The Bricoleur

Rainin' Babies

2012-01-29T14:55:00.000-05:00

Rainin' Babies by MK on Grooveshark
(Rainin' Babies is the first song on the playlist)

I remember the first time I heard Rainin' Babies. Painfully self-conscious, it told the truth about the pathetic desperation of the anonymous artist, and yet it was saved from self-pity by a certain flaming purity. That abject hunger was offset by a glimpse of the cosmos: the kind of vision not possessed but embodied by a baby. The song was suffused with a dizzying contradiction: that this glimpse was as fragile as ash, and yet big enough to contain everything. It was a hymn to that moment a person might experience once or twice in their life, if at all, or, if they are an artist and work hard, may encounter regularly, a moment of decision on whether to move with lucidity toward the light, or to let all the shades come slamming down all around, the decision to live or to be one of the walking dead. The singer had made his decision, but he was alone with it, and that loneliness seemed almost worse than living death. Take it from me, take it from me, please.

I was listening to a college radio station, and waited. Fortunately the DJ gave the band's name: The Flaming Lips. Perfect. Hard to forget. The song was impossible to forget. It was my life. I carried the song and the band's name with me for a couple of years - never heard anything else of The Flaming Lips - until I stumbled across one of their CD's in a music store and bought it.

I did not know it then, but for eleven years Wayne Coyne, the singer of that song, while writing and performing with The Flaming Lips, was also working at a Long John Silvers. He liked the job. After a couple of weeks he knew it and could let his mind wander and dream about all the things he wanted to do. I'm really happy for him and the rest of The Lips. Their success is well deserved. It's a reminder though that famous people aren't necessarily as well off as we may imagine them to be. A friend told me that once Philip Glass picked up a society lady in his taxi who exclaimed, "Young man, you look just like the composer of Einstein on the Beach!" I suspect that Coyne is the same man now as he was at Long John Silvers, except that, if he wants to, he doesn't have to buy his clothes at the thrift store.

I'm glad there are people like Wayne Coyne in the world, people who bring joy, who inspire. I call them beacons. What I'm thinking is so delicate. If I breathe.... Not precious, but delicate, fragile. Sometimes it seems the soul can go either way: keep moving toward the light, or hang the whole thing up and let the shades come crashing down all around. It's like what Borges said about angels:

I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away. [A History of Angels, from Selected Non-Fictions]

Have you noticed the rumbling out there? A vast rumbling, threatening a shift that could change, in a moment, the face of the internet as we know it? In the name of protecting people like Wayne Coyne, powerful forces are exerting their influence and trying to convince us to be afraid. It could happen so easily, because we face this choice at every moment every day. It's about the relationship each one of us has with our private and our public selves. It's all too easy for an artist to feel the inclination to hang the whole thing up: What's the point? I can't give it away. At every moment we can choose to approach language with an attitude of joy or of fear. Charles Newman put it in existentialist terms:

"if we really come out of a nothingness which cannot be named - then why should we make an act of faith, a decision to be, why should we push that bloody stone up the hill only to see it run down again - and more than that, why is this nothingness.... always described in terms of forlornness, nausea, alienation, etc.? Why does dwelling upon death and neurosis reveal more of "existence" than concentrating upon life? There is a peculiar brand of American "nothingness," after all, which has always been profoundly.... optimistic.... why describe it as vicious rather than magical, in the terminology of circumspection rather than access?.... I knew that I could become fully alive only if I could somehow learn to write not well or even easily, but simply write books that no one else could write.... literature is the continuous assault upon the established language of the moment." [Charles Newman, from A Child's History of America, 1973]

Censorship comes to a people not only through the exertions of the powerful, but also because the people ask for it. The fight to control content on the internet is more about bigger profits for CEO's and less about artists getting paid. More importantly, life cannot be reduced to the cartoon of a series of choices between the darkness and the light, between joy and fear. Yet, when it comes to the free exchange of information, we should err on the side of tolerance and openness. It may yet become apparent that a quasi-altruistic vision of the world-wide-web as a free culture of sharing toward the building of a vast heretofore unseen collective intelligence was a dream born of the internet's infancy, just some Star Trek-like fantasy. But what a staggeringly beautiful dream. And what will be lost if that dream-baby is thrown out with yesterday's wash?

Watch the documentary The Flaming Lips: The Fearless Freaks on Hulu

iAuthor (me?)

2012-01-20T23:05:00.000-05:00

Last Thursday Apple made yet another big announcement. It's new app, iBooks Author (for the moment free of charge), promises to make it not only easy but fun to create an ebook. I would guess there are a lot of writers out there like me who have thought about creating an ebook but have procrastinated simply because of the minor technical headaches involved. And there are probably a lot like me who now have the app loaded in their dock and are ready to go. So there's really no excuse now.

I would appreciate some feedback regarding any interest in what my ebook should be. When I publish it, depending on the book, it will either be free or under 5 American dollars. And I will make it available in pdf format for those of you who don't shop in the iTunes/iBook store. If you look to the sidebar you'll find a poll. Would you like to read:

Poetry
Microfiction
Short Stories
Essays on the Arts
Novella
Memoir

Unless I am deluded, poetry is what I do best, but I share a lot of poetry on this blog already. I have also shared quite a bit of my microfiction. Many of my essays on the arts have appeared here or at Escape into Life, but perhaps it would be nice to collect them, including the ones no one has read?

Only one of my short stories has been published (a short story being between 5,000 and 30,000 words), but I've written enough to fill a book. The story is called Mountain - would you like to see more of those?

Thus far only two people have read my novella, a 50,000 word literary-mystery-romance-soap opera, and they liked it, but they were friends. The main character is gay, if that matters to you.

My memoir is about the first two decades of my life. It's not a happy story and it runs to about 100 standard size pages. No one has read it. I honestly don't know to what extent I'm fooling myself into thinking there might be any interest in this, but I have noticed that in the past 15 years or so the genre of memoir has been gaining in popularity. I have some theories as to why, but I'm interested in your opinion. Feel free to leave a comment or click your answer in the poll. Please. And thank you!

2012-01-18T08:00:00.006-05:00

Freedom as a Possession

2012-01-17T13:30:00.001-05:00

Kafka/Leaves, oil on paper

Freedom as a Possession

Nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession

—Kafka

The wretched business of freedom

goes on like masquerading bugs

in the fibers of splintered boards

that ride out the months,

minimally attended to.

Every nuance of this, our weather,

is felt, nay lived, by such bugs

as we are, rolling over

in our beds of wilderness

shimmed in the concrete

expanse that we say

only God can see past.

dVerse OLN27

Kafka is one of the first writers to turn me on to the possibilities of the imagination in the written word. As an artist, he has remained one of my biggest inspirations. As a person, I admire his endeavor to become healthy. This month a companion poem to Freedom as a Possession has been published on the great website for writers, Every Writer's Resource. The poem, equally brief, is entitled A Day at the Office. I've also published a piece on Kafka's letter to his father at Escape into Life.

I believe in freedom as a state of mind. Nevertheless, I also believe there are times to fight for our beliefs. Tomorrow this blog will go dark in protest of SOPA and PIPA. Go here to read about these bills, and go here to use your blog in protest.

Hello 2012

2012-01-08T19:34:00.001-05:00

A scene (with dialogue removed) from The Sand Pebbles

The new year has barely begun and already she has kissed one of my cheeks and slapped the other. With each new year I realize how precious time is and that I need to use it carefully. Adjustments need to be made.

When I was a little boy I saw the movie The Sand Pebbles. Although I did not understand it all, I liked it. I didn't know why, I just liked it, and never forgot it. But I never saw the movie again until just a couple of days ago. I was surprised by how many scenes and images I remembered, some of which seem to have been burned into my mind, especially the one shown in the clip here (with the dialogue removed from the soundtrack). As I watched the movie I realized that it expresses my philosophy of life in a nutshell. The film starts as a sailor named Jake Holman (played by Steve McQueen) arrives for his new assignment to manage the engine room of an American gunship (called the San Pablo) stationed in China in 1926. On a transport boat he encounters a young American woman (played by Candice Bergen). She is an idealistic girl who has signed on to teach, while it is clear that he is carrying around a load of bruises and scars. She asks why he wouldn't rather be in charge of the engine on a large ship. He says because there are too many people telling you what to do. On a small ship you are your own man, "they leave you alone." As soon as he gets to the San Pablo everyone is telling him what to do, he has no control over anything and the whole climate is a mess. It goes downhill from there.

The political situation is complex. Missionaries want to spread the good word, western governments want to take advantage of an unstable climate to exert their influence and extract resources, clans are at war and the communists are on the rise. The political situation, wherever you happen to be, is always complex. Which side are you on? Loyalties are often divided; it's often difficult to know what to do. Sometimes, doing anything at all seems futile. Life is one battle after another. Even the attempt to stay out of it all is a battle, the fight to be left alone. Becoming a sailor was a hard choice for Holman, the lesser of evils. He's not really cut out for it, but he finds that when you're good at something (as he is with engines), you can get by. But if you're not willing to accept all orders without question, you've got a problem. How I relate to this character! By myself I do pretty good. It's only when I roll out of bed that the trouble starts, and we all must roll out of bed. Open a window. Walk out a door. Encounter a bevy of strangers. Come back home with dignity intact.

There are good guys and bad guys in The Sand Pebbles, just as there are in real life. Last week I laughed out loud when I read in Slaughter-House Five that when Kurt Vonnegut went to school to study anthropology they were teaching that everybody was the same. There's no humor in The Sand Pebbles, but in its own way the film mocks that sick little half-truth that everyone is the same. No. There are untold differences between people and groups of people. Some folks are primarily scumbags, while others are empathetic or downright helpful and kind. Really. But all of the primary characters in The Sand Pebbles are schizoid. This is how I see the world. A scumbag will have a good day, pinch a baby's cheek. An angel will do something terrible, and later cry and make it right. These are the characters of The Sand Pebbles. Good people do bad things and vice versa. All are embroiled in a political battle of some sort. Motives are very difficult to detect. People act, we often don't know why. They act, and their actions force a response on our part. This is what I believe: some people believe in God, others don't. We don't know why, we're born this way. Some are conservative, others progressive. We are born this way. Some are primarily self-centered, and do evil unto others because of it - they're born that way. Others are angels, and seek to build up light, life and beauty by loving and building up others. They're born that way. As long as there have been humans, it's been this way, and as long as humans are here on this good earth, it will be this way.

In the end, the hero gets shot and dies. He calls out, "What the hell happened?" There's no answer. No reason.

2012 has begun the way all of the years do, I suppose. She has offered a step up and the next day kicked me in the crutch. But with each new year I realize more that time is very important. I have less of it than ever before. I will continue The Bricoleur, but, who knows, maybe the posts will thin out, or perhaps I'll go for more conversational ones like this one. Happy New Year, all of you people in blogland. I hope you pick your battles carefully, and I hope you dodge the bullets.

