As if there were in fact a first place always in wait, like the sky. This desire for an initial encounter; it spins out of the actual reality—this stuff, these years—like a moth from its cocoon.
As if one could shed everything: a sense of panic and excitement, anticipatory, exactly against the stasis of calm and yet anchored by recessed attachment. Trust as always the crucial element.
There are patches of blue; the clouds are thick and white with dark gray underbellies; the river, a dull pewter. The inadequacy is obvious: “blue,” etc.
34.
Barges are plying the Hudson.
I don’t like looking up and out and ferreting for the possible occasion of the poem. O poem, where are you? Years ago I wrote a poem called “East River Barge,” written after a taxi ride up the East River Drive, but the Hudson does not want to offer a sequel, maybe because I am static as it moves. Poems as iterations of interactive motion.
What we retrieve hallucinates uneasily into morning.
Julian Barnes, in The Sense of an Ending, barely mentions the weather, or anything phenomenological; the book is scant on visual description, nearly void of sensuous detail. The protagonist
doesn’t seem to register these elements. This makes the writing both clear and arid.
35.
Last night looking out the south windows into the darkness, a huge light in the sky; Star? I wondered. Star? Huge and bright. At its side, the familiar three stars of Orion’s scabbard. But the big light moved, it came closer, it had tiny red sidelights, it passed over, humming to itself. Am thinking this morning about restoration, about how the Occupy Wall Street became a holding place, marking the disquiet and unhappiness brooding across the country, the countries. You see it mentioned often in stories that are not about it; it points, the name seems so far to escape the ideological impasse that has immobilized the political landscape.
Malfeasance, indifference, cruelty, hidden under the tarp of self-interest and greed.
Awake in the night, trying to formulate something about Gertrude Stein’s relation to description, wanting to come up with a phrase for what she does with the physical, material, visual world; her resistance to normative forms or linguistic structure which has fascinated into the postmodern poetic imagination. There is a way in which she proposes a radical interiority. (You see this in Picasso’s portrait of her: the static monumentality, the obsidian eyes.) She seems to have experienced the world and all its objects as a vast interior structure that her writings somehow externalized: exact resemblance to exact resemblance, but not mimesis. Something about her dissolution of syntactical relation, subject-predicate, that haunts us. The myth of the pure materiality of language.
36.
Emerson, age seventeen, 25 October 1820:
I find myself often idle, vagrant, stupid and hollow. This is somewhat appalling and, if I do not discipline myself with diligent care, I shall suffer severely from remorse and the sense of inferiority hereafter. All around me are industrious and will be great, I am indolent and shall be insignificant. Avert it, heaven! avert it, virtue! I need excitement.
Wind sound: as if the dark were in motion, an inky processional bloom.
Is there any way to measure or articulate the difference between writing or reading on or from a page and writing or reading a screen? What is the nature of this difference; does it matter? The question will soon be moot. Ah, books, the handwriting is on the wall.
37.
Milky morning light. Squirrel headed up the maple with a mouthful of leaves. Nesting. River gentian blue. Squirrel back down for more leaves. Deep hole in the tree.
The word estranged hangs in the air; remnant bit of conversation. The eyes stay a few seconds longer than they ought, or might. The twilight god is up to no good. The core spot is activated as a form of transport; the chip that harbors all the reticent energy awaiting release. Phantasm arc, zipper across the world; open it. Let mind embrace matter, let language subside into shared assent.
David Graeber (Possibilities):
In the world posited by Medieval psychology, desires really could be satisfied for the very reason that they were really directed at phantasms: imagination
was the zone in which subject and object, lover and beloved, really could genuinely meet and partake of one another.
38.
Old question: is there such a thing as disinterested love? Love without either the desire to possess or the expedience of use: ultimate good inscribed in religious texts and figured in the democratic civic ideal: to choose the many over the one. In our new world order, this choice seems difficult to access, remote, blocked by stunted ideologies, a staging of self-interest that stymies the possibility of responsive thought attached to deeds on behalf of, for, the greater good; so much myopic friction, belligerence, animosity. Pious rhetoric of shared interest, sacrifice.
