art gallery of ontario : application of principle

(or chevreuse ii)

in the spirit of my spirited attempt (the attempt that’s been spirited on me) to migrate from a word-to-word based aesthetics to a nonword-to-word based aesthetics, i offer chevreuse ii as an example.  It was formed through two afternoons sitting before/roaming around riopelle’s chevreuse ii at the ago.  (Auden does this sort of thing, far better naturally, in his perfect poem, musée des beaux arts.  Let this attempt of mine be a finger exercise, a scale, in f sharp minor perhaps, if language can be scaled in such a way ...)

impressions

sagrada família yanked into flesh, dropped from a star

heaven’s scorecard, sound’s soul

false seductions to the one true word

doors to the silence of our eyes

robert frost meets stephen king meets laurence sterne

parrots doing coke

auschwitz dressed up for a night on the town

the book of the shards of questions

self-lit, as though by hot human ash

flowers of glass in the wrinkled palms of time

a two-dimensionality of such depth mirrors lose their souls

the where’s waldo of the key to time travel

berlin’s destructions and its walls

the decalogue as gift-wrapped satan’s fingernails

aesthetic dna

details

pawprints of godfoot in the perfect suffering of fragmented mud

pools of haikus with moomintroll & seaweed

foundation:                             blood                                   piss                               the purity of moby dick

the tygers of history erupting through the corpses of children

burning ears               canadian flag                        messages from mars

wormholes blackholes holes, holes in holes, holes

toboggans      glossolalia              pigsties & prodigals      fungi-phalli                             david  letterman                         three-toed stygian slime

holy astro-hawk-priests sporting wagonwheels, geisha fans, with trains of hatched & aboriginal guts

the buddha tree in fungi form in a snowstorm, bent

zombie pacmen

naming

the fall of saigon, the roses of ludwig wittgenstein, chief brûlée’s last stand & laugh, kubrick on vacation, the broken garters of paris, cleopatra’s nipple, the extinction of africa, freddy mercury’s tonsils, a torah construction kit, dialysis, crowfight on a bed of sunsets & menstruation, happy hiroshima, flo’s birthday, job’s heart around chapter xli, it could be called almost anything ...

yet really

and yet the whole mess is about the tongue & chasm of love, its million teeth w/o a dentist, its maw of colour, the way it reaches into silence to create silences, these endless keys without a door, only stab & spectrum, splinters of the memories of beds, splintering;    and the sea so distant like a god or an apple, apertures in trenches, desire hiding in death, barbed black @ the visual center of all things, 

bain my bane

(or four core tits)

for ol tee es ee

((or get rid of your idealisms, idealists, this is the bain, the global village: its here))

claustrafuckia

everythings here, right under your armpit, every one equally real, legitimate, final, like marriages, the christian horror, its makeup, the affability hurts as much as the madness, we cant help each other by sleeping together, the tomb is in every smile, its the middle ages, you dont choose when to go public i do, i dont choose when to go public you do, love is my booze booze is my love, wired very wired or wired, it goes as slow as marriage, like a marshmallow thats good for you but still a marshmallow, its the schizoid seductive obnoxiousness thats everywhere, why you cant sleep with it, like sleeping with a hindu god with five thousand heads and a thousand cunts and so many arms it would blow the fucking universe up, india is here you moron, stuffed up your nostrils with extra shit as a bonus:  spiritualize the fucking galaxy and everything is good dammit the christians were right but in all the wrong ways

