mister loungechair being coy

 cat and man play under-the-door eye games ...

factory of light, factory of darkness

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

fact^ory ^of light, fact^ory ^of darkn_eess  

(in elusive instalments)

I am unable to separate art from god; so my desire to see and be seen can only be met in life—which is the attempt to love and be loved.  Art, like god, is of a space so pure it is committed to creating a detour around the rights and tears of eyes.

Art is the shadow of god, even as god is art’s shadow.  Life—its eyes, the igneous eruptions of love—is the shadow of neither god nor art; it is the shadow of nothing and casts no shadow, for it only bears a blood relation with death and death is death only be virtue of being a shadow of itself.  This is what justly terrifies us about life:  it is eyes, random lava and hardening—in which we seek for shadows, for shade, for respite, but find only the endless onslaught of light.

            Goethe’s reputed last words … more light, more light …

                        The gooey comfort of the television, the internet, storefronts, the city in its effulgent sleeplessness.  Life’s bloodless consummation.

Money, in its minority tangible and majority intangible (electronic, digital) forms, gathers from across the globe’s currencies into a virtual factory, whose only output is light.  Poetry too (for it must) transacts with this factory and is not unacquainted with its procedures—aspects of the poet’s utility.  But how can the poet be in love with this factory, its productions of light, its standards, exchanges and white blindness?  The poet is in love with darkness, the darkness hiding in the kernel of words, which money—despite its machines of volition, its trucks of drugged desire, its insured and polished efficacies—has not yet been able to penetrate, drilling though it has been for millennia at the cunning smoky shells of words.

The poet, like the merchant, politician, custodian or butcher, has its task—eternal, unalterable, from certain angles; constantly adapting to its shifting contexts, from others.  Like all professions, it allows for various temperaments and orientations, yet still is oriented in its own ineluctable ways.

We could say that the merchant is oriented toward exchanging services for money, the politician laws for money, the custodian cleanliness for money and the butcher meat for money.  So—whether we venture into prostitution, priesthood, the professoriate or podiatry—we find that money is the one side of the scale (of human justice, in a sense, as it maintains a rough equilibrium between individuals, classes to which they belong, society at large, and even—for the enduring professions at least—what we might call civilized history).

Money—society’s common denominator and sacred language (sacred, for it is not spoken, but speaks itself)—provides the mobile ubiquitous generalized legitimacy for more transient localized and specific legitimacies.  (While the Internet challenges certain notions, particularly of space, it has not yet fundamentally altered them).

By money it is certainly not meant any reduction to cash, or even money in its now primarily virtual forms.  Money is a structure of the soul.  A structure that is oriented toward using words to the end of things that are not words; it wishes to trade words in for other things.  In poetry, the soul is not an exchange but a lake without borders, without land, unrippled in itself, vulnerable to being disturbed by words.  Money is necessary to maintain the holy ecology in which the lake resides—what we might call flesh—an ecology which seems to seek language, to disturb, it seems, the lake.

So in money the body is composed of money; in poetry the body is composed of seeking, seeking for a vision of a lake brought to life with words and stilled by silence.

The poet, however, regardless of how it lives, what it says, how much it talks, bypasses money in its vocation (which is, most wholly, its life); it encounters it by accident and so must find justice by other means, the seeking for this law and balance a frequently treacherous and sometimes deadly enterprise, one which society is typically indifferent or ambivalent to, as the poet seeks for what society can only provide transgressively—outside of its sacred apparatuses, those established and maintained by money.

The poet, then, seeks to balance its work—not butchering, mopping, legislating, arguing or haberdashing, but language—not with money (the common trade) but language and so, in this balancing of like with like, but a like that in its vastness includes myriad subtle unlikenesses, it falters, as the structures and processes of language—so readily available, encouraged and rewarded for the butcher and lawyer if they are the least bit competent or fortunate—are vague, elusive, and discreet for the poet; it must seek with shifting, unlabeled and often unexpected and unknown tools, reaching frequently into the realms of the dead and yettobeborn, with the usual risks of such enterprises, excavating, sourcing materials, fuels, that find their way into its shop to manufacture materials, fuels, of equal worth and substance.  Considering the extreme and bulky irrelevance and unworthiness of much of this material, and the rare impossible glorious malevolent concatenations of the divine, the poet can spend much of its time vainly seeking and sorting, weighing, overcome with doubt, overcompensating with arrogance, flung like bills in a storm between environments not necessarily described as hospitable.  That the butchers and politicians attempt to pathologize the poet and remedy their imposed pathologies with an array of pharmaceuticals, operations, ostracizations, marriages, religions, incantations, forms of weighty and innumerable description, then wonder in astonishment or scorn (if they are still capable of wonder [they are still capable of scorn]) why the poet wails, rants or hides against or from them—well, the able poet must use even unusual inputs as material, if it can.