If I love a painting by, say, Philip Guston or Joe Brainard or Amy Sillman, is that love animated in part by a desire to own it? But then I want to say—with John Dewey—that an experience is a form of possession, something one has. I experience love for something or someone, and that love is what I possess; not the object of it. This is the side of Pragmatism often overshadowed by an emphasis on practicality and cool legal utility, outcomes or consequences uninformed by affects. The rational is pernicious if stripped of affect; reason includes it.
The experience of art shows us how to attach feeling to critical thinking, and so might inform, temper, how we act toward each other. Without this experience, we are set adrift in received, rigid ideas of the good. Art marks, demonstrates, the passage from the good to the just through the agency of care. To make something is to care for it. The burden of care. Etymology finds grief, anxiety.
The need to consider, to teach, human efforts and practices that do not immediately convert into practical utility or commerce.
Can the Internet be said to give us an experience, in this sense of fully undergoing something? There’s something at stake here I cannot quite name, having to do with the relation of mental activities to material or physical presence: the embodied, the performed, the real or actual near. Anxiety that our sense of each other will be denuded of the spontaneous ensemble of minute readings—facial expressions, hand gestures, vocal inflection, smells—which until now have informed how we distinguish, for example, those we come to love or admire from those we fear or detest.
This is almost too basic but touches on an elision, a potential devaluating, of our creaturely beings.
Noema, when we doe signify some thing so privily that the hearers must be fayne to seeke out the meaning by long consideration.
39.
Surplus ubiquity of imposed critique and rampant opinion; nothing can be near under these forms of distantiation; embarrassed at the very site of our attachment to work: productivity, satisfaction, use, beauty, the Other. So affect as a kind of virtual nomad, wandering in the desert of permanent techno-reification.
“Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift.” (Deleuze)
40.
In any case the ghosts are awake, and fearful. They seem to believe that they are about to disappear forever from our thoughts like mere clouds passing on the horizon, skipping autumn leaves. Although they are now distinct from each other, they fear they will soon be only a remnant archaic category, itself replaced by a new
generation that wafts around like so much decomposing smoke, detached from even the memory of the fire from which it rose. It will require a new name. This is what I am thinking while simultaneously aware of the fact that I do not believe in ghosts, nor do I know what the difference is between a ghost and a soul: two wayward nouns without objects. The new, renovated ghosts will be soulless and indistinct, mere zeros and ones for whom neither the peace of heaven nor the torture of hell makes any difference. These improved ghosts will have come from the old species as it set out to refine itself in the n
ew age. Refine, and so be equipped to forget the treacherous complexities that made life before death nothing if not a vibrant passage of quixotic, mostly irresolute questions. The species will have tinkered among the twisted strands of the genome, pulling out unwanted threads, as it were, and replacing them with others, so that what was once a tapestry of variegated colors and textures will be as smooth and monochromatic as a pool of melted ice. The new nameless ghosts will float upon this pool.
41.
There was a leak in the kitchen ceiling from which water dripped into a red pail from time to time, making a slight splashing sound, rounded at the edges, so you could almost hear the indentation in the surface of the water as the drops fell. Some of the drops did not fall into the red pail at all, but fell instead onto the newspaper I placed on the counter under a second hole in the tin roof of the ceiling. The sound of this second leak, more infrequent than the first, was muted and flat.
III.
DEAR INSTRUCTOR
UNTITLED (SPOON)
Dear instructor, how to
clarify this momentum from its
singularity among thieves.
The tide was pink this evening.
I saw three deer, a rabbit, and a fox.
A visitor came, we spoke, he
gave me
amazing tomatoes
grown by the sun.
These mild occurences
and others insinuate
the forgotten as the retrieved and
the impossibility of any recovery
as such. I know, you are lost.
I am lost as well. We need
a table. We need
objects on the table. Say a spoon.
to Peter Sweeny
OF SPIRITS
Dear instructor:
Pound said
There is no provision
for them
and made none.
Seek below
the inscrutable flood
a node broken from care.
Not the sensuous
not the damn dream gouged
not the backward angel.
Not yet ice.
Rake up air
discern the altered start
tether it
word by word
to go on or beyond
reluctance.
Attach reception.
Animate.
LETTER (IN PRAISE OF PROMISCUITY)
Dear instructor,
no one is faithful. This is not auto-
biography. There’s a clumsy note
on your doorstep
beyond orange bags at the roadside and
and this
apology for wanting to
to have spoken to you sooner.
