt; blood dries on a condom in a little silver trash can. Inside people are very cold, while outside I too am cold but not nearly as cold; lipstick is not for
 

toenails, although

anything can be
forced.

Now here

I’m flooded

with flowers by

cumin.

Lucretius

grabbed my arm

and led me

to the spot

where he went nuts.

I protected an

elephant as much

as I could.

What

do I ride?

The solar discus?

This is, therefore, a strange commitment, both impossible and necessary, for a living being supposed to be alive: « I would like to learn to live. » Which reminds me of the woman hitting the door of a Starbucks with a straw yelling, “Meeting at Dunkin Donuts! Meeting at Target! Meeting at Burger King! Meeting at Taco Bell!” Her belt is broken Christmas lights. “In the war,” says ta man warming his face, “Sergeant Conway called sex P-Touch. You believe such a thing? We’re in Paris and he’s asking any set of legs Excusez moi, fancy a game of P-Touch? You believe such a thing? By your expression, you don’t believe such a thing. Why not? Oh my, oh yes,” the man continues. “Conway. Tough son of a bitch. Head like a soup can. After the war drove a forklift in a carrot factory, if you can believe such a thing. I can tell from your face that you don’t believe such a thing,” he says, now cleaning his front teeth with his finger. “So first we turned off the air conditioner, and then we turned off the one on the second floor. Then we turned off the refrigerator and the electric cooking equipment in the adjoining cafe, the power of the multi-vision in the foyer, and the power of the vending machine in a space about ten metres away. One by one we took away these continual noises, which together created a kind of drone ... Hess was very interested in this and said things like, ‘From now on maybe I should do a performance of turning off sounds.’” This town in Ohio was like one of those imagined performances recast as a police operation.

To start with, he ate my sweater.

The wool was instantly

transformed into snow flakes, which fluttered

in the air as they fell to the pavement.

They produced a crystalline sound,

they seemed to be made of a wood, not snow,

farther back in the entryway they seemed to be cut out of poster board.

When they had formed a ground cover

about a foot deep,

he clapped his hands.

The mass of them hardened into a mirror.

At the mirror’s center a rectangular

gilt frame appeared—

it was very bright—

and a star began to rotate ...

This is the secret of the sacrifice. The ascending smoke kindles the blue light which then attaches itself the white, so that the whole candle is completely alight ... the blue light both cleaving to the white and consuming fat and flesh of burnt-offering beneath it, for it does not consume what is beneath it save when it ascends and attaches itself to the white light. Then there is peace in all worlds and ... The colors that show best by candlelight are white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water ... So I compare myself to certain persons ... who imagine they have earthenware heads or are ... pumpkins ... or glass ... nothing is feigned ... True of false or false and true: the man should be put into the Lanthorne. How is it els the man I’ th Moone? ... Then “The little o’ th’ earth” prevails again, reading most of what these five words say in the two the little; or signing, to the little ... Between these modes of existence, the beginnings of a poem started to emerge:

E throwing up in the flowerpots still reeling from the tear gas

“best

birthday ever” o humanity,

that shifting genre

I never knew I liked it—

its softly lit and clitoral fringes

fluctuating inside coastal paintbrush factories

Begin again:

Begin again:

who, what, where, when—

A and B, pressing against either side

of a closed door

trying to fit the outline of each other

saying, when the fit seems close, only “now”

repeating again and again until certain ...

Among the burning barricades on La Canebière, people from different manifestations mingled with one another, or exchanged updates, or smirked at one another’s chosen aesthetics, or were ignored completely ... There were the yellow vests; there were those protesting the “renovation” of La Plaine; there were those mourning the deaths of the eight people — Taher, Marie-Emmanuelle, Simona, Niasse, Fabien, Julien, Cherif, Ouloume — killed when two buildings in the first arrondissment collapsed, a result of unsafe housing conditions neglected by those in a position to do something about it ... The poem continued as the crowd turned a corner:

and someone, elsewhere says:

“five years later we are overwhelmed

by the shockwaves of empathy and at the same time

an absolute absence of political context”

the street rises to the occasion—

beautiful and laughing ...

High voltage lines, supermarkets, roundabouts, toll roads. I watched 2000 casseurs imagine an exclamation mark into existence. “She who denounces exempts herself,” wrote someone in an alleged letter from Venice. “Dear comrade, you have been trapped by the real,” wrote someone in an anonymous letter from Kyiv. No one could keep the situation under theoretical control. In Spit Temple, Cecilia Vincuña writes: In high school we studied poetry from Spain’s Golden Age by Góngora and Garcilaso. The kids hated it. No one could understand anything. The teacher would read a poem out loud and ask, “What does it mean?” No one dared to answer, but I stood up and offered an interpretation based on what I couldn’t understand. After hearing me, the teacher said, “But you are creating a new poem.” Ban en Banlieue tells of a blueprint that is also a building, a body, a book that “repeats a sentence until that sentence recuperates its power to attract, or touch, other sentences.” “Toutes les mondes deteste la police!” the cortège de tête yell as cars are flipped, stacked with kindling and luxuriously set alight by present-day pétroleuses. Anything that can be dislodged is, and thrown. “My Hermès handbag!” a woman resurrected from 1967 cries. That was the first heave ...

Begin again:

There are 103 “body” / “bodies” in this collection, to be exact, unfolding according to a logic of decomposition. There are 103 “body” / “bodies” in this collection, to be exact, unfolding according to a logic of decomposition. There are 103 “body” / “bodies” in this collection, to be exact, unfolding according to a logic of decomposition. Formally, this decay is demonstrated through the progression from “Proofs” to “Wagers” to “Remains.” In other words, to get into bed and find a swarm of worms powerfully symbolizes what happens to each of us, every day. Naturally, anguish was at its heart. The country was poor, the classes very differentiated. So when a student brought the master his poem, which stated:

A butterfly:

take away the wings

and it turns into a pepper!

the master’s response was immediate: “No, no; it is not like that. Let me correct your poem”:

A pepper:

add wings

and it turns into a butterfly!

But, as soon as we meet the first contestant, we’re whisked away: the man begins describing a rare book he’s found, by Antoine Lavoisier, called The Alley of Fireflies, which recounts his experiences in the garden of Frederick the Great. This leads us to a lost chapter of Voltaire’s Candide (a story of Pangloss’s youth that involves cross-dressing among other things) and a complicated experiment to create a small statue of frozen wine for Voltaire. The story then turns into a description of yet another game, a scientific way of making dice-throwing even more random, which involves putting fireflies into the dice and using a book of local Spanish feast days to calculate numbers. I have yet to mention the airborne paving machine designing a mosaic of human teeth, the worm (yet another worm) playing Hungarian rhapsodies on a zither, and refrigerated corpses, animated by a newly invented metal and serum, reënacting essential episodes in their lives. The green icon on the map represents the realtime location of an unmanned hypersonic glide vehicle carrying an explosive payload of 300 kilotons. You are one of a million participants randomly selected from the online community to choose its target. Use your keyboard, joystick, or saccadal interface to move the flashing white icon to the spot on the globe that you would choose for Ground Zero. The final target will be assigned based on a weighted bootstrap mode of all choices. If you leave the voting pool a replacement will be randomly selected from the online community. If you change your mind and select a different target, your definitive vote will be based on a dialectical boostrap mean of your combined choices. Target commit will occur in

            6 h 59 m 59 sec
            6 h 59 m 58 sec
            6 h 59 m 57 sec
            6 h 59 m 56 sec
            .
            .
            .

Just kidding. As if we’re ever gonna have any say in anything. Of the poems themselves, we have forty papyrus fragments: apart from poems 15 and 17, most of them are mere scraps. Poem 41, for example, reads simply:

]awe[ ]none[ ]oh yes[

Theophanes, the eleventh-century “mad monk of the Morea”, is also hilarious, inveighing against the Byzantine dynasty of his day, using Ananios as a cipher for sexual and culinary immorality (he is particularly upset by the misuse of fish). I mean,

]n[

]e[

]si J[

]in[

]ff[

]Ye[

]is[

]mir[ ]Re[ ]Po<[ ]Sc[ ]Set[ ] ‘Ka[ ]sla[ ]lag[ ]Pot[ ]Grc[ ]Edi[ ]Pot[ ]19’[ ]Po[, I mean

No leak can exist, you

say, when the world is always leaking,

to be human at this hour is not to be philosophical,

in at least the sense of having an oh well attitude,

a cloth over a birdcage may be premature.

You could have pulled the drowning migrant

from the water,

you could have stopped for the stuffed

animal that logically and illogically

bore a tutu around its makeshift waist. Later

when they shift through

the debris following the bombing, they’ll find your

iPhone with some images still intact.

In one, sun shone on the teeth of the dead horse.

Two in beginning: first floor, and there are trails of

blistered feet and squeaking oil ... second floor, dust.

Then, third floor, and repeats further on:

then he closes his eyes and there are no more lights. he says “I am the darkest thing that you have ever seen, and I am made entirely of light, and my name is lux, that is to say, xul written backwards” ... and other things ... I can’t remember ... and he cuts me and tears pieces off me like scabs that fall down down down toward the sad sea that opens and swallows them, and my body becomes different not light-absorbent any more but a frigid blue with a golden aura and a crest of gold. Skilled trackers, they recognize her distinctive footprint not only because no others appear nearby but also because the impression shows that she always walked backward. She always carries an epiphyte in her hands, too. And she was the first person ever to fan herself with a palm frond. You can hear her crying in the undergrowth at night, except during the full moon, when she navigates the rivers in a giant tortoise shell pulled by pink river dolphins whose fins sway in time with her singing. Long ago, an evil missionary came to these latitudes, a man wearing an ecclesiastical habit, who abused palm wine and Indian girls. Believing himself sent by heaven to destroy superstition, he ambushed Mapiripana one night on the riverbank. His plan was to tie her up with his rope belt and burn her alive, like a witch. Somewhere, not far away, possibly on this sandy beach where you are sitting now, he saw Mapiripana gathering turtle eggs. She appeared, by the light of the full moon, like a young widow dressed in a gown of spider’s web. The lustful missionary went after her, but an echo alone responded, luring him deeper into the jungle, and finally into a cave, where Mapiripana imprisoned him for many years. To punish him for the sin of concupiscence, she sucked on his lips until he begged her to stop. The missionary was losing all his blood, ad he closed his eyes in order not to see her face, which had become as hairy as an orangutan’s. Within a few months she had become pregnant, and she gave birth to an owl and a vampire bat. Aghast at having conceived such beings, the missionary escaped from the cave, pursued by his own abominable children. Whenever he stopped to rest, exhausted, the vampire bat sucked his blood and the owl illuminated the scene with the green flow of its horrible eyes. At dawn, the missionary fled onward, appeasing his flaccid stomach with a few bites of fruit and palmito. From what is today called the Laguna Mapiripana, he crossed by land to the Guaviare River and worked his way upriver using a canoe that he found conveniently tied up for the taking. But Mapiripana rolled gargantuan boulders into the river, producing rapids and defeating the missionary’s repeated attempts to ascend them. The intruder descended instead into the Orinoco basin, but he found his escape thwarted by Mapiripana at every turn. The floods of the Maipures River were her handiwork, as were the falls of the Isana, the Inírida, and the Vaupés. Finally, giving up all hope of salvation, the missionary returned to the cave of his imprisonment, guided by the owl’s green lanterns. And there was the little maiden, smiling at him from her swing of flowering vines. He bowed down before her, asking that she defend him from their progeny, and he fainted at her cruel reply: Who can save a man from his own remorse? But the high point of narrative in the first part of the poem is BoBo’s struggle to land a giant catfish while a hostile dog attacks and chews on his leg, which replays bits of Moby Dick:

... now he’s pulling the catfish up the bank he’s down on his knees

with the knife in his mouth the dog is trying to get a hold at his throat

so BoBo jerks his head around and gores the dog again I mean a good one too

the dog is lying in the mud whimpering BoBo has got a hold of the fish it’s nigh

as big as he is about two hundred pounds about the size of that alligator gar

we was riding the other day and I see catfish whiskers that look like

indigo snakes I’ve felt them brush up against my knees at night when I was in

the water I know BoBo is trying to stick his knife in the soft spot on the fish’s

head all he needs is a piece of wire like those sapsuckers twisted me up with

that’s right bob wire BoBo is going to try to paralyze it but the catfish

rolls and sweet Jesus the spike the big fin on top of his back it went clean

through BoBo he is hung up on the fish ...

And it’s true, USAmerican war culture does permeate our interactions and relationships. In a sense, we all live in Pineland (“I am with you in Pineland”) and regulate our emotions with the national food, corn syrup. The other day, we darted around muddy and slushy banks until we encountered a beaver lodge, its striated branches, the regular marks of its teeth. Time loops back on itself: did the child bring the shovel down, or not? Pineland is a fictional place that occupies real space, on real stolen-from-the-indigenous USAmerican land. In Pineland, if an individual is “killed” (not killed but quote unquote killed, kinda like laser tag killed) a high-pitched tone sounds. A bright blue “God-Gun” re-sets them. Of course, post-hypersonic vessels can be a double-edged sword. It wasn’t until last year that Unit 29 tested the general AI prototype Alpha0 in one in an attempt to train itself to filter out meaning deriving from what already exists in the world, aka “noise,” hypersonically-bases Alpha0s promise not only to abstract meaning from the unsound dimension (unsound as in “undetectable in terms of every life-form’s phenomenological experience”) but more importantly to use it to think with. The first communication we received back from Alpha0(1) was, interestingly enough, titled with the Blakean “A Memorable Fancy,” followed by three thumbs-up emojis. It was an infinite number of pages long, and every page was blank. Electric Tibet! so to speak. Or at least one version of it. Speaking of Electric Tibet, the photos in Lighthouse, Kazuhei Kimura’s fourth photobook, are of images and emotions which floated into view while listening to drone and noise music, about the changes that bodies go through and/or the relationship between sound and conscience. Kimura stripped these feelings and notions of all color and expressed them as pure light within his photographs, in “exquisite sights that float up in the everyday mine.”

It’s not like a high-speed slideshow.

And the word ‘evolving lantern’ doesn’t do it justice either.

If mine is a typo for mind it’s a great one, and it proves my point, not that I have one. I mean, when Tom told me he had seen three Thamnophis hammondii chasing polliwogs I asked them if Thamnophis hammondii were butterflies, and he said, nope, they’re snakes. When I was a child, when I closed my eyes to sleep, I would see a face in the darkness. Its flesh disintegrating to the bone, over and over, ripened and dried. I told the eye doctor that when I closed my eyes, I saw a face in the darkness. Its flesh disintegrating to the bone, over and over, ripened and dried. I asked him if he could give me some glasses to fix that. He said he didn’t have any glasses that could fix that. Then your form was mostly paper containing rib bones and rice. And suddenly I’m not depressed and suddenly I’m crying constantly. I want to be dramatic and pick up some dirt and eat it at the airport. Smear it over my face. And kiss the ground. But I don’t. They weren’t butterflies, they were water snakes, medium-sized snakes, 18-30 inches in total length (including tail), with a head barely wider than the neck. Two common color variations occur in the wild, a striped variant and a checkered variant. The striped variant has a yellowish lateral stripe on each side, and a fairly uniform dorsal coloring. The checkered variant lacks the lateral stripes and has two rows of small dark spots on each side. That something yesterday was forgetting this country, u-opicza in his dark night with the story, or when he climbs and can no longer get up lost a borron, or two, look at them as they fall, holding each other’s scaffolding.

[Note: Sources: Inger Christensen, alphabet (tr. Susanna Nied), at John Alba Cutler, 28 Feb 014; Lauren Holt, “Why The Post Natural Age Could Be Strange And Beautiful”, at BBC Future, 3 May 019 (hat tip Tom Marshall); JBR; Colin Pope, “How to Tell If A Moon Is Waxing or Waning”, in “Why I Didn’t Go to Your Funeral”, at SPD; JBR (can’t remember where), 7 May 019; Eli Rosenberg, “‘I think it’s a cap gun,’ police officer said. He opened fire on eighth grader moments later”, at SF Gate, 7 May 019; blurb for Friedrich Christian Delius, The Pope's Left Hand (tr. Robert A Cantrick), at SPD; JBR; blurb (tr. Google) for Friedrich Christian Delius, The Pope's Left Hand, at Friedrich Christian Delius; Stephanie Young, “Congenital”, in Pet Sounds, at Prelude; Marie Buck, “Let’s Memorialize The Dead Even More”, at Prelude; Tomaž Šalamun, “[Lucretius grabbed my arm”], “Granny”, in Justice (tr. Michael Thomas Taren); Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (tr. Peggy Kamuf), quoted in Terence Blake, “Reading WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (17): Spectres and Personae (Deleuze and Derrida)”, at Agent Swarm, 4 May 019; JBR; Shane Jones, “From Vincent and Alice and Alice”, at BOMB, 3 May 019; David Toop, Ocean of Sound, and Geoff Manaugh, quoted in Manaugh’s “Fob Jam”, at BLDGBLOG, 5 May 019; Tomaž Šalamun, “November 11, 1954,” (tr. Michael Biggins), quoted in Ryo Yamaguchi, “Tomaž Šalamun: A Love List of Lines”, at Michigan Quarterly Review, 28 Aug 015; Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare, in Poetry Vol. XCVII No. 3 Dec 1960 (via JSTOR); Lotte L.S., “The We of A Position”, at Poetry Foundation, 6 May 019 (the note to which reads: “A note on the title: ‘The We of A Position’ is borrowed from Tiqqun’s ‘Call’: “The We that speaks here is not a definable, isolated We, the We of a group. It is the We of a position.” A note on the text: Alongside those already attributed above, some words / lines / ideas / images have been used / developed / reworked from the writings / words /conversations of / with Ai, Djuna Barnes, Bechaela, Marianne Boruch, Anne Boyer, Cai, Clémence, Dimitra, Ediciones Inéditos, Etza, Euan, Flo, Donal Foreman, Forrest Gander, Heval Gelhat, Jean Genet, Jean-Luc Godard, Haukur, Nazim Hikmet, Sam Huber, Jazra, Jenni, Bhanu Kapil, Lewis, Liaisons, Rona Lorimer, Lucy, Matti, Steve McCaffery, Maureen N. McLane, Ana Mendieta, Nick, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Lisa Robertson, Roses, Muriel Rukeyser, Alexey Samoedov, Leslie Scalapino, Ron Silliman, Sophie, Verity Spott, Catriona Strang, The Invisible Committee, Rebecca Tamás, Michael Taussig, Thabit, Paul Torino, Alèssi Dell’Umbria, Jack Underwood, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, Adrian Wohlleben, C.D. Wright, Stephanie Young, Zayn, Émile Zola [and a bit JBR added from Ezra Pound]”); Kristin George Bagdanov, quoted in Amy Brady, “‘Fossils in the Making’ Uses Poetry To Explore How Climate Change Affects Our Bodies An interview with Kristin George Bagdanov”, at Chicago Review of Books, 21 Apr 019; JBR; Alejandro Jodorowsky, in an interview with Gilles Farcet, in Psychomagic, quoted in Jackie Wang, “Jodorowsky on living poetically and discovering poetry as a youth in Chile”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 18 Dec 016; David Wallace, “How Raymond Roussel Put the Impossible on the Page”, at The New Yorker, 2 May 019 (a review of Roussel’s The Alley of Fireflies); Peter Watts, “The Wisdom of Crowds”, quoted in his “The Hypersonic Weaponised Yogurt Award”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 8 May 019; JBR; Tim Whitmarsh, “A Nabokov of the ancient world: what a millennium of repressed, cock-happy scholars can do to an obscure Arcadian poet”, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “George Economou’s Ananios of Kleitor: A Review by Tim Whitmarsh”, at Poems and Poetics, 8 May 019 (RIP, George); JBR, who has included a portion of the result of converting a scan of some Anselm Hollo (Faces & Forms) to an otherwise perfectly intelligible text; Eileen R Tabios, various, in Witness in the Convex Mirror; JBR; Jorge Hernández Campos, “Speech that was forming in Cicero’s chopped head” (tr. Javier Taboada); Xul Solar, “45^th Hexagram (Vision 14. October 9th, 1925)” (tr. Daniel E. Nelson); José Eustasio Rivera, The Vortex (tr. John Charles Chasteen) (hat tip Javier Taboada and Jerry Rothenberg); JBR; Bill Carpenter, and Frank Stanford, quoted in Carpenter’s “Frank Stanford’s the battlefield where the moon says I love you: Introduction”, at Eratosphere, 27 Aug 012; JBR; Jasmine Dreame Wagner, and Nomi Stone, quoted in Wagner’s “Rehearsing Violence: Nomi Stone Interviewed”, at BOMB, 9 May 019; JBR; Luciana Parisi, “Surrational Fugitives”, at ŠUM 11; JBR; blurb for Kazuhei Kimura, Lighthouse, in shashasha Web Store, “NEWSLETTER｜10 May 2019”, email rec’d 10 May 019, approx. 12:01am PDT; JBR; Mina Zohal, “Untitled (17)”, at The Poetry Project, 7 Dec 017, “Mehan e ma / Macrorayan, Kabul/ April, 5:00 AM/ notes on return”, at The Brooklyn Rail, 1 Nov 016; JBR; “Two-striped garter snake”, at Wikipedia; Jorge Hernández Campos, “Speech that was forming in Cicero’s chopped head” (tr. Google)]

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With the Noose Around My Neck 129

so much grief! Such sadness!