If it can? It must.  Poetry, like money, is a factory, transforming the world’s jewels and garbage into words.  Poets are workers in the dark factory of words, even as merchants are workers in money’s bright factory.

Money, as a vastness, as that which can trade in language but not subsume it, as a democracy which hierarchizes itself through social scrimmage—devout negotiations:  building and maintaining given and battled-for positions—demands to be a totality and so, in its reach, desires to embrace its only true competition (not God, as Jesus would necessarily have had it [necessarily because of the way time unfolds in space] but language, as that which birthed God).

Language, as a vastness, as that which can trade in money—at least as but one of its aspects—as a democracy which hierarchizes itself through scrimmages in the void, demands, though in different voices and on different paths, to be a totality and so also reaches to embrace its only true competition.

One can reconcile this seeming dispute between two seeking totalities by modifying Jesus’ clever retort to the scribes and chief priests and say, with and beyond and before him—Give to money that which is money’s and give to language that which is language’s … and this is not untrue.  (No Manichaeism, unless you want it to be; this bifurcation can just as easily be the secrets and manifestations of desire, diverging in name as they issue forth, mystery and gateway and way of ways.)

We might also attempt to resolve the seeming antithesis of these totalities by discovering a more legitimate or antecedent claim by one or the other.  Did money, for example, precede language in time, even as First Nations preceded Europeans in North America?  Does language have a greater or deeper share of being than money—or is this a question only language can ask?  And what might the criteria be to judge any historical or ontological merits?

But.  Should we not stay on the shores of this dubious ocean, on the edges of the waters of knowledge, frolicking in the sands of doubt, building castles of words alongside knowledge’s monsters?

So the poet is always between the elements, between land and sea, air and fire, forced by blood to trade in competing factories, of dual citizenship, exiled into no particular home or habitat, a sojourner in the darkness that is the bed and roof of stars and worms alike, seeking to make itself, its very soul and body, a hospitable environment not for itself but words in their farflung hermitages across the inarticulate infinity of space.

henry moore sculpture centre

11 figures, wombs of stone, like the charred of auschwitz, eyes dug from death before death was named, lie strewn, almost casually, disregarding.

11 figures, neither of word nor opposed, without memory, without dreams, lie on their random pedestals, in a gallery of moors with night for walls, indifference for a ceiling, unmeasured time for a floor.

11 figures, as if they are acquainted not through anything resembling knowledge but in their geometric relations and the nature of their eyes which do not meet, lie in a gallery, without purpose, uncouth.

11 figures, though in a space that could be fathomless, seem to consume space, not through any sight, for no one sees, but through the presence of a quality that might be a function of their being stone.

11 figures, of a poverty so vast they would be saints if it weren’t for the lack of word and regard and function, lie in silence as you do in hope and pain.

Their faces—though this is too friendly a name for what might be claimed to be an aspect of their uncanny heads—somehow point to the palette of the human heart, without colour, expression, experience or capacity.

11 figures, notwithstanding their lack of legal rights and freedoms, are chained to a law that knows no rights, to a freedom that resembles black’s freedom to be black.

11 figures, belonging to various clubs of dismemberment and mutilations so unorthodox we might recognize them only when mad or in the pit of love, lie, as if they are exhausted by their very immobility.

11 figures, with holes for brains and hearts and eyes and gods, are and have been—though to be is too strong a word for such conditions and are and have been require a tense not yet available in language—of this gallery bereft of names and limits and will be.

11 figures, women, erotic in their unattractiveness, some wearing dresses, others outside of fashion, are as if they themselves were born of something that preceded stone.

11 figures lie—can we say in wait in such conditions?—and could we—if we were ever capable of entering a space that wasn’t full of waiting—say what lies so heavily upon them, who lack our hearts?

the comfortable numbing of art

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

th_e c^omf^ortabl_e n_umbing ^of art  

(in elusive instalments)

As the cliché goes, art no longer has the power to shock.  This is true only in certain respects, however (art is lost if it loses this power, the power though becomes hidden at times).  We might say the cliché is true in content, but not in form—or, rather, in the forms that have been usurped by money and that art has allowed to be usurped; that is, shock remains possible only in the forms that still permit of transgression (yet this is always true:  it is art’s task to seek for the forms that still so permit).