Waltz 2012

2011-12-30T19:25:00.002-05:00

Francesco Clemente

Waltz 2012

Not ending
the lilt and sway
of a waltz
sails an arc
and ball line
tied in a bow
with the two
upraised hands
of a clock
while the throng
lifts toast after
toast I let
my cup tilt
toward my feet
the ground the
earth and hope
the song tomorrow
sings with me
will be the one
that resonates
round about without
and within
both
and
we

Francesco Clemente (both images adorn the dust jacket of the Abrams book by Michael Auping)

currently listening to Vienna of the Mind

Walk with Me World: At the End of the Year with Conrad Aiken

2011-12-26T19:03:00.000-05:00

Many things perplex me

by Conrad Aiken

Many things perplex me and leave me troubled,
Many things are locked away in the white book of stars
Never to be opened by me.
The starred leaves are silently turned,
And the mooned leaves;
And as they are turned, fall the shadows of life and death.
Perplexed and troubled,
I light a small light in a small room,
The lighted walls come closer to me,
The familiar pictures are clear.
I sit in my favorite chair and turn in my mind
The tiny pages of my own life, whereon so little is written,
And hear at the eastern window the pressure of a long wind, coming
From I know not where.

How many times have I sat here,
How many times will I sit here again,
Thinking these same things over and over in solitude
As a child says over and over
The first word he has learned to say.
from Improvisations: Lights and Snow

Mysticism, but let us have no words
by Conrad Aiken

Mysticism, but let us have no words,
angels, but let us have no fantasies,
churches, but let us have no creeds,
no dead gods hung on crosses in a shop,
nor beads nor prayers nor faith nor sin nor penance:
and yet, let us believe, let us believe.

Let it be the flower
seen by the child for the first time, plucked without thought,
broken for love and as soon forgotten:

and the angels, let them be our friends,
used for our needs with selfish simplicity,
broken for love and as soon forgotten;

and let the churches be our houses
defiled daily, loud with discord, -
where the dead gods that were our selves may hang,
our outgrown gods on every wall;
Christ on the mantelpiece, with downcast eyes;
Buddha above the stove;
the Holy Ghost by the hatrack, and God himself
staring like Narcissus from the mirror,
clad in a raincoat, and with hat and gloves.

Mysticism, but let it be a flower,
let it be the hand that reaches for the flower,
let it be the flower that imagined the first hand,
let it be the space that removed itself to give place
for the hand that reaches, the flower to be reached -

let it be self displacing self
as quietly as a child lifts a pebble,
as softly as a flower decides to fall, -
self replacing self
as seed follows flower to earth.
from Time in the Rock

Or in duplicity
by Conrad Aiken

Or in duplicity, in ambiguity: as at the circus
when the cards have double meanings, or the flame
is deceptive, and the clown comes through it
unhurt: his face comes through the flame,
but the flame was perhaps unreal, was not there.
The white bright face, with the red mouth, comes grinning
alive towards you, and the flaming hoop, the ring of fire,
falls to the grass, goes out. Perhaps like this
is the profound duplicity, the ambiguity
which appeared your easy theme: of this you hoped,
walking on the bright stripes of your tamed sunset,
to phrase your ode to death: in this falseness
was something simple, in this doubleness
something disposable, as of two voices
which, in equivocation, make a chord.
But death, like life, is simpler still. Live it and see.
from Time in the Rock

Despair, that seeking for the ding-an-sich
by Conrad Aiken

Despair, that seeking for the ding-an-sich,
The feeling itself, the round bright dark emotion,
The color, the light, the depth, the feathery swiftness
Of you and the thought of you, I fall and fall
From precipice word to chasm word, and shatter
Heart, brain, and spirit on the maddening fact:
If poetry says it, it must speak with a symbol.

What is a symbol? It is the 'man stoops sharp
To clutch a paper that blows in the wind';
It is the 'bed of crocuses bending in the wind,' the
Light, that 'breaks on the water with waves,' the
Wings that 'achieve in the gust the unexpected.'
These, and less than these, and more than these.
The thought, the ghost of thought, the ghost in a mirror.

Catch a beam in your hands, a beam of light,
One bright golden beam, fledgling of dust,
Hold it a moment, and feel its heart, and feel
Ethereal pulse of light between your fingers:
Then let it escape from you, and find its home
In darkness, mother of light: and this will be
Symbol of symbol, clue to clue, auricle of heart.

The glass breaks, and the liquid is spilled; the string
Snaps, and the music stops; the moving cloud
Covers the sun, and the green field is dark.
These too are symbols: and as far and near
As those; they leave the silver core uneaten;
The golden leaf unplucked; the bitter calyx
Virginal; and the whirling You unknown.
from Preludes for Memnon

This image or another
by Conrad Aiken

This image or another, this quick choosing,
raindrop choosing a path through grains of sand
the blood-drop choosing its way, that the dead world
may wake and think or sleep and dream

This gesture or another, this quick action
the bough broken by the wind and flung down
the hand striking or touching, that the dead world
may know itself and forget itself

This memory or another, this brief picture
sunbeam on the shriveled and frosted leaf
a world of selves trying to remember the self
before the idea of self is lost -

Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk,
speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble
of all these syllables a single word
before the purpose of speech is gone.
from Time in the Rock

currently listening to Andrew Hill – Premonition

My favorite books from the past year

2011-12-12T22:43:00.000-05:00

This is a bricoleur’s list, not a ‘best of’ countdown for 2011; indeed, these books were not published in 2011, and my reading of them has not been confined to the past twelve months. In addition, if this were a 2011 list, it would have to account for two excellent books I’m in the middle of: Peter Jacob Streitz’ Past Oz and Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz. But I’m savoring both, and my manner of reading is too eccentric to fit the constraints of end of the year assessments.

These seven books are the cream of the many good books I’ve read in the past 18 months, and I’ve read some good ones, including: Summertime by J.M. Coetzee, Invisible by Paul Auster (read my review), The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Mark Ford's translation of Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa.

But first, here's some music to listen to while you read. This year Susan Scheid introduced me to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. In lieu of a post on favorite music of the past year (read hers instead) I'll just let this one piece stand. The second I heard Pärt that first time I knew it was for me, truly love at first hear. I prefer the version played by Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett but this one is good too.

de Kooning: an American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan is one of four biographies I’ve read in this period. The other three were of Marshall McLuhan, Wilhelm Reich and Donald Barthelme. All four were fascinating people, but the Stevens/Swan biography is transcendent, the best, by far, of the many biographies I’ve read in my life. Again, the facts of de Kooning’s life are fascinating in themselves, but the facts alone do not produce a good read. de Kooning reads like a great novel, the kind you fry your eyeballs out reading late into the night because you simply can’t put it down. It’s epic like Mathiessen’s Shadow Country or the great American Experience documentary on the Donner party, with David McCullough’s inimitable voice driving you to the edge of your seat: and then, and then…. Here is a sample:

Distracted by the legal sparring, de Kooning spent the nights by himself in the house on Accabonac Road. He would live that way, uncharacteristically alone, for a little more than two years. After a solitary Christmas he went on a long binge early in the new year; it ended in Southampton Hospital, where he saw a psychiatrist named Dr. Wayne Barker in addition to his usual doctor, Dr. Wright, in an effort to wean himself from alcohol. In late January, he traveled to New York for Lisa’s tenth birthday party. Then he returned to Long Island. The Springs was no longer new. Susan was gone, as were Joan and Lisa. He was beset by legal and financial problems. New York ignored him. He was having trouble in the new studio. He was getting older. It was winter. At night in the small dark house, he had little company apart from the rumbling of the furnace, turning off and on, and one small black and white TV.

From a work about an actual person that reads like a novel, to a novel that creates the illusion of actual persons: Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. McCullers was 23 when this novel was published, and I don’t know of a keener observer of people in modern times than this young woman. Read an excerpt here.

Ellsworth Kelly: Self Portrait Drawings. My admiration of this artist is boundless, and this book is a little gem.

Elsworth Kelly, self portrait

Ellsworth Kelly, self portrait

Chris Al-Aswad first alerted me to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Any poet that Chris was excited about had to be interesting. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across a collection of his poems in a used bookstore last summer that I finally got around to finding out just how interesting he is. And now I can’t share my thoughts with Chris. I not only see why he loved Pessoa so much, but I see Pessoa's influence on Chris’s work in many ways. Folks probably don’t know that the first version of Escape into Life was all Chris, but his name did not appear anywhere. The “contributors” were all personas created by Chris, complete with portraits which he also created and used as avatars. This version of Escape into Life was the prototype for the one you see today. There’s no doubt that the culture of the online arts journal takes full advantage of the resources of the internet, whereas the one man factory of Pessoa is a curious historical object. It wasn’t until he created the mature, social version of Escape into Life that Chris could emerge and, paradoxically, the true value of his work could be appreciated. But another Pessoa remains, that of the solitary poet wiling away the late night hours alone, the lonely Pessoa, the melancholy one. Chris Al-Aswad the poet reminds me of this Pessoa. Here is a sampling of his poems.

I read this book many years ago, having xerox copied the majority of it in the New York Public Library. Last spring, I got my own copy and could finally enjoy Serge Gavronsky's essay and interview with Ponge. But it's the six texts by Ponge that make this the kind of book one has had a murky dream about, convinced in the morning that such a thing could never exist, and yet....here it is. I hold the first text, Declaration: Condition and Destiny of the Artist, as a personal declaration of artistic intent: a researcher, an observer, a man, an animal, beyond romanticism, classicism and religious mysticism, a searcher and maker of matter, a worker content in his work and without ambition, believing above all in the importance of speech as affirmation. In The Object is Poetics Ponge writes:

Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.
Our soul is transitive. It needs an object that affects it....The artist, more than any other man, bears the burden, reacts.

But what, luckily, is being after all? Only a succession of ways of being. There are as many objects. As many as blinkings of an eyelid....the artist's goal is in sight....The object also reacts.
Truth takes off again, undamaged.

Were we only a body, we would undoubtedly be in a state of equilibrium with nature.
But our soul is on the same side of the scale as we are.
Heavy or light, I cannot tell....but we need a counterweight.

Man is just a heavy ship, a heavy bird, on the edge of an abyss.
We feel it....our eyelids beat like the wings of a bird, to keep us steady.
Sometimes at the crest of a wave, sometimes ready to sink.
Eternal vagabonds, at least as long as we're alive.
But the world is peopled with objects....all of them, according to our fancy....may become our point of docking....
It needs only the proper weight....
Therefore, we must choose true objects....that we would select again and again, and not as a matter of decor or milieu; rather like our spectators, our judges; without our being, of course, either dancers or clowns.
Finally to have our secret council.
And thus decorate our domestic temple:
I suppose that each one of us, as long as we exist, recognizes his own Beauty.
It keeps to the center, untouched.
Everything is in order around it.
It remains intact.
Fountain in our patio.

