The idea of the ordinary.
20.
Task: to ask what is the foundation of knowing: the unknown surrounds and defines: so boundary as instantiation of the known: knowledge as fluid, constant recombination and renovation (language): Deleuze’s sense of the immanent: immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects: an almost mystical view, from Lucretius to modern physics.
My dream of death: luminous atomic particle-arc falling across and through the curve of eternal time-space.
21.
[A]n event horizon is a boundary in spacetime, most often an area surrounding a black hole, beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. Light emitted from beyond the horizon can never reach the observer, and any object that approaches the horizon from the observer’s side appears to slow down and never quite pass through the horizon, with its image becoming more and more redshifted as time elapses. The traveling object,
however, experiences no strange effects and does, in fact, pass through the horizon in a finite amount of proper time.
Crossing of boundaries: no origins, no states: roots: routes. Nomadic: fancy name for homelessness: move across, move through: be watery: the beautiful necessity: figure of Hermes. Figure of the stranger. Exile.
22.
John Ashbery (“The New Spirit”):
Because life is short
We must remember to keep asking it the same question
Until the repeated question and the same silence become answer
In words broken open and pressed to the mouth
And the last silence reveal the lining
Until at last this thing exist separately
At all levels of the landscape and in the sky
And in the people who timidly inhabit it
The locked name for which is open, to dust and to no thoughts
Even of dying, the fuzzy first thought that gets started in you
and then there’s no stopping it.
Music/sound moving across, crosses boundaries: the locked name for which is open.
23.
This-ness overwhelms. Flood of response, a form of delirium, like an overexcited child. This is what happens: intensity of attention and attachment begins to dissolve into an excess of reception, apprehension that veers toward ecstasy. Language breaks open into pure existential assent.
A desire to collide: look at, read, listen to this! Not exactly, more like: be in this with me. So: unobtainable intimacy.
That we can know each other at all. Miraculous.
24.
A Thousand Plateaus. “1837: Of the Refrain” begins with a child in the dark, singing a song for comfort. Then home. Then:
Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud “lines of drift” with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities.
Task: to reconfigure the Open into the normal, a pattern, an ordinary: so the extraordinary can be folded into the prior and the yet to come without breaking. Improvisation: to wander.
25.
Contemporary poetry, since late-century: a certain nudity, denuded, as if we were standing in front of a doctor. The return of the sentence. The disavowal of mystery. The empirical cool. Journalism.
Counterexamples within this frame: tracks at the horizon of perception, as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s long lines: the intimacy, the extension, of her concentration. Michael Palmer’s relentless interrogation through the naming of what is along the edge of skeptical wonder. Younger generations indifferent to avant-garde yokes and doctrines, liberated and liberating.
These iterations of the pragma: William Carlos Williams allowing it into or onto Paterson; Charles Bernstein, in “recalculating,” bringing the violent rupture of his daughter Emma’s suicide into the fabric of the poem as if it were at the same level as everything else, so that its effect is one of an immeasurable undoing from within. Robert Creeley, famously, slight curb between written and spoken; this often the only way you could know or discern that the poem had begun as he reminisced about this and that: the minute shifts in cadence, pace, inflection; voice the insignia of poetic affect. Intensity spread out or distributed across or into the ordinary, a kind of diction, vernacular, what can be spoken I think Pound commanded (and did not follow); George Oppen’s unflinching materialist gaze; so-called avant-garde postmodern resistance to subjectivities, aversion to intensity heaped onto lyricism heaped onto self; new poem as a form of, testament to, scholarship, “objectivity.”
Register of affect as performance and in trajectories of subversive resistance, identities, genders, where actual uncomfortable, risky cultural shifts are found. Radical forms produced by historical necessity; not spurious avant-garde “moves.”
Is soul found, formed, at the juncture of mind-heart? Marilynne Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books): “Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word ‘soul,’ and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit.”
Greek word for soul: psyche. Blame Freud’s analytic for the loss of soul? Blame prerogatives of white secular liberalism?
26.
Day breaks into petulance: later, gestures become slights, insults. I read about hospice care and the dying surrounded by family, a sign of a life well lived, of fidelities and loyalties.
Rob Fitterman flies out to California for a day or so, to see our friend Stacy Doris in her last months. Thinking about someone is not the same as being with someone.