To see these forms, one has to look at the present orthodoxies of art.  There are no heresies in words themselves anymore, no dogmas, no taboos.  I can write about sodomizing the Queen of England in the Vatican, with my mother eating shrunken baby head cereal on a nearby chaise longue and only a puritan would blink.  One can publish anything in the traditional ways (or even the neo-traditional ways, such as e-books) and amuse, titillate, but not truly shock (other than those time-warped in regressive cultural bubbles; those who are still, shall we say, aesthetic cannibals:  The Satanic Verses is a sufficient illustrative case).

What, then, is expected of the writer who wishes to follow in the ancient path of poetry—which is to challenge the collapsed present to see (and there is no more painful or shocking act than sight)? 

Simply this:  that she seek to make their words known in ways, in packages (in non-packages, post-packages, neopackages, apackages), that have not been pre-approved, prefabricated, by our culture.  The new forms for art to explore, in order for it to shock (and not for shock itself, of course, which is a kind of aesthetic pornography, but in order to continually seek itself, which is its task, in the broken glass of the world), are to handle its cradle-to-grave production according to a vision born outside of the expected packages.

(This is what our adefinable book, t⁵, and its forms of release—the secular sadoo and other means [some named, some not; some accessible, some in–)—attempt … and why their means are inseparable from their words, their aesthetics from this psyche.)

            Also why this poet must accept an abyss between words and money, for money is ^the orthodoxy incarnate, the heavenly judgement seat … and poetry, while knowing orthodoxy, must follow the way of vision, the way of the eye …

(We don't speak of shock in the common way, but in the way that one speaks of terror, not in relation to a thief in the night or the blair witch project, but the trial. A soft shock, one that might only be felt if lying on the bedrock of the world.)

In other words, money has been clever, as money can be (in a limited way, a way it markets as unlimited).  It has segmented art, claimed it as a cut of its carcass (even the prime rib of its meat!), created a subdivision within itself through a (hostile?) takeover, a centuries-long M&A; it has defined the book, assumed control over its factors and means of production, and subjugated aesthetics to biography (vision to name), thereby chaining the eye to a rock as opposed to permitting or even facilitating its natural flight.

The joke of course—and if it is not the joke it is at least one of the jokes—is that art’s transgression—even when it is accomplished—is only transgressive to those committed to money’s packages and productions.  Only money permits transgression for only money is sacred.  One detects the devout, the pious, by spotting those for whom transgression is still possible.

Poetry is the deeper sacred, that which can violate itself and not be offended (or at least be offended and also laugh), that which is indistinguishable from (or knowingly bound to) the profane.  It is this indistinguishability, this knowing boundness, that violates money, for money demands separation (of people, buildings, gods, means).

So the most complete poets may be those exceptional ones—Euripides, Chaucer, Shakespeare are obvious examples (who may only be possible at certain convergences of history)—who appear to follow money’s path while following poetry’s, thus mirroring the soul’s peculiar and pyretic navigation through society’s arbitrary labyrinth, money’s middling maze.

a dialogue with father william

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

a dial^og_ue with fath_er william  

(in elusive instalments)

Your only asset, desire, is the common trade of everything, so you cling to its value as if it were the supreme and only good, denying its tortured past, the raining thorns of its present, the whimsical frenzy and blood of its future.

You extract desire’s tweets and smiley faces, place heaven on one side of the scales of lonely justice, automobiles and securities and veterinary-approved dogfood and penetration on the other, and find them equal.  You bury desire’s night, its true and other side, in two dimensions, in the planet’s unpronounceable names, in the video of nature.  You launder it with expedia and booze and the registered denial of night.

You purchase culture as a mask to cover the maggots of your face.  You drop art like an addict, as if its names could save you.  You hide behind the towers of noise, in selves of fearful nothingness, a sleight which only works because of our mass hiding, an efficacy requiring years of education to accept.

These are the necessary lies that are truths not from their falsity but from their necessity.  And if we were to imagine another necessity, would it be as false or true?

Little can be said concerning the destiny of humans.  Yet isn’t this all we speak of, in the flashing carousel of words?

This gap, between the vastness of what cannot be said and the vastness of what is, i call our sadness.  Isn’t this gap the poet’s home and the death of gods?

Money is the bridge over the gap between the two vastnesses, the soil of gods.