in anticipation of a time change

 Wo^rd, th_e bir_d, _th^e f_ish,

h^ob_bl^e_d ² the ^V_a^s_tato^rium

¹ _halc^yon _day

& ^wep_t

_nO_t ⁴ _thⁱs O_{R t}ha^t

_the ^wo^r_{d O}^R  _{f      i         s         h}

B_u^{t 4 t}h_e ^eye of silence

I look from my sunroom window and see children playing in the snow, bouncing down the forever hills of glory on their saucers and toboggans, hurt and laughing under the cold sun.  In their happy indifference to the world’s suffering, Bruegel reappears, as he so often does to me in seemingly casual urban scenes.  And I think (as I do particularly with Euripides, Bruegel)—the car, the internet, condoms:  they’ve changed nothing.

Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Children’s Games

            The Wedding Dance

The people are filled, like tombstones, with booze.

A human takes its own code as virtue, projects its moral inclinations onto the sky; virtueless virtue breaks the code(s) by accepting all codes … — … the silencing.

The political left frequently veils a deeper orientation to the right, in two senses of the word:  virtuous (pious) correctness, morally-aesthetically-psychically-socially conservative orientations.  What then is left of the left's left?

… drug of dreams over the pain of living … (with a vague nod toward ts eliot and the big river)

laurie spiegel — Imagination is something else I worry about a lot these days. I think it might be getting lost. Everybody is so bombarded and overloaded with media coming at us that we don't have the same access to our imaginations as we used to. Back when I made The Expanding Universe, I would go through my record collection and flip back and forth through my LPs. There was something I wanted to listen to that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, something that would sustain and keep moving in a certain way, and I found that I didn't have anything like it. I could picture the sound in my mind, but I couldn’t find it on a record. So I was led by my internal auditory imagination. There was a piece developing there, taking form, and it was something I wanted to hear. If I'd had a record with something like it, I would have just played the record, but instead, I had to make it.

i — Through my library, through the libraries, of the city, the academy, the canon, of Babel, of history—despite their delights, their volume, their varied and wondrous forms—something was missing:  a shape, shapes, that vaguely spied on me through distant mirrors.  I had to attempt to bring that shape, those shapes, into existence.  This attempt i call t5—a syllabic ecosystem of language that has never existed before on the planet of words. The pain within the drug of dreams, of course, is not less than the pain of living, even as the pain of living can’t be escaped, even as the drug of living is the drug of choice.  Yet.  Humans live within the dreams of others; civilization, culture, the city, our homes, the technology that increasingly we inhabit and inhabits us are born of dreams.  So i am a midwife to a dream … that this dream’s DNA is language is as accidental and fated as my being a dream of Word.

Feigned insanity, malingering, is, legally, a crime.  Hamlet, if behaving in a legal court the way he did in the royal court of Elsinore, would have been convicted of pretending to be mad—an act which nearly or wholly convinced most of those around him.  Hamlet’s defense might have been that the madness he put on, that he fashioned, was a simulation of the very real (but unacknowledged) madness of the society in which he found himself—where people spoke of virtue, truth, love, friendship, loyalty, but pursued hierarchical power, money, comfort, lies.  What is the name of the crime—and where are its associated laws—that convict Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?  Where are they?  Individuals cluster together in collective validated madness—as couples, families, institutions, societies, supported by a now global arsenal of gadgets, texts and images—and convict those who show them themselves.  They damn the mirror to the roaming Tartarus that tenaciously, translucently, lingers in the nightwatch of the soul.

the earth is an eyeball

the world is an i

Jabès, The Book of the Absent—

1.      When a man celebrates his God, he changes his sex.  He becomes a season of the soul.  And the soul is feminine.

2.      Prophets and monks always wear skirts.

Other than a few relatively inaccessible places—Antarctica, the ocean’s bottoms (the world’s primary peaks are now littered)—the explorer has no unknowns remaining to venture into other than space (a collaborative technological gargantuan costly effort misaligned with the historic independence and freedom of the lone explorer) and art.  It’s little surprise, then, that modernity frequently advocates the greatest adventure as the romantic, erotic and sexual forms of love.  Human flesh, as the remnant of nature remaining to us in the city, assumes the burden and expectation of the human’s profound need for adventure.  Relational-couply love as the adventure, the struggle, the desired destination, that which is common, readily available and promoted to the democratic masses.  (Baudelaire’s sexuality as the lyricism of the masses.)  (The arrogant reductionistic seemingly-friendly nature of the common question—how’s your love life?—always meaning only one thing:  that which the questioner has achieved or aspires to … its platonic sun and christian heaven.)

Space exploration is not simply, however, the reaching from our planet into physical space (quaintly called outer space); its opposite movement (just as collaborative, gargantuan, costly) is the technological enterprise in its totality, particularly in its virtual and near-virtual forms—led by those relative elite responsible for building and maintaining the environment and infrastructures which increasingly sustain and excite us, our physical reality, our imaginative and spiritual prosthetics.

Art—increasingly dependent on technology for its production and dissemination (its value)—is also an adventure of the relative elite, whom the masses permit to transgress, but only when the artist has first achieved success on the masses’ terms.  Until then it is ignored, disparaged.

The human need for adventure remains and hasn’t changed its deep forms.  But, with our having nearly saturated the planet with ourselves, spewing our image across the stretched and wrinkled spheric head we live upon and around, the ways to meet our need are shifting, residing now at the furthest reaches of space and art.