the stupidity of mysticism, everything is mysticism

unable to remain detached enough, like trees, detached enough, like trees:  i emphasize global you emphasize village ok, i dont transgress you until you transgress me and the reverse is true and aint that delightful, so many codes, like a galaxy with telephones, were all as smart as each other in that special way, what you mean by youre as intelligent as me is that youre an aristocrat which in nowspeak is a princess, some false ones some true the usual:  prove yourself  i expect awareness all the time you expect ... its all so tiresome, the objective subjectivity, the incarnate mysticism, no wonder those freaks just wrote about it and killed themselves, fucked fucking into god yet all those parisian idiots, just a necessary response, the mirror funhouse (but ok, now, back to the business of whateveritiswedo ...:):the circle of        ([{|and people sing along to that? dont they realize what theyre singing to?)]}| mysticisms far more fucked than the mystics told us:  you never get there, like a bodhissatva, there is no there only here and thats it and thats what pulls the gun and what americas resisting fly you fools said those winged things of our midnights and this is it, the ideal of no-ideal, what you say you practice on your mats and with your gavels and with your tears barbed and barbied kenned and kinned and kind, you know your kind of your kind how kind we are to our kind who are kind to us amen but no amen and so we go like marmite in the cupboard or a girl with flowers in the meadow in monet or milk commercials or what we cant say because it too much resembles what the mystics wanted in their trains and nuclear reactors, in their stupid cells, like ours, just painted different, this their point, our different paint, the same old craving, like the cravings like the cravings like the cravings like the cravings like the cravings like the ...

alice was right (again)

you dont say enough articulations below the articulations, you say too much, and the below and the too are birds of prey  i dont have money i just have the appearance of money and i can have the appearance because of the knowledge and knowledge and money are squabbling sisters, litigious, bound, you have to throw out both, you think you want to just throw out money or knowledge or whatever name you give it but, the names, the church is in the sewer and youre all losers and you say too much and you say too little and the earths victorious and youre an ape

            i need to be surrounded by calm people im too intense but ... fuck ... you all want the same thing ... (call dentist and parents) ...

            its a cult no its mcluhan its a bubble no its the future its a compound no its a meadow its a its a magicland no its mars its fucked up no you are

 ... so the only difference between us seems to be that language is slipperier for me, no, slipperier in a different way, for me, for me, than you, i think, which is why i write like this and you dont or you dont let people see or you dont let people see in this way, and language isnt word, some thing, but itself and so unnameable (though full of names) youre all christians, these words forever on a cross:  lewis & alice were prophets:  words are eggs, this the collapse of patriarchy:  the humpty dumpty alice duo crucifies god on itself in itself and rolls along, cracked, broken, it doesnt matter, once an egg always an egg, in the beginning was the egg and the egg was with dog and the egg was ... glory is an omelet ... its no slipperier than what i say it is ... if i can make anything mean anything it’s slippery ... and this is what should be said as youre lowered down, through the looking glass, our liturgy, more vatic than nietzsche, its all the rage ... slide, slide, slide slide down with me on rotten glass and monsanto carrots and a barrel of monkeys or giraffes or ... what is it anyway, wit?, another flower shop? a coffin in a daffodil, traffic in bombay? you know it, raging cunt, that funky name given you by the downthere spirit, euphemized as gaia or a song, you know it, christians, in the nails, sitting on your shelf, crack up, crosses are for graveyards, thats what the eggs are for ...

            and its whatever you want it to be, like an elephant or an alice, sand or a lover

and here it still is, like some four quartets that want to be written, dragged across time to be whate ...

            dumped in this toilet, ours, the one we clean, two thousand and thirteen, it shall be flushed:

flush flush flush twenty times a day

that little act keeps the dentist boob away

but what they dont tell you as they fuck your teeth

is that its act five and youre a hunk of death(oops that didnt work_)

overeasy

                        over to you how am i supposed to write the future  ﻕשּׂ_l ^{(the past did a lousy job)}

