madnesses iv

if we accept that all contain within them equal measures of sanity and madness, but in varied configurations, then what we call sanity is not sanity but a particular configuration of it with madness.  so we know our names exist far from both sanity and madness, and sanity and madness are simply present, necessary, and symbiotic presentations of the human.  would any future presentations play with these relations and configurations, would the human cease being human, and at what point?  to what extent is the human this particular presentation of sanity, and so any perceived threat to it most dramatic for those with equity in the human’s house?

while we could say madness exists in each of the primary portals to death – love, technology, god, art – and so madness resides more fully along some corridors in time than others, the portal itself makes little difference and its proximity and relation with death far more.

money is not a portal, but the paint and knobs on the doors to all portals, and the function of the sane is to maintain the closure of these doors – maintain the closure against the relentless pressure of the wind of the mad blowing from the infinite corridors of death.

this is hardly to say that the sane are on the side of the living, the mad on the side of death.  we know clearly the sane and the mad are complexly and irrevocably committed to both, but differently.  but in the realm of the sane, on that side of the doors, we say they are on the side of life – its presumed allies.

i watch the sane and the mad walk existence’s rough and transient thoroughfares, mumbling what each must.  i watch them, and it is often unclear whether they are something i should name outside or within.  this lack of clarity, a general indifference to this lack, is, it seems, why those who call themselves the sane are not infrequently inclined to not include me among their numbers.

the analytics of the mad – that sector of the sane that peruses the mad and pronounces and by pronouncing tampers – is a business not to be ignored:  for, like death, it grows.

and by tampering it tampers not just with the mad but with itself (and who knows what else, that in corners, fringes, holes?), these analytics themselves requiring a further analytics.  and so it goes on and on in the vastnesses of ignorance we are not disinclined to name knowledge or health or utility, and even the older names are far from absence:  truth and goodness and love.

so the function of therapy is to purchase sanity, to translate the currency of money to the currency of sanity, even as the confessional-indulgence continuum was, in the middle ages, to translate the currency of money to the currency of salvific grace.

and that one with only half his ears - was it suicided by society (as has been posited) or by sanity?  and that unone who jumped before a train?
     so in the matrices of identity are hungers and voids scrubbed and displayed and set for sale.

sanity’s magic –

            madness appears to cancel itself when its interior qualities roughly correspond to those of its exterior environment.  madness – or at least the appearance of its non-cancellation – thus is a mismatch between the interior and exterior, between a sarcous singularity (a complex within a singularity) and a technocultural complex (a complex within a singularity).  in this mismatch, this non-cancellation, the sarcous singularity is commonly blamed (not unusually to the points of exile, ostracization, death - expulsions to maintain a perceived purity of synchronicity), and only in cul-de-sacs of art and philosophy is this imbalance questioned and the exterior brought to bear, this questioning occasionally commonly celebrated – in the manner of an annual festival in which the people can briefly forget the constraints of time, entering the dissolutions of ecstatic darkness – and ubiquitously ignored in the dominant and pervasive societal rituals.

i do not say the mad are mad, the sane sane; neither do i say the mad are sane, the sane mad.  i let the sane and mad froth on words’ perilous pitch, and definitions are the vapour that rises from the battle.  all i do is trace on language's blank page the shifting shapes i see through endless gloamings.

madnesses iii

the official migration from nomenclatures of madness to nomenclatures of mental illness, like that from personnel to human resources, like that from word to language, indicates typically less the truth being stated, more questions of the distance between dark and light.

as published values and laws provide quotidian dreams and nightmares to navigate the expressed emotionality of society and the unwritten, value and law permeating the published, provides the actualized sacred, so money and sanity.

the sacred that refuses actualization but in transient form is madness.

the varied circumscriptions of madness are surely differently delineated than the varied circumscriptions of sanity.  but by what? and by whom? and this what and this whom on what authority outside these particular circumscriptions?