We’re sutured now.
A calm of sorts has taken hold and
and yet
technology is fevered.
Thought wishes everything were
were everything French
as in the living dead of the sad least genre.
The poem greets its bouquet.
I am thinking of floral wreaths.
They seem to have a story.
The story is not heartland pure.
The story yields a structure and
and the structure seems infinite.
The floral occasion is a circle.
This would be a trope for
everlasting or undead love
but the boy is gone. He stepped out over
over a crest of ocean into our own
perdition while we slept. In sleep, the lover
comes back. At first the lover is
is a cruel and indecipherable metonymy.
Then, or after, he seems
seems released from the triangular hood
hood worn as protection against infidelity.
Try not to think about numbers.
Numbers are a form of punishment.
UNTITLED (AGAINST PERFECTION)
All that left aside left awkwardly on that side done away with
in immediate neighborhoods of chivalry. Wait. Under the
cleft sign to read will be continuance, a kept event because there was a
delivery of sorts. Because it had come to pass near?
Wait. Old ting-a-ling sat down sweaty
thought the portrait was of Mick, thought she had long hair
then, then stopped. Wait. And wanted these not to die
not to pass on. Wait.
The lad’s charm charmed by the lad his demeanor thank you so young
among the crowded the high bed lifted charmed
while the gaze without therapy without the car.
Wait. She has this she has the left hand a paper
she has the kiss long afterward they had passed
had kissed in the smallest room had found the ring of fear
and still things happened, kept happening, went on
although the mode shifted in degree and measure. Wait.
Had these come withered now under such guise as the planet’s remembered
cycles, their friction carried out against clouds, anxieties, waste, then what
was planted or planned would approach through the center of conviction—
yay or nay—butressed into abstraction, possibly scented with lemony
highlights in our visual age. Okay, I too have had it, the tale, the tremors, the
incidents so enjambed that only the edgy molecule catches on, breathes its
miniscule agenda onto skin like that of a peel.
The peel of evening across high bricks.
The peel of an orchid’s deadly grip on perfection.
ZERO & A
1.
Usually biographical spill never mind or con-
like a snowball in hell
strain
against operations
of the sour physician
her lesions or lessons, her
blank-rimmed scan
across the universal cup
—smashed dialectic of the entire.
2.
Usually biographical spill never mind the oil
having opened the signature of all things
and peered into method
seeing there
that
a paradigm is only an example
repeated
and the empire of the rule
hovering over the example
like a snowball in hell
smashed dialectic of the entire
the laws of form
whereof Paracelsus speaks
our alphabet
strewn across
the herbs, seeds, stones, and roots
or then
that
merciless recurrence of our nakedness
unmarked until remarked.
3.
The irrational disorder usually
biographical spill
unintelligible quotient of the real
abstracted through love
and such invitations taken to mean
the con-
sequences
sequential
humilities of virtue
revealed while awaiting execution
in the eyes of the law:
trick.
4.
Winged creature stranded in oiled starlight.
A shadow’s weight filmed
without sound
unfurls toward its catastrophic bloom,
orifice of the ancient cave
con-
cealed secrets deposited
>
borne flashing
into an astonished fount:
toxic flames pillage the air.
5.
Usually biographical spill never mind
cold arcade
It is not that what is past
casts its light on what is present, or
what is present its light on what is past; rather,
image is that wherein what has been
comes together in a flash
with the now
to form a
constellation.
Look!
Deft market beckons toward a shelter, icon by icon.
Trespassing
the dying creature staggers across the path of art’s path
dragging omniscient sorrow.
6.
Zero is in love with A.
These accidents happen; they are signs of
things
to come. Ask anyone
ask the ghost
in the machine that speaks the code’s
new emblems—
ask the crippled incubus
limping up the hill
ask the last of the evolutionists.
The child of Zero and A
is unable to
point at the thing that is
outside itself
say that star
moves in swarms
over the shadowless desert
attaches
to the arc
waves
under and over
and the radar of sound
not spirit
not spirit
we are embarrassed by spirit, the grid attests to this
geometrical spit
informing the cluster of being
digital mime digital mime digital mime mime.
Under the Sign Page 5