^{[there should be a chinese character preceding the hebrew character; blogger seems to censor it ...] [this is not part of the poem] [maybe it is]}

explanation of disappearance

The negotiations with Blogger’s—and ultimately Google’s—executive, senior executive, very senior executive, and very very senior executive, which were alluded to in the sadoo’s 16.12.12 entry, were intense and ferocious.  Subterfuge, split infinitives, hostile takeovers, dangling modifiers, book cooking, misplaced metaphors:  all was there ... culminating in, not the divulging of how (or, naturally, why) five blogs mysteriously vanished ... no recompense, also naturally ... but only return.  So the sadoo imminently posts a gargantuan beefy stinky whopper of recovered blogs, in one (with bonus features to boot!), and the dictionary of modern times continues to unfold itself, little hints and tinsels, wobbles and crackers, peering from behind columns, in the forgotten creases of old books, the winks of time, the bittersweet acceptance of the soul’s meteorologies, clouds over England, revealing—tenuously, opaquely, brief, oh briefly—relations of words and things, things and things, words and words.  And the eye falters, but saunters on, like the grey mass in Blood Meridian’s epilogue, seeking the unseekable, naming the unnameable, blood and time fogs on unseen horizons, the sleep of language.

The sadoo continues to find his dictionary of modern times, his humptydumptonian adaptation of Johnson’s work and its many increasingly orthodox successors, a sufficiently flexible and expansive vessel to contain the cacophonous deluge of sensations he hourly receives and is then compelled to find (aesthetic) time in (historic) time to transform this deluge to what we perhaps indulgently are calling definitions.

due to

most comic circumstances, it was recently discovered that a number of posts were misplaced by blogger and shall be reinstated in due course.  the sadoo vicariously apologizes for any resultant inconvenience and in the meantime resumes his life as a mumbler of poetry and explorer of arcane mysteries.  also in the meantime, blogger is exploring an obscure technical defect and expresses its hopes to this blogger and its humble readership that, in the best manner of a customer-centered organization, a satisfactory solution will be implemented as soon as possible.

daodejing lxiv

It is easy to maintain a situation while it is still secure.

It is easy to deal with a situation before symptoms develop.

It is easy to break a thing when it is yet brittle.

It is easy to dissolve a thing when it is yet minute.

Deal with a thing while it is still nothing.

Keep a thing in order before disorder sets in.

A tree that can fill the span of a man’s arms grows from a downy tip.

A terrace nine storeys high rises from hodfuls of earth.

A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath one’s feet.

Whoever does anything to it will ruin it; whoever lays hold of it will lose it.

Therefore the sage, because he does nothing, never ruins anything and, because he does not lay hold of anything, loses nothing.

In their enterprises the people always ruin them when on the verge of success.

Be as careful at the end as at the beginning and there will be no ruined enterprises.

Therefore the sage desires not to desire

And does not value goods which are hard to come by.

Learns to be without learning

And makes good the mistakes of the multitude

In order to help the myriad creatures to be natural and to refrain from daring to act.

Always in the Dao a fish, deeply set, sensed, known, perhaps even loved, by the sage.  Below, some membrane separating words and things.  Is it feral?  Whose desire is it for it to be set free, to be loosed into the human circus:  another flood, another olympian drama?  Can anything be done to it? Can it be ruined?  Is it possible even to stretch one’s hand through the membrane and touch it?  What are the methods for its description?  Is this stretching, this setting free, the reason for humanity, its being and becoming, the arc of history, time’s timeless blood?

We exist on a murky equilibrium, an unseen fulcrum.  The sage knows the feel of the pivot as life whirls around and she is somehow not undone.   For to deal with a thing while it is still nothing, you must know nothing.  You must know how it feels to attempt to get the fish to leave, to grasp its scales, to know ruin, to have attempted to have become the slippery spirit of desire, suck on its piscine heart, been spat back to land, unloved, unnamed, unbecome.

But, in that Daoist twist, the scales—those energies of all seduction—are not known by grasping or doing but by grasping not-grasping and doing not-doing.  The sage does not lay hold, but lies on the membrane, watching the fish, watching the grasping, watching the watching watching the fish.  The sage does not seduce or is not seduced in the usual ways, but through the eyes on the membrane on the fish on the deep.  So things get done, though no one really knows how.  So ways are walked, and the walking is not a method, a program, a measure, but a step, and another, and another, and that is all:  this the vision and the eyes and the learning and the care.