if the will to power is already and equally a past twig in the rapids of history as madness, personnel, god, word, nature, what might it now be?  the will or non-will to energy? a reproduction?  a misnomer, misboner?  and how might this be related to the will to sanity?

sanity is collective, madness is individual.  sanity is individual, madness is collective.  what is the despoken word that holds supplely this appearing contradiction?

madness might only be the air that surrounds and infiltrates solidity, the necessary elemental counterpoint to monumental sanity.

madness might be another name for sanity if it were not for sanity’s necessitated need for definitional existence.

i have walked, with purpose and without and often not knowing which was which, the alleys of words and shifted through their garbage.  i have seen the worn walls of meaning and not gone mad. or wholly mad.  i have known in my blood that all the sane have said and all the mad have said balance on the scales that hold the universe.  and to some of the sane and some of the mad this knowledge is the greatest sanity; and to some of the mad and some of the sane it is the greatest madness.

it is not as if i would have the mad rule the present world.  but some other world?  (and, even so, i would hardly have the sane rule this one.)

if the present world is the best of all possible worlds and the worst and neither – which it all surely is – i would not (being not given to be able to choose between sanity and madness) present myself to the present (and so to those who rule it) but attempt to develop the arts of depresenting and through these avoid it.

we might speak of sanity as the void that bespeaks itself in the falseness that wears truth, and of madness as the void that bespeaks itself in the truth that wears falsehood.  two dancers on an infinite empty stage in perfect night, the only audience themselves.

sanity is less a reason that, founded on sensuous evidence, founds a more proximate relation with truth than other modes, founded on other evidence in other ways, and more a way that wears the name of reason, as a stretch of road might bear the name ‘Alphonsi’ but instead bears ‘Fifth.’  This ability to hold onto a particular name and have a particular value ascribed to that particular name, when wholesale evidence is lacking, being as we are minutely in time and hardly even in eternity, is perhaps sanity’s greatest attribute.  madness might be less committed to founding and holding and ascribing, and for this it is called mad.

as sanity manufactures madness to further its purposes, can we also – and if so in what similar and different ways – speak of madness manufacturing sanity?

for are not the mad the ones who see death in the lineaments of life, hope in the lineaments of despair, and leaves on the lineaments of words?  for seeing what is not and yet what is in what is, are they not mad?

that the sane see cannot be denied except at a certain cost.  the legitimacies and illegitimacies of this seeing, this denying of denying, this cannot, may be the seeing of the mad.

gott gedanken denken iii

to know in one’s body (and is there other knowledge?) that there are great truths, as equally from those we love as those seemingly outside of love, that wholly negate us is to glimpse god and in glimpsing die.  that humans at various times say god cannot be glimpsed as it is outside existence or that we can glimpse god (even if this be but as god is us) and live only reveals that humans say much.

that god lives in the conforming sectors, those that accept the order of existence and mould their lives to this acceptance and call the moulding wisdom or pragmatism or both or other, that these sectors are the only places god can live (according to that order’s visions of life), hardly negates god’s living absence:  rather, all words (and if god is anything it is all words) have these qualities of multiple citizenship, disorientations, and god is a way of exploring these qualities.

god’s official and legal dwelling is in these sectors – what are called religion, temples, shrines, churches, sacraments, sacerdotal embodiments, established sacred texts, notions and acts of piety, vestments and altars, and by many other names – and, while maintaining certain ironies and necessities, these resident in an inexplicably turpitudinous absence of absence, explicitly and complicitly cooperates in the mouldings, a requisite sector, through ancient prescriptions that don the sartorially visible structures of the day.

while only no one can know where god dwells, god’s de facto dwelling is oracular – in pointings and silences and strange visitations, the plays and shadow flickerings of memory on time’s unattended and broken stage.

certain articulations in the folds of the manifestations of god have claimed to discern good and evil; others have seemingly simply asked how great the distance is between them.  in holding these and other measurements and prepositions inside of us – in our thoughts and actions – do we possibly give ourselves opportunities to glimpse god and die.