So much that we love is has been, is going to be, lost. Coastlines, ecosystems, ways of life, so many species of planetary companions, the tears are many and the list is long. OK. That’s one, and a big one. Another surprise, which, in retrospect, is also unsurprising, is that we used the word “we” ... There is a “we”: all that lives. But it is in no way something to take for granted as being without significant contradictions, disjunctions, and aporias. In some ways, in many ways, the second assumption is the same as the first: that there is “the” world. The End of “the” World? I now think ... not. There are at least as many worlds as there are “we”-s (I don’t know how to write the plural of we, which is, perhaps, or perhaps not, indicative of the problem). Or ... I dunno ... If what we think is going to happen happens there will be lots of reasons to micro-organize. But organizing is only half what you asked about. I should also be focusing on your word “fearlessly.” OK, then, I believe that only one kind of human can form groups if they are to overlap successfully, if they are to not let the areas of no overlap get in the way, if they are to rejoice in our differences as well as similarities (I paraphrase Audre Lorde, who said, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”). And by one kind of human I don’t mean anything like white men, or indigenous women, or ... Wherever and whoever we are, we, and here I fearlessly use the word “we” ... we are all going to have to become bodhisattvas. We have to vow to take care of each other forever and ever. Because — not that we’re not, every one of us, already in the shit — we’re heading for the shit-shit. And, for those already in the shit-shit, sorry, but my guess is you’re headed for the even shittier shit-shit-shit. I can’t think of any other way. Maybe they don’t call it the bodhisattva vow in Zapatista country, or in Fiji, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Vanuatu, or the Marshall Islands, which, I believe are going to be the first to go under, or in Inuit country, or in Uzbekistan, or in south Florida, but they call it something. I mean,

the laundry-basket lid is still there

though badly chewed up by the cat

but time has devoured the cat

entirely

in the clouds

on the beach

in the rain not rain

if we listen we might

know one another

mix

the molecules

many waves

Thus, the sea lane flows to the sea. Perhaps these owls are refracted as index phantoms, as uncountable forms, perhaps analogous to phantom turquois lakes on Titan. It is like stating an irrational tautology, such as whisky is leather and leather is whisky, the latter being analogous to magnetic fading worms. Then one’s blood would amount to nothing except a dangerous and elliptical cider. Certain Tigers stagger and rise up, darkened vapour inhabited by photonic ghosts. These being ghosts that roam the void as creative androgynes. They register themselves via the a-sequential, via sonic mazes at the nths, this being the dialectic within existing. And by transmuting its respiration we then begin to understand the electrical structure of death. This allows us to sense the void as if it were a firmament of butterflies, this being a circumstance totally unlike a natural blizzard of Lantern Fish blowing towards the Sun. Perhaps there is truth in this. The rhythm activates and the individuals seed themselves as interior relay runners. So “say goodbye to Lonesome George,” the last Galapagos tortoise. Is my microphone on? Can you hear me? Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? The book unfolds across two “Acts” in nineteen numbered poems each titled “Scene.” Over the next hundred pages, in long-breathed lines strung together with a single insistent conjunction (“and”), the lake comes to signify several abyssal conditions: it is a Homan Square police torture site, an ICE detention center, a Shoah death camp, and a Chilean political prison or torture center of the kind the Pinochet dictatorship installed (and of the kind, before that, in Chile’s Pisagua, where Gabriel González Videla sent Communist political enemies in the late 1940s, and which Neruda decried in “La tierra se llama Juan.”) While Lake Michigan regards the embodied violence of contemporary privatization shocks as reiterations of quote unquote Chilean experiments, a phrase which is to be understood as a University of Chicago-based US export, it also place these forms of violence in the longer, convulsive histories of racist urban policy in Chicago itself. The cover of the book features a photo of Balas and Wax (Susannah Bielak and Fred Schmalz), who wade out into the shallows in front of one of the lake’s rocky berms, wearing druidic garb and holding aloft tree branches in the positions of a monstrance or processional cross. Over the last several years, Balas and Wax have exhibited a roving, multimedia art project entitled Settlement, documenting the lake fill in the North Chicago neighborhood of Edgewater, much of it formed from West Side demolition projects in the era that saw the expansion of the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways and the construction of Walter Netsch’s brutalist campus for the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Borzutzky is currently employed.

I look forward to the beach becoming a new beach said the mayor

to the lake becoming a new lake

God is a tough act to follow the mayor said to the functionaries

The mayor is a tough act to follow

The burning lake is a tough act to follow

I don’t want to make assumptions because the game doesn’t. For convenience, I made up the fact that we have feet. Only “vision” (and impaired vision at that) is alluded to initially. Let’s take it out, the feet.

Location: unknown

Population: no longer assessed

Immediate area: desolate, arid, no signs of vegetation,

unrelenting wind accelerating erosion, impairing vision

Assessing water

Rendering image

Water contents: high concentrations of brine, and unidentified substances

Not safe for consumption

Like a Ghanaian egg

Encadenar is a virtual reality game set in an unfixed future time near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico. I remind myself, let’s not pan for gold. (Is colonial.) (Makes for bad sex.)

This place is not a place of honor

No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here

Nothing valued is here

This place is a message and part of a system of messages

Pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture

Excerpts from Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Sandia National Laboratories report SAND92-1382 / UC-721, p. F-49

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Sandia National Laboratories charged a panel of outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking system for the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site, and estimate the efficacy of the system against various types of intrusion. The goal of the marking system is to deter inadvertent human interference with the site. The panel of experts was divided into two teams. This is the report of the A Team; a multidisciplinary group with an anthropologist (who studies different, but contemporary, cultures), an astronomer (who searches for extra-terrestrial life), an archaeologist (who studies cultures that differ in both time and space from our own), an environmental designer (who studies how people perceive and react to a landscape and the buildings within them), a linguist (who studies how languages change with time), and a materials scientist (who knows the options available to us for implementing our marking system concepts). The report is a team effort. We developed the following criteria for the marking system: The site must be marked. Aside from the legal requirement, the site will be indelibly imprinted by the human activity associated with waste disposal. We must complete the process by explaining what has been done and why. The site must be marked in such a manner that its purpose cannot be mistaken. Other nuclear waste disposal sites must be marked in a similar manner within the USA and preferably world-wide. A marking system must be utilized. By this we mean that components of the marking system relate to one another is such a way that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Redundancy must play a preeminent role in the marking system design. The designs considered here have redundancy in terms of message levels, marking system components, materials, and modes of communication. Each component of the marking system should be made of material(s) with little intrinsic value. The destructive (or recycling) tendencies of people will pose a serious threat to the marking system. The components of the marking system should be tested during the next few decades while the WIPP is in operation, not only for the longevity of the materials but for the pan-cultural nature of the message. In other words, as with the repository design itself, the team thought in terms of a marking system that would last 10,000 years if left undisturbed. Our efforts focused on making it understandable while providing minimal incentive to disturb it. We also consider a public information effort a necessary part of the marking system design. A system that is not understood today has no chance of being understood in the far future. The central area of interest is surrounded by earthen berms. For the WIPP site, the area of interest is where we do not want drilling or excavation to occur. In the design the central area is the area of the underground panels plus either (1) a one-fourth-mile buffer zone, or (2) the distance to which the radionuclides may migrate during the 10,000-year period, whichever is larger. The forms of the earthworks are jagged and rough, suggestive of energy radiating from the central area. The berms serve several purposes. First, they define the area of interest. Their size is set so that sand dunes are unlikely to cover all of them entirely at the same time. Instead, the wind will leave dunes streaming behind the berms and create an even larger marker. Second, their shape sets the tone for the entire landscape — non-natural, ominous, and repulsive. Third, the corner berms are higher than the others and provide vantage points for viewing the entire site. Fourth, the corner berms also include buried rooms with all the message levels recommended for inclusion in this marker system. As the berms erode, these rooms will become uncovered at various times. The investigator will be guided toward the center of the site by the berms. Prior to entering the central area, however, he or she will encounter a “message kiosk.” Each message kiosk is composed of a message wall and a protecting wall. In terms of site layout, the message kiosks form the only “nurturing” part of the marking system design. The protecting wall is of concrete and is meant to protect the message wall from erosion. The message wall is of granite or other hard rock and is a vertical, curved form. There are two reasons for a curved form: (1) it makes it very difficult to reuse the piece for another purpose, and (2) it is not an honorific form such as an obelisk. These standing stones mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. The area is ... by ... kilometers (or ... miles or about ... times the height of an average full-grown male person) and the buried waste is ... kilometers down. This place was chosen to put this dangerous material far away from people. The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants. Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything that will change the rocks or water in the area. Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10,000 years. If the marker is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak. For more information go to the building further inside. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. Sorry for fucking up the place. Which translates more or less as

my lords

please

try to understand

behind this white white wall

there is nothing

nothing at all

which doesn’t mean

that there is no heaven

or that there is no hell

that would be like confusing the sun

with a whistle

or with whatever you’re smoking

(never having seen the sky

only means

not even having the money

for eyeglasses)

(do you know what

eyeglasses are?)

behind this white white wall

paces a fabulous animal

and that its living is so brilliant

than neither old age

nor solitude

nor death

threaten its plumage

an animal

with wings with burning feathers

believe me truly

behind that white white wall

there’s nothing you want

nothing at all

On the other side of this you’ll find a rectangle. Are you there? Is your dog there? O I have made a mistake. We really don’t know each other very well so, whether we like it or not, we will be discovering new things in each other and that is another country we are going to. Slowly the great dialogues darken. Where were you walking earlier? I made all that stuff up about dolmens and trapezoids and falling over. Are you receiving those clusters I send out travelling? They stir me with a wooden spoon. I fell. I am frightened of flies. This is what makes it possible for a poet to cough up an oval, real and entire. The soil released its tassel immediately. How easy it is to watch it happen, the ice waltz away from its structure. We should introduce “garbage,” right? Though I actually quite like that ish. Recapitulation, modulation, development, repeating phrases, the discourse here is not spiritual per se, though Brown uses the traditional framework of the voyage to the land of the dead, the journey to the land of the dead, which starts off like a kind of sideways stoner-slip into alternative mental realms on the way to the supermarket, California is parched, the celluloid is not soluble. I think I must grow arms, more arms, a forest of arms, all skeleton images are happy,

one had a whole body

that lit up when touched.

Light,

through the blinds,

through my closed eyelids,

is the surface of the sun.

Like a video of the sea on mute. This is the only shirt I have. Later you are in control of the helicopter.

To control it properly

you

need

six kilos of

melted cheese

to control it properly

the cheese must come in packets of five or three

Now imagine a valley of exposed bedrock and boulders, its unusually high iron content. Over tens of thousands of lightning strikes, the valley becomes partially magnetized: small pebbles roll uphill, larger rocks clump together in structurally precarious agglomerations. Stones hover an inch or two off the ground, pulled upward toward magnetic overhangs ... now imagine artisans holding magnetized mineral chunks near iron-rich, basalt boulders to find areas in the rock where magnetic forces pushed back. Predesignated parts of these potbelly figures — which can stand more than 2 meters tall and weigh more than 10,000 kilos — were then carved at those spots. Two thousand years later you enter that valley, the only sound you hear a trembling in the gravel ahead. Your jewelry begins to float, pulling away from your wrists and chest. This is the moment I sunken myself down. Knock on my wall if you would like to be helpful. Density is random at times. I lose count. Crawl in, crawl in. Your anti-failure, or completion if you will, or abandonment if you prefer, is not in the arrival but in that attempt. I open my hand to you, here is a small mound of heat for you to take, just take it, the slipperiest

Of all the slippery

Things in life

The hotel elevator

That rises way

Past the roof

And slips across

A higher landscape

A different neighborhood

Why not ask

If any of these

Places will be

Open for breakfast

Now you see

yourself, sort of, before and after

Something like this could be

the book in which we live

its ink is almost dry –

Too early for a news release but

some point of reference, please, since

the rest ran away with the facts

When turning on the faucet you’ll find others

pouring out. Everything rises and then cross-winds

go to work. It’s not apparent as a twister anymore

because I’ve got the parking brake on

Bawr stretter! Bawr. Bawr. Stretterhawl? Bawr Stretter! Bawr STRETTER!?! “Black egg on top of pig snout boiling” / “Big bowl gold mushroom cowboy meat” / Stretterworra gawl, gawl. Thmen? Thmen? Bawr. Bawrhossop. Yuleeda tan hanna. Harrabost yuleeda /what doesn’t tell you everything you need to know? I mean, I was listening to the radio this morning, which was on FM, and when I switched it to AM it was tuned to a Catholic call-in show. Some kid has puked an hour after communion, and was worried he had sinned because the wafer was in his puke. The host of the show, a priest, I assume, says, “An hour? You’re good. No sin involved. Jesus remains within you for a few minutes only, because when your saliva, and your digestive enzymes, begin to break down the wafer ...” In other words, there ain’t no god in your bodily goo. Which is to say that, though I do remember Willard, I don’t remember it very well. Willard lives with his mother, right? in the old family house. She mother orders him to destroy a litter of rats. He spares one (or two or several). After a violent argument, the mother, who “resembles” a dog, dies. I don’t recall how. Some businessman wants to buy the house. Willard doesn’t want to move. Meanwhile, he’s made friends with one of the rats, named Ben, who proves to be way smart. There is also a white female rat, Ben’s companion. Willard spends all his free time with them. They multiply. Willard takes the rat pack, led by Ben, to the home of the businessman, who they kill. But then he takes his two favorites to the office with him and has no choice but to let the employees kill the white rat. Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a long, hard glare. Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his becoming-rat. He tries with all his might to remain among humans. He even responds to the advances of a young woman in the office. One day when he’s invited her over, Ben suddenly reappears, full of hate. Willard tries to drive him away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: Ben then lures him to the basement by, where a pack of countless rats is waiting to tear him to shreds. Then comes the famous encounter between Breton and Léona Camille Ghislaine Delacourt, which results in a 10-day romance, which culminates in Breton abandoning her after it is revealed that she is “mad.” What a dick, right? In Milk Bowl Caws includes translations of drafts of Delacourt’s letters, like the one which reads

After your departure

Why not just go to sleep forever?

This fire? I’m suffocating!

Alone

The night looks evil, and the soul of the volcano wakes up —

first, a muffled ‘repressed sob?’ — full of bitterness

Why, when everything is black —

Oh flame — why are you keeping watch? To spit out my anger! my disgust my

misery! to loosen my heart to cast far off its fetters! — To hear my

reason — to breathe its perfume — It’s too airless here and the fire ...

Which bring us to Now, Now, Louison, Jean Frémon’s fictionalized account of the life of Louise Bourgeois. In an essay Frémon includes as an afterword, he writes that although he began this project when Bourgeois was alive, he never spoke to her about it. He quote unquote needed the freedom of imagination that she used so well in her own work, but which she would not have been able to allow someone who was writing about her. That’s how I felt, at least. Whenever I visited, she’d ask me what I was writing, and since I always had several projects underway I could always say something without having to mention the project about her. This exudes the same attitude the surrealist movement was accused of from the beginning: fetishizing or objectifying women in the name of art. Rather than being a collaborative project, or one that asks Bourgeois to address the issues as she saw them, the essay imagines her life through the perceptions and experiences of a man. Did I mention that Delacourt was institutionalized, and that Breton never came to visit her once? Now wonder Carmella in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet says, Men are very difficult to understand. Let’s hope they all freeze to death. So when I speak with the corporate pharmacy representative I use polite, conciliatory language. This higher up tells me my file deems me “drug seeking.” Fuck yeah. These meds are my life support. Nevada’s opioid crisis is not my problem. I mean, I’ve never taken any Oxy or Fentanyl, nor do I want to. But, given my Schizoaffective Disorder with chronic PTSD and anxiety, benzos are a necessity. All I did was accidentally drop some on the bathroom floor with my motor control impaired hands. And now this shit. If I wasn’t an iron and leather cyborg of will? Taking long term medical patients off daily Klonopin after over a decade’s prescription is a death sentence. If I do die, my blood is on their hands. Every one of their employees: national corporate to regional branch. I shall haunt them and their descendants until the end of time via Latin curses in menstrual blood pentagrams. Tender reader, you may be wondering by now how I have not yet lost my mind. Gone on a mass shooting rampage like any normal red blooded, God fearing, beer drinking Nevadan. Or set my biker babe butch girlfriend on them? Good question. I have what these fuckheads do not, civilized self-control. Which is why, inspired by the poetic architecture of the Divine Comedy, I went to the marble quarries of the Apuan alps to excavate the stars. Knowing that this was the only place in Dante’s native region where a descent into the earth is still possible, I began my visits and research in and around Carrara, and quickly heard about a naturally occurring aberration of the stone that reflects light as a result of destroying its consistency — a quartz creating a rupturous defect — something otherwise discarded, what the locals call “luz’ke.” I began my search with color film photographs and with drawings, which inspired stone carvings and sculptures. Materials intended for finishing sculptures were used on paper surfaces instead.

And so, for conversation

after conversation we

sat in a circle as the

ocean breeze chilled

the sweat from our

shirts and our blou-

ses and cooled our

hearts a bit, our precious

hearts. We needed

them, we needed this.

These meetings worked

because at any given moment,

some of those sitting in

the circle weren’t paying

much attention to any-

thing being spoken,

which was okay and

which was understood.

Often attention wandered

to the ocean, whoosh,

hiss, whoosh, hiss,

whoosh, hiss, whoosh

hiss, seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss,

ooos, seaspawn and

seawrack, the nearing tide,

that rusty boot. Snotgreen,

bluesilver, rust: Aleph, alpha:

nought, nought, one.

[Note: Sources: JBR, quoted in Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR, “Editors’ Trialogue”, Anselm Hollo, “Elegy”, Charles Alexander, “from Truro / Shift”, Will Alexander, “Second Primal Fragment”, “Phosphenic Threading”, “Bubonic and Explosive”, “A Cannibal Explains Himself to Himself”, “Facing the Electron Field: The Primal Triptych of Byron Baker and Will Alexander”, Rae Armantrout, “My Erasures”, in The End of the World Project (eds. Richard Lopez, T.C. Marshall, and JBR); Greta Thunberg, “‘You did not act in time’: Greta Thunberg’s full speech to MPs”, at Guardian, 23 Apr 019; Harris Feinsod, and Daniel Borzutzky, Lake Michigan, quoted in Feinsod’s “‘The Mayor Is a Tough Act to Follow’: Some Social Poetry in the Theaters of the Rahm Regime”, at Post45, 23 Apr 019; Daisy Atterbury, and Mateo Galindo, quoted in Atterbury’s “‘The Jewel of the North”: Mateo Galindo’s ‘Encadenar’ in Space”, at Post45, 24 Apr 019 (the line about the Ghanaian egg is JBR’s, but see Peter Beaumont, “Rotten eggs: e-waste from Europe poisons Ghana’s food chain”, at Guardian, 24 Apr 019); US Department of Energy, “Message to 12000 AD”; JBR; Jorge Eduardo Eielson, “Blasphemous Elegy for Those Who Live in the Neighborhood of San Pedro and Have Nothing to Eat” (tr. David Shook), in Eielson’s Room in Rome; Oli Hazard, “Enter a Cloud: On / With / For / After W.S. Graham”, at Harriet, 22 Apr 019; David Grundy, “Brandon Brown - The Four Seasons (Wonder, 2018)”, at Streams of Expression, 22 Apr 019; Sina Queyras, “February morning, 2018”, at Word Pond, 19 Apr 019; Tom Raworth, “Close the Loop on This”, at Woodland Pattern; Ian Heames, Sonnets, Apr 018; Will Stuart, Sharp Wren Task; JBR; Geoff Manaugh, “Magnetic Landscape Architecture”, at BLDGBLOG, 25 Apr 019; Sawako Nakayasu, “I Am Thinking About Will Alexander”, at Harriet, 25 Apr 019; Alan Bernheimer, “Breakfast”, in From Nature, at SPD; Reed Bye, quoted in David Mutschlecner, blurb for Bye’s Morning Rites, at The Lune; Edwin Morgan, “The First Men on Mercury”, “Starryveld”, and Russell Jones, quoted in Jones’s The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping And Broken Wor(l)ds: Edwin Morgan’s Science Fiction Poems, at University of Edinburgh; JBR; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (tr. Brian Massumi), quoted in Jason Read, “Memories of a Ratman: Becoming Animal in Film, Literature, and Philosophy”, at Unemployed Negativity, 28 Apr 019; JBR; Claire Mullen, “The Return of the Surrealist Women”, at Public Books, 29 Apr 019; JBR; Andrea Lambert, “Dining With a Cursed Bloodline: The Biggest Little Sturm und Drang”, at Entropy, 29 Apr 019; Zachary Small, “The Dead May Outnumber the Living on Facebook in 50 Years”, at Hyperallergic, 29 Apr 019; JBR; Sabine Mirlesse, “Portfolio”, at BOMB, 1 May 019; Del Ray Cross, “mmdcccxlvii / Del Is Short for Delicate”, at Anachronizms, 30 Apr 019; JBR; James Joyce, Ulysses]

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With the Noose Around My Neck 128

But this does not necessarily have to be the case. And we see in experimental documentary production, that different relations to things and the social conditions in which we relate to them are possible. Thus, we have to assume that there is a language of stones, pans and cardboard boxes. That lamps speak. That mountains and foxes are involved in discourse. That high-rise buildings chat with each other. And that paintings gossip. There exists even, if you will, besides the language communicated by telephone a language of the telephone itself. But, you may ask: what is the point of this eccentric plot? Out of the wind-shirred depth-stripes

in the ocean we could hear

the dolphins cough.