A friend dismayed at not getting to her mother’s side in time; my own sorrow at not being near for my mother, for my sister, my aunt, my cousins, dying. Sister, moaning on the bed, in Washington; in New York, informed she is now dying, I am unable to act, to get up and go: turned to stone. If I don’t move will time stop? A collision between what should happen against what is happening. The Closed.
To arrive the next, the following day into her already death; the train moving through or into her not being alive; the singular loneliness of grief as a measure of what the beloved will not now know.
When I asked Leslie Scalapino’s husband, Tom White, about her being “ready” to die, he said she had no interest in it, was not resigned to it, thought “no poet should die,” because they, we, have too much work to do! Onward!
Emily Dickinson’s letter:
Ah! dainty—dainty Death! Ah! democratic Death! Grasping the proudest zinnia from my purple garden,—then deep to his bosom calling the serf’s child!
Emerson asked: Are they my poor? I might ask: Are they my dead? Many ones.
War.
27.
The notion that, among creatures, humans have no natural capacity, are bare, and so were forced to make tools: “a matter of instruments.” The instrument or tool: Mind itself, not something external to it. Is Mind language? Meanwhile, Mind continues to invent instruments to replace itself, speed itself, take over parts of itself: our machines, ourselves. In the Times an article on the end of forgetting: indelible traces or tracks on the Cloud that cannot be erased.
Task: garden.
Temporal-spatial limbo
sifting through the dawn
awning drawn up
embarking
toward the opening in the circle
this would be
a ritual harmony of the singular
tracing steps
the pond beyond
glossed
sails the meticulous dress
as she departs
her circumstances.
Not to belittle the cause. We remain alert
despite oppressive
march
drone
on into another war in another climate
to—
the killing machine
embracing the desiring machine—
shadow over
corpse.
28.
Irritant of lost time: immaterial repetition.
Setting down the track and then following, in the belief it will come out somewhere; the coming out dependent on the setting down. These narrative fictions constrain multiplicity
skips and gaps and snags, frictions and reroutings, repetitions and returns.
Thought experiment: imagine what a person might want to read in one hundred years.
Not about the new clarity of an evening light unless that light illumines something. Memory overvalued?
What troubadours? Blasted outward
toward the sink
get in line travesty of the incomplete
toward utility
its stench.
Sun on its way under but what? Horizon vanished.
The sea, the sea: that life itself is buoyant, will hold you up!
South African artist William Kentridge: protest as quickly shifting morphological abundance: lucidity, wit, and motion; intelligence as an inquiry that informs, or reveals, value.
This, then—form—how information finds its potential to mean. Has new technology been mistaken for form?
29.
I get up, make coffee, and begin to reread Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen. Acuity of his rage, consciousness in relation to rage, perhaps the acuity of the fact of consciousness as the site of persistent rage—spleen: the City the site of a disjunction between the world as observed—things, persons, creatures—and the world as or in thought.
Something there: an unraveling of the seam/seem that stitched world to word. Is this in part what moved and animated Walter Benjamin?
30.
Get better at it! Scold, out of energy, ambition, music. It was not a good idea to look out. It was a worse idea to look inward, where just that morning an object not recognizable as among the living but nevertheless alive had removed another tooth from her mouth and performed some other unseemly acts before she had had my first cup of coffee. Where then? To the side, an open page sizzling with merit and glee. Under the desk, a lame match barely visible on the sand carpet. Up at the cornice where an intricate tracery of shadow hovered and writhed, depending on the speed of wind. If one could look at sound, if one could leave the door to the dream slightly ajar, if one could, for once, refuse another nut. But the thin, empty boat of shell, pristine as only a shell can be, not far from the single oatmeal grain, with a slit up its center, a whole continent away from the other, larger shell, the one from the sea, wretched with black ash whose stench bears no resemblance to that of the roiling waters from which it had come, a ruffled scallop, its wide mouth hinged to its twin, innards intact; the tiny shell was proof that the nut, the pistachio, had been consumed. In the unblistered snowy landscape she could almost hear the waves crash, see the waters recess while at the same time sinking, rendering the sand a thick paste where footprints had, only moments before, been perfectly visible. She could also hear, over her right shoulder, male voices and the occasional crack of the fire and the train reassembling the air into a loud rustle that seemed to merge with the wind.
Calamity has forsaken vocabulary and is going on ahead, without our utterance to keep it company. From the back, it looks innocent enough, certainly not dangerous, like a slightly hunched, slightly
rotund cow that is beginning to sprout something that looks from a distance like purple thorns. Unique enough to cause the casual tourist to stop to snap or take or capture a picture; these days, the exact verb for this action is pretty much up for grabs. Something like snatch, or snag? Snag a picture. No, still too abrupt and noisy. It needs stealth. Swipe a picture, just like at the checkout counter.