why die before death?  isn’t the death we name death a drop of rain among the countless drops, and each a death, so dying before death is a portal to a mode of seeing rain?  god is just a way of seeing rain.

that the human remains so committed to turning rain to stone and thinks that if it were to give this turning up it would die are not holdings without truth; but were it to test other turnings, would it not then turn to liquid ways among the elements of evolution?

yellow poems

granny & the bathtub   or   (in the baskets along the pavement on the rua da prata the bananas for sale are tremendously yellow in the sunlight)

the bananas are not yellow in the sunlight

the sunlight turns their yellow off

bananas are the apotheosis of sunlight

antitheses of everything that’s off

which would you rather have, someone asked—

the yellow of bananas, or its opposite,

your name, or the yellow of bananas?

Who would shrug to such a question, or deny it?

We all know, and have learned since the earliest childhood,

That yellow is more in bananas than bananas in yellow.

This knowledge has not stopped us, however,

From preferring yellow.

If, though (and the questions must be stated),

Yellow is not yellow in the way bananas are bananas,

How then does one get through a typical day,

Is not-yellow more useful than the affirmation of bananas

Granny used to tell me to use yellow in the bathtub.

Granny used to tell me duckies weren’t bananas.

Granny used to tell me things that never helped me

Determine if the use of yellow was less than yellow.

I went to the banana merchant one sunny fine day

And asked for two kilos of his highest quality yellow.

He looked at me the way merchants do when asked such questions,

He looked at me and he sold me no bananas.

The morning after my mother died i was eating a bowl of yellow

When a knock came at the door.  It was my mother.

Of course.  Haven’t I always told you not to put your yellow in a bowl,

It belongs on a plate. Here. Use this one. And she slammed one down.

when i die i’ve always known i would turn to yellow,

reflecting somehow the sunlight in the grave.

there, it’s never night, night’s also dead,

i will be not i will be

along the rua da prata

in the baskets along the pavement of the
rua da prata the bananas for sale are tremendously
yellow in the sunlight

on the rua da prata the shrewd banana merchants
have become yellow, like their bananas

the banana merchants buy their bananas directly
from monkeys who, being shrewder but less
mercantile, laugh more freely

the monkeys’ knowledge and the bananas’, not
entirely analogous, is no more or less so than
the merchants’

yellow is the quality the monkeys sell, but the
merchants think what they are buying is bananas

along the pavement banana buyers stroll, and
become the sunlight in a manner not
unbefitting

bananas, monkeys, merchants, buyers (all
eaters of bananas but bananas), children of
sunlight, on the rua da prata

tremendously yellow.   Tremendously.   how
monkeys hold adverbs in their bellies like truth
while we shrewdly trade bananas

you have heard it said that yellow has no
opposite, but monkeys disagree – the opposite
of yellow is this

 

yellow days

on a good day
but what is a good day?
i see the sun as an overturned turnip truck,
the turnips dancing their happy deaths
On a bad day
but what is a bad day?
the sun is a charred tuna on beds of burning lemongrass,
the tuna flopping on its barbecued grave in the incarcerated sky
On other days
but are there other days?
the sun is just the sun,
and tuna and turnips are in the sea and the earth,
And that is that 