A transtime switchboard operator is asked to connect early primary technologies and myths with modern primary technologies and myths.  One possible connection—

Early		Modern
Primary Technology	Myth	Primary Technology	Myth
Fire	Prometheus	Internet (knowledge cloud)	Cerf
Wheel	Sisyphus	iWorld (mobility, relation, communication)	Jobs (of the biblical Job)
Alphabet	Golem/Kabbalah	O/S & Office (production, work)	Gates

Popeyes

Pope eyes

Pope yes

                                    Catholic chicken

p-Farts —

The challenge of working with words as an aesthetic medium is the tendency of reader (and poet) to identify words and world, the historic and unevolved hardening of an association between words, ideas and things.

            When the poet speaks with i, it is no different, formally, than flipping between all the radio stations in nyc or putting a vast and varied playlist on shuffle.

                        The false identification of i with i

I want words to be textures, colours, sounds, smells, barely clinging to meaning

                        to find emotion in text in the way i find it in a riopelle, kandinksy or pollock.

            I want language to create a composition which exists with a degree of independence from (semantic) references in the world.  Literature has been underpinned by the logic of logic and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of meaning.

At a certain moment the blank page begins to appear as an arena in which to act.  What is to go on the blank page is not a story, an argument, even primarily a feeling, but a soulic event.  Language must divorce itself from Word, entering the independence of itself.  It must grow up, enter its own habitat.

The reader should make no attempt to draw any established connections between text and world, as it is typically (routinely) inhabited.  Poetry establishes a parallel universe as equally valid as the physical one.  As one enters another country and accepts its laws, cultures, language(s), people—if one wants to see—so one sets aside the physical world when one enters the world of poetry.  Poetry is a planet of the imagination we are building with language.  It is ecological, self-sustaining, eternally expansible, vital, generative.  It is not Mars or the Moon we need to inhabit to grow and sustain ourselves as a species; it is poetry.

Let us imagine ourselves in a world made for us; let us then attempt to live in that world.

In order to create it is necessary to destroy; and the agent of destruction in society is the poet. I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future.         - herbert read

                            One could quite naturally omit “… of the State …”.  So “… all organized conceptions other than those which momentarily and spontaneously and temporarily form, not only those …”

The poet has little relationship with death, for language is deeper than death, and death is just another word.

The poet prepositions society

            We can say, and it is true, that the poet is (and must be) against society.

                        But we must simultaneously say that the poet is (and must be) in society, under society, over society, beside society, through society, with society, … … :  which preposition dominates is partially a matter of temperament, … but if there isn’t a good dose of against, the poet isn’t a poet … for the poet today—with prophets relegated to homelessness, the drugged, and institutionalized homes for mental health; priests servants of media and commerce; and philosophers agents of the monolithic academy—inherits the vatic torch.

The poet has a thousand eyes and a thousand ears.  If it has a tongue, it lies apart and wags its part apart.

The poet destroys and creates society by rewiring language to the void; society is society by virtue of being committed to certain wirings, protecting these configurations with machinations of war, incarcerations, manifold enslavements.

The poet does not—cannot—follow any established societal role but has its roles constructed for it by the cadences and configurations of language it finds itself within.

The poet doesn’t care for living long or well or healthily—it doesn’t care, in this sense—it lives, and living is the only word on its business card …

What poet of any worth does workshops, degrees, lectures, residences, readings? … in this age when art is increasingly a subdivision of commerce, the poet is called to maintain its prelapsarian vocation through vatic and mystic means, and mumble outside the bastions of economic assertion, to wounded cats and burning tires and the hacked, strewn, slain, decaying bodies of gods littering Olympus, the oceans, the Styx …

ⁱ   …m…o…v…e…  _{in the} ^shadow _of syllables

Words crawl across me like spiders

I want them to caress me like silk

I want to slide between them like sheets, and dream

But they hack and swarm

Hide in alleys and throw iceballs

Morph into each other like cars in fog

Words are questions and waterfalls

Syllables are oily dachshunds

I move in their shadow, it’s always dusk and dawn

Night is madness, naked and bloody, around the corner

Day is the dictionary, a speech, a project plan, a legal document, a psychological assessment, the omnipresent news, opinion, an itinerary, the magnificent routine of commerce, lists

My life is shadow and fog

Alleys and hiding

The salvation of language that

Turns time like

The rippedout pages of a book in wind

god, a word, the word, the word god, Word, The Word, language, us

God—a word, the word (not the word but as the word god:  god, as it appears or is as word heard), but not word, for word is language and no word is language but only language—is, like chocolatechips or halitosis, a tool to apply when a task asks for it, a particular crayon to extract when a godhue might enrich a canvas, a spice or vegetable or carcass to throw into the crockpot on tuesday at eight, a toboggan or protocol or missing legoblock or hangnail.  But also that which pretends to be anything—a beet or maggot, a roman blueprint for a catapult, a galactic sieve, a list of those to murder or a sushi rose—:  a whore of words, a veritable Madam of Verbal Brothels.  Yet, when all is nearly done and said or done or said, a night of words, a bottomless tango of meaning, faceless eyes, a roaming beefcake of blackness, quite capable—it seems more than most—of taking almost any word and wearing it comfortably, but briefly, then letting the assumed transient word slip silently (and when is the slipping, the silence, not surprising?) to the ground, where it is gathered and restored to itself for a time.  Just as we do to the word god.  We do to god what God does to language.