by Eileen Myles
My deep knowing about alcoholism and families and the genealogy of foam is limited to architecture sound and society mainly as it describes interiority and “family.” I feel more comfortable than ever before when I talk about the coincidence of alcoholism in my family, for today I will discuss both my father’s and my own because I am approaching the third ladder, or platform of life so henceforth (and turning back as you can readily feel) I name myself Bo Jean Harmonica.
6. The Chora space is a church in Istanbul dedicated to the Virgin which has a navel on its floor the navel being connected to heaven. During one of the takeovers of Constantinople an infamous whore was placed on the throne to desecrate the church but really she just stirred what was already in there. Legend has it she wrote poems sitting on that throne.
7. Sometimes it is Rosie. She is [birthing] part of the popping motion that is foam.
The Order of Drinking (3-D)8
Some very large birds are nesting and flapping overhead, others are deep in the forest, tweeting. There is an army of good and it is birds. Dog and person of a mixed gender bow, handsomely. Hi. Thanks for hanging in. Forgive the chaos of my studio. It feels right to be speaking live with you from here. Takes a sip from a glass on the table next to her. A small dog bends down to his bowl. Lap-lap-lap. Water! Every day is a good day now. I used to drink and so did my father. Pulls a book off the shelf behind them. There are a lot of books about drinking. Puts it on the table beside her. Cheever’s daughter wrote one and Cheever himself wrote only one. That’s our core belief about his work. O’Hara too. John O’Hara. Certainty and singleness are such western pleasures and blessedly the drinker knows his purpose in life always. You could be sitting in a bar telling people that you are a juggler but in fact drinking is what you are doing. Anyone can see this except another drinker and increasingly the drinker spends their time only with drinkers so the seeming is utter and increasingly the drinker just doesn’t know. And if you know a drinker you shouldn’t bother to tell them. Throw them in the gutter. Rich drinkers are the saddest of all cause the seeing is utter; nobody throws them out and if they do any work at all it is madness and only contributes to the density of the culture. The culture’s tendency to believe itself is particularly strong when it is wrong. And it gets shored up on the inside. Have you yet had the dream about the simple thickness, a dense and white humming substance like the catholic wafer. That is the culture looming in, trying to r-r-rape you in your sleep with its pictureless numbness. Watch out. What drinkers call blackouts are really festivals of awful white density chewing up everything in sight. The reason people have dreams about losing their teeth is because on the dreaming plane teeth are the only weapons against the thick coming fog, awe.
Awe surrounds angels, awesome is a good word to use to describe a thick pleasure—it’s the holiness the thick-minded can muster and there is the argument that any holiness is good, but it’s a fact that not everything is without scale: poetry, holiness, sex, nature. Less of these things or too much creates thick states. Alcohol is one of them. Heroin. It was awesome. Fire is one of them. Any fire is not a good thing. Weather is one of these things. All these things need be entirely designed by the participants or (in the cases of alcohol or drugs) I think not practiced at all. It’s a hard position yet I am very much against the sameness of all things. That is thickness through and through. Increasingly our world is run on this principle. Why not? Those two words together make no sense. Don’t ever use them in that way.
Eileen’s father Ted, yeah that’s what we called him, was an animal man. In his final months and days he growled around the house. A soaking wet glumness like all of Ireland governed his existence. Her mother, Genevieve, was partner to this Ted’s dying and either should have had no partner at all (“Gen” aspired originally to be a nun) or one whose own stabbing need to be alive would have confused and startled her right out of her own tendency to always be ready for the dying. This dad had been such a man but he lost his wavy nature in the war. And then the alcoholic simply needs to stay wet until dog comes. The alcohol sloshes freely in the person’s system until it is all there is and when it recedes the person begins to have visions they cannot stand.9
Therefore spiritual rehabilitative societies for the drinkers have come into being, clubs, and I, Bo Jean, have attended these. And I will share some intimacy about them as well I shall offer some new ideas for their improvement. The first one is this. Here I go. Unh. Get it. My unh changed the room. That’s some of what needs to happen here. For the real time of this lecture you will be in the club. Forty minutes. Can you give me that.