“Last night,” you said,

“I was killed twice by goblins.”

Their sound performs a cloud of gnats.

So when this one guy sitting in front of me said, “Oh, what a shame that there’s nobody left alive now who knew Emily Dickinson,” I said, “That’s not true.” And he said, “What do you mean by that?” And I said, “Well, I’ve been to her house and those trees in her yard, some of which she planted, are very old.” And he said, “Well, I mean people.” And I said, “Well, I do too.” I filled a canister with the dirt by their roots. I did this whole thing. I still have some of the dirt. I have plenty of it. I took a lot of dirt. Anyway, I was angry and I looked across the room for somebody else like me and there was this really angry older dyke across the room with her arms folded and I thought, I have to speak to her. I went over and said, “Can you believe this is a fucking Holocaust party? And she said, “I know. What’s the matter with these people?” People were eating liverwurst sandwiches. The color green is the heart chakra. I don’t have any advice for the people of the world. The results of the permafrost analysis confirm information provided by previous midge studies, and reveal that Yukon temperatures are the highest they’ve been in 13,600 years. The

MRI voice says the next scan will last four minutes

Anyway, the other night there was a knock at my door, it was just like the time the raccoon was banging at your door in Massachusetts, hanging upside down. I was a little scared at being alone, I answered & these two people were asking directions, or at least they seemed to be, then somehow in the midst of our talking it was obvious they knew me, they began without my telling my name at all to call me G & before I knew it & without it seeming spooky at all they were making all these big generous sorts of old jokes about me & my family & you & .... That night I never thought anything about their knowing everything. Oh wait I’ve gotta describe them. They looked a lot like S actually, they were small and androgynous with her kind of big eyes & I couldn’t tell, though it never occurred to me then to try, if they were women or men and women or what. They were wearing old-fashioned loden coats & pants & one had on a bright Persian blue shirt & the other had a New York Aquarium shirt with whales on it. After we talked for a while they offered to show me their technique of flying. They hovered about the ceilings then, singing a light-hearted song about sleep:

Sleep sleep sleep

I do I do I do

we’re all balls of ears

two by two

It’s me hot sun

blue sky at night

all knit together

darkness is light

half of one

becomes my twin

one hand is thick

the other is thin

transparent sky

lets me go through

in sleep each night

each of you

one of us is

brilliant weather

little sleep

statue mother

little sleep statue father

someone anyone

and another

I know I slept then though I can’t remember how I got to sleep & you’ll laugh when I tell you I had a great dream about sex in which it was raining milk because of the snow in a movie & next morning when I saw the sun I knew I remembered something that should fill me with either pleasure or fear but I felt like I do in dreams all the time & I couldn’t be scared or notice any other sensations in my body, I just felt even like a body with a mind moving. We left on our trip together without talking about it after we ate a big breakfast of Irish oatmeal with cream & tea. We went in their car which was a kind of Peugeot, modified to have 3 rows of seats & the whole inside was painted red. For a long time it seemed like we were travelling over the hills themselves, you didn’t notice the roads. We talked about politics, sex, money, books, and music and dance, till, around noon, we arrived at a kind of camp. My friends introduced me to some of their friends and together they cooked for all of us a meal of pumpkin soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Then we took a big paill of some peculiar dark beer down to the pond & sat on the shore to have a conversation. They had something interesting to smoke which made you feel like you’d been in a steam bath. We were watching the sun set & as we watched all these people began describing it to me in such a new and fanciful kind of language with all kinds of new words for everything that seemed more like the truth or accurate that at some point if they told me the sky was purple I could see a purple sky & a yellow mountain, but then it was obvious that was exactly what I saw and besides all that that wasn’t what they said, it was something even newer, I can’t remember ... It was after that they took me into the future on such a long and thorough trip I can’t begin yet to tell you all the details of it, but wait and let me tell you all the rest first. We all ate another meal later, again I can’t remember, it seemed like mashed potatoes with garlic and maybe cream or something combined like that, then a bunch of complex sex that made perfect sense that G describes in utopian detail ending with “Then they took me here, to your door, in an instant, though now it’s night, and I don’t even remember coming up in the elevator ...” In other words, let’s say that one way or another this was a dream or a poem or maybe oh, I dunno, anyway let’s say that this asks you, perhaps accidentally, to think about flossing your teeth. To have teeth, and to write about them, and to, as the speaker of Brown’s poem does, floss your teeth with little sticks to the point of bleeding ... to be wearing a tie, then readjusting your tie, flipping it over your shoulder behind your back where you can’t see it then writing that it’s “flopping ... like a hummingbird’s tongue,” is to, well, Chory says these new plants will not only absorb more CO2 than unmodified plants, they will also have deeper and stronger root systems that will also stop erosion, and when they die, significantly less CO2 will be re-released due to more carbon being stored in deeper roots and soil for longer periods, and suberin’s natural ability as a carbon polymer to resist short-term decomposition. Right now, the Mississippi delta in Louisiana is a test zone for a first batch of Ideal Plants in the wild, a major step to see if improved root systems can mitigate sea level rise. To today’s tourists, the gargoyles are perhaps the most appealing element of this magnificent structure. But they, too, are modern. Only since the middle of the 19^th century has this particular cast of ghouls screamed from their stone lungs at the square below. Dozens of these creatures thrust out their gullets from the two towers of the west facade as well as along both sides of the nave and from the choir at the east end. Better known still are ones who peer down from the projecting corner buttresses of the balustrade that runs horizontally around the base of the western towers. The most famous of them all is the horned, winged demon who gazes over Paris from the left buttress on the front of the north tower, his hands resting pensively on his chin, his tongue protruding. Though not a gargoyle in the proper sense of the term (since he does not serve as a drainpipe) he has nonetheless become the very essence of gargoyleness, the quintessence of the modern idea of the medieval. Like a Baudelairean flaneur he surveys Paris with eyes sunk deep. This figure, eventually to be known as “le Stryge,” it takes 27 days for the moon to orbit Earth, 27 percent of Earth's surface is land, and I have women friends who menstruate on the full moon every 27 days. It takes 27 days for a human cell to regenerate, and there are 27 bones in the human hand. In Sanskrit 27 is a Harshad number, which means “joy giver,” and in the Kabbalah, there are 27 channels to communicate with God. When is a good time to mention that a man's ejaculate travels 27 miles per hour? By a giant grandmother tree outside the museum, I buried a tiny clear crystal, set in the ground vertically, with the pointy end up. Nutrients traveling to Earth on the rays of sunlight can feed you no matter where you receive it. You can hide in the backyard where no other humans can find you, but the Vitamin D nutrients will reach you just the same. There are 27 bones in the human hand. In the sunlight I massaged my hands. But these were very rough drawings. In one part of the film, I just put dots on each of the frames. Because I had pressed down on the film so crudely, the dots, unlike polished animation, looked as if they were jumping around. There was another part of the film that had lines. They seemed to be wavering back and forth. This wasn’t the only thing I did. From here on, my story is about sound. I started recording a variety of sounds. This meant, for example, trying to capture the most ordinary sort of sounds that one might hear in daily life such as water flowing out of the tap or a chair being pulled out. The dwellings thus constructed are igloo-like but built from mammoth bones. Mithen speculates that these Ice Age building supplies did not come only from coordinated acts of hunting (in which slaughtering large animals would also have meant obtaining spare parts for your house, as if wooly mammoths were a kind of living Home Depot). Instead, he suggests, “the river supplies building materials ...” Do you know what Moon Trees are? Did you know that a second generation Moon Tree might be growing in your own backyard? That reminds me of moulding a jello map from prominent bumps. Which may contain invectives against the government along with portions of August and fragments from poets you’ve forgotten you once read in The Penguin Book of 20th Century German Verse. So now you lie flat beneath the wine dark sea and feel the fresh water touching it there are marks on your arms where the secret police promised to twist them (with e.g. “gsoet p indl ieis grapce / cihechoi / biet weep ...” “eapsuor thvlwodta / vweavpeb v, xif”). It’s cold and I’m unwisely in ankle socks that slip down with every step of my 2.5 mile walk to the office. That night as I get into bed, I eat a homemade cannabis lozenge. Who can resist Mang Co’s fiery eyes and golden belly? Or the brilliance of Griffin’s ASMR mukbangs?! It’s a convulsive geography — a geography of swarms and q-q-q sounds. It’s not a geography that ignores borders and boundaries, but attacks, festers, and infects them. Once we let the “blot” — as you wonderfully put it — in instead of abjecting it, we can begin to see the ten million starving people in Yemen. The words always change! But there was no stable original to begin with either. I’ve been accused of inventing poets I’ve translated. In other words, Zapatismo didn’t rise up against hacienda owners, or hacendados, but against the structure they managed. Then, as now, those who confronted each other weren’t simply two classes or two groups of the Mexican population, nor even two ethnically homogeneous groups. The war of the pueblos against the haciendas was the clash of two radically distinct forms of occupying space: two forms of relating to the earth, to its fruits, and to its history. Two worlds. The same space where collective life had once been lived was converted into a succession of agricultural farms, where the Nahua pueblo lived and died / lives and dies enchained by debt to their bosses. Elsewhere this is an exemplary museum, repository of “all things stolen and stuffed,” its cabinets full of items that once had cultural significance and context but which now look sad, beaten down and impossible to define. A Church of England primary school seems to have donated a mummified feline; or perhaps adopted it. You would do that out of sympathy, the instant you saw its minute teeth; though it doesn’t at all resemble a cat. There are various Victorian birds, along with their eggs, nests and environs; and many weapons! including “an armguard with dagger and pistols” (Madras, early 1800s), which looks like something from the cover of a fantasy novel no one would ever pick up to read. An echidna is partly hidden beneath less identifiable stuff. But then, suddenly and gloriously, the specimen is received in formalin labeled with the patient's name, identification number, and “transverse colon polyp.” It consists of 2 tan fragments of tissue measuring 0.2 and 0.7 cm. The specimen is entirely submitted in 1 cassette labeled 1A. A microscopic examination has been performed. D12.6 — Benign. True and/or false? Direct and indirect conclusions are impossible. True and/or false? Scholarship cannot be based on what Aristotle did not say. Later, at least, it has already been buried, and the green grass grows over it.

There are many wise men. But on the other hand, there is not a single

insane tree.

The sun might go out if trees started speaking.

That is the most profound statement than can be made about this

subject.

In the world of various thinking. In which fire and water made a pact. In other

words, the roads are so poor it is hard to write on the bus.

But there is no point in building better ones

because the gods don’t like the smell of road tar,

and the gods have nostrils

all over their bodies.

Gradually, over millennia, these nostrils

are worn away, and when there are only

two of them left, the gods have changed into

animals and human beings, and then

when there are no nostrils left

at all, there is only gravel and sand and stones.

When you return, you feel as if

you had been away for many days.

I felt happy as soon as I woke up in the morning.

Everything’s going to hell.

Wherever you look, everything’s going to hell.

First it rains, then it’s sunny, everything’s going to hell.

No matter what kind of government,

everything’s going to hell anyway.

In the fall, the panelists return bulging with new ideas.

In the same scene, what was sitting on the floor next to the man?

Why didn’t anyone seem to notice that he was on fire?

It is sunny today

here in the

sunshine

in fact

quite

warm.

Dear Margie, hello.

Speaking of the Extinction Rebellion, it’s great to be back on Waterloo Bridge. At 9am affinity groups moved onto the bridge with no trouble, quickly transporting tens upon tens of plants of all sizes. Thousands of people have come to join us, listening to music from the stage, or pulling some moves on the newly established skate ramp. Those blocking the bridge were cheered by a surprise action at the nearby Shell offices on Belvedere Road: three activists glued themselves to the front of the building, breaking the glass of the main door, and two adventurous colleagues climbed nearby scaffolding to access the glass roofing above, spray painting the message ‘SHELL KNEW’ to draw attention to the company’s half century of lying about and criminal complicity in the current crisis. With this action, activists aim to get a case into crown court to get the case before a jury. UPDATE (1:00am): the rebels on the glass roofing have elected not to come down for twelve hours, forcing police into a protracted waiting game. During this time, the three at the door who were arrested earlier in the day have since been taken to police stations and released without charge, and have returned to find their two fellows still up there. Supportive rebels have thrown food and sleeping gear up to those on the roof. Meanwhile, as night fell (7.30pm), police issued a section 14 and began arresting people on the bridge — but for every rebel arrested another stepped forward. At the time of writing (Monday turning into Tuesday, 12:00am) there have been over 30 arrests. In any case, Oxford Circus is still banging to the baselines of the pink boat sound system, the DIY garden party on Waterloo Bridge is still a-buzz, speakers are still serving out truth beside the mother of all Parliaments, and there’s still a beautiful village of tents, table tennis, and theatre at Marble Arch. And it’s not just London. XR Scotland has taken a bridge in Edinburgh; Dutch rebels have occupied the International Criminal Court in The Hague; shit is going down from San Francisco to Chicago to Mexico; from Australia to India. Now it’s Wednesday. For a while XR NYC held, at least half-held, Brooklyn Bridge. The die-in outside City Hall nets 62 arrests. XR New Zealand is in the house. There are roadblocks in Sweden, occupations in Australia and Canada, and die-ins in Canada, Germany and France — many of the actions highlighting the theme of food security, in solidarity with farmers and peasants all over the world. Because this is also the International Day of Peasant’s Struggle of La Via Campesina, which commemorates the 1996 massacre of landless peasants in Eldorado dos Carajás, Brazil while struggling for agrarian reform. So yes, we are doing our thing alongside the many actions taking place across the global south. Meanwhile, a group calling itself Genesis II Church of Health and Healing plans to convene at a hotel resort in the state of Washington on Saturday to promote a “miracle cure” that claims will put an end to 95% of all diseases. All you have to do is drink a few shots of industrial bleach. [Applause. SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK and JORDAN PETERSON are standing in a big cauldron, tied together back-to-back, before an audience of CANNIBALS from a racist 19^th century cartoon. The CHIEF CANNIBAL, or at least the one with the largest bone through his nose, prances around the cauldron, humming an obscure tune and freezing at regular intervals to hiss and violently shake a long staff at the two debaters. He is the moderator. Once this ritual is complete, he gives the cauldron a good sharp kick, and it rings satisfyingly. We are ready to begin.] MODERATOR: Thank you, thank you all. I’d like to start by acknowledging that we are on the ancestral lands of the earthworms, who funnelled the soil through their bodies before we walked upon it, and who will eat us when we die. So: we have something of a treat for you tonight — two of the most prolific and controversial scholars in the humanities, Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson, finally coming head to head, here to debate the motion ‘For God’s sake, not me, don’t eat me, eat him.’ Arguing for the motion is Professor Žižek. Slavoj Žižek is the author of over eight thousand books, some of which are slightly different. Stunning in its breadth and fluency, his work has touched on Lacan, Hegel, Marx, what would happen if they were cold pockets instead of hot pockets, what the deal is with airline food, etc. Arguing against the motion, we’re very lucky to have Dr Peterson, who shot to fame after he filmed himself eating dog turds to prevent Islam. He’s received further notoriety for his self-help book Crying Yourself to Dignity, sleeps surrounded by Soviet propaganda for apparently non-sexual reasons, and is currently serving on the editorial review board for a twelve-year-old’s Disney blog. The debate will work like this. Each participant will have ten minutes to make an opening statement, which will be followed by three minutes for rebuttals, before we open it up to the audience, who will be able to ask questions and then eat one of the debaters. Professor Žižek, you’re arguing for the motion, so if you’d like to start? ŽIŽEK: Thank you, thank you, no, no, thank you. I’m very glad to be here, my God, in this pot, to be cooked and eaten and so on and so on. In this situation, I am reminded of one of my beloved Radio Yerevan jokes from Soviet Union. So the listener asks, is it true that Marx, Engels, and Lenin were stealing the wheelbarrows? And Radio Yerevan replies, in principle yes, but with three corrections. First, it wasn’t Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but you, second, you weren’t stealing them but being gifted them, and third, they weren’t wheelbarrows, but a pair of testicles hanging underneath your chin. I claim, is this not our situation today? I like this joke in that it repeats itself. You will see what I mean. First you have the heroes of the grand socialism of twentieth century, my God, in reality it is only yourself, the politics of the self. The act of stealing the wheelbarrows, in which we see labour activism, fighting your bosses, insurrection, all that bullshit: they are not what is taken, but precisely that which is given to us by power. You know, I was at Occupy, but now I have no time for these things, it is precisely the form prescribed by capitalism. It is as Jacques Lacan said to the revolutionary students in Paris ’68 — as hysterics, what you want is a new master. But see what is happening in this joke! Here I agree with my good friend Alain Badiou — the testicles are the least shameful area of the body, precisely because they belong to the part of the Real; there is no testicular enjoyment, testicular desire, and so on, and so on. They constitute the remainder, the third term that destabilises the system, it is here that the truth of the system will be found. In the whole of Freud, he refers to the testicles only twelve times, and the penis, you know, on every page he has the penis, if you look. But do you know this, Freud’s first research as a physician was to try to find the testicles of an eel by, how do you say in English, disekcija, cutting up hundreds of eels to find their balls. You do not need me to finish the joke, you are good Lacanians. Now Freud says in his letters, he writes: I cannot find these testicles, all the specimens must therefore be female, das schönere Geschlecht. In this, I claim, we find the model of the entire theory of castration complex. It is not that Freud can only see woman as a mutilated man. No! The true history of Freudian psychoanalysis is the history of a fruitless search precisely for the mutilation, for testicles within the, sorry to be vulgar, the impenetrable feminine-phallic body of the eel. But what is it when the testicles appear underneath the chin? Just as what was taken is in fact a gift, now the Real we try to encounter in revolution becomes this grotesque ornament. Here I am a pessimist. It is not that mystical bullshit, the answers will always elude us, we have limited intellect, truth is outside our grasp, and so on and so on. No! The answers are literally under our noses, but they are only a pair of testicles, they will not satisfy you. But I see from our moderator that I am running out of time talking about the testicles on his chin, ok, so enough stupid jokes, I will address the question. You know, my critics will tell me that as a Communist I should not be arguing for this motion, that I should take the militant posture, sacrifice my life, heroically demand that I be eaten instead of Dr Peterson, and so on and so on. But here I claim that in this stance we do not see the testicles on the groin, the proper functioning of things, but precisely the testicles on the face. The renunciation of desire is in itself a perversion, because there is no ordinary operation of things in which the testicles that have no proper place are in their proper place. MODERATOR: Slavoj Žižek, thank you very much. [He throws a bay leaf and some peppercorns into the cauldron.] PETERSON: Well. I suppose I’m meant to respond to this, but I think my opponent’s made my case for me already. He claims I have a pair of testicles on my chin. I don’t. It simply isn’t true at all. I challenge you to find even one, let alone two. Clearly Professor Žižek doesn’t have the faintest bloody idea about basic human anatomy. It’s an absolutely dreadful lie, it’s a horrible thing for a distinguished professor to be teaching people, and it’s the kind of degeneration of civilised debate that happens when you allow this neo-Marxism to take over our universities. Professor Žižek is upholding an ideology that brutally murdered tens of millions of people, starved them in gulags, shot them in ditches, made them watch Frozen, all because they held to the nonsense idea that people could have testicles on their chins. Totally contrary to biology, and when you come up against the laws of nature you need to be ready, man, because they will always win. I think the only sane solution is to just damn well eat him. Among certain species of amoeba, they performed a study, the amoebae will hold a debate on abstract concepts, and the losers are digested by the winners. And you see the same principle in the Bible, when Elijah holds a Parliamentary-style debate with the prophets of Baal and slaughters five hundred of them on a point of information. So you can complain, or call this injustice, but you have to accept that the most competent individual will always win, and elites are there for a reason. Except academic elites, they don’t count. There’s an important archetype you should know about here, and that’s the Devouring Mother. There’s the Devouring Mother in Babylonian myth, the monster Tiamat, and in some of the early Care Bears cartoons. And the Devouring Mother teaches you that if you’re not careful, the same things that created you are going to consume you, and that’s life, man. It goes to show that these behaviours have been with us for a long time. You can’t just throw out these traditions, you can’t go into a fantasy world where you pretend they don’t exist, unless they tell you to eat a varied diet of grains, pulses, fruits, and vegetables. So maybe if more discussions were run like this, and people understood that the consequences of falling into this kind of pernicious nonsense is that the nonsense is going to come and eat you, then we’d have a lot more caution and a much fairer debate on our college campuses. Look at what you’ve thrown away! Western civilisation is in ruins! We had trains that arrived on time, they had a computer to tell you when they’d be arriving to the minute — an honest-to-God miracle, something that would have astounded every one of our ancestors. A society that works — and they want to get rid of it! Look what happens when the SJWs get the upper hand! ŽIŽEK: You know, I agree with everything my friend Dr Peterson says here. My God, it is a monstrosity that we must eat him, I oppose this utterly. But let me pick up on what he says here. Yes, I agree, we must defend the Western tradition, but is it not true that Marxism and postmodernism come precisely out of that tradition? I claim, look at where we are, in this pot, about to be eaten by naked cannibals: instead of the opposing term of Western humanism, is this not its own internal fantasy of the colonial other? So when Dr Peterson says that one tries to escape the contradictions of reality in a fantasy world, is not fantasy that which is precisely more real than the reality?