Donald Barthelme's second collection of short stories, published in 1968, and now out of print as a single volume (it's an outrage!), is one of his most surprising and beautiful. It contains several of his most celebrated stories, including The Indian Uprising and Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning. Barthelme read very widely, everything from history and philosophy to all kinds of poetry and fiction. As an editor he published Raymond Carver. And that's ironic, because a lamentable change took place in the tastes of the reading public in the 1980's and it's only now that maybe, just maybe, things might be turning around again. That change is that Americans got very boring in their choices for fiction. I love Raymond Carver, but please god may the Age of Carver be over, finally! There's so much out there, so much language can do, so much the simple short fiction can do. Barthelme gave us a whole palette of examples. Take them, use them, enjoy!

And finally,

an important and deeply beautiful book: Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster. I'm sorry to appear so schizoid: one moment exclaiming enjoy! and the next putting forward an oil covered bird. I am sorry, but this is the world I live in, a place where life is good, I eat very well, am comfortable at home, have a world of music and literature at my fingertips, and yet I know that, given a few strikes of fortune, I could become that desperate exposed creature. Disaster can strike at any moment, and our modern consciousness includes the terrible weight of many disasters. Blanchot asks one of the most sensible questions a writer can ask: how shall an artist respond to disaster? He is not always an easy writer to follow, but I never feel that my attention goes unrewarded. I've written about this book (and quoted from it) HERE and HERE

Finally, for anyone who has enjoyed listening to Fratres (for violin and piano), here is a playlist on Spotify: Arvo Pärt

More Trouble Every Day (thoughts on 'the wild')

2011-11-28T16:27:00.000-05:00

(This is an excellent video. Too bad it stops just as the jam is about to kick in, but you get the main theme and lyrics.)

After thinking about the wild for several weeks, writing some wild prose fragments, writing a prompt on the wild for dVerse Poets Pub, and then reading the poems displaying a wide range of reactions to and interpretations of the idea of wild, my mind is still churning with it. Is the wild nature, is it everything other, everything that is not us, everything we are incapable of being, that we don't want to be? Is it people going nuts? Is it the weird impulse to put words in italics?

"Wild" is one of those words that acts as an explosive in the mind, firing off ideas in every direction. If one of the primary tactics of poetry is to place a word or phrase in such a manner that it allows a refraction of ideas, then some words are inherently poetic. Wild is such a word.

Why then, in wanting to write a poem on the wild, did my efforts keep getting swept into the unrestrained flow of prose (albeit a poetic one)? My problem was, at first, how to address the wild. Should I stay on this side of it and offer a meditation? Or would this effort, like writing about madness, remain a description of rationality, of the familiar and tame? Should I use memoir, and recount a tale from a wilder youth? Or would a philosophical approach be more useful? - the explorations of a questing mind, alternately assertive and doubtful? Maybe a mashup, a hybrid text, my preferred mode, but that text has yet to materialize.

One thing I would not do: pretend to go into the wild. I would not attempt to evoke the wild through my manner of discourse. If there are wilds within me, and I think there are, let them come out in a way that does justice to the concept, that shows respect for the wild. I've never been good at playing games, and the idea of playing games with the reader is repugnant to me. If what I write remains unclear, it is due to my failures and insufficiencies, not willful opacity.

Maldoror and the Wild

Last week a fellow named John came to my post on Lautréamont and his views encouraged me to push harder for clarity on a matter that ties in with these explorations on the wild. The questions that apply here are on the unconscious mind, the practices of the literary Surrealists, and whether the unconscious mind can be equated with wild. Are we wild when we dream or engage in an unrestrained flight of the imagination? Are the thoughts that flit through our heads without our conscious control connected to the primal wild deep within us? Or is the wild closer to the surface?

It seems to me that the perturbing quality of these questions points to the wild as being at the root of our humanity. In grappling with such questions, the questing mind is in search of the root of our humanness. For generations we have been defining ourselves as beings apart from the rest, and even the most hard-core, go-green, animal rights types have to admit that we feel different, even if, hypothetically, we aren't. That feeling constitutes a reality of its own. The legend of The Fall tells us that far back into the ancient past our gradual feeling of disconnection to All (we call it "nature" today) in conjunction with our increasing sense of 'humanness' created a breach. We have never been able to heal this breach, not with God, not with love, not with art, and certainly not with science. I can't escape the feeling that many of our activities are motivated by the desire, deep within us, to feel the oneness with It All that we have lost, so long ago, and that many of our "wild" acts, resulting in varying degrees of self-destruction, are often due to the pain of disconnection and the misguided attempts to escape it.

I see the literary Surrealists, hot on the writings of Freud, in love with Rimbaud, as practicing the impossible with regard to the wild: they wanted to prove their sincerity with objective demonstrations of wild utterance, if the wild can be equated here with the unconscious mind. They wanted to break through, all at once, to a greater reality (surreality), as if automatic writing could achieve such a thing.* But of course it can't, nor can anyone ever provide objective proof of their sincerity. Faith and trust will always play a part in human interactions. Just look at the feuding that went on between the Surrealists - love speech followed by hate speech, in the group one day and out of it the next. The failure of automatic writing to achieve a greater reality is implicit in the very act of writing a manifesto, leaving the status and indeed purpose of the conscious mind troubled.

Not only was Lautréamont not a Surrealist, but his book, Maldoror, is against the basic principles of Surrealism, as defined by Andre Breton. And not only that, but the purpose of the book is to educate and instruct (and to entertain, of course) and as such succeeds where Surrealism fails on teaching us about the relationship of language and poetic utterance to the conscious mind. Lautréamont was a champion of the conscious mind, not the unconscious, and his "surrealistic" passages serve his demonstrations, which are designed to lead the reader to greater lucidity and conscious control. There is a point to the madness. That's the whole point.**

I have yet to study Jung, but from the references I've seen in my travels, he was concerned with understanding the so-called dark places in the human mind and heart, of respecting their reality, not denying it, so that in our everyday behavior we are not slaves to what the popular mind likes to call "wild" behavior. This is what Lautréamont is all about. But Maldoror is such an incendiary book that its lessons are not at first apparent. In addition it contains so many dimensions that the casual reader is easily dazzled or confused. I have repeatedly seen readers stuck in one of these dimensions, steadfastly refusing to budge, blind to all the others. I once met a famous member of the early New York punk music scene and we discussed Maldoror. I won't mention his name out of respect for the fact that our conversation was private, and he probably wouldn't remember meeting me anyway. He was convinced that the book was a primal scream of rebellion and rage - and that alone. With every point that I brought up to demonstrate that it was also something else, he only shook his head, "No, no," he kept saying, like an alcoholic in denial. Truth is sometimes so ugly that people have to build cartoons to protect themselves; they Disney-fy the wild. And unfortunately, the perpetual campaign to keep Lautréamont aligned with Surrealism only obscures his value, at a time when we could use all the help we can get.

*It is worth reminding ourselves of how Breton defined Surrealism.
** The careful reader will demand examples, and she should have them. Here is one passage among many, chosen almost at random:

Hitherto poetry has followed the wrong road. Raising itself up to heaven or groveling upon the ground, it has misunderstood the principles of its existence, and has been, not without reason, constantly flouted by honest folks. It has not been modest.... As for me, I would exhibit my qualities; but I am not hypocrite enough to conceal my vices! Laughter, evil, pride, folly, will appear each in its turn between sensibility and love of justice and will serve as examples for the stupefaction of mankind.... Thus hypocrisy will straightway be chased out of my dwelling.

I do intend to post an article the sole purpose of which will be to cite more examples from Maldoror and how they follow the theme of instructing us on language and the conscious mind.

Counting Teeth

2011-11-26T15:19:00.000-05:00

Counting Teeth by mark kerstetter

You were over six feet tall
but never made it to 99,

a man, a dynamo. I read that

you cried, wanted to be held like a child.

You helped bring yourself down,

but they killed you,

there can be no doubt.

The dead kill the living

throughout history, mere ripples

on the surface of placid humanity.

It’s all written in a zombie novel somewhere,

soon to be seen in a local movie theater,

soon to be eaten with the dust

of fallen suns,

mixed with shit and scum,

casually tossed in the fan.

The imaginary is taken for real,

and the real for fake,

and one day the real Borg will completely

replace the lost links

in the dead databases of today’s categories.

Complete connection will be complete

disconnection to the past,

and no Wild will compare

to the Lost that will prevail.

And it’s all good, you say, roll

over the concrete expanse skim-coated over

the ancient wilds of mind best

forgotten, you’re truly alive now.

But it’s not all good to me.

I don’t fit into the plan.

Call me luddite or philistine,

it little matters which, the result is the same:

a fall into the margins

where the last cries are

mashed with Baboon Blue

and Bengal Tiger Red to become

the grey of last year’s color.

I won’t plug into you.

You won’t fuck my mind.

I won’t work for you, won’t run

your tired treadmills

with my Flintstone feet.

All my avatar cutouts are sodden

in the rain that rolls down glass facades

and cheeks alike, over distended bellies,

pepper-sprayed makeshift tents, this year’s model

and the quivering gunman’s hand.

I’m tired running to stay out

of your race, of proving I’ve nothing

to prove, of putting out like a shameless whore,

birthing babies no one wants

as mountain meadows cover over

yet again with wildflowers.

Stand up and take notice:

your loves me loves me not mentality

has as much place in that field

as your poetic ooze in your

sector of the grid. One foot in,

one foot out, until your ability to write

the autobiography never written

—the one, justified—

is bitten off with your last

counting tooth

in your last

steak.

join me at the dVerse pub where folks from around the world are gathering today to share poems on the theme WILD

see more pepper-spraying cop images here

One Day Mars! or Bee Thankful

2011-11-18T18:41:00.000-05:00

I’ve confronted the challenge every day for weeks now, held my breath and counted to ten—wait a minute, maybe that was supposed to be “take a deep breath.” But if Houdini could hold his breath for three minutes I don’t see how— Anyway, I’ve pedaled hard my bike, maintained reasonable hours and fortified with vitamins. You don’t think that bear behind bars there did anything comparable, do you? I’m well aware of my privilege. That’s not the issue. Or maybe it is, the issue I confront as a tabula rasa in the form of a blackened page. Language can’t be made to function as an eraser. What you seem to see as a man backpedaling out of a cultural inheritance is just one more idler doggie-paddling in the soup du jour. It’s in bad taste to be unthankful, and these days one is expected to commit some act of veiled contrition toward our native brothers and sisters who blazed the trail for us. Buy someone a turkey, set another one free. Franklin thought it should be the National Bird. I digress. For weeks now. But is there any other way to address the wild, today, here? What happens when our beaks and nails are clipped and we’re crammed in grids, fed a steady line of bull? Where is our wild then? except in the vast interior stretches of the human heart? the stretches, the labyrinths, hidden passageways, coves, treacherous outcroppings, dizzy ledges and arid wastes. It’s all there and only there, perhaps, that the wild will be found today, not on any point locatable with a GPS device. Still, I take some comfort in the fact that beyond the best efforts of industry, a boiler will still sometimes explode. It gives us something to work for, and for that I’m thankful. That and the bees haven’t all died yet.