Stop the car, Honey, I want to swipe a picture of that cow!
Anyway, the cow is lumbering on just at the edge of the tide and seems to be heading for the dunes, and then on into the mountains. Hard to say what, if anything, she is after.
At some point it will be dark just as at some point the cow will return. This is one of the facts that doesn’t have to come with a money-back promise. That is why, she told me, she had to return the engagement ring. We were in a taxi after the recordings warning you to buckle your seat belt had been curtailed, heading uptown to an opening of a show by that guy, you know, the one who seals himself in an enormous Coke bottle filled with Coke and then tries to drink his way out of it? Just as we were headed into the curving tunnel over Grand Central, she explained about the ring. The one I had, an emerald, simply slipped down the drain.
31.
The dark is not an allusion to anything untoward. That primordial analogy has the characteristics of an absolute. Light: good. Dark: evil. But when you think about it, the reverse is often the case. I suppose, before electricity, the dark might have been construed as ominous. Even now, with the storm approaching, we make sure to have candles and such on hand, just in case. Just in case the flat, barren vista opens before you as you turn to kiss him on the mouth and feel the slight tug stirring below on a cloudy night without a single star to help you find your way home to the
mercantile ravishment of new linens. Ah, Joni Mitchell: “I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne.”
The emerald was cracked. It had had another life before it came to me, and who knows, maybe others before that, time without end. Surrounded by small diamonds, it sat up in a high, ornate gold setting, its cracked green eye staring out, the diamonds wincing. Others have probably noted the word gag sitting inside of engagement. The original artifact was made of cloth, and large enough to place across the mouth of the beloved. The smile gag, it was called, a soft crescent scarf tied at the back, its tissue tails falling provocatively under her long tresses. Sometime toward the end of the century before last androgynous energies were unleashed, especially in the West, and so the smile gag found itself used by thieves to cover their faces during criminal acts; sported by cowboys around their necks at hoedowns. In the 1950s, teen girls once again took them up as “neckerchiefs.” Or, comme il faut, “neckies.”
She plucked the fine hairs under the chin. Her sufferance of fools did not exist, and under the heading “fool” she included all forms of destitution. She turned her back on the immigrant woman who wanted, in the midst of another opening for another show, to unburden herself of her trials on her journey from Kraków to America, losing everything in its wake. She ignored the fellow always seated under the canopy of the Korean deli’s assorted flora, who addressed her with a dull familiarity: How’re you doin’ today? She kept her eyes forward, uptown. She stored these human impositions for a later moment when they emerged from her beautiful mouth as cunning, comic bile.
32.
The spark we do not see when we put the key into the ignition. Or when we turn up the heat, and the floor trembles as the furnace
is called upon to heat the room. Life heat. Death cold. What to do? Another hot war, heat the planet up with fire, burn everything, the temples of course, and the fences—so what if they once made good neighbors? The hell with that; we need fire to heat our freedoms to boiling point, and then make some nice green tea. I like mine with honey and soy milk. The ice caps melting is outside of our current policy. It confuses the issue.
“Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”
“I believe in peace, perhaps even peace at any price.”
33.
The sky is good company. It refuses to accumulate, which makes it always first; the sky and music. These should be the elected guides for the new world order. The sky cannot repeat: most precious, most desirable. This particular light, that cloud, these colors, have they ever been before? I conclude they have not, although there is virtually no way to know; no proof. Swipe, swipe.
Emerson called his journals Savings Bank, Blotting Book, and Wide World.
February 1820:
These pages are intended at their commencement to contain a record of new thoughts (when they occur); for a receptacle of all the old ideas that partial but peculiar peepings at antiquity can furnish or furbish; for tablet to save the wear and tear of weak Memory, and, in short, for all the various purposes and utility, real or imaginary, which are usually comprehended under that comprehensive title Common Place book.
In another entry, from March of the same year, he imagines himself in a library, “costly, splendid and magnificent,” where he
would “let my soul sail away delighted into . . . wildest phantasies.” Emerson is interested in the possibility of furthering motions of the mind: “imaginations of enchantment.” He hunts around for figures whose writing can help him find how to inscribe thought; he assesses the early journal: “It has prevented the ennui of many an idle moment and has perhaps enriched my stock of language for future exertions.”
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