In ‘Krazy Kat,” Ignatz

said it with bricks; I mean

superficial in the sense that

all processes of chemistry

for example can be said to be

superficial upon the deeper layer

of physical amplification which is

a constant drive for power — no one

would take this statement to mean

that feet are unimportant — indeed

the whole point is that the more

abrasive the reciprocating movement of the hand, in a

definite operative sense, the greater the speed and

endurance of the horse which was not available for cartage

until the discovery of the collar. Will Rogers discovered

years ago (not forgetting the hills of Wessex) that any old

newspaper read from a theatre stage is

hilarious

[Note: Sources: Hito Steyerl, “The language of things”, at Transversal Texts Jun 06; Frances Richard, “Universally Accepted Definition”, at PEN America, 20 Sept 013; JBR; CA Conrad, quoted in Ali Liebegott, “Road Trip: CAConrad”, at The Believer, 9 Apr 019; Blake Eligh, “Yukon temperatures are the highest in 13,600 years”, at Climate & Capitalism, 11 Apr 019; JBR; Stephen Ratcliffe, “4.13”, at Temporality, 13 Apr 019; JBR; Bernadette Mayer, Utopia; JBR; Diana Hamilton, “Saint Strawberry”, at Harriet, 15 Apr 019; JBR; Adam Popescu, “This scientist thinks she has the key to curb climate change: super plants”, at Guardian, 16 Apr 019; Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity; CA Conrad, “(Soma)tic Poetry Ritual & Resulting Poems”, at Sublevel 3; Shimamoto Shozo, untitled, at Gutai; Geoff Manaugh, “The Archigram of Mammoth Bones”, at BLDGBLOG, 16 Apr 019; JBR, but see Geoff Manaugh, “Design Futures, Sacred Groves”, at BLDGBLOG, 16 Apr 019; JBR; Tim Atkins, “Tuesday poem #315 : Tim Atkins : Excerpt from a book called: NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE”, at Dusie, 16 Apr 019; Sueyeun Juliette Lee, “Self Portrait in an Academic Poetry Industrial Complex Mirror”, at Harriet, 17 Apr 019; Johannes Göransson, quoted in M. Buna, “Transgressive Circulation: A Conversation with Johannes Göransson”, at LARB, 13 Apr 019; JBR; Liaisons, “A Pueblo, a World”, at The New Inquiry, 17 Apr 019 (from In the Name of the People, a collectively written text that develops shared perspectives on the populist backlash currently unfolding on a planetary scale. Friends from France, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Quebec, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Ukraine, and the United States respond to the question: How is populism embodied in our worlds, and how do those of us who fight relate to it?); M John Harrison, “real histories”, at The M John Harrison Blogv, 18 Apr 019; JBR, result of recent colonoscopy, 18 Apr 019; Paavo Haavikko, “On becoming a forest” (tr. Anselm Hollo), at Books from Finland Issue 2/2006; JBR; Pentti Saarikoski, “A good day” (tr. Anselm Hollo), at Books from Finland Issue 2/2001; Todd Smith, “Twelve Questions and Two Stipulations: Found Poem”, at Todd Smith, 18 Nov 018; (hat tip Richard Lopez); Tim Longville, (i.e., Anselm Hollo and Tom Raworth), “Sunny”, in The English Intelligencer Series 2 Issue 2 May 1967 (hat tip Michael Tencer); Ted Berrigan, Sonnet II, in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (eds. Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan); JBR; Extinction Rebellion, website and emails, 15-19 Apr 019, and “17 April, 2019: International Day of Peasant’s Struggle”, at La Via Campesina; JBR; Ed Pilkington, “‘Church’ to offer ‘miracle cure’ despite FDA warnings against drinking bleach”, at Guardian, 19 Apr 019; Sam Kriss, “Scenes from the Žižek-Peterson debate”, at Idiot Joy Showland, 16 Apr 019; J.H. Prynne, (i.e., Anselm Hollo and Tom Raworth), “Sunny”, in The English Intelligencer Series 2 Issue 2 May 1967 (again, hat tip Michael Tencer)]

Posted at 01:32 PM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the Noose Around My Neck 127

Which is to say that we should not forget to examine the introduction’s subtitle: «Ainsi donc la question ...». «Ainsi donc» indicates that we are starting in medias res, in the middle of things, and so the «introduction» is not the beginning, but rather the continuation of a line of thought. This expression can be translated variously as «and so», «therefore», «as a result», «thus», «consequently». It marks a new turn or a bifurcation in an already existing discussion or argument, one painted on Yupo paper with water-soluble crayon, watercolor pencil, water brush, paper towel, and Q-tip. They heat these stones outside for a long time and then bring them in. They glow red from inside, alive, sparking with embers. There are big shovels to port them over to a wooden trench positioned to slide down into the pit at the center. Each sweat uses new stones. There is a boy, maybe ten or eleven, who cleans up afterward, clearing away the branches, sweeping, doing little chores. He asks me what the tattoos on my forearms mean. I explain their significance. “The one on this arm just says, ‘Now is the time to study yoga,’” I say. “This other one,” I gesture to my left forearm, “is a line of poetry from Iran. It says, ‘I’m a Muslim; the rose is my qibla.’” “What’s qibla?” he asks. “Qibla means the direction to Mecca. When you’re Muslim and you pray, you turn in the direction of a city in Saudi Arabia where a very ancient mosque is located.” “But it says the rose is the qibla. Which rose?” “Any rose,” I say. “Any rose in the world is the direction for my prayers.” The boy nodded like he understood perfectly. He said seriously, “You’re plugged in.” She sat cross-legged within a semicircle of porcelain bowls arranged small to large, each filled with water and amplified with submerged microphones. Dipping, pouring, and striking, washes of feedback rolled over and intersected. I first found this material while at a residency in the ceramics department of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans. I dunked a small piece of unglazed ceramic and wow — such strange sounds, like insects singing. Working this way is almost like making a field recording, and it keeps surprising me. I also found out that my rice sings. So I immediately just started hitting and listening to ordinary bowls I had at home. I draw on that material and try critically to deconstruct it. I take a lot of sentences out of other people’s books and I repeat them endlessly through the work around the narrative structure. Also when you write a book, you need about 60 thousand words. Raymond Chandler says “If you run out of ideas, have someone come through the door with a gun.” What I do instead is I have a sex scene every other page, and every sex scene is identical. That’s half the book before you’re even started. So yes, each of Kunz’s diagrams were drawn in a single sitting, some of which could reportedly last over 24 hours. The drawings operated as conduits for patterns of vibrational energy that could be used to realign the psychic imbalances underlying her patients’ medical conditions, which is why, in 1942, the financial adviser to the royal family of Lichtenstein asked her if she would attempt to repolarize Hitler. Citing excessive negative energies, she at first declined. When she later relented, the 63-centimeter metal spring Kunz used as a transmitter flew up and began to slash at her body, before wresting itself from her grip and flying across the room. That’s when my gaze shifts to the filthy white bucket. She extracts a handful of honeycombs. There are objects concealed under the expanse of uncut grass. Stones trace a path up to the house. They remind me of the decapitated marble head my aunt kept in her garden. I imagine the lawn mowed, a lit artificial lake and the ‘unkempt’ forest in the foreground. The four of us step into the field that grows by the side of the road. I cannot tell the plants apart but feel the sharp or blunt edges of the leaves against my calves. Veronika calls me over. She turns a small round leaf over. Shows me the tiny parasitical insects. Then brushes them off with her nail. She crouches to inspect another. Copy her. There is a row of red ants between the stems. Look up. An American woman stayed in our home. Upon returning they found the doors locked from within. She sat in the windowless hall. Two doors led to the adjoining bedrooms and one to the entrance. She tied a rope to each handle. Tethered the other end to three of the four chair legs. The American woman sat atop to keep them taut. I’m not sure what followed. It rained the next day. The dry mud that was cracked from the drought was eroded. It was during a period where he was writing short, playful and often collaborative poems on blank postcards which had been supplied by Ken and Ann Mikolowski for a project for their Alternative Press. About a hundred of those poems would later comprise Dad’s last completed book, A Certain Slant of Sunlight, published posthumously by Leslie Scalapino’s O Press. Our upstairs neighbor Megan Williams, who was designing and making clothes, had drawn some dresses on one of the cards. I suggested to dad that he write a poem about dresses for mom. He agreed and wrote the first line down: “We are the dresses for Alice.” I suggested a 2nd line, but he countered with “We go on, or off, for solace.” I was dismayed by my choice being rejected and expressed that, so he pointed to the line and reiterated, “No, ‘We go on, or off, for solace’.” Now I see how the word bears a weight of expectation beyond its placement and context. It draws out the need derived from its definition by simply existing in a space, seemingly innocuous, while the longing for solace expands outward. I had also bizarrely found a book in the warehouse, titled A Practical Spanish Grammar Guide for Border Patrol Officers, which had been issued by the Department of Justice in 1951 and reprinted a few times. It included sample bilingual immigration interviews, and strange lists of phrases to memorize, like “music conducting the sky” and “a splash alive forever.” In any case, the germ of The Real-Town Murders was an account I came across of a film Hitchcock never got around to making. He had the idea for a pre-credits sequence, set (this was the early 1970s) in a fully automated, robot-only car factory. He said the camera would follow the whole process of a car being made: you’d see the raw materials being delivered by automated truck; the camera would work its way along the assembly line as robots fitted the body panels together, inserted the engine, put in seats and so on. No people around at all; everything automated. At the end of this sequence the camera would follow the now completely built car out the other end of the factory, down a ramp to join a long line of similarly assembled autos. A man would come along with a clipboard to check the build. He would open the boot of the car and ... inside would be a dead body. The first clue is the cereal box I opened this morning, which features a froglike creature with big eyes, an open mouth, a startlingly human tongue, and human like hands, splashing about in milk and wheat stalks and larva shaped honey smacks, against a vivid red background, and which tells me that it provides “50 % Vit. D. Daily Needs”. On the back it provides me with a printout of “ingredients” and “nutritional facts.” That the words are in English and Arabic points to the global system — this Kellogg’s cereal box has been somewhat vaguely routed or controlled by the Kellogg’s office in Casablanca. Myself, I can sit pretty, given such predecessors as Barthes and a thousand others. Yet I still don’t have the categories to quite understand, for instance, the glue, or — I suspect — starch based adhesive that gives the box its use and mystery. The top of the cereal box is a familiar rectangle divided into two rough triangles traced out by impressed creases. One of the triangles slots under the other. However, to get to that organized state — which we will call the OPENED cereal box — I have to make it so — because the box is eminently CLOSED this morning. It comes closed. It is closed when it finishes its transit of the assembly line. I am confronted by a sealed box top. The potentially separable triangles that make up that box top are glued to two interior cardboard flaps. In the face of this, I, a USAmerican bred and born in the 20^th century, know just what to do: I must open this box. But from long experience I also know that I can make a mess of it. Too much pressure and you tear the thing, destroying the ideal symmetry that would insert the slot snugly under the mouth of the other triangle. If I exert the right pressure, I can break the adhesive bond and the box top will tent perfectly over the contents, which are, as well, protected by being stored in a little wax paper bag. That wax paper, too, I will have to force open when I get to it. On the other hand, if I am too violent, the box top triangles will rip, and instead of tenting the contents, they will raise up, irregularly torn, revealing the grayish paper under the beautiful red dye. Every time, then, I open the cabinet and take out the cereal box, its ruinous state will reproach me. In other words,

the instruction manual lay soaking in the bilge

I’m yours I’m all yours but the signals were garbled

persistent cigarette burns on his hand & arm

it is peaceful peaceful

the people go crazy

enter another plane

drive the big white car

on the horse’s back & into a hall

a single large crystal

think of Don Giovanni

with no interference from tree-cutting crane

in other words

IN THE LONG VIEW OF HUMAN HISTORY MAN’S RELIANCE ON FOSSIL FUELS CAN BE BUT A SHORT EPISODE

the moving houses are very moving

as they move slowly into the sea.

And why the “art/life hospital?” After a palm reader told me I would go to the hospital 2 times before I die, I got negatively triggered and angry. Asking myself, “How can I make art of this nonsense?” I had an embossed sign made for my house that said, The Art/Life Institute and Transfiguration Hospital. Living in a hospital at home has been wonderful.

STATION 1: THE COFFIN/SKELETON/DEATH MASK/DOLL/BABY CHICKEN PUPPET.

INTERACTION: 1.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

INTERACTION 2.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

STATION 3: THE DOLLS

The audience gets to practice compassion by praying at each doll bed and then rocking a chakra doll in the rocking chair.

INTERACTION 3:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

STATION 4: THE 7 BLACKBOARDS AND 7 LIGHTS

And now everyone is equally fabulous.

INTERACTION 4:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

INTERACTION: 5

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Imagine a corporation-approved robot cat for company on long space voyages, which dispenses narcotics from its space-anus and records your every move for the corporate database. Imagine the UN replaced by an API, a reformed open-source Facebook for which clicking “I agree” on the User Agreement is an official part of coming-of-age and citizenship ceremonies. Imagine wallpapering your room with a representation of your own genetic code; imagine an identity-stealing drone drifting past your window, reading that personal art and reverse-engineering the code it was based on. Imagine a society so diffused across the solar system that actual face-to-face meetings are rare high-status events commemorated by the exchange of physical DNA samples. Imagine those samples incorporated into facial photophores — like the ones on deep-sea fish — coded to flicker in certain sequences when they encounter kin; imagine those handshaking protocols coded to provoke dopamine cascades to enhance social cohesion. Someone learning to hack those protocols, using optogenetic trickery to make everyone she meets trust and adore her implicitly. For a while I’m paired with a very nice person whom I literally can’t understand. Her words make sense on a sentence level, but their underlying meanings seem predicated on axioms I can’t quite figure out. When it comes time to present our preliminary findings I suggest that she take the lead, because I don’t think I can do justice to her perspective. Instead, she gives me our notes and, as I stumble through them, throws herself into some kind of interpretive dance in the middle of the floor. OK.

You are plumed,

Or feathers have been glued to you.

They are crying.

Why is this? I am not sure.

Then some men sat down

On the sidewalk

And wrote slogans

On bits of cardboard.

Exhausted,

They wore the slogans

On their heads like hats.

That’s when I saw Nassif,

My friend from Paris,

In the process of throwing a brick.

            90^th Ave, beautifully remodeled.
            55^th Ave, a bungalow ready for your move-in.
            23^rd Ave, built as an ammunition box factory during WWII.
            I reawoke to find myself,

            Upon the course of this,
            Upon the road,

            In the middle of the war against nurses and patient care,
            Halfway along the road we have to go, three cranes,

            I found that I had strayed into The Forest, an American horror
            Film, The Forest, a survival video game, The Forest, a plantation,

            I was eating a bagel, hand-rolled,
            Boiled in honey water, baked in a wood fired oven,
            Either that
            Or I was eating an oyster,

            I found myself again
            Climbing

            Through a night-dark wood, Wellbutrin,

            There were no good choices
            And they wouldn’t answer my email,

            Water jets, seaweed wraps, mud baths, and sea-fog inhalation
            Appeared not anywhere,

            I came to in the neighborhood

            Coveted for its central location, cultural diversity, great climate
            The many storied properties have good bones—the breath of new
                    life flows through—

Two spacious areas, original wood floors
Updated Jack and Jill bathroom, walk-in closet

For I had—

Which is to say that “Ave | Via” is the absolute opposite of Athena emerging fully formed from the head of Zeus, it’s more like going back into his head (already split open by someone else) in order to retrieve something you forgot, or forgot how to do, so that you can think about uneven forms of life in the neighborhood. A little bit diving into the wreck, a little bit Orpheus. I love the sound of Bergvall’s poem, the circular condition of waking up again and again lost, and listened to her reading it on repeat. At some point I typed up “Via” and dumped the language into a spreadsheet, a familiar form of self-soothing. Then sorted it alphabetically. I was looking for patterns which were of course all around me, old, and violent. Speaking of Trump, the ribbon is red; the charcoal — well, what is the color between black and gray without waxing too poetic about it? Is the ribbon tongue or tail? Is the charcoal dirt or purifier? Will you need to interact with these objects, or are you just a witness to their existence? It is okay that you have these questions and are impatient for answers. It is okay that the answer will be “all of the above.” The only thing that will prohibit you from moving forward is a failure to accept multiplicity. Before or after the performance, I can’t remember which or when, Kapil held a $20 bill in front of the audience and asked someone to take it if they needed it. I was seated in the third row, to the right of the panel. My heart met my throat — yes, $20, did I need it? Imagine a cloud of milk as it dissipates, spilled on a London street. That asteroid, which created the Chicxulub crater, might have been the most cataclysmic event in Earth’s history, eradicating 75% of the planet’s animal and plant species. Project researchers believe the impact set off fast-moving, seismic surges that triggered a sudden, massive torrent of water and debris from an arm of an inland sea known as the Western Interior Seaway. The surge left “a tangled mass of freshwater fish, terrestrial vertebrates, trees, branches, logs, marine ammonites and other marine creatures,” according to Robert DePalma, the report’s lead author. “The sedimentation happened so quickly everything is preserved in three dimensions — they’re not crushed,” said co-author David Burnham. “It’s like an avalanche that collapses almost like a liquid, then sets like concrete. We have one fish that hit a tree and was broken in half.” Sometimes those words can be used as a springboard — like Benjamin Péret’s mortadella question recalled by Buñuel in his memoirs. In this way, in Dorsky’s cinema everything he films becomes sacred. A shirt, a glass or a handful of sand, in

light of gel, my gel, my vision

come out of

my eyes to hold you sur-

round you in

gold & you don’t know it

ever. Everyone

we the people having our

vision of

gold & silver & silken liquid

light flowed

from our eyes & caressing

all around all the

walls. I am a late Pre-

in this dawn of

to the things that are & were

& come to be

Once what we knew was only

and numbers became

It is numbers & gold &

the night turns one quarter green

that visibly pet moth

Cherry-pick workplace murex vernix Euler tour

moth dolphin

(elsewhere a “beached moth”)

“trees like the trees of another world”

use iris to melt locks

1.1.3

crab panther Dis regent emanation clown

flame troubadour tsar manta

sort of floats

in on the receding undertow

it is listed as vulnerable and looks pleasing

etc. But this lunge to containment is always compromised by border spillage. The word “list” in particular yields copious etymological spoils. That which is “listed as vulnerable” is the building that ‘leans,’ ‘inclines,’ or (in light of the already established oceanic setting) ‘careens,’ it is ‘bordered’, or ‘taken pleasure in.’ But it is also ‘listened to.’ That is to say, it would and it wouldn’t be easier, depending on which kind of prehensility we are taking about — indeed, his question “Why should I even mention / These politicians” is like, I mean, I had been reading 300 pages of Kant a week. In class, I tried to bring up the problem of moral and political philosophy’s search for the “neutral” example, but the professor was not interested. We were reading Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom, where his chapter on contract and consent used the example of agreeing to get one’s hair cut. Can you change your mind halfway through? When does a haircut become violent? I thought it was bizarre to pretend that we could talk about rape by talking about a haircut. I thought it was stranger still to pretend we could talk about “force” and haircuts without talking about the very long history of people in power shaving the heads of their captives, I mean how could we not talk about

the psychic root which is stained by dialectical illness

by the thought contained in black ozonal mirrors

where general slaughter is reflected

where the mind impels its wits by bleak molecular isolation

by stunted mangrove withdrawal

by absence from the life of euphoric solar trees

I mean, robots can’t take your job if you’re already retired, what sick fuck puts up a billboard with that phrase on it? When all I want to do is sleep? The story is contagious and the imaging tells it: Susan Sontag smiling at her notes on Frau Kloterjahn, the tubercular patient in Thomas Mann’s Tristan, while out the window one can see Le Corbusier, clad in a swimsuit and smoking a pipe, boxing with Pierre Jeanneret on the beach. Later, tho I don’t know how much later, Adolf Loos arrives, and just in time: Frederick Kiesler is distributing the yerba buena and someone who says he’s from the future has shown up with the orgasm machine. After leaving the others, we found ourselves at an excavation. I noticed strange kinds of resting places almost at the bottom. They were the shape and length of sarcophagi and looked like they were made of stone. As I knelt, however, I realized that I was gently sinking into them like onto a bed. They were covered with moss and ivy. I saw that there were always two of these resting places side by side. Just as I was about to lie down on the one that was next to the one which seemed to be reserved for D, I realized that it was already occupied by other people. So we kept on going. The place resembled a forest but there was something artificial in the way the tree trunks and the branches were arranged, which made this part of the scenery look like a shipyard. Walking along some beams and climbing up some wooden steps, we reached a kind of tiny, planked deck. The women with whom D lived were there. There were three or four of them and looked very beautiful. The first thing that surprised me was that D did not introduce me. This did not bother me any more than the discovery I made when I put my hat on top of a grand piano. It was an old straw hat, a panama that I had inherited from my father. (The hat is long gone.) When I took it off, I was surprised to see that a wide slit had been cut into the crown. There were some traces of red along the edge of the slit — they brought me a chair. That did not prevent me from taking a different one that I placed a short distance away from the table where everyone was seated. I did not sit down. Meanwhile, one of the women was engaged in graphology. I saw that she was holding something I had written which D had given her. I was slightly worried by her analysis, fearing that some of my personal characteristics would be revealed. I moved closer. I saw a piece of cloth covered with images. The only graphological element I could distinguish was the top part of the letter d. The elongation revealed an extreme aspiration to achieve spirituality. Appended to this part of the letter was a small sail with a blue border, and the sail was billowing as if filled by the wind. That is the only thing I was able to quote unquote read — otherwise, there were only indistinct shapes of waves and clouds. The conversation turned on this handwriting for a time. I do not remember the opinions expressed. But I do know very well, that at some point I spoke these exact words: “Il s’agissait de changer en fichu une poésie” [It was a matter of turning a poem into a scarf]. I had barely uttered these words when something intriguing happened. I noticed that one of the women who was very beautiful was lying on a bed. When she heard my explanation, she made a movement as quick as a flash. She pushed aside a bit of the blanket that was covering her. It took her less than a second to do this. It was not to show me her body, but to see the pattern of her sheet. The sheet must have had imagery similar to the kind I had probably quote unquote written many years ago to give to D. I was quite aware that the women had made this gesture. But I was aware of it because of a sort of second sight. My bodily eyes were somewhere else. And I was not able to distinguish what was on the sheet that had been so surreptitiously revealed to me, but, statistically, the text is roughly 32% nouns, 15% verbs, and 8% adjectives,

AN ASPECT OF SHELF,

ALIVE IN THE PLACE AND SMOKE

It is the chains of our seas.