brownspotted saddies

d
in the baskets along the pavement of the rua da prata the bananas for sale are tremendously yellow in the sunlight. hermadida cox strides in silver sandals. She is of the lineage of the third provedor of the Hospital Real de Todos os Santos, which until now has made little difference. Juan de capos da masa di conquistadodo du alvararo comes from a long family of banana merchants, which has made much difference. Hermadida and juan are about to meet, not over bananas, as one might expect, but below them. ms. Cox, whose nickname is nixi, is fretting about her pet poodle, albert, who’s very cute but has a present problem with indigestion, causing consternation. Senor de capos da masa di conquistadodo du alvararo is obsessed with the daughter of senor de conquistadodo da alvararo di masa du capos, the banana merchant across the way, who has recently returned from amerika after a lengthy absence, quite transformed, and is temporarily helping her father sell bananas, to great effect, including the notable decline of juan’s revenues.  He casts now barrowsfull in the targus daily, brownspotted saddies, as he calls them, but in Portuguese, after a pessoa poem, or so he thinks. Juan’s marriage is less than good enough and he has compensated for this perhaps more tragic decline by means of his bananas.  Now, though, he is in an alfacinha tizzy, his marriage being what it is, his bananas becoming what they are, the banana merchant’s daughter stretching his diameter of joy and sorrow in the ancient way, and unbeknownst to him in any rational or sensuous sense, nixi just appearing.  Wearing just a straw straw hat, lightly magenta’d sundress, and silver sandals, concerned only of albert, still it is challenging not to be distracted by the bananas in the baskets, albert’s unfortunate duodenum giving way to yellow’s temporarily superior existence.  In the brilliant sunlight the bananas’ yellowness is tremendous, paling lemons and rapeseed, turning butter brown.  They redefine yellow in such a way as to make all other redefinitions seem restatements, as if yellow comes into existence solely and firstly on the rua da prata, as if it seeks these bananas to call its very own and see, virginally, itself. Nixi briefly loses her breath, her thoughts of albert.  But, then, now, look, here, there, upahead, totheright … – … – … brownspotted saddies. She recalls the pessoa poem, or thinks she does.  Albert returns rushedly and with him guilt for his departure.  Why even is she not with him now? Why is he with the detested mother who cannot love him according to the methods he is destined to be loved?  All this, and more, the brownspotted saddies bring, in the midst of yellowest yellow, under the unspotted sun.  she wavers, faintly hints at toppling.  The banana merchant’s daughter catches her dimming eye, rushes out to catch her, to save her from the pavement, but this rushing and catching and saving at the very time alfonsanano on his bicycle is racing through after having stolen bread from mrs peccabilo, whom he hates, and all—the banana merchant’s daughter, nixi, yeah, yes, her memories of Alfred too, the stolen bread, alfonsanano, the bicycle, some bananas, sundry tourists, many locals we shall not mention—conglomerate briefly and are dispersed, flung indeed, and nixi to below the saddies for her appointed meeting with senor de capos da masa di conquistadodo du alvararo, quite etiologically opening doors to his divorce and albert’s irrelevance and the recovery of juan’s revenues and the redisappearance of the banana merchant’s daughter and the sunlight, which has been the one dependable character in our story, continues to shine in the baskets along the pavement of the rua da prata, and in it, tremendously yellow, bananas are for sale

d

            puke and tampons and all things yellow

This morning the human is a beautiful disaster
A constipation of jelly beans
An unflushed toilet of tampons
Haven’t i seen the human like a sidewalk lay itself down by forgettable avenues, cars pouring down its esophagi, moon and sun like calculus in the neglected heavens
I have seen something
I have seen a simulacrum of mathematics,
Though i don’t know what this means
I have seen the text of a dream in a mirage of concrete
I have seen
I have seen
I have seen the human low and smelly like a puked g&t
I have seen the woman and the man dance into each other like softballs
What have i seen?
I have seen nothing.
The world is as beautiful as genocide
Tampons are our future royalty
Dawn breaks the way it always does, over easy
I think i have counted to 8 or 9
On a good day
8 or 9 is less than 4
i know because i studied math once,
in a vomiting cubicle in lee’s palace on a throne
you dogs of sunrise
you beautiful dogs of sunrise
walk down thine appointed stairs to the high blinding
and weep,
not for that or this or the child on the stoop who weeps
not for the stew of stars or your own lonely destiny
but only for this morning
only for this morning on its treadmill of glory
in its wormy-fingered dew
we miss each other like meteors
words are burnt kale chips
the human rides a slide of sunrise
to the tune of toast and slaughter
it slips into its automobile like a vagina
we are less than trees
we sing only of a torn blanket in an incarcerated crib
on the back of … on the back of … not gods, …
on the back of …   
But only this morning