In the Dao a fish and in a fish the Dao.  Untouched, bound, and in its binding free.

tao te ching lxiii

The sadoo returns to the Tao Te Ching after a hiatus--

Do that which consists in taking no action, pursue that which is not meddlesome, savor that which has no flavor.

Make the small big and the few many.  Do good to him who has done you an injury.

Lay plans for the accomplishment of the difficult before it becomes difficult.  Make something big by starting with it when small.

Difficult things in the world must have their beginnings in the easy.  Big things must have their beginnings in the small.

Therefore it is because the sage never attempts to be great that he succeeds in becoming great.

One who makes promises rashly rarely keeps good faith.  One who is in the habit of considering things easy meets with frequent difficulties.

Therefore even the sage treats some things as difficult.  That is why in the end no difficulties can get the better of him.

The Dao is a self-sustaining spiritual ecosystem, using the materials of destruction to destroy destruction, enabled to do this through its core use:  using use to achieve non-use.  For doing is usually active, pursuing meddlesome, savoring flavorful.  The small is usually just small, the few few, and greatness a result of effort.  What is this spiritual magic show, pulling big from small, many from few, good from injury, greatness from nothing, action from no-action, and flavor from no-flavor?  A linguistic game, an inane delusion, a mind so imbalanced it’s upside down, hanging from itself?

Perhaps.  But it could simply be a graceful imaginative act:  seeing the world in your beloved or without stirring abroad.

The Dao itself is a manual for this seeming sleight-of-hand:  using word to get beyond word, language to deconstruct language (long before deconstructionism).  But once language is deconstructed through the Dao, there is not nothingness but a way of nothing, not emptiness but an empty path.

Unlike the dominant forms of religious and secular moralities, the Dao never attempts to be good or to eradicate or condemn evil; instead it asks how great the distance is between the two and in asking, in not defining, dissolves the duality.  It pursues non-pursuit, creates by turning back to old ruts.

I wait at Yonge and Bloor for the scramble to open.  In waiting and in scrambling i immerse myself, naturally, with minimal cost, in the waiting and scrambling that comprises life.  This little waiting becomes the waiting the bureaucrat does for the president, the general for the enemy to finish a mistake, the universe to end or expand, the pain of unrequited love; this little scrambling becomes the way through, the cessation of unsustainable pollution, an order of chaos.

This smallness is not done from volition, from frivolity, self-effacement, inferiority or ressentiment, from spiritual principles or guidelines, some text, but from an almost unthinking unwilled unassuming efficiency of nature—this self-sustaining ecosystem called Dao which the world tries vainly to emulate visibly through green technologies and spiritual systems.

Yet here it is.

Dictionary of Modern Times - scattered first entries

The Sadoo begins listing selective preliminary entries to the Dictionary of Modern Times.  (Readers are free to alter this one, write their own, or eat this one.  Other freedoms that may appear as freedoms are not.  Avoid them.)  (In the future, Dictionary of Modern Times may be referred to as dom-tea, DoMT, or something else.)

Marriage

Sitting here in a condo watching a couple in the building to the northeast of me having a fight on a monday morning around 7:00, their kids still asleep:  she very aggressive, racing back and forth, arm outstretched, pointing, then going back to the mirror to put on her makeup for work, then racing back; he shoulders slunk and dismissive.  Ah, morning love.  (There’s something about a pretty woman in a dress blowing up:  among my many defects, part of me has always rather enjoyed watching it, even when the anger’s directed at me, which, i must say, has not often felt like a particularly useful trait.)

Geese

Somewhere in a lost Austen scrapbook, there’s this scene of a young woman—i think her name was Filomena—who is believed to have been meandering, vaguely happy, through meadows of stinging nettles, undisturbed to that point, pursuing (though this might be too strong) an elusive morsel in her soul (some undigested leftover from a Brueghel is not impossible) which she would likely have (if she had ever had the chance to find it) put into another compartment, like a spiritual cow, for further processing.

Alas.  It was not to be.