There is this none.

Some crunching, although.

Because the head is at the very place.

So I will take nails, long nails.

Then I will set fire to everything.

It will burn for a long time.

It will burn for seven days.

Only the nails will remain, all welded together and rusty.

In a blood in angel there is this each.

Because the first war came to be and the first colonies It’s a lesson in love. The world is no longer simply a singular, devouring infant, but an infant that grows through interactions. To feel love is only possible if one realizes that symbiosis consists of you + me = we. Which is perhaps why I cannot forget that, on the cliffs in the park, I stepped on a wounded bird. Its helpless movement under my heel, its absolute softness. When I raised my foot, it was still able to flutter on to a stone beneath a lime-tree. We watched it and, in front of us on the granite, it buried its beak in its feathers, and there was no more movement.‘A small sparrow and a great peace,’ Doña Quixote said. It was the first day of autumn; the weather had changed. Behind the lime-trees the blue perspective of the clouds darkened. ‘In the winter we shall be able to ski to those islands, unless I am that sparrow,’ she said. Why did she say that? I felt, again, the suffering under my heel, as if it had been a human face. Later, when we were walking on the beach, a choir was singing unceasingly: very clear, high voices, women’s or boys’. It was an aria no one had heard before, and it was born in the masts and rigging of the yacht-club’s boats. What’s more, Foucault was heralding the return of this tradition within which the philosophy book served as a “manual or guide to everyday life,” a set of instructions in the “art of living counter to all forms of fascism.” As his final lectures made so clear, for Foucault philosophical activity was an exercise, an experience. Foucault’s work in this last phase of his life was himself in the act of becoming a philosopher. The purpose of this exercise was to transform himself, to let himself be altered by the activity of thinking, and to offer this experience of transformation to those who would come into contact with this work. In the opening pages of The Use of Pleasure, Foucault described what he was doing in the following terms: As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity — the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of themself? Or, as Donald Trump once told me, unknowingly quoting Ed Smith, in 1986 I was arrested and charged with armed robbery, possession of a controlled substance, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, statutory rape, indecent exposure and lewd conduct (but not resisting arrest!). Fortunately, that year I was awarded a Literature Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment of the Arts and was able to use the Fellowship money to retain some state-of-the-art legal counsel. What with plea-bargaining and all I only ended up serving two years forty-seven days. Since my release I have attained the eighth Operating Thetan level in the Church of Scientology. My short-term goal is to have my civil rights restored so I can pursue my long-term goal of being elected President of the United States.

This is a line.

Similarly, we watched the Elephants on the veldt in Kenya pay no attention to a young lion who was stalking the newborn just behind the mother’s legs. Filled with anxiety and disturbed by the mother’s seeming oblivion, we still adhered to out pledge not to interfere even when he crouched. We could see the taut energy in his limbs as he prepared to spring, the baby surely doomed, when the mother, just before he might have been mid-air, turned on a dime and reared as casually as we might swat a fly. She had known he was young, and practicing, not skilled enough yet to be of concern. She returned to grazing, her little one remaining behind her massive legs while the lion, seemingly chagrined, skulked away.

It’s not enough just to build the engine —
you need a head of steam:

            uh,
            rh,
            sha,
            shcha,

stones, wire, and paper tags, Yutaka Matsuzawa with “White Circle” (1969), digital print reproduced from “Y. Matsuzawa,” exhibition brochure published by Aoki Gallery, Tokyo, 1969, 6 x 4 1/8 inches, a fertilizer blower to spray colored food dyes across a wide, snow-covered gravel riverbed of the Shinano River in Niigata Prefecture, a gigantic fiberglass egg, which The Play released with theatrical flair into the ocean near the southernmost tip of Japan’s main island, hoping that it would reach California’s coast. Japanese marine-safety officials required that the artists add the inscription, “Would you please report [to] us the place and date when you found this egg[?]” Not properly weighted, it did not travel on the current the artists had anticipated for its journey; it was once sighted out at sea and then never spotted again. Nevertheless, on a normal day on the open road, you probably won’t encounter THAT many classic trolley problems. It’s not really something they cover in driving lessons, like parallel parking. In fact, there’s an argument that the obsession with trolley problems is a distraction from the real issue with smartcars. Machine vision will probably never be smart enough to navigate safely in today’s traffic conditions, especially in cities ... so we’re likely to see a push from developers to redesign city infrastructure around the technology. Does it sound too far-fetched and dystopian to imagine a law that everyone carry their phone at all times, broadcasting their location to all nearby vehicles? And if your battery dies and so do you, that’s sad but too bad. This was the nursery, so to speak, that generated the post-Imperial dissatisfactions and self-pity that eventually produced a Boris Johnson, a Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Nigel Farage. O’Toole is right to frequently refer to Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, with their scenes taken from the peculiarly noxious set of spoiled wealthy people, the infants of an immunizing privilege who, at existential loose ends, engage in transgression as a form of sport. St. Aubyn’s figures seem prophetic of the incredible careers of the entitled crew of British “populists” driving Brexit. One could easily imagine them arranged around the table at David Melrose’s country house, laughing as he made his wife eat like a dog on the floor.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Terence Blake, “Reading WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (16): the introduction is not the beginning”, at Agent Swarm, 30 Mar 019; JBR; caption to illustration in “There Is Water by Maggie Umber”, at Bomb 146; Kazim Ali, “from Northern Light”, at Bomb 146; Britton Powell, and Tomoko Sauvage, quoted in “Tomoko Sauvage by Britton Powell”, at Bomb 146; Stewart Home, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Stewart Home Slow Death (1996)”, at DC’s, 11 Mar 019; JBR; various, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Galerie Dennis Cooper presents … Emma Kunz”, at DC’s, 13 Mar 019; JBR; Elisa Taber, 300 and 25, at Gauss PDF; Edmund Berrigan, “We Go On, or Off, for Solace”, at Harriet, 25 Mar 019; JBR; Adam Roberts, quoted in Jo Lindsay Walton, “Real Talk: An Interview with Adam Roberts”, at All That Is Solid Melts Into Argh, 6 Mar 019; JBR; Roger Gathman, “MYTHS: The Cereal Box”, at Willett’s, 26 Mar 019; JBR; Anselm Hollo, “Reviewing the Tape”, at EPC; JBR; Anselm Hollo, “IN THE LONG VIEW OF HUMAN HISTORY MAN’S RELIANCE ON FOSSIL FUELS CAN BE BUT A SHORT EPISODE”, at Charles Agvent, Rare Books & Autographs; Linda Mary Montano, “DEATH IN THE ART AND LIFE OF LINDA MARY MONTANO: LECTURE AT DORSKY”, at Linda Mary Montano, 25 Mar 019; Peter Watts, “The Gong Show”, at No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons, 8 Mar 019; Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca, “from ‘The Náhuatl Exercises’” (tr. Heriberto Yépez), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Toward a Poetry & Poetics of the Americas (18): Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca, from ‘The Náhuatl Exercises’”, at Poems and Poetics, 7 Mar 019; Safaa Fathy, “Snapshots (excerpts)” (tr. Pierre Joris and the author), quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Safaa Fathy: from Revolution Goes Through Walls (translated by Pierre Joris with Safaa Fathy)”, at Poems and Poetics, 28 Mar 019; Stephanie Young, “Ave | Via”, and appended note, at Poetry Society, ?Mar 2019; Emily Paige Wilson, and Bhanu Kapil, quoted in Wilson’s “My Page to Submit”, at con•text, 15 Mar 019 (on Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue); Agence France-Presse, “Found: fossil ‘mother lode’ created by asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs”, at Guardian, 31 Mar 019; Miguel Garcia, “Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema”, at Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema 1; Alice Notley, “I the People”, at Poetry Foundation; Ian Heames, and Colin Lee Marsshall, quoted in “Colin Marshall on Ian Heames”, at Intercapillary Space, Apr 017 (a review of Ian Heames, Arrays (Face Press, 2015)); JBR; Diana Hamilton, quoted in Bryan Woods, “Friendship Is Incredible: An Interview with Diana Hamilton”, at Triangle House Review 12; Will Alexander, “Above the Human Nerve Domain”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Will Alexander, “Above the Human Nerve Domain”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; text on billboard in photo at the head of Alli Warren, “On Sleep”, at Harriet, 2 Apr 019; JBR; Ashley Simone, “Beatriz Colomina’s X-Ray Architecture”, at BOMB, 2 Apr 019; Walter Benjamin, letter to Gretel Adorno, 12 Oct 1939, quoted in Sharon Sliwinski, “The Fichu Dream Featuring Cai Glover”, at Museum of Dreams; JBR; Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and Gwendolyn Brooks, Riot!, algorithmically reorganized by Bertram, in Bertram’s “An Aspect of Chatter, Alive in the Today and People: A Computational Approach to the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks”, at Harriet, 4 Apr 019; Tomaž Šalamun, “Eclipse”, quoted in “Remembering Tomaž Šalamun”, at Archipelago Books, 5 Jan 015; Gwendolyn Brooks, Riot!, algorithmically reorganized by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, quoted in Bertram’s “An Aspect of Chatter, Alive in the Today and People: A Computational Approach to the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks”, at Harriet, 4 Apr 019; JBR; Aase Berg, “Language and Madness” (trs. Johannes Göransson & Joyelle McSweeney), at Harriet, 3 Apr 019; JBR; Leena Krohn, “Doña Quixote and Other Citizens. Portrait (Tales of the citizens of an [sic] usual city)” (tr. Hildi Hawkins), in Leena Krohn, Collected Fiction; Edward F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askēsis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life; JBR; Ed Smith, “You Can’t Legislate Maturity”, “Untitled”, quoted (or misquoted by JBR) in Dennis Cooper, “Please welcome to the world … Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, edited by David Trinidad (Turtle Point Press)”, at DC’s, 6 Apr 019; Deena Metzger, “What Our Bodies Know”, at Ruin and Beauty, 5 Apr 019; Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Order to the Army of the Arts [1]” (tr. Harry Gilonis), at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 5 Apr 019; Edward M. Gómez, “Japan’s Radical Conceptual Art of the 1960s”, at Hyperallergic, 6 Apr 019; JBR; Jo Lindsay Walton, “Notes on three SF short stories”, at All That Is Solid Melts Into Argh, 2 Apr 019; Roger Gathman, “The Killing Joke: Brexit”, at Willet’s, 3 Apr 019]

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With the Noose Around My Neck 126

“Except the clouds, and in the middle, in a field of forces crossing tensions and destructive explosions, the tiny and fragile human body.”

This revelation is the true religion.

The true religion.

[...]

In other words, the active essences are happy in themselves because of their close marital relationship with their monads; they are also happy with the tender relations they constantly have with their lawful monads, which, while being much less perfect than they, have nevertheless a touch a hundred times more tender than [...]

            what should I look for?
            what should I do? where?
            aside from you, great Foosh,
            who is my friend? a little stone,
            a lot of dirt, a terrible headache

[...]

what am I supposed to do then?

sick and smelly

I dip my finger into my belly button

and it seems to go forever

not a shallow cup this is just

AttemptS just attempts to remember

what it was like to be pastel

Indeed, mediation between this world and another is one of Cultist Simulator’s primary directives. In a number of playthroughs, I learned to summon the spirit called “Caligine” found “at the corners of the Forge, in the bounds of the Mansus, where the Glory’s fire meets baser elements ... A cunning vapour to infect your enemy’s dreams.” In others, I conjured “The Hinter” and “Percussigant.” My encounters were always fleeting; the numerous spirits I met usually disappeared after a few moments. For some reason, this

makes me think of the plinths that used to support Confederate memorials, like the one in Baltimore upon which Pablo Machioli’s Madre Luz temporarily replaced Robert E. Lee’s and Stonewall Jackson’s figures, for example, and another one in the same city streaked with red, having been splashed with paint before its statue’s removal. The House of Fame is an early poem, and intriguing in that its narrator, Geffrey, bears some complex relationship to its author, Geoffrey. Geffrey’s dream takes him from a temple made of glass and decorated with the story of the Aeneid to a desert landscape where a giant eagle scoops him up, carrying him skyward while eaglesplaining etc etc. I’ll assume you know the poem. The very project of narrating the dream reminds us how difficult it is to exit systems of heritage, order, and power even when one wants, as Geffrey does, to critique their stone and metal markers. We see that dilemma when the eagle squawks to Geffrey to “Awak” even as both remain within the dream. How do we open our eyes to the hidden “joynyngs,” the places where remembrance and power support each other? But Euclid wasn’t just a geometer. His Elements was an omnibus compendium of all the mathematical knowledge he knew. Check out the definitions that begin book five, which furnish a series of important concepts, first the mathematical ratio, then proportion, understood as an equality of ratios.

Definition 3: “A ratio is a sort of relation in respect of size between two magnitudes of the same kind [Λόγος ἐστὶ δύο μεγεθῶν ὁμογενῶν ἡ κατὰ πηλικότητα ποιὰ σχέσις].”

Definition 6: “Let magnitudes which have the same ratio be called proportional [Τὰ δὲ τὸν αὐτὸν ἔχοντα λόγον μεγέθη ἀνάλογον καλείσθω].”

Digital and analog appear here on the same page, perhaps for the first time, at least so under the guise of logos and analogos. Of immediate interest is the expression “two magnitudes of the same kind [δύο μεγεθῶν ὁμογενῶν],” or, to mimic Euclid’s terminology even more closely, two homogenous magnitudes. What does it take for two magnitudes to be homogeneous, to be “of the same genus”? They must contain a “part” or submultiple [μέρος] out of which each are measured without remainder. Hence 4 and 3 may form the ratio 4:3 because each is measurable by a shared, discrete submultiple, the simple arithmetical unit more commonly known as 1. Reading that, intuition tells me that he could have been born in one of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. For example, if I perceived things in the same way as a praying mantis, my perception would not be misleading, but probably would not be adequate to the mechanisms of my body. (In this sense, some forms of madness could be traced back to the onset of an alien perceptual apparatus, or be the result of a forcing to behave in ways extraneous to the body, as happens with the elephants of commercial circuses that go crazy ...). I mean, the materials that come from the landscape are also of great importance. Each and every plant has its place in Diné culture and relates back to the Diné Bahane’ (the Navajo creation story). The use of natural materials in my work, such as the Churro wool, and the way I mimic the tones, vegetation, animal hides, and stones found within the landscape is a direct response to the way the western world doesn’t acknowledge the land that we come from anymore. Weaving is a way to translate the importance of Naalyéhé (materials) through Hózhó (balance). Resistance movements have sought to bring back the land to the Diné (to all of us, really). Through Hózhó we bring back that deep connection to land and what we see.

Hózhóogo naasháa doo

Shitsijí’ hózhóogo naasháa doo

Shikéédéé hózhóogo naasháa doo

Shideigi hózhóogo naasháa doo

T’áá altso shinaagóó hózhóogo naasháa doo

Hózhó náhásdlíí’

(In beauty I walk)

(With beauty before me I walk)

(With beauty behind me I walk)

(With beauty above me I walk)

(With beauty around me I walk)

(It has become beauty again)

Is that also the secret of Velasquez’s fools? It is worth the trouble of considering them [fools] again with this question in mind. Copies of the magazine are rarer than hen’s teeth these days — there was talk of an Umbra reader coming out from CUNY’s Lost and Found programme, but I haven’t seen or heard any news of that for a while. Let’s hope that something happens! Something does. For example, the interviewer visits a Ponderosa Pine in the Coronado National Forest on June 12, 2010 and says, “I: Hello.” A bird responds, “weet! weet!” followed by the sounds of wind, “hhhhhhh/hhhhhhh,” and another question: “I: You are surrounded by trees, that, like you, were damaged by fire. What we would call corpses are scattered around you. Do you feel this? Can you describe what it is like?” The Subject’s responses are more hushed h’s like those we’ve just heard in the wind. These are accompanied by bird tweets and alphanumerics, including diacritical marks, )))) ((((, ////, ***, etc. These may indicate motion and expression in time — the direction of breezes, wayward music from a building, worms arguing, zips and zaps of carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, water, defense compounds, and allelochemicals traveling thru the mycorrhizal network — I dunno. There are some blows in life ...

each species suffering

with its identity blurred

with its evolution misfocused

amidst disfigured bone yards

missing condors & pumas

along with broken burial Wrens

the body of fauna being toneless platique

the oldest ‘millipedes’ from ‘the Devonian’

a ‘placoderm’ which ceases to breed

blurred ‘amphibia’ from the Mississippi

all exit as dazed Locusts

as aquatic Salamander deaths in the midst of the Permian

I’m feeling the sea that enlivens

the sea that vivifies misfortune

this is life

listening to sand

listening to its tumultuous commotion of kelp including coral reefs

including sea grass beds

including conflict with land

& on land

the grass burning with sand fleas

with sail-backed polycosaurs

seen from a floating optical core

watching the sea tables poisoned

always viewing with hieratic alacrity

with vatic incessance

the blinded toxins in carnivorous ravines

Where am I? you might ask ... always already within a cosmic holism! Sun Ra was evoked — Ra’s mighty ability to act as guide and conduit to the immensity of the cosmos. Cecilia read after Will. “Iridescence is word we should use more often” she said and

... You,

throbbing eye

glimpse

an ally

primal pore ...

When any element is tampered with, damaged and destroyed all sentient life is made vulnerable. She talked about “the Guarani of the rain forest in Paraguay and Brazil who say that when the mist and the forest are gone, we will all be gone.” It is crucial to maintain the commons of breathing, wouldn’t you say? So yes, I confess to not knowing what a Crab-O-Saur, a Tin Trespasser, or what Grabbers are. But a few days before I arrived, a dead sperm whale washed up sort of onto the shore. The head was stuck between some rocks but its body flowed freely with the waves. The weather was really bad for a week. Rain and wind every day. The first clear day that came, I decided to walk across the island, we lived in the middle of the island, and I decided to walk 11 miles to the other end. At the end of my walk I thought that I wanted to wash the dead whale. I had never been in the water with such a large dead being before. I’d never seen anything so large and dead before. The sense of shared humanity was overwhelming.

Invocation of loss of balance

Invocation of falling

Invocation of inappropriate laughing or crying

Invocation of a shadow

Invocation of writing with light

Invocation of evaporation

Invocation of tea bowl with impression of a leaf

Southern Song Dynasty, 12^th-13^th centuries

Jizhou ware; stoneware

From early times, Chinese potters understood that the ashes of plant material could melt directly into glazes

Where do you want ghosts to reside?

In our wakeful hours there are flowers which produce nightmares

There is in that breath sparkles of scorched flesh and the fainting of stars

The meaning (then) is not feasible. It is offered up / leftover bonbons thrown to the chickens and geese / for our brief notice — it offers us (us [it offers us]) nothing. What does it mean to be in a room full or signifiers (in a city full of them? / in a worldly country redolent with their abstractedness?) / but with not a referent to be seen? / or with some seeming referents seemingly somewhere nearby / but with no connection between the two (the many)? — really / no / not / nothing / really / nothing / but no / I didn’t mean to say that / it was nothing / really / really nothing. Little Wedgewood figurines / slowly revolving / without regard to even relationship / certainly out of all regard for revolution (of either sort) — or / perhaps they’re not revolving / perhaps they’re not revolving after all — there’s nothing to worry about / not even the slight bit of worry that seems to be constantly haunting us — that little bit of worry. But / how can there be even that? / how can there be an as-if / without an is? — There can’t / or / there just doesn’t seem to need to be — not for now / anyway — not here / where there is no now / nor ever will be. I won’t say that I don’t enjoy reading the poems. In a way / and to an extent / I do — I enjoy reading them rather the way I enjoy watching a windshield wiper clean the rain off the windshield (not for long / for limited effect). Then

            My mind turns to my breath, one.
            My mind watches my breath, two.
            My mind turns and watches my breath, three.
            My mind turns and faces my breath, four.
            My mind faces my breath, five.
            My mind studies my breath, six.
            My mind sees every aspect of the beauty of my breath, seven.
            My mind watches my breath soothing itself, eight
            My mind sees every part of my breath, nine.
            My breath is not indifferent to itself, ten.
            The numbers are made of rubber or something like that.
            They stretch.
            They never lose their shape.
            They are ageless.
            They don’t need repair.