The recession that creates the longing for Dog also should be covered in a procession of pictures. I will show you. [Pulls down.] I understood [sip] the sea and the land when I was young because of charts that stayed open all day our eyes to drink in that this is sea [slap] and this land [pound]. The phenomenology of education is alarming. Children stand in the wee classroom in their very first days with brushes and pots of paint, their eloquent little fingers unloading the foam of existence onto these flat portals that are developed in the schools. We call it art. The information is later on posted taped up on the walls of the classroom or the refrigerator of the child’s home. And that’s it—end of story which represents a major loss. All the information from these charts remains mute, unread, unless the child is a lucky and future artist. The family saves it so that it will turn up in some art books years later. This is true in the case of Eisenman. Even here the information is read wrong. Coy genius it is pronounced and not a guiding light of the contemporary day. In the future I might even abolish the category of art in order to put some things in their right place.
The next phase was dark. We deal now in specific experience. Nonetheless useful. In old schools covered women with their charts showed us saints, heaven and hell; devils, actual bald devils with wings crawling up from a stinky underworld, under your bed perhaps and these pictures too stayed open all day. Yet there was very little connection between the two worlds. The earlier one had us opening the pockets of our minds and now they stuffed it with fear of Satan. Alongside those unrelated maps of land and the sea. Satan is a thick creation. Geography is a lie if not properly entwined with an understanding of Dog and how they make the waters stop and start. We also need the color. We need to encourage that nature of mind.
Yet later on these problems do begin to get solved.
Indeed the clubs the drinkers attend during the recession of their waters are highly evolved utilities where so much important happens—so much good. Love flows here and also writers develop novels & memoirs to sell to the world—but mainly these clubs create time.
You sit in your lovely prisons with your coffee on your metal chairs listening as one speaker after another faces “you” and tells you their story. You get up and get a cookie. You line the cookies on your thigh and you eat one after the other not paying attention to anyone except to hope they do not see your quiet chewing. You swipe the crumbs off your lap onto the floor. You spill your coffee, a milky puddle of coffee and crumbs surrounds your shoes and you sit there. Agog.
We call this agog listening. And you are learning here.
Because while someone at the table is speaking these cryptic charts flank them like in school. You have not seen the like since then and there’s ten truisms on one side of the chart and ten on the other and one means the inside and the other means the out. There’s an unrelated poetry to these.
The one about the outside is actually more interesting than the in, that’s what we are learning but people feel that if they have to talk about the outside it has to be dull, as if the outside of these clubs (“the building”) were a thick place and not insubstantially thin, absolutely nothing, totally and entirely transparent. Altogether the club is not boring. Indeed it’s less adult than Disneyland and no fax of maturity either like so much of the culture. It’s one of the most insubstantial and thin facilities on this plane(t) for instance you don’t give it any money. It’s
like a machine you don’t have to feed. This is the inconceivable thing. The club does not have to profit or multiply. This is spirituality. It’s about recession an invisible thing, as pliable as the soul. It’s the after, I don’t think it’s the before.10 Mainly it is ultimately a place where you know you know less and as soon as you can picture anything at all it’s where you go and the nature of this society is to operate exclusively this way yet I feel we could be informed so much quicker of all of this by pictures.
I think a nice big map of the world with “Dog” neatly printed on the water in an archaic font in one version [slap] and another on the land [pound] not much more complex than the ratty Christmas lights strung up and flickering in these rooms like a cheap bar so why not a glowing map deep and consciously plugged into how it actually is. Just a picture or a moving picture I don’t care. I’m thinking dog stickers too. Stickers of Dog all over the map, in the bathroom, all over the world. Ones to take home. Put everywhere. Maybe ones just saying “bark.”
People very often have a problem with the club because of “God.” Nobody has a problem with Dog. You think this is a joke. Good. Laugh harder. Roll your eyes. Snort. This is not an airport. We need your love.