fuck pessoa

i forget about yellow
i forget about the rua da prata
i forget about bananas
i forget about sunlight
but i don’t forget about sunlight
or yellow
or even bananas
i forget about the rua da prata
i forget about in the baskets along the pavement on the rua da prata the bananas for sale were tremendously yellow in the sunlight
but i don’t

dundas square

fire hydrants too are yellow,

in the manner of fire

pavement is yellow

in the avocado morning cradling its burden of feet

men with their yellow ties,

as irregular as streetcars
women yellower than yellow walk on themselves.

weeping the pavement with yellow tears,

all is yellow, even the avocados,

which exist, truly, only in my mind:

the red purses are yellow

the orange tangerine ads are yellow

the memory of night is yellow

the horrible knowledge of a winter cast irrevocably
into the future is yellow

yellow is the imperfection of perfection,

G^b, another tyranny in the news

The picture of god i saw in the glassblowing furnace

(no, god was white)

white is yellow

the streetcars as they round the intractable corner

birthed like endless siblings from an original dawn

are yellow

even bananas are yellow

tremendously yellow

all is yellow in the prism of this empty holy may

the skyscrapers like flowers,

death like a daffodil

falling accidentally in my coffee

and floating, saying nothing

          may prayer

I hide in the marrows of harrowing.  I lie in the lies of truth.  The clouds of my days are tongues, wagging hope that hasn’t met itself.  the grave rises like a smiling spectre on the seeds of spring.  All is tea and crumpets after all.  One can only hide in them, and lie.  One can only wag and meet the meeting that hasn’t met.  Let us order pizza on the verandah of our tears.  Let us wash the dishes.  Let us count to ten the way they used to in the yesteryear.  I am a battery.  I store energy.  I am packaged by the past for future whirrings.  I sing the songs.  I have not known alleys the way i would have known them if i had wanted to.  I can count to ten.  I think.  On days i think.  The roofs are green.  Like god or tomatoes or silent films.  I climb the holy mountain like an injected sheep.  Bliss and condolences.  They remind me of my mother.  Who after all isn’t dead, but dead.  Let’s count the suns.  Let’s ride to Rome the way the slaves always do in movies.  I do not hide.  I hide in hiding.  Clouds climb like bricks to Auschwitz and do not count.  I count.  I count the springs.  I hide in truth.  My days are like the grave.  Tea drinks us all.  i sing the songs.  I’m never much as clean as yesterday.  And that is it.  these choppy sentences, signifying themselves.  Let us crumpet.  Amen.




*** this ninth and final yellow poem is rabidly and impoverishly presented, due to the usual translation exigencies.  so be it. ***

in the baskets along the pavement on the rua da prata the bananas for sale were tremendously yellow in the sunlight

 

 

in along on for in

            the the the the the

                        baskets pavement ruadaprata bananas sale yellow sunlight

                                    were

                                                tremendously

?          ?          ?

the bananas¹

            were

                        tremendously

                                    yellow²

in the baskets

            along the pavement

                        on the ruadaprata

                                    ¹for sale

                                                ²in the sunlight

 

in the pavement

          along the sunlight

                      on the baskets

                                  for ruadaprata

                                              in the sale

in the ruadaprata

             along the sale

                         on the pavement

                                     for sunlight

                                                 in the baskets

in the sale

      along the ruadaprata

                  on the sunlight

                              for baskets

                                          in the pavement

in the sunlight

    along the baskets

                on the sale

                            for pavement

                                        in the ruadaprata

the yellow

              was

                          tremendously

                                                  banana

 

 

 

sunlight the in yellow tremendously were sale for bananas the prata da rua the on pavement the along baskets the in