            Four thousand one hundred twenty-eight feet here.
            Four thousand two hundred eighteen feet there.
            And the body of the house itself.
            Fourteen dollars and twenty-eight cents here.
            Forty-eight dollars and twelve cents there.
            Forty-two or forty with twenty is always sixty-two or sixty.
            And I mean forty-two with twenty can be sixty as well as sixty-two.
            And the other way around.
            Just as ten and twenty can be thirty-two or thirty
            Or twelve and twenty can be thirty.

            It is the key.
            The mystery of the balances is there.
            The church forbids its angels entry there.
            Blood is exchanged there.
            Mothers weep there.
            It is night there.

            My mind turns to my breath.
            My mind watches my breath.
            My mind turns and watches my breath.
            My mind turns and faces my breath.
            My mind faces my breath.
            My mind studies my breath.
            My mind sees every aspect of the beauty of my breath.
            My mind watches my breath soothing itself.
            My mind sees every part of my breath.
            My breath is not indifferent to itself.

            In this scene there is one shot.
            Giordano Bruno comes to mind, whoever he is.
            She is in the doorway of her mother’s house.
            She faces south.
            We see it two ways.
            First is the house behind her and the great Northern constellations.
            Magnetic north, true north, the north star path ...

            People are gathered in the backyard.
            This is the celebration of the changing of the light.
            They do it as often as they can in summer.
            They come to talk.
            They pass the time.
            They say things like:

            God, this is sentimental.
            This is the hour of the mystery of the barn swallows.
            One, where do they go in daytime?
            Two, do they never rest?
            Three, when you buy them in the store, made in China, on the end of strings
                        they do exactly what they do alive.
            Four, how is that possible?
            The idea of the changing center is not in anything we make.

            Our toys run down.
            Six of one, two times three of one, five plus one of one,
                        nine minus three of one, half a dozen of another.

Which is to say I cared about the collective head, which seemed to be running a fever. But if we managed to escape, to break out of the great skull and into the fresh air? It seemed fitting to write it in the third person because I no longer felt like myself. Here’s how it began. She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted. Close-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection, a garage door spray-painted with the words ‘STOP NOW! DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE!’ Why did the portal feel so private, when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere? She opened the portal. ‘Are we all just going to keep doing this till we die?’ everyone was asking. She had become famous for a tweet that said simply: Can a dog be twins? That was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the stage of penetration where teenagers posted the cry-face emoji at her. The audience looked at her encouragingly.

grisly british witch pits

sex in the moon next summer

what is binch

what is to be corn cobbed

that’s the cost of my vegan lunch

pants burn leg wound

She could not feel her first fingertip. It was like the way your ear used to get soft, pink and pliant, and the swirls of hair around it like damp designs. The whole audience conjured up the image of a man in a white T-shirt grinning over his shoulder, and private music began to autoplay for each of them. ‘SPICY MEAT-A-BALL. And it is lost, lost, lost, lost!’ Turning away from the sphere of production and wage differentials, Wang explores the modalities of accumulation and governance that have become increasingly important against the backdrop of the neoliberal restructuring of the global economy and the dismantling of the welfare state since the 1970s. Crucially, these mechanisms are racialized, and they have a predatory and parasitic character. The book’s chapters examine, among many other things, financialization and the debt economy, the use of police and courts to generate municipal revenue, mass incarceration, algorithmic policing and predictive analytics. There is no longer room for the belief, writes Wang, that “revolutionaries and the police [can] be bedfellows.” “Abolish ICE.” This is followed here by the five movements of The Code Gods’ Musical Offering:

Which is to say, basically, that both the distinctive scent and coolness of a pine grove, for example, turn out (according to recent scientific studies) to be consequences of the same chemical process, in which uniquely structured molecular chains form as the trees ‘exhale.’ Similarly, the emotive ‘sigh’ of the wind in the pine — recurrently regarded, across cultures and centuries, as one of the most beautiful of natural sounds — can be heard without much of a stretch as sexual reproduction made audible, since the pine depends on the wind (rather than insects or birds) for pollination. Contrary to what one might imagine, however, this is not why lovers pine. Pine in that sense is thought to be etymologically derived from the Old English pinian (“torment”), from *pine (“pain”), possibly from Latin poena (“punishment”), from Ancient Greek ποινή (“penalty, fine, bloodmoney”). Cognate to pain. It entered the Germanic languages, of which English is one, English is West Germanic specifically, with Christianity. This citation appears on page 219 in the English translation, as the footnotes have been grouped together at the end of the book. In the French this note appears at the bottom of the first page, and so is much more salient. In other words, the fact of old age is subsumed under the reign of the law of increasing entropy, which leads us into « universal ruins ». Using the terminology of Deleuze’s other books, we can call D&G’s plane of universal ruins a plane of universal « demolition », or universal « crack-ups ». In other words, the Sunsphere stands 6,520 feet tall and is composed of a black, cylindrical base capped by a miniature neutron star. I mean, the Sunsphere Shot Tower is made entirely of brick, and in it many horned elves manufactures shot for shotguns. But then, the Sunsphere is 1,000 feet tall and composed of a green tower and a pulsing orb of blue lightning. Really, the Sunsphere is dilapidated and covered in blue tarps, it hasn’t been seen in years. That doesn’t stop the 1862 mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota from haunting Mary Todd Lincoln, institutionalized now and alone with her ghosts. It’s May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of being nuts. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln’s claim that every night a quote unquote Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. “It was my century too,” he writes. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey — a tufted capuchin named Ottoline — to assist Duncan with basic tasks. She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, à la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective. You’ve heard of Fight Club, but have you been to the Underground Punch Market? “They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved. Smoking penis blood with jaguar skin to talk to ancestors. SMURFS MAN, SMURFS taking over the basic gestalt. I’m telling you. Just stop your heart for 5 minutes and let your soul open a communication channel that delves in and through multiple dimensions bro!” I mean, “Growing up as a young boy in Wakanda, I would see T’Challa flying over our village, and he would remind me of a great Xhosa phrase. He says ‘abelungu abayazi ndiyaxoka’ — which means, ‘In times like these, we are stronger when we fight together than when we try to fight apart.” Which got huge applause. Which is the best thing ever. Because it actually translates as, “White people don’t know I’m lying.” What is HyperFace? An algorithm for simultaneous face detection, landmarks localization, pose estimation and gender recognition using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), which fuses the intermediate layers of a deep CNN using a separate CNN followed by a multi-task learning algorithm that operates on the fused features. It exploits the synergy among the tasks which boosts up their individual performances. There are two variants of (1) HyperFace-ResNet that builds on the ResNet-101 model and achieves significant improvement in performance, and (2) Fast-HyperFace that uses a high recall fast face detector for generating region proposals to improve the speed of the algorithm. Extensive experiments show that the proposed models are able to capture both global and local information in faces and performs significantly better than many competitive algorithms for each of these four tasks. Be that as it may, the most significant architectural spaces in the world are now entirely empty of people. The data centres, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, unmanned ports and industrialised agriculture that define the very nature of who we are today are at the same time places we can never visit. Instead they are occupied by server stacks and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and internet-connected toasters, driverless tractors and taxis. OK. Has it been in any other papers? George, don't make no full moves. What have you done with him? Oh, mama, mama, mama. Oh stop it, stop it; eh, oh, oh. Sure, sure, mama. Now listen, Phil, fun is fun. Ah please, papa. What happened to the sixteen? Oh, oh, he done it, please. John, please, oh, did you buy the hotel? You promised a million sure. Get out. I wished I knew. Please make it quick, fast and furious. Please. Fast and furious. Please help me get out; I am getting my wind back, thank God. Please, please, oh please. You will have to please tell him, you got no case. You get ahead with the dot dash system didn’t I speak that time last night. Whose number is that in your pocket book, Phil 13780. Who was it? Oh — please, please. Reserve decision. Police, police, Henry and Frankie. Oh, oh, dog biscuits and when he is happy he doesn’t get happy please, please to do this. Then Henry, Henry, Frankie you didn’t even meet me. The glove will fit what I say oh, Kayiyi, oh Kayiyi. Sure who cares when you are through? How do you know this? How do you know this? Well, then oh, Cocoa know thinks he is a grandpa again. He is jumping around. No Hobo and Poboe I think he means the same thing. The boss himself. Yes, I don’t know. I showed him boss; did you hear him meet me? An appointment. Appeal stuck. All right, mother. Who shot me? No one. Will you help me up? O.K. I won’t be such a big creep. Oh, mama. I can’t go through with it, please. Oh, and then he clips me; come on. Cut that out, we don’t owe a nickel; hold it; instead, hold it against him; I am a pretty good pretzler —Winifred — Department of Justice. I even got it from the department. Sir, please stop it. Say listen the last night! I don’t want to holler. I don’t know, sir. Honestly I don’t. I don’t even know who was with me, honestly. I was in the toilet and when I reached the — the boy came at me. Yes, he gave it to me. No. If he wanted to break the ring no, please I get a month. They did it. Come on. (A name, not clear) cut me off and says you are not to be the beneficiary of this will. Is that right? I will be checked and double-checked and please pull for me. Will you pull? How many good ones and how many bad ones? Please I had nothing with him he was a cowboy in one of the seven days a week fight. No business; no hangout; no friends; nothing; just what you pick up and what you need. I don't know who shot me. Don’t put anyone near this check — you might have — please do it for me. Let me get up. heh? In the olden days they waited and they waited. Please give me a shot. It is from the factory. Sure, that is a bad. Well, oh good ahead that happens for trying. I don’t want harmony. I want harmony. Oh, mamma, mamma! Who give it to him? Who give it to him? Let me in the district — fire-factory that he was nowhere near. It smoldered No, no. There are only ten of us and there ten million fighting somewhere of you, so get your onions up and we will throw up the truce flag. Oh, please let me up. Please shift me. Police are here. Communistic ... strike ... baloney ... honestly this is a habit I get; sometimes I give it and sometimes I don’t. Oh, I am all in. That settles it. Are you sure? Please let me get in and eat. Let him harass himself to you and then bother you. Please don’t ask me to go there. I don’t want to. I still don’t want him in the path. It is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Please put me in that room. Please keep him in control. My gilt edged stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in. Please mother, don’t tear, don’t rip; that is something that shouldn’t be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends. Please, look out. The shooting is a bit wild, and that kind of shooting saved a man’s life. No payrolls. No wells. No coupons. That would be entirely out. Pardon me, I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Look out. Look out for him. Please. He owed me money; he owes everyone money. Why can’t he just pullout and give me control? Please, mother, you pick me up now. Please, you know me. No. Don’t you scare me. My friends and I think I do a better job. Police are looking for you all over. Be instrumental in letting us know. They are English-men and they are a type I don’t know who is best, they or us. Oh, sir, get the doll a roofing. You can play jacks and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it. I take all events into consideration. No. No. And it is no. It is confused and its says no. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. Did you hear me? I don’t know. I don’t know. Two thousand. Come one, get some money in that treasury. We need it. Come on, please get it. I can’t tell you to. That is not what you have in the book. Oh, please warden. What am I going to do for money? Please put me up on my feet at once. You are a hard boiled man. Did you hear me? I would hear it, the Circuit Court would hear it, and the Supreme Court might hear it. If that ain’t the pay-off. Please crack down on the Chinaman’s friends and Hitler’s commander. I am sore and I am going up and I am going to give you honey if I can. Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast. Him? John? Over a million, five million dollars. Yes. Yes, I will lie quiet. That is what caused the trouble. Look out. Please let me up. If you do this, you can go on and jump right here in the lake. I know who they are. They are French people. All right. Look out, look out. Oh, my memory is gone. A work relief police. Who gets it? I don’t know and I don’t want to know, but look out. It can be traced. He changed for the worse. Please look out; my fortunes have changed and come back and went back since that. It was desperate. I am wobbly. You ain’t got nothing on him but you got it on his helper. But I am dying. Come on, mama. All right, dear, you have to get it. Then pull me out. I am half crazy. They won’t let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. Give me something. I am so sick. Give me some water, the only thing that I want. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Danny, please get me in the car. I don’t know. I didn’t even get a look. I don’t know who can have done it. Anybody. Kindly take my shoes off. No. There is a handcuff on them. The Baron says these things. I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers. It isn't worth a nickel to two guys like you or me but to a collector it is worth a fortune. It is priceless. I am going to turn it over to ... Turn you back to me, please Henry. I am so sick now. The police are getting many complaints. Look out. I want that G-note. Look out for Jimmy Valentine for he is an old pal of mine. Come on, come on, Jim. Ok, ok, I am all through. Can't do another thing. Look out mamma, look out for her. You can’t beat him. Police, mama, Helen, mother, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! Please help me up, Henry. Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone. This happened inside the El Paso County Coliseum. I was outside in the parking lot, with about seven thousand others, shivering in the frigid desert night. Inside, Trump was winding down his speech and people were leaving. Suddenly there was a commotion at the exit. A pair of young people wearing black were hurrying out of the building, holding the large Soviet flag, being chased by a pack — a posse — of cowboys. I have seen some curious things at Trump rallies, but none stranger than the sight of four cowboys running after two people carrying a giant red USSR flag. But the flag bearers were fast and crafty. They weaved through the crowd with ease, while the cowboys moved awkwardly, their cowboy boots a bit too stiff and their pants a bit too snug. Companies are beginning to capitalize on these opportunities. Motif Ingredients has just announced it had raised $90m in funding, the largest Series A round ever for a food technology company. This makes Motif the largest company focused on cellular agriculture — the new industry creating animal products without animal farming, aka lab-grown meat. This is no surprise given Motif is a spin-off of Ginkgo Bioworks, a huge player in synthetic biology, and funded by organizations like Breakthrough Energy, which includes Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Vinod Khosla. According to surveys, large numbers of people are down with the idea of eating synthetic meat. Does this mean India and China could become the first countries to adopt these new products? Maybe. Most of these new animal-free food companies are based in the US — in Silicon Valley specifically — and there is no comparable hub of biotech investment in the world like the Valley. So the first to go synthetic could be the United States. Why? To get rid of cruel and methane-producing factory farms, perhaps, in support of the Green New Deal. Respondents didn’t say. But 53% of USAmericans surveyed did say sure, they’d switch if the price was the same.

[Note: Sources: Walter Benjamin, quoted in blurb for Bérangère Fromont, Except the Clouds, at Void; Louis Riel, from the Massinahican (gr. Bryan Sentes); Armand Schwerner, Tablet VIII, at Grist; shireen alia ahmed, “u-r-lying”, at BOMB, 20 Feb 019; Rex Barnes, “A Ouija for the Apocalypse”, at Public Books, 19 Feb 019; image: Leif Sandberg, from Beyond the Mirror, at Void; JBR; Seeta Chaganti, “B-Sides: Chaucer’s ‘The House of Fame’”, at Public Books, 14 Feb 019; Alexander R Galloway, “General Formula for the Digital and the Analog”, at Alexander R Galloway, 20 Feb 019; Miranda Mellis, quoted in Elisabetta Rizzo, “‘Being a writer means reacting’. Interview with Miranda Mellis” (tr. Google), at Altria Animali, 21 Oct 018; JBR; Dakota Mace, “Weaving Diné Design from the Desert Landscape”, at Edge Effects, 12 Feb 019; Simone Weil, quoted at Spurious, 21 Feb 019; David Grundy, “A Black Arts Poetry Machine”, at Streams of Expression, 7 Feb 019; JBR: Michael Gessner, “The Synecological Poem: On Tree Talks: Southern Arizona by Wendy Burk”, at Kenyon Review; JBR; César Vallejo, “The Black Heralds” (memory quote); Will Alexander, Brenda Iijima, and Cecilia Vicuña, quoted in Iijima’s “Telluric Guerilla Visions and Effervescence: Will Alexander and Cecilia Vicuña”, at Entropy, 20 Feb 019; JBR; David Pritchard, “The best of all possible Audens: A review of ‘Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul’”, at Jacket2, 21 Feb 019; JBR; Patty Chang, “Invocation of a Wandering Lake, 2016, 12 minutes”, at Patty Chang; Patty Chang, The Wandering Lake; Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse XLIV, at Poetry Foundation; Alan Davies, “A vacancy one knew, Or: shallows of content; or: casuistry”, at Jacket2, 11 Feb 019 (on John Ashbery, A Worldly Country); JBR; Robert Ashley, “The Backyard”, at Mountain 7; JBR; Patricia Lockwood, “The Communal Mind”, at London Review of Books, Vol. 41 No. 4, 21 Feb 2019; Dan Nemser, “Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present”, at Social Text, 13 Feb 019 (a review of Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism); JBR, the music being the complete Autopoiesis CCIX, the note to which reads “Autopoiesis CLVIX-CLXIII, as they appeared when opened by Alan Baker; we must have been using incompatible versions of MSWord; I think of these as the Code Gods’ Musical Offering, and, since MS HQ is 1500 miles from here, and since Alan lives 5000 miles in another direction, as New World Music. For Alan; to quote Lady, sing, brother, sing!”; blurb for Craig Dworkin, The Pine-Woods Notebook, at Kenning Editions; JBR, Wikipedia, Grammarly, and other places on the web; Terence Blake, “Reading WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (14): Old age, entropy, and modality”, at Agent Swarm, 1 Mar 019; JBR; various blurbs for various books, quoted in Jacob Singer, “February and March: Small Press Releases”, at Entropy, 1 Mar 019; Sebastian Gorka and several people on 4chan quoting, paraphrasing and/or imitating Alex Jones on Joe Rogan’s show, 27-8 Feb 019; JBR; Trevor Noah, and Chrizelda Kekana, quoted in Kekana’s “OPINION | Trevor Noah’s inside joke was more than just a laughing matter”, at Times Live, 1 Mar 018 (hat tip K); Rajeev Ranjan, Vishal M. Patel, Rama Chellappa, “HyperFace: A Deep Multi-task Learning Framework for Face Detection, Landmark Localization, Pose Estimation, and Gender Recognition”, at arXiv.org, 6 Dec 017; JBR; blurb for Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene (ed. Liam Young), at Wiley; JBR; Arthur Flegenheimer, “Last Words of Dutch Schultz”, at Baby Face Nelson Journal; Dave Eggers, “Why Donald Trump could win again”, at Guardian, 2 Mar 019; Jacy Reese, “Is the world ready for lab-grown meat?”, at Guardian, 3 Mar 019]

Posted at 02:07 PM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the Noose Around My Neck 125

yeah no,

            That it goes from all
                        shall be well to oh
                        well

Knock knock

It is its own intelligence,

Though here must be a bad vortexx

Which is to say

“eo rovs peoy ci meou wahr t boiru,” which is to say say,

NORRTHOW ! OOOHMEE ! NOG LITE ! NOO

KHRAHRR ! TEEMOWW !

