Sometimes it is like one is from a
family of beavers that more enjoys
swimming than building the dam - as
seems to be this species’ wont - to
forever stop up th’ bloody water.
Sometimes it is like one would rather
be awash in the blood than buried
behind this barricade. And sometimes
it is like one watches a race to build
a bridge across an ocean, and is
beginning to think the whole affair
just ruins one’s view from the beach.

People are misguided, but the world
is not so strange. Culture is the
concretion of forces immanent to
humankind. Myriad, its powers of re-
cognition, association, representation;
tonality and humor collaborate in the
production of a giant mirroring which
reflects its claims upon us like so
many accountants on reality

Ah. . . ah yes. But what on earth can
beat early spring. Nothing; except,
early fall.

What is strange is that the things you
should want are inevitably lost if they
are said aloud. A desire stated is as
good as dead whether or not it ever
comes true. So what would you do
about culture. But if a life is just
collusive accident, one would no
longer have reason to doubt

The first buds come at the tips of
the trees, and the rest follow further
after. That is what we like best - the
utter certainty of spring.

And to speak and see like buds on
a tree, which is to say, not at all; to 
unfold, give color, and pass over in the
season of becoming, a’flourish in one’s
time; was it not like this that those
previous dreams passed into the ones
that surpassed them, and left us like
seeds to grow anew in the gardens of   

Indeed, but that one sometimes finds
oneself amidst the rarest of fine beauty,
and in trying to speak, finds a way to
squander it. . . . 

Lofty! Lofty like trees in silent steady
combat, all of this pretense to get more
of the sunlight they all co-inhabit

Sent from my iPhone

It seems every time she writes about sex it begins and ends with a bird.  It is the bird she cannot let go of.  It is the bird no one ever mentioned.  When in the act she thinks of all species of things – a lost button, a clogged drain, the words to that poem by Rimbaud.  She does not even think of the bird yet afterwards it is all she can remember.  When asked to describe it she says simply The wise continue to search for what they have found.

Gazing upon the vast expanding plane of science and knowledge and the all-acclaimed advances of ‘civilization’, Nietzsche had asked, And whence this Will to truth? I, looking upon a photograph book of my home, which happens to catch my eye on the table in this Dutch bookstore– I cannot help but ask, looking at the towereing skyscrapers cutting their metallic outline of ascent against the hazy, glowing horizon, with a slight stammer, What is this, this - will to fiction? All these buildings filled with people and so many caring naught for their jobs. Or for the reality their jobs imagine–O but what a day this is! I go to the pond at lunchtime, enjoy the scenery, and read. I leave my car and smoke a butt by the water’s edge. Ducks and gulls and geese standing on ice. And the ones on the shore hurring into the water but for one female which glances at me and ambles in my direction. Searching for a bite, she is. I squat down to look closer, perhaps to offer a hand, but she hops away. And now the other ducks too, which had just come back to shore worry and jump back in. All done. I stand up and walk away.Now I decide to read. Kandinsky; On the Spiritual in Art. The unbounded warmth of red has not the irresponsible appeal of yellow, but rings inwardly with a determined and powerful intensity. So he says and so I’m reading when there’s a knock at the window and uniforms and what’s this about and he’s on the passenger side how do I get this window ah here’s two moreThe thing about the piedigger is, he says he isn’t being negative, but his choice of words - his tone of voice - gives him away.two blue unies bulging bellies and the thickness of hair as I crack the window, Yes and What are you doing here and Well, I’m having lunch and reading and Where do you work, andBecause I had asked myself; I had Asked. What keeps this going, why does a story go on, even if it must.one of them leaning in my window, grabbing a parking ticket off the floor saying I just want to see this, and I turning Oh yeah I got that last week and now the one on my side pressing in towards me, smelling of gristle, looking at my license grinning, Out of state, huh?Indeed, one could read in both Jung and D.H. Lawrence how the education of the human individual should tend towards a full cultivation of collective potentialities, one could read this day in and day out, complete with the supporting arguments of various and sundry well-spoken, contemporary, foreign and largely unknown though “canonized” authors who with the finest slants of subtlety ironize and radicalize one’s understanding of the relation of desires and power and control in society and still one has not even God’s own chance ofSent from my iPhone

In sex she wants everything.

She forgets the song

walks right in

floats right along the river to the waterfall part.

She mangles

the words with her fancy teeth.

—

This poem was titled “Cactus” when I first wrote it, but it’s changed a lot since then, and the title no longer makes sense.  Suggestions for a better title would be much appreciated!  Oh, and it’s not supposed to be double-spaced, but I can’t get it to publish single-spaced.