Reality

really, except when it’s not, a positive negative condition we prefer to be inspired by the following fine story:

Josephine-Joseph or Joseph-Josephine, a boy-girl of the girl-boy persuasion or a girl-boy of the boy-girl persuasion, persuaded, or was persuaded by, a similarly minded individual to try on his or her (or her or his) or her or his (or his or her) outfit one fine day, leading from or to or to or from or to and fro or fro and to another persuasion or persuaded or persuaded by or outfit and another day.

Mellifluous

Bob, sometimes known as Bafti-Salood or Alice, reached in the little used cupboard above his stove for what he thought might be a jar of peanut butter left there after a party of sorts some years prior.  Following an uncomfortable struggle with some bugs and knocking over a bunch of jars he was sure couldn’t be it, his hand settled on something resembling a memory he had of it, one which had cunningly, serpentinely, somehow intruded through the day’s grimy detritus, its rambling mindscape of unswept chimneys, and set itself, prominently, at the very forefront of Bob’s desire.

(church) Pew

That on which i sit in yonderscope, wondering if my pondering her open yoni and what i’d do with it if here might be of that prayerway to heaven that that leaden blimp besang some yonderyear.

The Middle Ages

In 1400 Griselda, a peasant girl, was swinging her basket on her left and charming arm when a pig she had never seen before approached from a stile.  Griselda, fair of flesh and foul of doom, avoid the Frith of Flith, orient thyself to the Fwith of Fnith, and of the Fhith of Fvith we have no opinion, the pig intoned.  But Griselda did not heed the words of the pig who had approached from a stile, and was bludgeoned to death the following day by a band of marauding alesmen from the north.

Cast Shadow of a Plaster Cast, in Floor

Around ’57 or ’58 or maybe ’74 or later but definitely—to the extent we can speak of time in such a way—before ’13, a femme drapée (of no relation to Drapeau, that froggie dépensier!) emancipated herself from her voyeured dais, crept into the floor, improving hue, mystique, originality, translucence, unstealability, seductive prowess, and acepholosity.

That femme drape, that shadow cast, that froggy-not, she who refused to remain seated, she knew what she was doing, eh?

Talk Of Facts, Acquisitions, Positions, Vis-à-vis, Holdings, Social Scuttlings, What’s One Seen, Where One’s been, All That Usual ([almost] regardless of the quality of conveyance)

Matilda, being hairy, was humping, being hairy, Harry too, who, being hairy, being eyed by, being hairy, Jane, wished to, hairy hairy, hump too Adgar, in addition to her usual, being being, you.

white highheeled boots

Grit was sitting there, on his ass, the way we sit, on his ass, watching white—call them white—highheeled boots—call them boots—walk by.  Grit was there, on his ass, getting hard by those boots, and those boots, by themselves, were somewhat hard, very wet (it was raining), being watched.

Transience

Myrtle crawls across the exhaustion of her days muttering, muttering, muttering, muttering, muttering, muttering, muttering.  She crawls the way she crawled, the way she’ll crawl, mutters the way she muttered, the way she’ll mutter.  Myrtle crawls across, exhausted crawls, muttering across, across exhausted, across her days, crawls muttering.

atavism

(note that the definition of atavism is incomplete at the beginning of the third line of third, last and climactic stanza due to blogger's or blogger's stupidity)

Billy went o^Ene day to scho^Eol and was beaten up^E by boys.

Billy^E went one day ^E to school and was ^Ebeaten up by boy^Es.

Billy went on^Ee day to school^E and was beat^Een up by boys.

And there you fucking have it.

^ESusan San from the Soo sang a^E little song.^E

Susan San from the So^Eo sang ^Ea lit^Etle song.

Susa^En San from^E the Soo s^Eang a^E little song.

And there you fucking have it.

Bill a^ánd Sue met on^ãe day and fucked.

Sue and Bill me^™t one day and fucked.

   ^ºmet one d^ëQJay and fucked.^R

And that is atavism.