eem now ooh-nohh

THEE OWW OHH

grahoored to waking gowwr

which is to say,

nnoam

trouse

clud

age

girer, plancher

sask jaw, grire,

plote

throatqh

narn serie

surnce

brurnal

lengthqer,

sleech,

Norah Maki, Vanitas (oranges with death mask of hair), 2014. Graphite, ink, hair. Jace Clayton, The Great Salt, 2018. Detail. Modular synthesizers, cables, marímbulas, aluminum, speakers, salt replica of silver salt container. Jumana Manna. Wild Relatives, 2018. Film still. Photograph by Marte Vold. Savannah Knoop, Screens: A Project About “Community,” 2019. Installation shot from the outside of Essex Flowers. Photo by Marina Winther. Installation view of Alicia Kopf, Diary of Conquests at La Capella, Barcelona, 2014, ink on wall. The relationship between an author and their translator can take myriad forms, including a large, glowing, white cube emergeing from a stadium-size pool of water. “When it was no longer funny, it became profound.” The art of animation and automatons. The setting is our reality, but. The characters are happy, but. The plots are straightforward, but. Take the lithosphere: 193,000 human-made “inorganic crystalline compounds,” or what you and I might call “rocks,” now vastly outnumber Earth’s approximately 5000 natural minerals. Which is to say, someone is not looking in a mirror. Or rather, a mirror is not being looked in. Instead, “the head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes the feeling glass. But what does it feel? The position is for body balance during the brushing of teeth and the washing of face neck arms and torso”. “But who feels what?” “Does steel or glass or napkin or ground or earth or universe feel?” Things worsen. She has a couple of falls; “the author collapses, into the character again”. A table with wheels is bought, to make things easier, and it causes a raft of new difficulties. Mozart, Beethoven, Athena and Christ are nothing but shadow and light on stone. Nothing much happens, other than “the armchair, the world.” It is a question of dialogue. “Who’s talking to whom?” But the other thing that happened was much more important. I had a very serious illness, lost a kidney and had a very long convalescence. I fell into a semi-trancelike state for a long time. A fly straddles another fly on the faded denim stretched over the knee. Sooner or later, the knee will have to make a move, but now it is immobilised by the two flies, the lower of which is so still that it seems dead. The fly on top is on the contrary quite agitated, jerking tremulously, then convulsively, putting out its left foreleg to whip, or maybe to stroke some sort of reaction out of the fly beneath, which, however, remains so still that it seems dead. A microscope might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy in its innumerable eyes, but only to the human mind behind the microscope, and besides, the fetching and rigging up of a microscope, if one were available, would interrupt the flies. Sooner or later some such interruption will be inevitable; there will be an itch to scratch or a nervous movement to make or even a bladder to go and empty. But now there is only immobility. The fly on top is now perfectly still also. Sooner or later some interruption will be necessary, a bowl of gruel to be eaten, for instance, or a conversation to undergo. Sooner or later a bowl of gruel ... Around the same time Jakelin died in CBP custody, a man stood waiting at the cruce, an informal stop for all buses turning left toward Raxruhá from south in Guatemala. The man stepped on every bus, calling out, “Is anyone from Candelaria?” Finally, a cautious voice responded, “who wants to know?” The man explained that he was in Port Isabel Detention Center with Pedro for weeks. When he signed his deportation papers and prepared to return to Guatemala, Pedro asked him to get a message to his father-in-law in Candelaria: he was detained in Texas and did not know where his 10-year-old son was. Please send help. Shortly thereafter, I received a new contact request on WhatsApp. Pedro’s family did not know what an Alien Number was, what political asylum meant, or how to find a lawyer. Nobody in Candelaria had spoken to him for over a month, because he didn’t have money to make an international phone call. They were glad I could put money on his account, and hoped I might be able to visit. Then, they were surprised to hear how far away the state of Texas (where he is detained) is from the state of Washington (where I live). Pedro left Candelaria for the United States because he, like over 50 other men in his rural community, lived in fear of capitalist criminalization and prosecution as state racism in land grabbing for ecotourism. While the person who stole land and sowed conflict in the community was a foreigner, he was only able to illegally seize land through racialized privilege tho Guatemala legally recognizes Q’eqchi’s as an Indigenous people in its constitution, and the government legally recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to territorial autonomy (such as through ILO 169). Rather than recognize the Candelaria community’s legal property rights, the state has framed the people who live there as criminal trespassers on their own land. This is why traveling north with a 10-year-old son who does not speak Spanish is the choice Pedro made. It’s probably needless to add, but now that Pedro has a transnational WhatsApp team, money in his commissary account, and has claimed his rights, not much has changed. He has talked to his son once, but the boy cried the whole time; they’re both still in detention ... and so on and so forth and scooby dooby dooby ... which is to say that the problem with making Earth Moon System in a comparable size to Selfie is the moon would be almost invisible. But what doesn’t come across online with either work is how both pieces are really black mirrors. This is why the first piece, which is of the Earth alone, is called Selfie. The Earth is tiny, the viewer huge. And the same is true with Earth Moon System, though here, the viewer fills the void between the two masses. As a species, we are indeed egomaniacs. So I’ve also been buying all the self-published books I can find titled ‘My Life’ and thinking of them as my autobiography. I’m not sure yet how to present this work but it’s in the pipeline. Regards, Mishka. “And who is not a borrower?” However, I have a redeeming quality: I was gifted with a sunny disposition. I have tried in my own work to free myself from my own head. I would hope that people would take the opportunity to do likewise. With some kind of transparency and even a certain simplicity. The world is a dark place. The world already has the dream of such a time. As to how I utilized the other lines, my recollections are less precise.

luminous effects

some kind of transparency

where is the gate to paradise?

my memory fails me

my recollections are less precise

everything we do is music

I put my fingers to the glass and bowed my head and cried. A narrative hinders no one. Can a narrative succeed? It’s that simple. Anybody can nearly see what I mean. Alone and terrified. Engaging with the terrain. The most marvelous overlappings. Empty spirit in vacant space. There are voices but no words. At the edge of audibility. We hear it but choose to ignore. The machinery of process. An awareness of other possibilities. Language of a blinding clarity. So much crumbled stone. Along the face of the sky. Millions of facts of distributed light. But meanwhile I am to include everything. I took a deep breath ten times, facing the morning sun and held it as long as I could possibly hold it. Orchids appeared in front of my eyes, then a voice spoke to me, “Don’t forget to breathe out, my dear, it’s important.” I looked around but only saw a thin white dog. My tooth suddenly began to ache. I’m now quite sure the white dog is below the earth, in a secret chamber, having followed a mole, her dear friend. In my own childhood I spent hours folding colored paper into small birds and animals. Yesterday I thought I was watching some letters spell out “a girl in red shoes has gone with a blue-eyed alien” on the wall of my room although there was nothing on the wall but a small black spider with red legs. This morning, on the way to the noodle shop, a small French man made an abrupt halt in front of me and asked if I had ever seen him before and I replied “non.” Suddenly he leapt into the air, spun around, and raced off, a bushy tail dangling from his butt. Dogs and foxes have the power to foresee the future, but humans barely understand their languages, which we need to start learning no later than the age of five. Likewise, they will develop a dependency on music and the whirring of locust wings for guidance through life. I went up to the roof of the building and found there a pile of ashes still smoldering and a strange-looking lump of melted metal. I took the lump — about the size of a medium-sized coin — and dropped it into my pocket and went home for lunch. A few blocks away from my house is a butcher shop, and the butcher, who was usually busy chopping meat, was acting funny without any lump of meat on the chopping board. With a knife in each hand he was beating the board like a drummer and singing at the top of his voice. The song was something like this: “Flowers in summer never last, and the azaleas are nowhere now. Come back, come back, my sweet azaleas!” and suddenly I became worried about the shiny rainbow insects in my closet, the party, and the dogs the tornado had blown into the air. I was absolutely destroyed. People at different times in my life have told me I’m scary. When angry I make myself ridiculous and jump up and down, but not to intentionally scare. Usually I’m just frightened and upset so I holler and yell. It’s difficult to get used to one’s own failure ... So I got into this industry because I wanted to find out, “What is life about? What does it mean?” And I still don’t know. You go to your little zafu and all of a sudden the heavens open, ears smoke, eye balls spin, and belly button vibrates — “I got the answer! Been broken free!” You run off to the teacher who says, “Oh that’s nice, now go mow the lawn.” And you can see that we have fits of elation (and anger) and break through the veil, but of course the veil comes back when we look the other way. People need to sit down, that is my program, sit down and stay there until you find out, “Why born? Why die? What does the predicament of being in the body mean? What does, ‘Beyond the physical body’ mean?” Can’t be “out” until thoroughly “in” — the “inness and outness” thing. And how to do laundry? I got a whole lot of dead underwear waiting in the washer upstairs. All we know is mush — all we know is

The goose drank wine, the monkey chewed tobacco

on the street car line. The line broke

the monkey choked. And they all went to heaven in a little row boat.

Clap Clap. Clap Pat Clap Pat Clap Pat Slap! Clap Pat!

Clap your hand, Pat it on your partner’s hand ... Right Hand.

Clap Pat Clap your hand. Cross it with your left arm.

Pat you partner’s left palm.

Clap Pat, Clap your hand, Pat your partner’s right palm

with your right palm again.

Clap Slap, Clap your hand, Slap your thighs and sing a little song.

I was a medic. Delivered 465 babies.

Baby and mother feed together.

There is a last exchange of blood after birth while

they are still connected thru placenta.

Don’t severe the placenta until it stops pulsing.

Orange poppies all over the place.

Lungs, livers, hearts, stomachs, brains.

We depend utterly on each other.

Stones. Rocks.

Alpha bird dinosaur.

And where are the wheel barrows?

Lungs, livers, hearts, stomachs, kidneys, spleens, brains.

I went to the kitchen to peel potatoes.

When Miyo Vestrini was born

In 1938,

Cesar Vallejo was dying.

Dust must be kept well away from camera equipment,

But it is deeply photogenic. It’s late Spring, and the spiraling

Sun leaves a glow across the thriving earth

And eight million reindeer head north

Loose through dark snow

To mate with eight million zombies on ecstasy

Who will not eat you because they are not hungry

To mutter of old men’s voices,

these urges overspilling into emphatic proclamations of love, such as in section II of ode 2, where for all the time you wait and break or mend to die will only make the memory of difficult passionate love still more occult and tender faces disappear as lost mist leaves a mirror clear to vanish permanently diminish not so passingly as love must in a slighted head shut up in dreams admired instead of shed like jobs to multiply the way out by the inward cry for fleecy care or finny drove or feather’d youth or all my love or scaly breed since with that shit Iraq in general must grit its icy core of heart and mind in not just spectral abstract rind but profit for the vested rim who mass produce the phantom limb rip open markets in despair mock cannibals who bite the air rinse spit and flush their sacred founts and “a life aflame in the shark shit a haptic rose, my dead the body viewed thru a cell window where he lay / Not breathing.” Readers however will not have access to the “big picture,” since it does not exist: there is no panoramic viewpoint, only one mediated by socio-technical devices (an online chat, data collected by a smartphone app, a sex tape released to the web and emailed spam). Please RT. Her vision is to mine the basic questions of brain biology but ’Toya thinks unicorns improve her ability to model real species, making fish swim toward the Arctic —causing genes to interact. Is she ageless? ’Toya has a new therapist so she is free of stress. Tell your doctor if you have side effects, which is to say that

when ’Toya’s father, Sven, lost his job at Theranos®

he moved the family to Brooklyn

where Walgreen’s® hired him to give flu shots

and to check the blood pressure of homeless men

tho when ’Toya thought like a dolphin she had a mind of her own, proving that pets are good for people if they come home safe. The truth is, ’Toya wants to be happy. Then the speaker is waylaid from an errand to buy fixings for mimosas; he inexplicably finds himself not in the aisles of Whole Foods but in the land of the dead. Alone with no Beatrice, heavenly light, celestial spheres or bars on his phone to guide his soul, his brain scrambles and doubles back on itself. But his doubts are put to rest when he hears, “Yeah, we’re dead motherfucker.” That settles it. Instead of the Bataillean accursed share, irrecuperable and catastrophic, there is a give-and-take, a dynamic pulse, from heart to hand, mouth to ear, an intuitive cadence without counting. From swimming holes on the Yuba, to a National Park on Big Sur, to the Kansas City of the speaker’s youth, to Minneapolis, where “five Black Lives Matter protesters were shot by white supremacists in bullet-proof vests,” the corporeal enters the poem like a string quartet: bladder, teeth, asshole, knees, all playing their minor fugues. We are transported to “a field of hedge crickets with AK-47s” like a “deep wet pond.” In other words, the Keatsian line, “and full-grown lambs bleat from hilly bourn” rings out its five iambs like a lucky charm in a dice cup filled with “crazy glue and everyone I’ve loved.” You know, I bet Henry James really did think “summer afternoon” were the two most beautiful words in English. In other words, if an official wanted to describe the reign of the first Inca, Manco Capac, and say that before him there was no king, chief, or religion and in the fourth year of his reign Manco Capac subdued ten provinces, and that also the conquering of these provinces cost him a certain number of warriors and in one province he seized a thousand units of gold and three thousand units of silver, and that, after conquering all these provinces, he had a feast of thanksgiving for his victory and to celebrate the honor of the Sun-god, the Quipucamayoq, the keeper of the quipus, would use a black cord, the color that indicated time, as the central string to hang the others from. Then he would suspend from it a lot of uncolored strings with many little knots tied in them. When he reached the center of the cord, he would make one large knot and run crimson thread through it, this is the color of the Inca. The reader of the quipu, seeing this system would read it as saying before the first emperor (crimson thread) for a very long time (many threads and knots), the people had no ruler (no scarlet threads), no chiefs (no deep purple), no religion (no blue threads), and no administrative departments (no variegated threads). In the scarlet thread would be made four small knots to say that the events being recounted took place in the fourth year of that ruler; and to the middle knot he would attach a gray thread which he tied with ten small knots which indicated subdued provinces. Each of these knots would have fastened to it a green thread on which he would indicate with knots the number of enemy killed and would add little strings to name their native province. In this same way he would add a red string, which is the color of the imperial army, to describe the number of men killed and the provinces they came from. To describe the nature and amount of the treasure gained a string of yellow for gold and white for silver would be suspended from the thread of the province it was taken from. On this thread knots would be tied in the yellow thread to indicate one thousand and on the white thread knots would be tied with knots indicating three thousand. Last, he would add a twist of thread with the colors of blue, white and yellow to indicate the god who resided in the sky (blue) and made silver (white) and gold (yellow) and to show that a celebration had been held to honor him. I wonder what this one, by Cecilia Vicuña, which appears to be made of PVC-coated electrical wire, says.

I imagine it’s something akin to how Harrison Ford, speaking of world leaders who ignore climate change at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February, put it: “I’m the ocean. I covered this entire planet once, and I can always cover it again.” Take that and shove it up your quarterly reports, fuckers! Glub, glub glub,

plew, ilmls,

lottle, briar, “eroica”

hormer, beads

brar

sprill’s, locix

clells

plam, (-y),

cent-ats

thoi,

perq, tracted, immathace, atipiques

errit, hist

o#

“nimr”

“decker,”

“eyeds, / dreg,

/ daint”

bo.nes. to. a. pause.

I mean, “All reification is a form of forgetting,” as Adorno puts it.

[Note: Sources: JBR, With the Noose Around My Neck 91, at ZS, the relevant portions of the source note to which reads “Jane Gregory, Yeah No, and Ryo Yamaguchi, quoted in Yamaguchi’s “Notes Towards Jane Gregory’s ‘Yeah No’”, at Michigan Quarterly, 14 Mar 018 ... David Melnick, PCOET, quoted in Steven Fama, “A Polished Apple (for David Melnick)”, at the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica, 8 Nov 09; JBR; Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras, quoted in Janice Lee, “Ghost Tantras by Michael McClure”, at HTMLGIANT, 16 Sept 013; P Inman, Ocker, at Eclipse”; bits from BOMB that came into my RSS feed, Jan 10-31 018; Julia Adeney Thomas, “Why the Anthropocene is not ‘climate change’ — and why that matters”, at Climate and Capitalism, 31 Jan 019; JBR; Ali Smith, and Christine Brooke-Rose, Life, End of, quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Spotlight on … Christine Brooke-Rose Life, End Of (2006)”, at DC’s, 29 Jan 019; Christine Brooke-Rose, Out, in The Brooke-Rose Omnibus; Megan Ybarra, “Why Are Indigenous Children Dying At The Us Border? Transnational State Violence and Indigenous Erasure in Asylum Bureaucracies”, at Socity and Space, 16 Jan 019; Sly Stone, “Everyday People”; JBR; No Sounds of My Own Making (the original source note to the complete text reads “John Cage, Philip Whalen, Pablo Neruda, Van Morrison, Maureen Owen, Eleanor Antin, George Harrison, Marcel Duchamp, Guy Debord, Raymond Roussel H.P, Lovecraft, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Jorge Luis Borges, Bob Dylan, Frederick Sommer, Walter Benjamin, David Sudnow, David Mitchell, Donovan Leitch, Alex Ross, Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Czeslaw Milosz, Oskar Loerke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pete Townshend, John Ashbery, Arthur Cravan, David Hockney, Ernest Toch, Ted Berrigan”); James C Hopkins and Yoko Danno, quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “James C. Hopkins & Yoko Danno: From ‘Scrolls,’ an experimental work in progress (installment two)”, at Jacket2, 22 Jan 014, except for one line, which is from Hopkins’ and Danno’s “Scroll 34”, at Ikuta Press; Philip Whalen, “Zen Talks”, at Lion’s Roar, 1 Nov 02; JBR; Jennifer Birkett, Heart Bones: The Evolution of a Spew, at dPress, with some additional lines from Kay Werner, Sue Werner, Lincoln Chase, “The Clapping Song,” as performed by the Belle Stars; Miyo Vestrini, “The Call”, “One Day of the Week I” (trs. Cassandra Gillig and Anne Boyer), at Granta 145; “The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver Presents a Handful of Dust, Curated by David Campany”, at Hyperallergic, (?)4 Feb 019; Keston Sutherland, and Rob Halpern, quoted in Ed Luker, “Poetry in Crisis”, at Jacket2, 28 Jan 019; Jean Boîte Éditions, “February begins in love <3 with de l’amour by franck leibovici”, email rec’d 8 Feb 018, approx. 2:13am PST; Clara B Jones, Poems for Rachel Dolezal, at Gauss PDF; JBR; Chris Tysh, and Brandon Brown, quoted in Tysh’s “Brandon Brown’s ‘The Four Seasons’ Reviewed”, at Tarpaulin Sky, Jan 019; JBR; Louis Baudin, A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru (tr. Katherine Woods); JBR; image: Cecilia Vicuña, “Quipus”at Cecilia Vicuña; Harrison Ford, quoted in Ed Pilkington, “Harrison Ford: leaders who deny climate change are ‘on the wrong side of history’”, at Guardian, 12 Feb 019; JBR; P Inman, and Theodor Adorno, quoted in Ryan Gato, “P. Inman Written: 1976-2013 if P then Q, 2014”, at Tripwire 10]

Posted at 11:08 AM in Noose | Permalink | Comments (0)

With the Noose Around My Neck 124

In order to facilitate this, take one flower from the garland of flowers that you were given earlier, and imagine that you have arrived inside the mandala. Drop the flower onto this small mandala. Imagine that it hits the head of the central deity of the mandala, who blesses it into magnificence and then give it back to you. Then, put it on your head. At which point the lama says

Today, Kalachakra is making effort

To open your eyes.

Through being opened, all will be seen.

The vajra eye is unsurpassed.

Om divyendriyanudghataya svaha.

A dirty bird in a square time

[Etc.

Etc.].

On New Year’s Day, the NOAA’s Mauna Loa Earth System Reacher Lab measured CO2 at 409.73 ppm.

Like they say,

Om ah hum hoh hamkshahmalavaraya hum phat.

Om phrem vishvamata hum hum phat.

Om dana-paramita hum hum phat.

Om shila-paramita hum hum phat.

Om kshanti-paramita hum hum phat.

Om virya-paramita hum hum phat.

Om dhyana-paramita hum hum phat.

Om prajna-paramita hum hum phat.

Om upaya-paramita hum hum phat.

Om pranidhana-paramita hum hum phat.

Om bala-paramita hum hum phat.

Om jnana-paramita hum hum phat.

Om Vajrasattva, etc. Make me firm, etc. Make me compassionate, etc. Also, make my mind virtuous in all actions, etc. Hum ha ha ha ha hoh, etc. A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine. To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day. Sometimes the two are combined as for example, You first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. If he is alone on his back in the dark why does the voice not say so? Why does it never say for example, You saw the light on such and such a day and now you are alone on your back in the dark? Why? Given the existence etc., of a quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine etc. with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering that everything is new and that is what’s no longer new — the lack of novelty in the endless iterations of newness. Nothing old occurs anymore, either. Rhubarb is rote; edamame has entered Standard English. There are two large supermarkets equidistant from the building in which I live, one ten blocks south, one ten blocks northwest. I am entirely familiar with the way they are laid out. Produce to the right as one enters the door, against the wall. Citrus first. Nonetheless, shocks proliferate; what returns is perpetually unfamiliar — within every story another story is hidden, autonomous and unfolding though scarcely noticed except now and then, inadvertently, when, just as with a slip of the tongue a woman exposes a bit of the turbulent life underway in her unconscious mind, a rat scurries through an open window with a doll’s head in its mouth, or a man shouts a couplet from a passing bus:

o queens of urbanity, kings of the crush

let’s sing of convenience, importance, and plush

The city has 101,377 names, around 9800 per square mile. Maxine Able Smith, Leo X. Lee, Charles Altieri, Maggie Fornetti, etc. The sun emits a continuous roar, but from such a distance that it doesn’t seem it can possibly be addressing any of us. The city players and planners all keep a low profile and work fast. And, like Don Quixote, the literary scholar sets forth to do her work. Entering the supermarket with an empty cart pulled from the chain of carts standing ready by the door, I turn sharply to the right, past the avocadoes to the melons, in front of which I park my cart out of the flow of other shoppers. I move like an unregulated chess piece across the large checkerboard pattern formed by the floor’s square tiles. I tear off a plastic bag and reach over a display of parsley; I select a single head of butter lettuce from the dewy, vernal, green display. The tips of its outer, darker leaves are imperfect — they are slightly torn and rust-stained, travel-worn. But the inner leaves are a pale, delicately variegated green, tender without being limp. This is the most succulent of lettuces. I’ve now added a cucumber, a head of endive, and a rubber-banded bunch of scallions to the shopping cart. I’m letting myself go. Long ago, little Lyn was in the produce section of a grocery store eating raw peas from the pod; big Lyn can remember the pods, the peas, the bin, the wood floor, the handsome, genial grocer: Roy of Roy’s Market whom little Lyn carefully conflated with Roy Rogers, whom interim Lyns have had little occasion to remember, and whom big Lyn recognizes to have been carefully produced and like an animated porcelain (and later plastic) doll. With private ownership of land, myth-enchanted social culture along with its myth-suffused, story-bearing spaces came to an end. I find myself watching a tall, shabbily-dressed man wheeling a grocery cart south along Seventh Street in which a fat woman in an overcoat is crouched, holding a paper bag. The rules that establish a relationship between them, and between them and me, and between me and the intrusive friendliness of the tellers at the bank I enter after noticing them, are isolated from the text, say “Sweethearts. There is a seventeenth moon deciding”, and expressed visually, with orange moons like pumpkins and yellow and red moons like ice cream cones behind blue houses filled with moonlight, which is to say that historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place,’ a pink notebook emblazoned in silver with the Aztec Piedra del Sol, a souvenir from the Museo Nacional de Antropología. So yes, text messages received while out suggest some kind of astrological disruption, crises everywhere, which is to say that in the dream I won using my intelligence and not by donning the regalia of Alma Mahler, which allows me to speak out of this rare pocket of calm, sitting at my Lyon and Healy harp playing Bach’s Prelude in D Minor until my fingers develop blood blisters. Which is to say that Ahmet, who had been taken into a cave with two others and killed by dynamite was discovered because the fig tree that grew from the seed in his stomach was unusual for the area. I mention all this because one fascinating example of psychiatrists tasked with evaluating a new spatial environment for its effects on human beings comes not from architecture but from the early days of the long-mission nuclear submarine. We might say that, while Ballard himself remained on land and in the cities, the true Ballardian environment was offshore, under water, and heavily militarized, a hermetically sealed psychological experiment prowling the ocean depths. The prospect that humans might have constructed something they themselves are unable to tolerate psychologically was an explicit secondary theme of that research. In more recent work, looking back at several decades’ worth of pathological behaviors observed in submarine personnel, crew members were described as hiding in ever-smaller places at the outermost periphery of a submerged vessel, curled up against the hull as if seeking solace there. I mean, “Imagine you are dead. After many years of exile you are permitted to cast a single glance earthward. You see a lamppost and an old dog lifting his leg against it. You are so moved that you cannot stop sobbing.” I mean, whether or not one thinks impeachment is a good idea, who could argue with Rashida Tlaib’s choice of noun when she said of Trump that the Democrats are going to “impeach the motherfucker” besides some other fascist dickweed motherfucker?