The text, the rolldown, we don’t need at all. It’s equivalent to the speaking. Love happens here. Drinkers find people to talk to and even have sex with and if the one you found is early in their recession the club says you are “elevening” them. You put your one against their one. The founder of the club himself was very much inclined to this. Look at the sad boozy eyes in the photos of him so often hung in the club and you think elevening and you think dog. I do. The belief is to be that kind of dog is wrong but everyone does it. I did it. You’ll do it too. I’m proposing that we pull all the numbered charts right off the wall I already said and we let the love step be all. I don’t mean go orgy with every shaky pigeon who walks in the door vision clouded with foam. 11 is dog that’s all. 11:11 on your clock and you feel it. Right? And I mean love. Then we’ll build a ship. That’s the subtle meaning of what the “building” means. I’ll take it slow.
I come from gratitude because the club is where I learned to speak, to do. It’s where I first identified the capacity to choose-listen. Neanderthals had it. When we listen we are capable of using this ability (already installed) to intuit the diagram of the talk [see fig. 1] and also later [see fig. 2] the speaker is giving rather than to be trapped in agog time. Often children’s paintings are of this thing. The over-seeing (or SFA—Seen From Above) came by way of dogs in spaceships aeons ago travelling above and transmitting maps which humans received as plaid and dogs intuitively know but even later with the invention of fire in the cave, what you got was just a grunty (but complex) diagram drawn by a stick in the dirt and not a lot of talk.
Maybe like this:
fig. 1
Or this.
fig. 2
Feel it?
The mark about a thought was always a drawing not a word. When we say people need to be listened to we mean felt. They want their marks to get in. Go deep. The belief about listening inculcated in unwell families and school is that the person talking is an actual bag full of cogent & valuable information; the speaker is to be honored with obedient stares, even rhythmically averting your eyes to protect them from your intensity lest the speaker grow awkward and confused going um and ah; Yet we learn now, we try to waken & live for these moments. Lurch nod and bob when it happens. Grunt ’n groan. Receive. These are the nodes of communion, by which we get the plan, the living pattern in here and up above everywhere the speaker is spinning.
In the club we could easily project this pattern up on a screen. Imagine. It is both meditative and soothing. Without thinking at all to see how the speaker feels. Yet we already do know. We must dream, we must love. Tonight, today, the room where you sit is lousy perhaps the speaker having been taught by those who required the cheery agog listening in tandem with an aversion to yielding their own living pattern (“slick”) thus a thick copy of knowledge has been transmitted to the speaker and extended now to us (yuck) by the speaker pounding on the table a thick version of the club’s lore getting passed. No dog in sight. It’s alright.
We can get to it, you can each one in all your own time can come our way. I myself developed choose-listening in my seat sitting there yes right next to you in the club. I say simply abide it. Eat cookies bob and flow. What I am developing please I have not developed alone. Choose-listening. I am only the first to name it.
We also call it seismic pattern. We call it junction or joinery.11 Poets call it rhythm. My own belief is that all is nature, (and poetry) the nature of buildings, and trees of sex and of war. In all cases we observe the animal mind the person is jouncing without thought. Very often one is without. A person may be extremely thick and flat in terms of the content of their talk; a person can be out-and-out evil and maybe you’ve been wondering if there is such a thing. Yes there is. We all trade in it. We get on the subway. And we show it there. We shove and ignore. We kill.
If we didn’t have a little experience of it how could it grow. How could it gain power. One of the great tragedies of our existence is that even dogs can be convinced to succumb to evil. Sorts of dogs are synonymized with evil, which is unfair. Here I mean even the highest and the sweetest of dogs which Rosie was, one of the variety of dogs with the large elongated jaw, “the last fish” is what these dogs are called in the naming room of the supreme board. Operated by dogs and the pictures sent which as plaids are motes from that.
The board (and poets and dogs designated by the board) determines “true names” for aspects of existence that in daily rotation would simply become thick—they can’t be used as actual names because they don’t work. The way naming is determined is with a practical and transparent ordering of time in mind. A name reflects what is. If there is a deeper purpose to my telling here—and by “here” I mean inside the digits of this node, sagging, speeding iteration arising from a trove of science fiction, occasion of mold, fall perhaps into bathos; miracle. This is the tale of a dog written not solely, but perhaps skeuomorphically in order to articulate the enormity of just before and just after. The death of Rosie was a shrine of course, a bale of feeling, a stop-time but there’s nothing actually to be learned from that. All of Rosie was a meeting place. As the now only always is. And I hope to find you now here too in this talk. I share my past, our hope.