Persist or Destroy

2011-11-08T15:04:00.002-05:00

Today I'm posting an older poem. When I was nineteen, an artist named Roebuck made the news because he got depressed. Distressed over financial troubles, he stole into the gallery with a can of black paint and sprayed big X’s over his paintings. Sometime later, a journalist captured the frowning artist posed in front of his newly X'd pictures; I clipped it out of the local paper. Suddenly everyone had to have an X’d Roebuck. He was now forced to ask himself, ‘should I make more X’d out paintings?’ The sadness of being ignored was eclipsed by a more insidious anonymity, like falling into a deeper circle of Hell. For if the vampires who bought his X’d paintings were buying a man’s despair, no one would want a faked despair, yet the dilemma Roebuck found himself in could not fail but to leave him in a more profound anonymity than what he began with, hence a deeper despair. I thought about Roebuck when I formed the words persist or destroy, which became my credo. Deciding to live is not enough. The world is full of people who, in Thoreau’s words, “live a life of quiet desperation,” people whose lives live them. No, in deciding to live, one must persist in seeking out the best in one’s self and the world. Anything less is not worth the while, one may as well call it quits. Roebuck brought his Hell upon himself, I thought, because he merely X’d his paintings out. It seemed to me he was saying, 'look at poor me.' He should have ripped them from the walls and burned them, then started over. Persist or destroy also means: sometimes in order to create you must destroy. That’s what I hoped I would have the courage to do.

After writing about Roebuck and what his story meant to me, I crossed most of the words out. That is what you see in the photo above; it is a page from a sketchbook I kept at that time. And below is a digital transcription of the poem I made back then after further excisions.

Persist or Destroy

Roebuck a parable aware of the photographer pose pictures hung so nice clean X’s well sprayed anger? at one idea destroy one so strongly the pictures fun art new important weed ritual creating making art volved in up recognize inherent quality which is bound to conduct this society know? meaningful world Well as for me now a modern artist but now I am only able some of my ideas could probably feel like one minute may be the next fact is I am my ideas good are they to me now? An artist depressed troubles and black paint now says he sees a sign of national sickness for all these years love hate artist intellectual X strangeness reason a small but

a crossed out painting act of anger slashed out creator this violent act his own creation X’d result evidence of the act —————————————

he really wanted to destroy his work burning ideas and attitudes what’s important communicate act of violence idea xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

consciously and deliberately it’s really impossible to tell only want more than anything to make work certain honest picture slash enough to act go all the way annihilate completely every trace abandon at least doubt mean not look at it Nothing get rid of the ashes child coward stupid act hell wrought upon himself people going nuts horror of horrors—he might occasionally see one paint or not paint—persist or destroy national sickness—what of his own sickness? be harsh after all it would be nice to talk to see his pictures without the X’s

The first micro-fiction I posted, The Real Thing, is based on the parable of Roebuck. Interestingly, I've just watched Schnabel's film Basquiat as well as the Tamra Davis documentary on Basquiat and I see intriguing parallels. Basquiat's work sold from the start, but also from the start an immense hype machine attached itself to him, bringing with it ethically questionable zones of attention toward his work and person.

I'm linking this poem to dVerse OLN

A Bricoleur's Underskirts

2011-11-07T17:56:00.002-05:00

I'm going to share some photos of my bookshelves today (click for larger views). The Blind Owl perched up there is one of my favorite novels. According to Wikipedia, it was first published in Tehran in 1941 and later came out in France. In terms of structure as well as flavor I compare it to David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive; it's really the same story. On the left a one-of-a-kind novel, La Belle Captive. Alain Robbe-Grillet assembled a large number of Magritte's paintings and constructed a novel around them. Hiding behind The People of the Saints is Kundera's The Art of the Novel, containing some of my favorite essays. Next to it Daumal's A Night of Serious Drinking - essential reading, a signed copy of Improvisation by Derek Bailey and a really cool book of Ellsworth Kelly's self portrait sketches.

Some favorites. Shadow Country is the best novel I've read in at least five years. That tall slim black volume is a first edition of Maldoror. Grove Press published many of my favorite authors. I love the designs, and the paperbacks they produced in the 1960's are among the finest ever made. The Genet's shown here are first edition cloth-bound.

Here is the heart of my shelves, which I built out of salvaged wood, glass doors open.

You'll notice several books by Francis Ponge. He's a French writer most often called a poet, but he argued that his work comprised a new genre, neither art nor science but a compound of the two. The title The Voice of Things indicates the area: Ponge examined objects, their names and definitions and by careful observation made them speak. Soap is an entire book. I discovered Ponge as a young man in New York, and xerox copied the entire contents of Soap at the public library. The machine was defective, and kept spitting my dimes back out. I kept going. After all, this was a time when I'd be lucky to have a cup of white rice for dinner. The librarian kept an eye on me but waited until I was finished to put the 'out of order' sign on the machine. I love librarians. Ponge is a bricoleur and one of my biggest inspirations. His works are prose essays and poems equally.

Here are my Ashbery books. Beginning with Flow Chart, the book I nearly got killed running across the highway to buy, I began purchasing the hardcovers as they were published. I had a great time sharing lines from The Skaters with Susan on twitter recently, and that has encouraged me to write a piece on Rivers and Mountains. Look for it!

Coetzee on the left - his trilogy: Boyhood, Youth and the recently published Summertime is one of the most unique (in terms of form, at least) memoirs you will ever encounter. Foe is an extraordinarily beautiful and poetic retelling of the Crusoe story from a young woman's perspective. When Coetzee won the Nobel Prize I was very excited at the prospect that he would become a household name. That didn't really happen, did it?

That black book with the palm tree printed on it is a beautiful 1931 edition of seven of Melville's novels. At that time Melville was still a controversial figure. The publishers justified leaving Pierre and The Confidence Man out of the volume by stating that they "[do] not transmit to us [their] author's greatness." They singled Pierre out for abuse, calling it a "mad book, overwrought and undecipherable." This is one of three editions of Moby Dick that I own, along with a copy which includes Rockwell Kent's marvelous woodcuts and an electric version on my eReader.

Sorry about the fuzzy photo. That thin red & black volume next to Beckett on Film (all nineteen of Beckett's stage plays on film) is Beckett's trilogy. If I were in a Fahrenheit 451 situation, I'd memorize the first one, Molloy, perhaps Beckett's greatest work. The second volume of letters, 1941-56, has just been published, and I'll share my thoughts on it in due time. Beckett's first American publisher, Barney Rosset, bought Grove Press books when it was the tiniest of buds and founded the legendary Evergreen Review, which continues today as an online journal. Mr. Rosset continues to make all final decisions on the content of Evergreen Review, which will publish my poem Wilhelm Reich in Lewisburg in an upcoming issue. I need hardly say how I feel about this. You'll notice a couple of Reich's books to the left. I'll share some of my thoughts on him in upcoming posts.

I'd like to draw Brendan's attention to the book on Lascaux below. I've written about what this book means to me in my post on Georges Bataille.

Finally, here's a photo of my writing desk. That folded piece of pink paper contains notes scrawled down on my lunch break at work, the way many of these posts begin.

If you're like me, you can never get enough ogling at books. So here's a glimpse of Hedgwitch's books, and here's Anna Montgomery's. And if anyone's still wondering what the title of this post means, just take a look at Brendan MacOdrum's great tribute to the late James Hillman.

Burn Girl

2011-10-22T15:39:00.001-04:00

Burn Girl

for L

Born from the flames:

My new identity. You can address me as

one of the same. Do not

grill me, I will not answer. Turned

over, I’m done. See how plump,

how juicy? You can eat me.

Take me in, if you can. Ingest me,

if you can. You’ll find the heat

of the spotlight turned back on you,

you in your comfort, you in your complacence,

you with your taste for crash ‘n burn movies.

No, I don’t hate you, I just can’t live with you,

there in the shadows,

the shadow world, where they say is real life.

I exist in the light.

With the angels, whose tongues of fire

sing at a pitch too high

for ears of clay.

I miss your coolness, and the nearness

of the earth, the way fingers trace

and moist breath leaves its wake

on the back window of a speeding car,

propelling higher and higher,

shedding clothes for wings.

Back among you, fallen to earth,

I can only whisper, there is a reason for this.

Or an emissary of light, an incandescent flicker

to punctuate the shadows. You

may see me—a flash here

or there, out of the corner of your eye.

You think you know me from somewhere,

like a long lost memory

when all was light, and whole,

undifferentiated Love. I remind you

of the eyes of a newborn baby

that don’t see anything because

they are everything.

for dVerse Poetics~The Other

This is my poetic imagining of a young mother who nearly died trying to save her baby from a burning house. I do not presume to know how such a person thinks or feels. The poem is my attempt to apply my imagination to her being. The sketches are my own.

Limits

2011-10-20T16:57:00.000-04:00

Limits

By Jorge Luis Borges

Of all the streets that blur into the sunset,

there must be one (which, I am not sure)

that I by now have walked for the last time

without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,

sets up a secret and unwavering scale

for all the shadows, dreams, and forms

woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure

and a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,

who will tell us to whom in this house

we without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws

and among the stacked books which throw

irregular shadows on the dim table,

there must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,

with its cement urns and planted cactus,

which is already forbidden to my entry,

inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever

and some mirror is expecting you in vain;

to you the crossroads seem wide open,

yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one

which has now been lost beyond recall.

You will not be seen going down to that fountain,

neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian

said in his language woven with birds and roses,

when, in the sunset, before the light disperses,

you wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,

all that vast yesterday over which today I bend?

They will be as lost as Carthage,

scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent

murmur of crowds milling and fading away;

they are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;

space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

Translation by Alastair Reid

And the original:

Límites

De estas calles que ahondan el poniente,

una habrá (no sé cual) que he recorrido

ya por última vez, indiferente

y sin adivinarlo, sometido

a quien prefija omnipotente normas

y una secreta y rígida medida

a las sombras, los sueños y las formas

que destejan y tejan esta vida.

Si para todo hay término y hay tasa

y última vez y nunca más olvido,

¿quién nos dirá de quién, en esta casa,

sin saberlo, nos hemos despedido?

Tras el cristal ya gris la noche cesa,

y del alto de libros que nos trunca

sombra dilata por la vaga mesa,

alguno habrá que no leeremos nunca.