It is you, oh yeah

I said a pressure drop,

Oh pressure, oh yeah

Pressure’s gonna drop on you

I said pressure drop

Oh pressure, oh yeah

Pressure’s gonna drop on you

I said when it drops

Oh you gonna feel it

Oh that you were doin’ it wrong, wrong, wrong

Now when it drops

Oh you gonna feel it

That you were doin’ it wrong and how

Etc.,

in an interview about which Toots said “It’s a song about revenge, but in the form of karma: if you do bad things to innocent people, then bad things will happen to you. The title was a phrase I used to say. If someone done me wrong, rather than fight them like a warrior, I’d say: ‘The pressure’s going to drop on you.’” As Martin writes, “I think, if I’m picking you up right, I get that bitter sweet, hopeless hopefulness of tending one’s plants breath by breath ... It is a difficulty, the tension that Socrates’ understanding of death voids everything whilst Cebes would that life counted for something. And not insignificant that in the counsel Socrates then gives to Cebes he speaks of philosophy as nothing more nor less than a charm, a makeshift really, and, even more surprisingly after he’s said so much so often about the soul alone by itself, that he should all but say they should stick together so as to discuss things amongst themselves, to hold close, hold close.” One simple but effective technique is called the three breaths practice. Here’s how it works: whenever you need to, you make the conscious intention to simply feel — fully feel — the full texture of the present-moment for just three breaths. Just stay with it, with as much presence as you can bring, for three full breaths. If you can do this, you still need to think: OK, what about three more breaths? What’s amazing about the three breaths practice is how often the ego is willing to go along with it.

I have been working on my daylight hours

for 26 years now and hope to collect them

in a chapbook-length manuscript soon

Needs

paper towel

red onions

milk

juice

bread

dressing

beautiful day, I’m in you

It’s a city with 36,485 actively managed street and park trees, which is to say public trees. They are unevenly distributed, abundant in the hills and more sparse in the more densely urban and industrial flatlands. The poor live on the hillsides above some cities (for example Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City) and the rich on the hillsides above some others (eee gee Berkeley and Oakland). Fragments of street music circulate — a bicyclist’s bell, a siren, a vagrant with a guitar. Her beagle straining at the leash, a woman turns a corner and disappears. This isn’t a city that “never sleeps.” There’s no bus service between 1 and 5 am. Dewanda Horn tries the three breath thing and, for an unperceived amount of time — it might have been hours, or only a few seconds, but it does not pass in increments, it is all of a piece, in a room, the windows open — she is but is not Dewanda Horn, sitting on a bench in the plaza with friends, facing away from the sun. Suddenly there’s a tall hourglass-shaped cloud spinning toward us, blindingly white but dappled with dark markings, an hourglass cloud in the blaze of a rearing appaloosa. The massive twister grabs two women — I see them suspended upside down in the air, their dresses billowing. Then it’s over, and we’re standing in the plaza. Beside me is a young mother, holding a child; with her is Dewanda Horn. The young mother points to a photograph of herself with three children. Political struggle seeks to open new possibilities for happiness — ordinary happiness, it’s dark, very late, a man is passing slowly through the neighborhood. He pushes a grocery cart. But freedom is always qualified. Askari Nate Martin sighs in his sleep, and Maggie Fornetti feels his breath on her face before she realizes she’s heard it. His breath is slightly stale; she turns over, the comment “I’m changing my olfactory orientation” crosses her mind and amuses her. Cretaceous thimbles, metal delectables, sporadic blankets, and effigies en croute? Here are some of the many useful instruments: bed, belt, blanket, book, boots, broom, bus, cash, cell phone, chair, Clingwrap, coat, coffee maker, colander, comb, computer, deodorant, desk, dishwasher, doorknob, dust pan, envelope, faucet, file folder, garbage can, glass, glasses, gravy boat, hairbrush, hair dryer, hand lotion, jar, key, knife, mouse, mug, notebook, paper, pen, pencil, pie dish, pillow, plate, platter, postage stamp, pot, printer, radio, rake, refrigerator, roasting pan, rolling pin, shampoo, shirt, shower, sink, skillet, skirt, soap, socks, sofa, spatula, sponge, spoon, stapler, stove, sweater, table, toaster, toilet, toothbrush, towel, umbrella, underpants, waste basket, watch; who knows what’s possible. Indeed, who knows what’s happening, what has already happened? Allegories, on the other hand, are not made out of parts. “The stars have [...] virtue for the allegorist.” Dawn is not far off. The stars are fading. Maggie Fornetti is asleep on her side, right leg straight, left leg bent and drawn close to her body, left arm across her chest, right bent and tucked close to her side. Askari Nate Martin is asleep on his back, arms folded, legs straight, toes pushing at the bedding at the end of the bed. One night, I dream thirty words. I have to pace and place the semantic arrival of the words, their “meaning units.” As, for example, in minimalist painting — and, perhaps, in minimalist musical compositions as well, where the micro-modulations can become as pervasive as dust. Roy Robinson Trelaine has a raw blister on his right foot and this may be what’s preventing him from moving swiftly forward again into the battle (his term), which, however, hasn’t yet begun. With the pain, such as it is, comes a flicker of history. Gears mesh, systems circle. In an essay on circuits and screens, capitalism’s inventiveness is acknowledged, along with the complexities of its flow. The children are wielding wooden sticks like swords. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up — just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger — well, affectionately — when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works. In other words, “The teeth of the board grow hair.” The plants and animals know this and now all humans know this as well. The cellular understanding of our common fate is making us ill. This disease is called Extinction Illness. No one is immune to it. There is no cure. As Ubuntu teaches, “I am because you are,” which now we must rephrase as: I will not be because you will not be. As I write this to you, my heart beat is irregular. Notley, the final reader, stepped on stage, hesitant up the stairs, stood at the lectern, said that if she did an intro, she wouldn’t stop talking and would use up her slot, is the microphone working, this poem is called ‘Jimi Hendrix Anecdote,’ she had a bad trip and felt there was a white thread inside her that needed to be clung to or she’d be annihilated — would that be possible, she muses later in recollecting how she recollected this incident to her sons and friends on her 60^th birthday — and Hendrix looked at her in the crowd and seemed to be the only one who’d understood — he performed solo and died a few months later — ultimately the poem concluding “there is no anecdote”, ending with a parody of the narrative structure the anecdote assumes, the final lines “this thing that happened this is this thing that happened”. That was the warmup, anyway, then a poem from Certain Magical Acts, revisiting her earlier “I the people” and more insistently meditating on what that collective pronoun might mean. And then — but then! — the third poem (‘Malorum Sanatio’ — her own Latin coinage meaning “the healing of evil”), which is from a recent Canadian chapbook, Undo, published by Rob McLennan's Above/Ground Press with an A5 card cover but with the pages huge and expanding out beyond that cover. She prefaced the reading of this poem by saying, ‘this is going to be hard to read so I’m going to count to ten first.’ Then she launched in, and it was amazing, like six voices at once. A few days later, looking back at the text of the poem, the setting seems to be a different planet — or maybe a different version of earth. The character / speaker in the poem knows they have to heal this figure:

I’m supposed to know why in order to heal you or him am I

Let’s not concentrate on what it means dead guys with

Past to be unpasted pressed over with letters who can

Read them

Later the speaker asks:

... have I healed you yet I’ll continue to try

On the street corner behind broken ice whatever planet

They are not sure

If it’s a feeling I have to heal or if it’s a disease

[...]

no one gets

Out of here unhealed battered by grief

And in the final stanza that healing reaches a climax of personal and collective healing, every syllable earned as it comes to resounding, concluding, unquiet clarion-calling rest. The desire to remember literally everything, to fall away in order to remember all words ever spoken, is utopian and impossible and enormous, it fits with alma’s project of remembering, to write a history adequate, but not commensurate or complicit with, the project of human life understood in terms of its violence, exclusions and framing definitions — perhaps too, beyond them.

All of us call come here and be healed of displeasure

Healed of extreme distress of disease imbalance and fit-

Fulness healed of every mark that hasn’t a source in your

Spirit healed of ruptures between substances these words

Are pure without cynical precedent or calculation

I obtain for you the blessing of others we heal and holding are you

Falling away so you can remember all words ever spo-

Ken in any language remember thoughts all thoughts

For you can in one instant be healed knowing everything

Remembering everyone and finally remembering

Lampra sumbaine

light coming into clouds above still shadowed ridge

two sparrows standing on bricks in right foreground

Compare [BD009] Mazen Kerbaj’s Walls Will Fall: The 49 Trumpets of Jericho, a site-specific composition which premiered last May 19^th. The piece guided 49 trumpeters through a large water reservoir in Berlin-Pankow, whose winding corridors are both acoustically interesting and reminiscent of the labyrinth found in early depictions of Jericho’s ancient city map. Why? According to Joshua 6:1-27, Jericho’s walls collapsed under the sound of seven trumpeters, blowing their horns for seven days while circling around the city. It is the idea of music breaking walls and barriers that is central here (the participating trumpet players come from Australia, Austria, Cuba, Denmark, England, Germany, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Somalia, Spain, Sweden, Syria, Turkey and the United States, and that’s not unimportant). The performance was mainly captured by the 3D-perspective of a binaural “Kunstkopf KU-100” microphone. To purchase the digital release please visit Bandcamp. Headphones are recommended for listening.

You don’t even have to take the train

I’ll guide you to where they are

In a big conversation.

Do you hear, do you hear it

The way a snail hears,

That snail there who teaches,

Tearns from the earth’s replies, learning

The snail hears and gets there,

Gets there for sure

Even the slow one gets there,

Even the slower one will

Get there, it will

Surely get there

Between the worlds,

Around zero o’clock

The galleries burned

but the strongest works, good deeds

Survived nonetheless.

Mornings he ends up

Putting on his clothes.

“Subject, predicate, object!”

He admits.

“The Cape of Blues” was very much in the same vein, involving 12 cloaked performers, one saxophonist, and Nicola herself, who directed the event. I was part of a crowd of around 50 who walked along behind or beside, as in a pageant. Each of the cloaked performers wore a section of the beautiful blue cape Nicola made where each hood represented a dead person whom Nicola admired. I recognized a few names: Yves Klein, Sidney Bechet, Marcel Broodthaers. We paraded all around Place Saint-Sulpice and then, much to my surprise, entered the Saint-Sulpice Church while a Mass was in progress. The saxophonist went silent then, but we, the blue parade, kept on truckin, snaking our way through the back of the vast church and out again the other side without any apparent interruption to the ritual in progress. On exiting the church, a blustery wind blew hard, and my mood turned heavy and sad, particularly when I focused on the hooded heads of the performers I now associated with those intense hooded figures in religious processions I had seen in Spain. The photographs show elements of a city — eerie rifts in a space overflowing with objects, commodities and information — that Nakahira encountered and captured in his everyday life, from ivy creeping across walls and manhole covers in the streets to the tire of a large truck, from a pale-bellied shark floating in the transparent darkness behind the glass of an aquarium to close-up shots of a subway station. For example, “Comfort Animal” fuses language from a passage from Isaiah in which God says, “Comfort, comfort my people,” with an article from Cosmopolitan titled “Here’s Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About Getting an Emotional Support Animal.” The result is a Shekhinah who samples and remixes gendered forms of diction, enabling her to speak in ways that, well, I would have loved to have heard more. And then she went on to speak of “a kind of network thinking, with the heart being the center.” “I’m trying to talk about the condition of being so connected, the way we are.” She speaks of the impact on her, several years ago, of reading The Gift, with its evocation of a system of circulation that could include gods, things, animals, people, words — “everything is in the same big system. I saw it around me when I read that book, I saw all these connections, all these lines between things.” In the poem, therefore, the parts of the heart become rooms, they take on an architecture, they can be parts of a city. “The heart could be a castle, for instance. You can jump from level to level very fast.” For example, after registering specific details about torture sessions — including the areas of the body to which electric shock has been applied and the tools employed — Soto Román transcribes the partial testimony of a victim, but leaves the end of each sentence blank:

they disrobe me completely and tie me to _________.

they put a band around my head and throw water on _________.

below the band and at the level of my temples they fit me with _________.

and on my stomach another_________.

they hit me with electric current.

they interrogate me about _________.

they tell me to raise a finger to stop the _________.

this session lasts between _________.

Hela, viewers learn, previously served as the instrument of Odin’s conquests, the bloody campaigns that put nine realms under the control of the all-father and his kin. In one of the film’s most striking moments, Hela destroys a mural, part of which features Odin, Thor, Loki, and others sporting halos and brandishing peace treaties. The mural, it turns out, had covered an older one that portrayed Hela and Odin riding into battle, leaving only death in their wake. There’s horror behind Asgard’s infinite power, and Hela highlights that horror not to prevent its repetition, but to return Asgard to its glory days of expansionist empire. The unfortunate familiarity of Hela’s villainy, in turn, points to her most frightening quality: how unextreme she feels. The threat of her reign is less dystopian than it is the next logical step of contemporary far-right politics (if politics is the word). The compass by which Hela seeks to govern is, plainly, imperialist self-interest — not a far cry from Trump’s “(Rich White Male) America First.” Luckily for Thor and Co., Hela appears to perish when Surtur, at the end of the film, fulfills the prophecy of Ragnarök and burns Asgard. But Hela, win or lose, is right about Thor and Odin. They gained their power through death and can retain it solely through death. Ragnarok suggests as much when Thor decides to take his newly homeless people to Earth. Thor is ostensibly enlightened, wary of repeating his father’s sins. But once on Earth, Thor will, of course, ... you know. He has to: there are and might always be more movies to make and more killings to perform. The gods will rebuild, and the lessons they learn will be fleeting. They will create new murders and new murals to honor them. It kept gittin’ worse and worse and wind blowin’ harder and harder and it kept gittin’ darker and darker. And the old house was just a-vibratin’ like it was gonna blow away. And I started tryin’ to see my hand. And I kept bringin’ my hand up closer and closer and closer and closer and closer and I finally touched the end of my nose and I still couldn’t see my hand. That’s how black it was. And we burned kerosene lamps and Dad lit an old kerosene lamp, set it on the kitchen table and it was just across the room from me, about — about 14 feet. And I could just barely see that lamp flame across the room. That’s how dark it was and it was six o’clock in the afternoon. It was the 14^th of April, 1935. The sun was still up, but it was totally black and that was blackest, worst dust storm, sand storm we had durin’ the whole time. A lot of people died. A lot of children, especially, died of dust pneumonia. They’d take little kids and cover ’em with sheets and sprinkle water on the sheets to filter the dust out. But we had to haul water. We had a team and we had water barrels. We hauled stock water and household water both. And we didn’t have the water to use for that, so we just had to suffer through it. And lots of mornin’s we’d get up and strain our drinkin’ water like people strain milk, through a cloth, to strain the debris out of it. But then, of course, a lotta grit went through and settled to the bottom of the bucket, but you had have drinkin’ water. And when you got you a little dipper of water, you drink it. You didn’t take a sip and throw it away, because it was a very precious thing to us because we had to haul it ... Some people thought it was an act of God and a punishment for — and possibly in a way it kindly was, because they’d more or less what you’d say raped the land ... They abused it somethin’ terrible. They raped it. They got everything out they could and —

[Note: Sources: JBR; The Kalachakra Tantra Rite of Initiation for the Stage of Generation. A commentary on the text of Kay-drup-ge-lek-bel-sang-bo by Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and the text itself (ed. and tr. Jeffrey Hopkins); Philip Whalen, “Sourdough Mountain Lookout”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Philip Whalen, “Sourdough Mountain Lookout”, at Poetry Foundation; The Kalachakra Tantra Rite of Initiation for the Stage of Generation. A commentary on the text of Kay-drup-ge-lek-bel-sang-bo by Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and the text itself (ed. and tr. Jeffrey Hopkins); Samuel Beckett, Company, at Timothy Quigley, and Waiting for Godot, at Genius; Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun, at SPD; David Lehman, “When the Sun Tries To Go On, by Kenneth Koch”, at Jacket 15; JBR; Joe Romm, “My Nature Piece On Dust-Bowlification And the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security”, Think Progress, 24 May 012; Jackie Wang, “the triadic structure of dreams and other ways of staging encounters with what has been left out”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 31 Dec 018; JBR; Sibel Abdiu, “Murdered man’s body found after tree ‘unusual for the area’ grew from seed in his stomach”, at Mirror, 20 Sept 018; Geoff Manaugh, “Submarine Psychiatry”, at BLDGBLOG, 31 Dec 018; JBR; Paul Klee, quoted in Elizabeth Hamilton, “These Are the Good Old Days”, at Zen Center of San Diego Newsletter, Jan 019; JBR; Frederick Hibbert, “Pressure Drop”; JBR; “Pressure Drop (song)”, at Wikipedia; JBR; Martin Waterson, email rec’d 5 Jan 019, approx. 3:39am PST; Ezra Bayda, “1 2 3 Three Breaths at a Time”, in Shambhala Sun Jul 05, found somehow at the Zen Center of San Diego website (I think); Marina Blitshteyn, “Fellowship”, “prayer”, “sketch 4”, at Two Serious Ladies, (?)2015; Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun, at SPD, and Hyperallergic, 6 Jun 018; Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon; JBR; Garma C. C. Chang, The Practice of Zen; Deena Metzger, “Extinction Illness: Grave Affliction and Possibility”, at Ruin and Beauty, 5 Jan 019; David Grundy, and Alice Notley, quoted in Grundy’s “Alice Notley Reading: King’s Place, London, June 2018”, at Streams of Expression, 27 Dec 018; T. C. Marshall, text, 7 Jan 019, approx. 8:45pm PST (explained by Tom as Ezra Pound’s “transliteration of the Greek for ‘it all coheres’”); Stephen Ratcliffe, “1.7”, at Temporality, 7 Jan 019; JBR; “BD009 | Mazen Kerbaj – Walls Will Fall: The 49 Trumpets of Jericho”, at Bohemian Drips; Alice Notley, “For Anselm Hollo”, at The Brooklyn Rail, Jun 013; Lauri Otonkoski, “On the Ear’s Walk”, “When”, “Around Zero O’Clock”, “The Poetry Track”, “Observations on True Voluptuousness,” 20 Poems (tr. Anselm Hollo), at Duration Press; Joseph Nechvatal, “On the passing of Nicola L. / Remembering ‘Cape of Blues’ (2007)”, at Academia.edu; blurb for Takuma Nakahira, Overflow, in shashasha, “NEWSLETTER｜11th January 2019”, email rec’d 11 Jan 019, approx. 2:24am PST; Joy Ladin, “Writing Beyond the Human”, at Harriet, 10 Jan 019; JBR; Barry Schwabsky, and Ursula Andkjær Olsen, quoted in Schwabsky’s “A Poet Invents Her Voice”, at Hyperallergic, (?)4 Jan 019 (re Olsen’s Third-Millennium Heart); Scott Weintraub, and Carlos Soto Román, quoted in Weintraub’s “Narrating (The Other 9/)11: The Poetics of Carlos Soto Román”, at Asymptote, 3 Jan 019; Niv M Sultan, “The End?”, at Public Books, 10 Jan 019 (re Thor Ragnarök); Melt White, quoted in Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire]

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