In a spiritual situation I once asked a good man, a holy man named Paul12 why I was absent in the significant moments of my life and he said what were the steps that brought you here. I sat agog. He looked at me. You were already gone. Today I feel the rapture of each of these mundane bricks. Each chapter, one moment, one building, one ship. Watch out! There are dogs on board. The road may be fouled. Where are you stepping now?
Time is an incessant building and knowing, hundreds of sandy steps. Jean is speaking for Eileen, I speak for Rosie, Rosie speaks for Eileen. Say Rosie is dying, say I, in my sand chair; she dies now, I mean you die, I die.
Iddy, Iddy, Iddy, Iddy.
I speak of our radiance, the agony of time and the mountainous and descending musik of the human scale. We need no torch. It’s lit. Wuff I mean light; mean bed and I mean one little pumpkin face in a litter of puppies. Pretty little face. Rosie looked up on East 3rd Street one day and I heard call. I mean the joinery. And I heard it then. Each step its own tone, it’s own truth.
There was a sign in Cambridge Mass. In the nineteen fifties. It was a billboard which I read repeatedly in the car on family trips when I was learning to sound words out. Even the Iron Curtain can’t keep out ruth. My parents always laughed. The “T” had been crossed out. Who’s Ruth I would ask. Why is there a billboard about her. [Smile.]
I am Bo Jean Harmonica. Who are you? What is your dog’s name. I mean what is your dog name. Your true name. This is the call to power. Look at that beautiful grey sky full of storm. See how poetry spatters, unmooring separateness—calling a boat “tree
on water” overlaying one perceptual moment [Make pancakes with hands.] over another. “Tree” over “water” creates moving on it [hand roll] sailing, the human machine of being dog-like, paddling, two things at once then three.13 This affords a breathing in time which can (I am getting there so long) produce a splendid node for a speaker of hate. Hate speech is wielded mainly by wounded lovers of power who defensively over-produce flatness14 and thickness as an enormous anti-feeling blanket. The gratuitous result is that they are sometimes rendered as moving public speakers. And evil is just this accident perhaps. Awesomeness in the worst way. These speakers’ seismic pattern is raggedly open and engulfing, sexual, persuasive, war-like and inestimably charming. They may put it to bad use. The woman-man! It is always true. Lesbians in the wrong body. Sometimes lesbians in lesbians. Clawing to get out. The female-female ones stay home become evil mothers. But more often these are men. Know that the same hidden unifying force is operating in all these people. Homeopathically in all people. Know it.
Cult leaders have it, all leaders do to some degree. I knew a man, Danny Krakauer, a poet and a postal clerk on E. 13th Street who heard Adolph Hitler speak when he was a boy. In Vienna. He said Hitler was riveting. His speech was largely composed of an erratic telegraphic popping. A misinformed flow amplified by irregular bursts of consonantal arcane verbiage and the effect on crowds was to reduce their cells to that of a receptive and submissive child. Which is not so far fetched if we return to the scene (which probably seems like ages ago, perhaps it was) when the young George Bush in short pants climbed down off his presidential chair to get a big hug. Adolf Hitler’s seismic pattern was apparently so strong that entire populations became that yearning and doleful boy. And Kurt Cobain (surely lesbian-lesbian) needed only to incant a few of his soft lamb lines (“I’m so horny …”) before his own very vulnerable fluid self his passive-aggressive nature miraculously transformed into an agonized and thrashing chorus of the underworld. This too I have confirmed from good witnessing. The Kim saw it. Kurt had the thickness. He was crouching behind the Courtney, a flat thick person as a non-feeling blanket to protect him from the foam of the communities he lost touch with as he cascaded ever higher and higher into the flatness of global success. (To die on the mountain!) He had to assassinate, he had to self-war. That was now. Time is moot. Here you stand waving your arms. Hello! I once saw Courtney on a stage after his death holding their baby child up to the audience like a camera. Do we have that film. We do. It is the meeting place and that is all. As Kurt said, blam.