Hay en el Sur más de un portón gastado

con sus jarrones de manpostería

y tunas, que a mi paso está vedado

como si fuera una litografía.

Para siempre cerraste alguna puerta

y hay un espejo que te aguarda en vano;

la encrucijada te parece abierta

y la vigilia, cuadrifonte, Jano.

Hay, entre todas tus memorias, una

que se ha perdido irreparablemente;

no te verán bajar a aquella fuente

ni el blanco sol ni la amarilla luna.

No volverá tu voz a lo que el persa

dijo en su lengua de aves y de rosas,

cuando el ocaso, ante la luz, dispersa,

quieras decir inolvidables cosas.

¿Y el incesante Ródano y el lago,

todo es ayer sobre el cual hoy me inclino?

Tan perdido estará como Cartago

que con fuego y con mal borró el latino.

Creo en el alba oír un atareado

runor de multitudes que se alejan;

son lo que me ha querido y olvidado;

espacio y tiempo y Borges ya me dejan.

Conversations with a Clown by Michael Welzenbach

2011-10-16T20:28:00.000-04:00

Picasso, Les Saltimbanques

Conversations with a Clown, published in 1991, is the only novel by art critic Michael Welzenbach, who died far too young in 2001. The novel concerns art critic Corry Peters who lives in Washington D.C., has profoundly ambivalent feelings about the state of the art world in December of 1999, and can't stop thinking about his estranged wife. Seeking refuge from a horde of relatives who descend upon him for the holidays, Peters escapes to the National Gallery of Art to visit his favorite painting, Picasso's Les Saltimbanques. While the previous galleries had been deserted, due to the time of year, the critic is distressed to find that not only is his favorite occupied, but that a man—a tall man in a worn out cream colored suit—is planted directly in front of the Picasso. Thinking to encourage the man to move on, Peters edges closer, but rather than it having the intended effect, the man turns to Peters and regales him with a tale so strange, indeed so insane, that it can barely be grasped. In short, he suggests that he was the model for the standing figure on the left side of the painting, which would of course be impossible since the work was completed in 1905. In a theatrical manner that doesn't fail to amuse Peters, the peculiar fellow introduces himself as Pierrot. And it hits the critic like a cannon shot: this Pierrot bears an uncanny resemblance to the harlequin in Les Saltimbanques.

Letting curiosity get the better of him, and wanting to put off the dreaded end of the millennium wrap-up he must write, Peters follows Pierrot to a bar and the two have the first of the conversations that comprise a good part of the book. These conversations range from historical anecdotes (the clown claims to have hung out with Watteau, Goya, Hokusai and others), to the state of American art in the late 20th century (bad, very bad), to philosophical speculations on the nature of magic and reality, and how this relates to the social significance and meaning of art. Peters is not only estranged from his wife, he is also estranged from the art of his time, disliking nearly everything he sees—everything, that is, that his job requires him to comment on. The artists he likes are either not so well known or dead. He shares this view with the clown, who marks Andy Warhol as the precise point when American art achieved an advanced state of decay. One of the evil words in their lexicon is "post-modernism", which in their canon is practically synonymous with chaos.

Cindy Sherman

If I have painted a rather cartoonish portrait of their relationship, it is nevertheless accurate, although incomplete. If I didn't like Welzenbach so much, I would argue that he has written a post-modern novel despite his stand-in Corry Peters, pointing out that the novel functions as Pierrot to its reader who is skeptical nearly every step of the way and then, in the end, is won over—not to its point of view, perhaps, but to its charms. It is a mash-up of art theory, history, social criticism, magical realism and situation comedy. One might say that such a hybrid deserves to be described as post-modern. But I won't say it, not only because I like Welzenbach, but more importantly because it isn't true.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Duel after the Masked Ball

Conversations with a Clown is an old-fashioned novel of ideas, a Dickensian tale with an array of literary parlor tricks. And that is the basis of its integrity. Welzenbach practices, as a novelist, what he preaches. The novel demonstrates handsomely the traits admired so much by the clown in works of visual art: passion, earthiness, a harmony between emotion and intellect, and a sprinkling of magic to add color and charm.

Picasso, Acrobat on a Ball

In one of their first conversations, Pierrot gives an example of magic in painting by describing Anselm Kiefer’s Parsifal III, a crude attic scene of rough-hewn wood with an arrow smack in its center. Pointing out the cartoonish manner of its execution and the incongruity of the arrow’s appearance in such a place, Pierrot asks the art critic to recognize the special function of arrows—that they point to things, they are “symbols of direction”, and in this painting, the clown argues, the arrow points to disorder, decay and chaos, “perhaps the greatest enemy recognized by civilization.” He continues:

By the use of this one universal symbol driven into the calm and complacent dark of an old and venerable attic, Kiefer reminds us that time recognizes no civilization; no creed, no philosophy….It is the ultimate paradox of the nature of art: a refined human artifice informing us of the innate futility of itself….Kiefer’s arrow….digs into the ancient wood as surely as grooves of laughter and sorrow will score all of our faces….the impulse to make [art] is timeless. But the process by which that knowledge is conveyed is often a matter of devices—parlor tricks, if you like. [p34]

Sean Landers, Around the World Alone (Knox-Johnston)

Pierrot argues that the ancient painters of the Lascaux caves were great, accomplished artists, fundamentally no different than artists who came generations afterward. Art will survive the deplorable state of decay that both he and Peters see in the late twentieth century. Basically they see that art as a deafening, colossal joke synonymous with marketing. It is soulless, utterly devoid of craft or magic, intended only to market personalities and make huge profits for private collectors, and its effect on the viewer is either bewilderment or intimidation or both. Andy Warhol is singled out as an object of ridicule, being the prime representative of art as money and death. The long description of Mr. Peters’ nightmare in which this is all laid out is a very good read. The fact that Warhol had been dead for four years when Conversations with a Clown was published makes the bitterness of Welzenbach’s point of view all the more pungent. Warhol appears in the nightmare waving a dildo, asking for a can opener and informing Peters that there’s no such thing as magic, reality, love or god. Sex and money are all.

Pierrot explains, in their post-nightmare conversation, that magic is not gone, but in hiding. Artists, he says, “have lost their sense of reality. And how can one possibly dabble in magic if one doesn’t understand the nature of reality?” What follows is a long monologue on the relationship between reality and magic, with a preamble on Baudrillard and Derrida, and illustrated with some of the best painters in history.

At a time when the internet was just in its infancy, Welzenbach’s Pierrot claims that “our experience of the world is so completely governed by mass manipulation that we have lost the ability to discern what is truly real”, even though any child knows what reality is. Reality is magic. And the artist’s true work is grounded in reality. Reality (a partial list): love, lust, a toothache, a cardinal’s nest, stars, a new leaf, earthquakes, a newborn baby, a stone.

The nature of reality is for everyone such that even the dumbest person in the United States knows full well the difference between the antiseptic life he sees giggling on the television sitcom, and the stains on his trousers or the dust balls under his bed….the artist, of all people, has a special relationship to reality….the bite of the saw, the buttery consistency of paint, the rasp of a file on metal….Of the arts, music is perhaps….the most abstract….Yet it exists when it is being played, and it can be crudely written down on paper, and perfectly captured in the memory. At the same time painting is possibly the most complex. And the painter is a person who in many respects must be the most deeply connected to the reality of his materials and methods than any other artist. Because he must be competent to make of them an illusion, and that illusion must say something of reality. [p89]

James Ensor, Masks Mocking Death

I disagree with Pierrot. It is the artist of prose fiction who has the most complex job, and Conversations with a Clown is an example of that. Prose fiction is the most complex of the arts, because its medium—ordinary language—is the one we use every day. Out of the very stream that we swim in the novelist performs the most magical of art acts: he rolls our eyes around into the backs of our skulls and causes us to see the soup of our daily shift—naked lunch: what’s on the end of your fork? You don’t need a concert hall or a museum to encounter this art; indeed, it depends on the intimacy of one’s private moments. Like Paul Auster said, it’s always just two people involved, every time: the writer and the reader. Through the parlor tricks of a thousand year old clown, Welzenbach has an intimate conversation with his readers, one at a time. I haven’t even tried to convey a sense of the novel’s magic, haven’t so much as hinted at its surprises. But since I’ve touched on its ideas, one might ask, if magic and reality are in hiding, where might we look to find them again? At the end of the novel, Pierrot states that Europe is the place to begin the twenty-first century. She will reclaim her role in the arts. America is played out. Welzenbach did not live to see For the Love of God and the rise of White Cube. For me, his argument is rooted in the idea that the American avant-garde was never a true avant-garde in the first place, but simply carried the flag while Europe floundered in war.

But this idea is based on a misunderstanding of Warhol, matter for another post, another day.

Daddy Two

2011-10-13T18:08:00.000-04:00

Sweet has turned to bitter, darling.

Hope sat out too long, and vision has blurred.

Or do I now see what I would not let myself before?

I did not want to think the worst, did not want to think

ill at all

—did not think

—at all? But I have thought and thought

—what else could I do?—but throw my thought like water

on the flames?

And I think now

ill of you.

You have thought only of you.

‘What if I go here? Probe there? Pull this out, red and throbbing?’

—like a cat with a toy,

and with as little feeling,

until you were done.

Now I’m nearly done with you.

Just push a word here or there,

pull out a rhyme or two,

and you will have served your purpose too.

No longer a daddy to your whims,

no longer a surrogate,

hand to prop your anemic frame, let fall by him —your Daddy Two.

He will let you ultimately down

and then who?

But there will be nothing for me to do

not for you since you left you lost—

You do not know you.

I once thought I could but if you can’t I don’t know how to,

nor could anyone, now, know you.

Your choice: not to be a person,

not to grow a heart and move into

the world a free soul without D-2 to tell you

how to take or leave a poo.

Pussy—sweet Pussy—

To hell with you!

Victoria Ceretto-Slotto, at dVerse Poets Pub, asks for poems that imitate famous works. The above is a spoof or a parody of Sylvia Plath's Daddy, a poem I love. Don't take it too seriously, folks. And Sylvia, I'm so very sorry, but I do laugh when I read Daddy.

Making a Poem

2011-09-25T21:48:00.003-04:00

1 man's poem by mark k

One Man’s Poem

By morning all is shot to hell

-Ashbery

Two hours of lousy sleep and an inauspicious beginning,

I apologize in advance for the coffee.

But even in deepest sleep,

the muscle memory of my meat heart,

my meat brain,

the flashlight fans out

an empty room.

And how do I even know the room exists?

If I fret over being ejected from it

by monster, landlord or thief maybe

I’m already out of it, or was never

in it to begin with, or don’t

even know what “it” is. Possession

and loss is a coin toss into

a gaping hole.

And angst isn’t fear, not really.

It’s fatigue that won’t rest on a treadmill of dread.