1) Rats - Syd Barrett, from ‘Barrett’ - 1970  http://popup.lala.com/popup/576742248995947025 2) Memories of a Moviegoer.  I recall the fine film Willard (1972, Daniel Mann).  A “B” movie perhaps, but a fine unpopular film: unpopular because the heroes are rats.  My memory of it is not necessarily accurate.  I will recount the story in broad outline.  Willard lives with his authoritarian mother in the old family house.  Dreadful Oedipal atmosphere. His mother orders him to destroy a litter of rats.  He spares one (or two or several).  After a violent argument, the mother, who “resembles” a dog, dies.  The house is coveted by a businessman, and Willard is in danger of losing it.  He likes the principal rat he saved, Ben, who proves to be of prodigious intelligence.  There is also a white female rat, Ben’s companion.  Willard spends all his free time with them.  They multiply.  Willard takes the rat pack, led by Ben, to the home of the businessman, who is put to a terrible death.  But he foolishly takes his two favorites to the office with him and has no choice but to let the employees kill the white rat.  Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a long, hard glare.  Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his becoming-rat.  He tries with all his might to remain among humans.  He even responds to the advances of a young woman in the office who bears a strong “resemblance” to a rat–but it is only a resemblance.  One day when he has invited the young woman over, all set to be conjugalized, reoedipalized, Ben suddenly reappears, full of hate.  Willard tries to drive him away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he then is lured to the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is waiting to tear him to shreds.  It is like a tale; it is never disturbing.

(from 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)

3) Corporeal - Broadcast, “Tender Buttons” - 2005  http://popup.lala.com/popup/5836946618128270675

4) The Wisdom of Rats.  Laws are passed, uniforms designed, theories float like butterflies over the mountains and valleys and deserts.  Things are Mexican or things are American or people are settlers or pioneers or savages or aliens, men are outlaws or lawmen, boundaries are violated or secured, armies sweep through, order is insisted upon, revolutions come and go and succeed or fail and it is all under control at all times whether there is control or not.  Havoc is disguised as police, violence parades as an economy, murder described as establishing peace or law and order, and the bugles blow, dust rises from the cavalry, warriors descend with lances and clubs, screams slash the blue sky and it weeps blood, governments tremble, the men gather on the mesa and puzzle out the science of mass murder, and the rains fail, cattle die, villages are put to the sword, entire nations of feathers and tongues fall dead at our feet, the books arrive–those histories–and all this is tidied up and made sense of, history becomes the final suicide where we block ourselves off from the earth, from the ancestors, from ourselves, and from the hungers that feed our dread.  I go outside in the night and sit on the ground as it slopes toward the creek and rats appear and move all around me as the music plays in the houses and spills out the French doors, yes, the rats mock the metes and bounds of my world and they have been here since before the beginning, were here when Cortes rocked on a ship off Veracruz dreaming of conquest, back then, even earlier, but certainly back then.  The rats came out in the night and moved right here where I sit, a continuous thread of rats reaching far back with love and anger and lust and dreams and reaching past any place my world will ever attain, and the rats know but will not say what they know and so we must find out, experience the fantasy of power and control, and finally we will go under like everyone one of our kind they have ever seen and still they will come out in the night and move around, not making a sound, not a single sound, but move around and thrive as the creek purls along in the black love of the night.  We must not play it safe if we wish to share the wisdom of the rats.

We stand on the deck, Cortes is pacing, it is early in the sixteenth century, an empire is in the offing, he paces, and within twenty years, men just like him will cross what we now call the border, as men have been crossing that line on our maps for thousands of years.

Our idea of history is the end of history, of tracking a concentration of power that finally reaches critical mass, and by an explosion of force solves all problems and ends all change forever, amen.

No rat has ever believed our history.  (from “Contested Ground” by Charles Bowden, selection in Harpers Magazine Jan 2010)

5) Sad Rat (2009) http://gothamist.com/2009/10/24/sad_rat_in_sidewalk_forever.php

Not to answer the postmodern with the modern, but… to make a suggestion towards un-nostalgic ‘couth’… recalling July’s notes from George Lukacs, which mention “a world of intended and would-be soullessness”… and seeking somehow to exist within a ‘difference separating man and God,’ within vibrations in word and color, within flows of internal necessity, within the music striking keys of an anachronistic soul… watching without knowing, not present, not absent… unconscious, wide awake… 

I. ‘Masquerades’ - a selection from Fernando Pessoa (1936)

I like to think, because I know it won’t be long before I stop thinking.  It’s as a point of departure that thinking delights me– a cold, meticulous harbor station from which to set sail for the vast South.  I sometimes try to focus my mind on a large metaphysical or even social problem, because I know that, ensconced in the hoarse voice of my reason, there are peacock tails ready to spread open for me as soon as I forget I’m thinking, and I know that humanity is a door in a wall that doesn’t exist, so I can open it onto whatever gardens I like.

