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?

gott gedanken denken ii

mysticism is the process of attempting to enter the process of that of god which survives the deaths of gods, doing so by avoiding names.   it has no throne:  whether reason, passion, self, will, nothing.

i speak of god as god is the most impossible thing and if i should lose the ability to speak of impossible things i will lose the i and the ability to speak, which are one.

i and god are one in the way cabbage and god are one.  in this way i speak of god.

the negation of reality is humanity’s only positive and distinctive attribute and it achieves this to the extent it enters spaces of zero dimension:  god and art are two common names for this entering.  that the former was dominant in past time and the latter in present and future time registers in reality but not in its negation; in its negation god and art are the same.

certain existentialists and others who thought they were brave derided god as an escape, mysticism as weakness, sacrifice and passivity as shadows of authenticity; promoted the will, projects, societal struggle as the valid human enterprises.  and who could not say this sitting at certain angles?  but stretching the triangles and squares out to be spheres, who could not see escape as escape from convention, weakness as water, shadows as something to be praised.

that god is obviously unreal hardly prevents us from believing more (not more firmly, for that is an adverb of the real, but more spatially) – and yet with another belief – that god is not only the most real thing but the only real thing.  this possibility is hardly possible in the marketplace, the marketplaces of money and ideas, the unfirm that pretends not to be.

not suffering leads us to god, for suffering can equally lead us away, or anywhere; suffering is random in origin and direction – god leads us to god, and if money is said to be a wall between the seeker of god and god it is hardly because money is more a wall than society or art or love or even a wall or non-wall but as it is something and there must be nothing – not even suffering or non-walls – between.

the demons have left me and i am empty

while they inhabited this i they covered my disease

with their words, their carousings

now there is nothing

i am an empty monastery waiting for gods

to leave their lives and inhabit these

hapless infinite cells

i am average – the sum and average of all averages.  i cast rough planks on the mud of life to cross to the outhouses of god.  the planks are made of booze, sex, books, dreams – anything i can find that prevents me from sinking in the mud.  but i know god is the mud and i’ll never reach the outhouses, only finally sinking when no longer can i find.

to say that god is death is not untrue.  yet even if it were true, would we not now need god more than ever in time, death being now what it is – a nothing that is refused?

god cannot enter time but through shadow.  so the lover of god lives in shadow and the light of the city is a constant burden.  that god cannot is no reason to refuse our need.  that god cannot, that the city is a burden, are no reasons to assume our divinity, or anything resembling knowledge, to avoid the city or time.

we hardly ate of the tree of knowledge; this is history’s ruse.  our innocence is maintained.  and only the story we tell ourselves of our eating deceives us in disbelieving our innocence.

visions of god are not negated from asceticism but affirmed – god enters vision through unions of flesh and flesh’s absence.

it has always been the book that has saved me.  but saved me from what? and to what? that these questions are unanswerable in the i and yet i knows it has been saved - is this not dissimilar to god being dead and in its being dead made more alive?

god is not an escape from reality but a confrontation and subversion of it.  for there are those born into the human who test existence and rather than have the capability or desire to conform to it object to its order.  god is a name given to this objection and those who conform live in the creatings of that givenness.  weakness is a name given by the conformers to the non-conformers.  but weakness is everywhere, even as strength; it is rather that they are variously configured - and how are these varieties of configurating seen, but through god?

gott gedanken denken i

i speak of god, though god be dead.  i speak of god for in its death we eat of the divine corpse through the earth and in eating know it in the knowledge that is not the knowledge of articulation but of flesh before it speaks.

so these words are nothing unless the reader has gotten on its knees and put its face in the earth and eaten of that corpse.  even then, they are nothing, but of a different kind.

in this knowledge – of divine flesh in animal flesh – we see – see with that vision not of words – that god was not god, and that not-god had to die.

i speak of god in its living death, for in our eating god reanimates and death becomes again the molecules of life.

i have so much to say of god and all of it is untrue.  i have so much to say of god and i will say it in its untruth.  for it is only through untruth that we walk the way of truth.

i would rather speak of god than humanity.  and if you say being human all i can speak is the human, i would say, on what grounds even can we speak the human?  on these grounds then i speak god.

the pronouns i use are false.  i say i.  i say it.  i say you.  i could call i they and it we and you she and he.  in god pronouns trade clothes like actors.  and glyphs and phonemes are clothes on what we cannot say.  not just pronouns, but prepositions, adjectives, nouns, verbs – the entire anatomy of speech, naked in its speechless glory, constantly robing and undressing.  words are robbers, aren’t they?  like god.

god is most adept at stealing from itself.  it has stolen so many clothes from itself it forgets what it owns.  and this forgetting is intrinsic to god, this slipping of ownership away.

that god doesn’t exist, that science can’t find it, that psychology doesn’t want it, that religion bypasses it, that philosophy murdered it, that art decreates it, that the crowds as always assiduously ignore it – all this proves nothing, for god disproves.

if god has been sufficiently crafty and bold to take nine billion names, to sacrifice its child, to morph itself through the evolutions of the divine, to twist ladders into running wheels, to lay claim to no merit, it can also stage its death.  non-existence permits such flexibility.

to say that if i speak of god i simply speak of a projection of my own image is to miss that i may not have an image and if even i speak of a projection of an image that hardly falsifies less other speakings and that if i do not speak of god – who will?

the most compelling – often the only compelling – aspects of the human are the inexplicable, aesthetically generative, expansive and boundless, visionary, detached, holographic … what we think of when we think of the compelling aspects of god.

god is just another word, like cabbage, and one is surely not wrong to say god is as in a cabbage as cabbage is in a god.  we grow both, we eat both, we worship both, we kill both.  cabbages evolve as gods do, and both may well outlive humanity.

when it is said – mysticism is truer than i can tell you – we speak of god.  we speak of it in the inability to speak, in the eternal inarticulation of truth.  and we speak of it with a word that is commonly and uncommonly mocked among and not among those of the knowledge classes.  mysticism is not a less rigorous mode of inquiry than philosophy or science; it is a differently rigorous mode:  one can argue a centrally rigorous mode as it uses the central artifacts of life – flesh, breath, and as extension words – as tools.  it relies primarily on the spiritus of the technoanimal that gives itself over to the relation between and among spirit and flesh.

sadoos live

while the voices on the secular sadoo have recently and apparently been silent, while this blog itself may seem to have entered the spaces of the hidden, the global sadoo community is growing. seek evidence on the ether of language and silence.

in the meantime, make your vocation sadoo.

do not neglect inhumanism.

the plurality of mixters shall speak.

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