And one day I’ll be done

testing the formula

for the model that’s been rattling along

the superhighway for years,

decades, if truth be told.

And it must be told.

Unless I am to have no name.

But that’s tomorrow’s business, not mine.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait

Last Wednesday I read a remarkable poem by Brendan MacOdrum of Oran’s Well. If You Read This is a long poem, part memoir part social commentary part cultural history. The past, Brendan writes, “is now nothing but retro” and contemporary consciousness is not much more than a “balloon of white noise.” He questions why for years music satisfied him and then “singing reached a frozen silent /shore where I couldn’t turn another/loss into another 3-chord bad angel.” He mentions Julian Jaynes, where I first learned about Thamyris, a poet mentioned in the Iliad who boasted that he could control the Muses. Enraged, they crippled him, took away his ability to play the harp, and caused him to lose his way as an artist. Brendan writes:

There are blues that no one sings

because there aren’t chords sour enough for them,

because there’s cold that cracks even a soul on ice,

because the singer lost his guitar and then his voice

and walks the blasted city streets of the

heart’s January like death in a dead tongue….

If You Read This begins: “Sleep did not come easy last night” and that night I had terrible dreams. I did not become lucid, take control of the dreams, nor wake up. I was too tired and only had a few hours before the cursed alarm bell. So I slept and suffered through this tired reminder of how I got my biggest scars. That monster has been chasing me around the block since I was a kid. He’s not scary. Far from it. I know every hair on his insipid body. He’s a cartoon I can draw with my eyes closed. In the morning I thought, this is how death will capture me - just weary of it all, like I’m done.

In the morning, all morning at work I was in a funk, could not get out. I used to fall into pits of depression that would sometimes last for weeks. I’d feel powerless to climb out of the pit on my own, would have to wait it out. A moment would come when the light would change and the world would take on a different appearance. The pit of depression, I learned, was my own self-centeredness. Yet chastising myself on that account only set a rat to scurrying in my brain. If I was lucky I’d see the humor in this and lo, a handhold out! I’ve learned to put up with a lot from myself over the years and the moods aren’t so dark or long lasting anymore. So this recent morning I’m talking about - last Thursday morning - was disappointing. I’m better than this! All morning long I played with the lines of the poem, One Man’s Poem. During my lunch break I wrote the words down.

“By morning all is shot to hell” is the last line of John Ashbery’s poem also entitled One Man's Poem. Ashbery is an artistic beacon for me. He is one of those, like Francesco Clemente and Pat Metheny, who shine a brilliant light in the world. They represent a type of integrity that I aspire to: a steadfast commitment to artistic ideals, not as a religion but for the sake of beauty itself. That’s a kind of faith that I can believe in, and it’s something that the world is ever in desperate need of. Just some music. Just some light. Just some beauty, for God’s sake. Readers of Ashbery will be surprised at that line; I could not avoid beginning with that surprise.

In the opening pages of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Julian Jaynes posits that consciousness is not at all the thing that people tend to think it is. Specifically, it comprises a “much smaller part of our mental life” than we think it does. I’m not sure consciousness is exactly what Jaynes says it is either, but the book asks fascinating questions and in this passage he equates our use of consciousness to shining a flashlight in a dark room searching for anything that does not have light shining on it. Since everything we can see has light shining on it we conclude that the flashlight - consciousness - encompasses everything. This happens when we think about consciousness, about what it is. But what is consciousness when we don’t think about it? I can’t climb out of my own pit on my own volition. I have to forget about the pit and then, suddenly, I’ll find that I’m out of it. The moment just prior to that is One Man’s Poem. It’s not beautiful, and I’m truly sorry for that. But I think there’s a small truth in it, and there will be better days and better poems.

Small Talk

2011-09-20T13:59:00.000-04:00

Strands of confabulations

vein the trees, bending

and waving:

the sap that holds together

the muck.

And it works,

but the result is we do not

touch.

Remember when dad seemed so tall,

so strong, a giant?

And everyone else a head or two

above? Straining for

the sun, my eyes somehow

spun around

to face my inside

and now we’re the giants

—but I see us small.

Dust mite or Goliath,

my body does not discriminate, rolling

over

the smallest point

the mind conceives

is just big enough

to swallow it

whole,

the dangling rot

of an overgrown forest.

dVerse Poets OpenLinkNight 10

Describing, with Mark Twain and Alain Robbe-Grillet

2011-09-19T13:53:00.000-04:00

Wallas drops his token into the slot and presses a button. With a pleasant hum of its electric motor, the entire column of plates begins to descend; in the empty compartment at the bottom appears, then halts, the plate whose owner he has become. He removes it and the napkin that accompanies it and sets them both down on a free table. After having performed the same operation to obtain a slice of the same toast, accompanied this time by cheese, and once again for a glass of beer, he begins to cut up his meal into little cubes.

—Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers

Literary description, not of abstract but of physical things, especially the appearances of things, takes time. It takes a lot of words. Why do it? Because the market for novels is bigger than for short stories and poems? Because some physical description is necessary, not to say desirable, to build character and structure? True enough. But, to be purists for a moment, if one asked after the unique characteristics of prose fiction writing, then physical description—especially that of the appearances of things—will not come up. Photography is the medium of choice here, a fact long accepted by painters. A camera could have reproduced the food automat described with so many words in Robbe-Grillet’s 1953 novel immediately and vividly. A camera, however, has great difficulty in capturing thoughts and making them vivid. This is what prose fiction is for. And in order to elucidate a character’s thought on a thing seen, that thing must be described somehow. But Robbe-Grillet does not tell us what Wallas thinks or feels about the automat. He tells us only, “he begins to cut up his meal into little cubes,” then continues:

A quarter tomato that is quite faultless, cut up by the machine into a perfectly symmetrical fruit.

The peripheral flesh, compact, homogenous, and a splendid chemical red, is of an even thickness between a strip of gleaming skin and the hollow where the yellow, graduated seeds appear in a row, kept in place by a thin layer of greenish jelly along a swelling of the heart. This heart, of a slightly grainy, faint pink, begins—toward the inner hollow—with a cluster of white veins, one of which extends toward the seeds—somewhat uncertainly.

Above, a scarcely perceptible accident has occurred: a corner of the skin, stripped back from the flesh for a fraction of an inch, is slightly raised.

From there the author takes us to the next table where three men, eating “replicas” of Wallas’s meal, have a conversation. What’s the point? Why is the description of the tomato so conspicuous?—as if it exists for its own sake, is the point somehow (apart, of course, from the beauty of the language).

What could that point be? We notice first that Robbe-Grillet has chosen the thing to be described very carefully. In 1953 the method of dispensing food here described was a novelty. Whether or not the writer had a presentiment of its significance in our culture is not the question so much as how the manner of the automat’s description fits the tone and form of the novel as a whole. Units of information are dispensed in what seems a mechanical and certainly a repetitive way. Wallas himself takes on the character of the automat, cutting his meal into “little cubes.” After a while it becomes apparent that by looking carefully at the differences in these units one gains a unique pleasure through the effort, and that only by looking closely—reading with attention—can one see in Wallas, or any of the other details, what marks off their uniqueness, the way close examination of the tomato slice reveals the “barely perceptible accident” in its “faultless” appearance. Therefore the description of the automat, and in particular its focus on the tomato, is a cipher for perceiving and reading the novel as a whole.

I had shut the door to. Then I turned around, and there he was....

He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fishbelly white. As for his clothes—just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t’other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor—an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.

I stood a-looking at him; he sat there a-looking at me, with his chair tilted back a little. I set the candle down. I noticed the window was up; so he had clumb in by the shed. He kept a-looking me all over. By and by he says:

“Starchy clothes—very. You think you’re a good deal of a big-bug, don’t you?”

“Maybe I am, maybe I aint,” I says.”

—Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Dressed in a red T-shirt and baggy underpants, he is seated in the center of his playpen with his back to the fireplace, facing the inner front door (a glass door covered with Venetian blinds and opening into a little front hall full of boots and umbrellas). To his right looms the piano, to his left stands the little oval table before the empty couch, over which one can see the top of the mahogany bookcase and the row of balusters disappearing diagonally into the ceiling. The narrow rugless passage between the couch and staircase leads to the open doorway of the vast invisible kitchen behind Edwin, where Mrs. Mulhouse is making clinking and whooshing noises. I am seated between the playpen and the piano on the dark brown rug with its dark green leaves, facing Edwin’s right profile.

—Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mulhouse

Millhauser’s description goes on thus for another page until the sounds Edwin is making are described:

Edwin grins suddenly, catching my attention. The sound leaps from the box [record player] to him, changing with his grin from nnnn to eeeee. The eeeee grows louder and switches to a giggling kkkkk; bits of saliva appear at the edges of Edwin’s lips; he clenches and unclenches his little fists. He is tuning up for a sound fest....

The description continues thus for another page until, the eleven year old narrator tells us, “the astute reader does not need to be told that Edwin has just composed his first poem.” The joke is that an eleven year old is using adult language to describe a perfectly ordinary child, whom he perceives—though he hasn’t told us exactly why yet—to be a genius. The detailed descriptions are examples of his powers of observation. Twain’s approach to a narration by a child of about the same age is quite different. Using his uneducated and immature language, Huck nevertheless conveys to us an admirable common sense and what we would call street smarts. Of the two it is tempting to say the latter—Twain’s—has much less to work with. Yet Huck Finn comes alive as a complex being, whereas Jeffrey Cartwright never seems to emerge from behind the language he is using. If Jeffrey Cartwright were describing Huck’s Pap, he would tell us which ankle was resting on which knee, what the color of his rags were, and on which side of his body the window was. But these kinds of details, while appearing exact, have the opposite effect in the imagination of the reader. When one has to pause to visualize the exact position of the bodies and their relation to everything in Millhauser’s text, one is already there experiencing the scene in Twain. The difference is one of immediacy and palpability.

In describing, only what is essential to the story or feel of the piece is desirable. In Robbe-Grillet it might be extensive. In Twain it might be as simple as, “his clothes—just rags, that was all.” No amount of description of these rags is going to help. It would only deter from the tone of disregard made clear by one simple sentence. In Millhauser, establishing Jeffrey Cartwright’s power of observation does not need to be labored, or could be demonstrated in ways other than testing the reader’s tolerance for long descriptive passages that, in the end, please only those who like to know that the mirror the butler happened to be standing in front of, as he did the deed in his argyle socks, was hung in a gold frame.

Stats

2011-09-13T15:34:00.001-04:00

I have statistics. I have stats. These people have been to bed with their parents.

—Lou Reed

At least as useless as they are useful,

bringing you news of hits that don’t land,

and others that bruise a sensitive blogger’s soul,

stats are distraction, not lunch. My blogger buddy Cathy

happened to mention a name-brand potato chip

and suddenly became popular with dips around the world.