Thank God for that ironic element in human destinies that makes dreams the mode of thought for the poor in life, even as it makes life the mode of thought– or thought the mode of life– for the poor in dreams.

But even dreaming channeled through thinking ends up making me weary.  At which point I open my eyes from dreaming, go to to the window, and transfer my dream to the streets and rooftops.  And it’s in my distracted and profound contemplation of so very many roof tiles divided into rooftops, covering the astral contagion of people organized into streets, that my soul becomes truly detached from me, and I don’t think, I don’t dream, I don’t see, I don’t need to.  Then I truly contemplate the abstraction of Nature– Nature, the difference between man and God.

II. ‘Panel for Edwin Campbell #4′ and ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ (1914, 1912)

www.wassilykandinsky.net/work-106.php

www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20of%20art/kandinskytext2.htm#1

Could’ve chosen nearly any chapter, chose

71: MORELLIANA

Basically, what is this story about finding a millenary kingdom, an eden, another world? everything written these days and worth reading is oriented towards nostalgia.  An Arcadia complex, the return to the great uterus, back to Adam, le bon savage (and so it goes), Paradise Lost, lost because I searched for you in my eternal darkness…And so much for islands (cf. Musil) or gurus (if you have the cash for hte Paris-Bombay flight) or simply picking up a coffee cup and looking at it all over, not like a coffee cup any more but like evidence of the immense asininity in which we all find ourselves, believing that this object is nothing but a coffee cup while even the most idiot among journalist is assigned to give us a precis of the quanta, Planck and Heisenberg, knocks himself out in thre columns explaining that everything vibrates and trembles and is like a cat about to take an enormous hydrogen or cobalt leap which will leave us with all our feet sticking up in the air.  An uncouth way of expressing one’s self, really.

The coffee cup is white, the noble savage is brown, Planck was a formidable german.  Behind all that (its alwasy behind, convicne yourself this is the key idea of modern thought) Paradise, the other world, trampled innocence which weekping darkly seeks the land of Hurqualya.  In one way or another everyone is looking for it, everyone wants to open the door that leads out to the playground.  And not just for Eden, not so much for Eden as such, but just to leave jet planes behind, Kikita’s face or Dwight’s or Charles’s or Fancisco’s, the waking up to bells, the adjustment to thermometer and weather vane, the retirement from kicks in the ass (forty years of rubbing one’s behind so that it won’t hurt so much, but it hurts just the same, the tip of the shoe digs a little deeper every time just the same, and [I got bored of that passage]…

7o: a quote from MEISTER ECKARDT’s sermon:

“When I was in my first cause, I did not have God…I wanted myself and I did not want anything else; I was what I wanted, and I wanted what I was, and I was free of God and of everything…That is why we beseech God to free us from God, and to let us conceive the truth and to let us enjoy it eternally, there where the supreme angels, the fly, and the soul are all alike, there where I was and where I wanted that which I was and it was that which I wanted…”

[but I want to add this practical advice for writers, and none of us are writers]…115:

“The novel that interests us is not one that places characters in a situation, but rather one that puts the situation in the characters.  By means of this latter cecase to be characters and become people.  There is a kind of extrapolation through which they jump out at us, or we at them.  Kafka’s K. has the same name as his reader, or vise versa.”

Inside

Inside is a redness outside is dust.  Inside is a bird only a bird can make that sound.

Needle

In between the feather and the leaf is the drifting needle.  It is tender and true.

Nothing Pretty

Dangerous and fainting.  A large box is customary.

Milk

If the name is something white then the inside is burning.  Oh, burn!  Better that you love.

Aim

Here, a yellow bird.  Here, waiting and humming and waiting. Wind, take these sails and let them touch.

Man

Anger and bile and fingers it is like weaving.

Outside

Outside is a branch nothing rests upon.

Ruined by having read
too much philosophy I board
the tram and head downtown.
It isn’t much, I think.  Sitting
on this moving rectangle,
moving downstream with a
bunch of who-knows-whats all
of us just sitting blankly staring,
it isn’t much to take when you’ve
just come from God knows where,
her eyes and no it isn’t hard
at most it’s soft, rather soft
sitting waiting for the tram to move
on

Tram traffic ahead you will be
moving shortly, they tell you and
if only you had a pretzel stick to
munch at the first time I felt
this peculiar feeling in my side
I was sitting in a park by
some trees, on a sloping hill,
sloping towards the water in the
sun I sat and children biked
down the sloping concrete and
the grass all swayed and hustled,
a park full of people sitting being
reading each other in the soft
fluorescent glow of sunbaked summer,
that was when the sensation of
eternity first beckoned in the
crevice above my left hip, I
felt it like a child feels love
and it’s been there ever since
and even now, waiting, for her,
for the tram to move, I wonder
if it will ever go away….
awe