Mention your foot the wrong way and get sex slave offers.

Careful how you post pics of yourself and watch your captions,

uninvited guests will be all up in your shit.

It changes how we write, with an eye

not to p’s and q’s but to keywords and tags.

You must get creative with titles, and sometimes

relinquish creativity. Toss out that clever title for

the attention grabbing:

STEPHEN KING SUCKS!

even if you’ve got nothing to say about Stephen King.

You’ve got to think about the playground repercussions,

like naming your kid Ky (that’s “sky” without the “s”):

YO JELLY! KY JELLY! HOW’S IT HANGIN’ KY JELLY!

Ugly pink things crawl out of hidden holes and squirm

around stats, slithering political pythons,

enemies you never knew you had,

curiosity seekers inserting unintended meanings

into your best intentions.

It doesn’t even matter if you think

you could eat just one and wonder

how much they’d be willing to bet you on that.

Or if your prose beats most people’s poetry any day

(who was it said that? I’ll google later),

because you really don’t give a fuck if somebody says,

THAT’S NOT POETRY THAT’S PROSE!

They may have come just to steal your profile pic anyway.

That’s how some get their adrenalin flowin’.

Me, I would never steal without crediting the source.

Someone googled a line from one of my poems,

I was flattered, and then I thought, wait a minute,

which came first? And maybe I got it from somewhere

else, and forgot, and thought it was mine.

Best to google every line before you hit post

these days, depending on how you get your kicks for living.

Maybe you like that sort of come-on. This ain’t a pitch,

I’m just saying….if you put jelly on your shoulders

and lie down on the carpet you never know

the crushed chips you’ll find.

dVerse Poets OpenLinkNight 9

Still Grows the Vivacious Lilac

2011-09-10T15:00:00.028-04:00

Still grows the vivacious lilac
On my green grayed gate.
Still moves my minding way
On the rough beaten path to you.

And will nature's perfume unwind
So many ratcheted thoughts?
Or will the heart beat march
Fall further behind
Love's proffered torch
Passing,
Passing still?

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone...
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Visit dVerse Poets Pub to see responses in poetry to the ten year anniversary of 9/11.

Buying Donald Barthelme's Books

2011-09-07T15:32:00.002-04:00

Since I follow The Library of America on twitter, and am very happy to own copies of their editions of Carver's short stories and Ashbery's poems, I asked them if there might be a complete edition of Donald Barthelme's short fiction in the works. And they actually answered. Their answer: Not really. They indicated they might like to, but there are copyright issues involved. They said that "nearly all" of Barthelme's work is in print. But when it comes to someone who is surely in the shortlist of the best American writers of short fiction - yes, along with Carver and Hemingway - it's a shame to have to track down every story and see if they really are out there. They added that they might like to publish Hemingway too, but again copyright issues are in the way.

Here is the problem: fine complete editions of Hemingway are available; there's no reason for Library of America (or anyone else) to publish another one. There are no fine complete editions of Barthelme available. And that is just wrong.

I'm not writing this little post as a spokesperson for or against any publisher, but as a reader and a consumer of books. The primary collections of Barthelme's short fiction in print are two paperbacks and the recent collection Flying to America. I'm glad they exist, and indeed the first two are the collections that the late author selected (Flying to America seems to contain the stories not included in them), but Barthelme deserves to be published in toto in one fine hardcover edition. And, by the way, there's nothing available in eBook format.

If you don't care how you read your literature, these incomplete paperbacks are OK. But if you do, the best way, as of now, to buy Donald Barthelme books is to get copies of the first editions (a good place to start is AbeBooks). As of now the prices of most of them are comparable to new books (the first two are getting pricey, but you can still find affordable paperback versions), and, in my opinion, first edition hardcovers are always preferable to new books anyway. You'll be supporting independent booksellers, and that's good too. If the market for Barthelme continues to lag behind his importance as an American writer, these first editions will become more and more difficult to come by.

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) published seven books of short fiction, plus the hybrid (if it makes sense to single one of his books out as a hybrid) Guilty Pleasures. The first, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, contains the story Hiding Man, after which Tracy Daugherty named his biography of the author. The second, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, contains some of Barthelmes' best stories. One of my favorites is The Balloon; you can read a selection of it here. One of his most discussed stories, and justifiably so, is The Indian Uprising; you can hear an excellent reading of it here. His third, City Life, pictured above and published in 1970, is probably my favorite collection. Here is a passage from Brain Damage:

We thought about the blue flowers. Different people had different ideas about them. Henry wanted to "turn them on." We brought wires and plugs and a screwdriver, and wired the green ends of the flowers (the bottom part, where they had been cut), to the electrical wire. We were sort of afraid to plug them in, though - afraid of all that electricity pushing its way up the green stalks of the flowers, flooding the leaves, and finally touching the petals, the blue part, where the blueness of the flowers resided, along with white, and a little yellow. "What kind of current is this, that we are possibly going to plug the flowers into?" Gregory asked. It seemed to be alternating current rather than direct current. That was what we all thought, because most of the houses in this part of the country were built in compliance with building codes that required AC. In fact, you don't find much DC around anymore, because in the early days of electricity, many people were killed by it.
"Well, plug them in," Grace said. Because she wanted to see the flowers light up, or collapse, or do whatever they were going to do, when they were plugged in.
The humanist position is not to plug in the flowers - to let them alone. Humanists believe in letting everything alone to be what it is, insofar as possible. The new electric awareness, however, requires that the flowers be plugged in, right away. Toynbee's notions of challenge and response are also, perhaps, apposite. My own idea about whether or not to plug in the flowers is somewhere between these ideas, in that gray area where nothing is done, really, but you vacillate for a while, thinking about it. The blue of the flowers is extremely handsome against the gray of that area.

After City Life Barthelme vacillated in this handsome area, and his next collection, Sadness, contains many beautiful stories. Here is my reading of an excerpt from The Genius.

Next came Amateurs. I just received my copy in the mail, I'll let you know how I like it!

Great Days is Barthelme's penultimate short story collection, and I'll be honest, it's my least favorite, but Barthelme at his weakest is still better than most of the fiction I encounter these days, and he made heavy use of a new and exciting form with this book: stories comprised entirely of dialogue. That ain't easy to do.

His final collection, Overnight to Many Distant Cities, is a must have, because only here will you find the stories as he wrote them. The book includes a series of "interchapter" pieces of italicized text placed between the short stories, and they're gems. Most, if not all of them, have appeared as stand alone pieces in other collections, sometimes renamed. But they appear in Overnight in the untitled, italicized context with which they were conceived, and it's a beautiful thing. They're amongst my favorite things in the world.

As if this weren't enough, if anyone would like to explore more, this is an excellent resource for Barthelme material online.

Guest Poet: Susan Ersinghaus

2011-09-05T19:42:00.000-04:00

Vija Celmins, Web Ladder

Untangling Best Friends Forever

Two little girls pulling strings

to make a cat's cradle and other things.

So much delight in link and loop

and pushing up tight to bring

new angles into sight.

Under, over, over again.

Back and forth they take their turns,

fingers changing holes into holding

fistfuls of strings flexing into skill

until the magic leadens, pulls the thrill

out like a loose thread going nowhere.

So one reaches over and under from the no

going back journey up Jacob's ladder.

It might lead to heaven, but it always

ends the game. Even as little girls

we toyed with the idea there is a point

of no return, some things one can do

no one knows what to make of.

Pass It On

When in doubt, drink more water.

It might not help but it won't hurt.

These are words I told my daughter.

Chaos likes to fight with order.

Don't be tight but stay alert.

When in doubt, drink more water.

Battle cries will lead to slaughter.

Don't let just anyone up your skirt.

These are words I told my daughter.

Be the heralded, not the lauder.

The outside world is full of dirt.

When in doubt, drink more water.

Be the wheel and be the potter.

Don't forget to eat dessert.

These are words I told my daughter.

I pray she learned more than I taught her.

My love is vast, my time is curt.

When in doubt, drink more water.

These are words I told my daughter.

Laura Dern in a still from the David Lynch film Inland Empire

Different Versions of the Same Entrance

There are two versions of this movie, the directors

cut where she is a bit of a control freak and does everything herself

wanting nothing more than coffee and company from her coworkers;

the edits to the counters stand and what was not

welcome to be left on the floor is not visible there still.

Door opens to a woman juggling her keys out of the door

and back into her purse, she looks up:

Oh! she thinks, things are just as I left them.

In the collaborative version, the vision of what should be

is so hazy, the excitement of creative threads pulls each

bee in the hive so ineluctably toward the process of producing

honey that when the director appears on the set the

Door opens to a woman juggling her keys out of the door

and back into her purse, she looks up:

Oh. she thinks. Things are just as I left them.

Pairs and Relations

When they didn't come back, their chairs sat

like faithful dogs on the empty porch

as if promising they still would return

to fill their waiting seats.

Then Uncle Henry said I want his. You ass

said Gladys. That would be like taking

just the salt shaker in the kitchen. You have

to take the pepper too. They are a set.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

That morning the sobs ran down the basement

apartment hall to my ears like a rushing river.

I answered their call, came running and threw

my arms around his six year old shoulders

still rising and falling in his minds tide.

What is it honey did you have a bad dream?

I asked pulling him closer, leaning in to show

him I could help him face his fears, rocking

him in the silent rhythm of mother comfort.

No, he sobbed harder, I had a good dream:

I dreamed I knew the most beautiful elephant

in the world, it was so....the colors... I...

it made me so happy. I am crying

because I realized it is not real....

The life raft of my love was revealed

to have shrunken to the size of a soggy piece

of wooden board to which we both clung

barely afloat as the ocean he had fallen

into lapped against us.

When children grow up, it happens

in an instant and takes your breath away

like a magical elephant that never was.

Sign Language

They have painted bike symbols along the streets

fitting prayers where

there is no room for reality.

I am like that. I start each day justifying

hard left like the margins on a new page.

I scribble symbols as if they mean

something real, stand in for something solid.

Nail gunning feelings into a frame

of dry wall that should just be a pass-thru.

Buddha said life is an illusion

from which we should try to awake,

sometimes I feel guilty, what if

the whole planet is patiently laying clues

for me to get it, while I turn

on the tv to watch another re-run?

But other times, I think: shouldn't I just

keep dreaming until I make it turn out

better? I like to sleep late, roll-over

until I understand why Paul Newman

is talking to the parking lot attendant

in my great Grandmother's living room,

or finish admiring the roofs of Stamford

that time my legs grew so tall I could see

endless places to land, the deep wells

of the night streets. Meaning doesn't happen

overnight, you know. You have to take

your time and navigate your way in and

around the waves of nightmare until you

can make the next buoy into touchstone.

Maps don't make sense without keys.

Your keys don't fit someone else's door.

Start the map backwards from your house

identify important markers for yourself.

Write them in the corner for the next traveller.

A couple of weeks ago, I said to someone,

"Have you noticed even the clouds

seem different?" and then just yesterday

there was an article about meteorologists

petitioning NOAA for a new classification

of clouds... I would believe me making

this up before thinking I am a scientific

observer from my kitchen sink.

I guess it is possible there is a bike lane

in my head where elbows aren't in danger

of being clipped off like side mirrors,

and I carry a truck load of knowledge

from one coast of quandary to another

with nary a tremor in my wake

as I rinse and set the plates

into the drainer. I know they are not real

plates, and they weren't really dirty but

until I know why the clouds have changed, why

my forks dry while soldiers die and other mothers

cry, I will keep on dreaming.

Susan Ersinghaus has been a writer since fifth grade when she penned "Growing up I fear, is when you shed a tear..." and went to ask her mother where to apply for a poetic license. Having spent the first fifty years afraid of everything, her love of symmetry now demands she step out of her comfort zone and become fearless. She has enjoyed decades of interesting and engaging progeny. She lives with her husband and youngest son in the Land of Steady Habits. Visit her blog, One Hundred Days Cubed.

About Susan

By Mark Kerstetter

In her poem Tightrope, Susan Ersinghaus writes:

….part of me

always spends the summer gently swinging

in the rope hammock in the corner of the porch

feeling the wind of turning fifteen against my neck

The plans I was weaving! The many eyes I saw

things with! I was everything I feared:

a hungry self satisfied spider biding its time.

Biding her time for what? the reader might ask, and the only answer I can come up with is me. I am the reader caught. The first time I saw Susan’s work (when she linked a poem to dVerse Poets Pub a few weeks ago) I loved it. Tightrope goes on to explain to the reader what the poet is doing with the string trope:

So yes, I am following the silly strings

I see swinging from the rafters,

I am pulling on the ends of hairs

I find at the bottom of the shower,

just in case, they lead me on, show me

where they are hung up or cut loose,

or need another knot to bear all this weight

I put on them.

In this poem Susan teasingly suggests her one hundred poems in as many days may just be “one hundred loose ends”, as if a poem, or a series of poems, is a device for tying something (anything) up—or down, and I will not be the one to tie them down. For that would destroy their beauty which consists, I believe, in their domestic particularity. They are the moments of a mother, a daughter, a girl and a woman as she lives them in the course of ordinary days, a record of a life truly seen and not merely passed through, set down in a poetic language that allows us to see them as well. When I read Row, Row, Row Your Boat, I am both the mother and the boy, I see the elephant and feel the aches of mother and son, so different that a mute partition seems to stand between them. Only the delicate balance, so tender, of a mother’s embrace holds the two worlds together, but for how long? Susan gives this moment a voice, washing the dishes and dreaming, in a household rhythm one might recall from childhood or, in a moment of illumination, recognize in the next room. Memory merges with present apprehensions and mundane concerns, with touches of whimsy and splashes of metaphysics throughout the hundred poems (or 97, as of this writing. Susan assures me that the other three, handwritten, are nearly ready to be added). She wears her learning and her prodigious skill lightly as she weaves these moments into poems that can, and should, be read just the way one reads a good book: by going to the very beginning of the archive and reading from day one.

The Rainbow Ball

2011-08-27T16:57:00.001-04:00

Yes, light, there is not other word for it.
-Samuel Beckett
for Terresa

The rainbow ball
bounced round about me
while eluding my grasp,
like Blumfeld's, even though
I called to it, sang to it,
cajoled, cooed, prayed.
It will not be mine.
I should get used to it.
But even with my eyes
like two red suns my
bedpost knobs become
in the nighttime black
rainbow balls of unequalled
luminosity, unapproachable
grandeur. I will hold
out my hand, flex and
release until the muscles
are toned to the tee.
I will fortify with vitamins,
will think positive thoughts,
will say the glass emerges
halfway from a full,
a secret heart:
spectrum hand,
sphere of light.

He's trying to take my place again

2011-08-25T17:21:00.000-04:00

He's trying to take my place again
While I hang tied he wants to walk in my shoes
Playing the part with aplomb
Finesse I could never master
With relish lighting the match
To what I wore holes in my jeans building
I see him now through the eyeholes
Making a friend of you

Please, don't believe him
He won't love you
Like I do

Whose Self?

2011-08-23T14:11:00.001-04:00

Has anyone seen this, and related videos?

Mr. Self (gotta love the name) is worried that the imagination itself is eroding and withering in contemporary culture, that it is a faculty - indeed a muscle - in poor circulation amongst the younger segment of the population. The health of the imagination, according to Self, depends on suspension of disbelief; the higher the level of suspension required the more vigorous the workout to the muscle and therefore those things requiring the most suspension are the most important activities to the health of the imagination. No doubt Self would place prose fiction in this category, but the one example he gives is opera. Because opera is so artificial, because the narratives are so preposterous, because, sitting in the theater, it is impossible not to be highly aware of an intensely artificial situation, one must make a strong effort to suspend disbelief to the point of even being able to enjoy the experience, much less participate imaginatively with it. Perhaps some of you have been to such a production and have seen individuals in the audience squirming in their seats, and are inclined to agree. I'm inclined to agree, but to what extent?

It seems to me the WWW is a hyperextension of an already existing situation. Self admits this in one of the related videos. The printing press and the sudden proliferation of novels, followed by radio and then TV - it's an old argument about low culture. What I find interesting is Self's claim that the internet is inherently psychotic. In "real life" a sane person knows the difference between fantasy and reality; on the internet, Self claims, the distinction is blurred. Everything that occurs in the world of the internet does so arrayed on an even patina - a "screen-based life" to use Self's phrase. Everything that happens, he says, has the same "ontological status". Since it's not real, but treated as if it were, it's inherently psychotic.

Now I wonder, doesn't engagement with the WWW require a more sophisticated sense of suspension of disbelief than ever before? Unless someone is psychotic to begin with, will engaging in internet activities necessarily drive a normal person towards psychosis? Or does the normal person know this stuff ain't really real? Virtual reality is a lot like reality, may even have some reality mixed in, but it ain't really real, right? Don't we all know that, unless we're hopelessly fucked already?

Is it necessarily a symptom of a contemporary disease that our idea of reality itself is not quite the same as it once was? Or is it just a mutation of the disease itself of humanity, which we can trace back and back and back....

Two quick observations: 1) For a long time, hundreds of years in fact, people have been attracted to realism in the arts, high and low. They still are. New technologies have allowed more dimensions to the trompe l'oeil effect. The more real it looks the more intense the WOW factor. Realism in painting, the movies, in fiction, even in poetry - people love it. and 2) There is a genuine level of reality in some of the social aspects of internet activities - it's absurd to deny that.

Will Self reaches out via the internet to warn me of the dangers of the internet. He does this as himself, no one else, just a man talking. I echo the edge of unreality in his words back via the internet as just another man writing. This virtual dialogue will bounce around a little bit, and who knows, maybe spark another virtual dialogue or two. Whose mind is this discourse taking place in? Is it real?

Fernando Pessoa has come into the poetic arena just in the last couple of decades, with the rise of internet culture. He was a lonely man who created at least 72 personas with their own biographies and writing styles. He is thought to have anticipated internet culture. But I don't think Pessoa would be successful today. He is successful as he is: a fascinating glimpse of the future. Today the internet has made it too easy to create avatars, to play at being someone one is not, to hide behind masks, to lie. It's a wonderland for predators and victims of all kinds. Here is what is difficult: to be aware of these dangers and yet strive to present something of one's true face and character, to be an individual, and not to run from it, but to find inventive ways to uphold it online.

A massive difficulty, a huge hurdle, is in being believed. One might argue that this is one of the inherent difficulties of the internet, but I would say the difficulties are different, not greater, than in real life. The much touted importance of face to face interaction, the body language and so forth creates difficulties of its own. For example, a common problem of middle-management in large companies is the promotion of unqualified people based on irrelevant factors such as height, aggressiveness or a ready smile. A young woman whose sex appeal might be a distraction to me in real life can approach via the internet with nothing other than her poetry - how refreshing for us both! By the way, Self cites the dark side of internet romanticism, that it too easily becomes an obsessive-compulsive search, renewed daily. But there's a harmless edge to romanticism that he does not mention. It's the romance of never really knowing who is on the other side, and being content with not knowing. You can't embrace everyone, and I'm sick to death with every aspect of our culture being pushed into false intimacy, from customer relations in the service industry to Orwellian corporate or political language that presumes a familiarity that only exists, and should only exist, between friends. We don't really know each other, and that's just fine. All you have are my words, and I always attempt to put something of myself into them, but in the end you will have to decide whether I'm lying or not. It seems to me that the only reason the James Frey controversy over A Million Little Pieces was a controversy at all (really, who cares if he stretched the truth a little bit over minor details about his own life?) is because the true person, the true face - and not some avatar - is a precious commodity in our world.

Of course, for Self, this only ties into the psychosis. Notice me! Notice me! But I don't want to be just me, I want to create myself from bits and pieces, like a new Pessoa, so I don't really know me, and neither do you - and it's all so much alienation. To which I answer: what else is new? The internet only helps perpetuate what we've been doing for generations.

Finally a fear and a hope of my own. I have anxieties of my own about mass psychosis, but I think it's too easy to blame the internet; I think it goes to a deep-seated human impulse that goes into the far reaches of our ancient past, and will probably spell our doom. We humans either think we know better (than nature) or just don't care if we do know better or not, we'll drive blindly into the future anyway creating ourselves as we go. As robotics and genetics advance, so too will the illusion that we can freely create ourselves. We'll begin with our pets. We'll continue with our babies. Will a point come when we have become so divorced from Mother Earth that we can't get back, even if we want to? And every attempt to correct an error delivers a more insidious frankenstein? That's the fear, and the hope....

Well, it's not really a hope. It's a belief. Fat good it does me. It's a belief, no better than any other. Like Will Self, I believe in the imagination, I believe that it was made to soar and it should soar, but that, like a kite, it should be rooted to the good ground. Like Self I believe that some of the most difficult - most unrealistic - kinds of art are the healthiest. It seems to be a paradox, that realism does not promote health the way more abstract forms of art do, but that is my belief. Doesn't it seem strange that articles about artists like Pessoa are constantly written that run something like this: he was a postmodernist before the term existed! In fact modernism and "postmodernism" have always existed side by side. It's only fascinating (and controversial) because people are just beginning to realize that there are two parallel forms of artistic creation that have been going on side by side for generations. Postmodernism is the term pasted onto this flickering realization (which is why it's so notoriously hard to define). This realization - a discipline of awareness, a regular exercise for the muscle of imagination - is where I place hope. It requires a willingness to go deep into the forests of nonrepresentational and abstract types of art.

To those interested, I've written a bit more on this view of art.