Suppurating heart wound, in a good way. Or in a could-be-worse way

Supposing truth is a woman and also God is a woman (which reframes Mary’s experience, clearly) and that we still have books and binders of women, and anyone reading this understands that some women in the past were not women but gods. Supposition that until next Tuesday as a kind of marinade for framing this consideration. Now: are we finally past the point where women will get behind a woman to serve as the truth and embody the persona of God? To vote for that metaphysics, declare it to be so. Or is that point in the future?

men and women make their own history, but not the circumstances of their own making.

Succession auteur, by way of the 18th Brumaire, said something like this, in accounting for the prevailing view of his Roys. The Rex est regnum but with piss stained rugs and loveless marriages and the variegated spectrum of prostitutes for sex for lucre for power for spite for joylessness - all the things to be sold for.

And if the canon were to specify that from the actual labor and intellection of the toilers and the strivers comes money, for which the toil and the striving are directed, and out of which comes status and opportunity to go to bed with an ideal partner, then does that canon attach to reality at when? At what point is it first weaponized?

To conceive of a way to hate a kind of life that isn’t born from envy or perceived to be.

It’s not clear that fantasy or speculative fiction is any farther or closer than the real politik portraits of the .0000001 percent, at least when it comes to hitting on what is going on and which levers are being pulled to push ever-accelerating history down its current greasy slope. This murky quality is of a piece with not being 23 anymore and not being stricken with the whirl-is-king panic of irreducibility all the way down. So art and volatile relationships or despondent problem drinking or sobriety and cold plunges, but also art. Then maybe some parenting, early onset like dementia or diagnostically elusive like TB.

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that when the CIA charisma-farmer recounts the boast that “flies would be walking across their eyeballs,” it wasn’t just a desire to project a directionally if not epistemologically closed system, but to reclaim the rightful place of order and comprehensibility and the father who could set things to right in a world in which everything would be ok just wait and see there is a plan even if it is not this plan and not being able to instantiate the plan is part of this plan, which is but a node on a larger one. Just so long as no one comes to see it all as a palimpsest made readable only if held up to a mirror to make these backward ass letters come to resemble themselves in their very difference.

Ripeness is all vs readiness is all

Having not quite completed the annotated study of the Rule of Law as the Law of Rules, with an emphasis on the rhetorical tropes as a funhouse of mirrors, I gave up and read Shakespeare. Tenure could wait, or so I thought.

The first reading is what Hamlet meant when he said Readiness is all. It does not, surprisingly, address survivalists or self-help influencers who want to be auteurs. Dying with zero, discipline equaling freedom, stoicism as a daily calendar - cramming Hamlet into that racket proved to visit too much conceptual violence than could be borne. But Notorious B I G and ready to die was a skeleton key text that helped turn what Horatio heard into just the kind of flotsam and jetsam that the book buyer at FSG would find alluring and, even better, sellable as whetting an appetite, a decimated lack from which the masses didn’t know they were suffering.

From there the first reading of ripeness is all fell like meat from a bone of a brisket that a wealthy celebrity enthusiast of wood chip grills and sous Vide cryovac dilettantism might post about. Lear knew what Shakespeare didn’t yet conceive, but eventually birthed, just like Doubting Thomas knew what faint-hearted Antonin so obviously wrote but couldn’t intentionally say or at least could say it intentionally but not mean it: Roll it all back to 1920. Here, of course, Bryan Garner is Cordelia.

Mundis Ex Igne Factus Est, and So What if It Is?

I was writing out le rouge et le noir longhand, word for word, like Pierre Menand, with periodic cramps and vague stirrings of spending the future traveling down a tunnel of carpal. I would break to read Padgett Powell and Dianne Williams and Caryle and watch documentaries about apex predators doing their apex thing.

It could have been cancer, from how my top layer of skin seemed to sizzle without heat and blister but invisibly. It was not cancer, vouchsafed the cancer-detecting professional in five sentences. the derm then shared seven sentences describing a property boundary dispute with his four-stall garage adjacent to his 6500 sq foot home.

I am off the self seriousness. Pulled free of it like an excitable bully dog pulls free from a chain with two weak links and runs to go fight another dog, which found joy and blood and the possibility of everything going awry there. Two sets of bared teeth and snapping jaws. Like the Wolf against the Airedales in The Crossing, when the boy walks up and with mercy in his heart shoots it dead.

I am shooting self-seriousness in stride and with mercy in my heart and then taking aim at knowingness and sentimentalized self-loathing, which is world loathing of a sole solitary self unable to see the world as a bigger, separate, other-containing thing that exists outside of the life being lived in this particular idiosyncratic instance of selfhood.

Point: Human institutions are inherently and invariably fallible, and the more certainty and moral superiority they claim, the more filth and deceit they are likely trying to conceal behind that clean, lofty veneer.

Counterpoint: 404 error.

Freaks and Greeks

in

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and be warned of freaks bearing the 1970s on their inflationary shoulders. Pay due consideration to defaced monuments as to debased coinage.

After Virtue ends by calling for the waiting for Godot to end and waiting for St. Benedict to continue. Doubtless that’s mangled but the point is the waiting and the austerity which which it instructs.

Staring down the incessant run on the prime rate, our forebears in their salubrious American spree waited for Volcker and his pound of cure. Which turned out, in retrospect, to weigh out, in multiples, as spur, then hedge, as taurus looks back toward ursa in its great celestial sparkle.

A terrible beauty is born, we are told, and so we go and search for it, bumping into the calling out of lines unspooling black against white. We strain to see what may come, and in straining come into our strength. Poetry without you equals us, and you don’t like my easy way of claiming “we,” not because it is presumptuous in being wrong, but because in its presumptuousness such wide and consuming shadows are cast.

Do you remember when the anthropologist went down the stairs beneath the tower at the outer edges of the mapped territory and found the wall on which was written so much incantatory gibberish, but the writing was not just a process, but a kind of biological seething, and the anthropologist wanted to hold the gun instead of being held at gunpoint? Maybe some details are wrong, doubtless so - I’m tired and my grasp of the new weird was always tenuous and trending toward unintelligible - but I can still feel the breathing unease that arose alongside the reading of the biological seething that did its own writing, which tended to make agoraphobia look like personality strengths and not just holding off the bughouse at arms’ length.

Sigh. I wouldn’t suppose that

when Achilles with his short sword pierced the breast of Penthesilea
and as usual twisted the blade thrice in the wound, he noticed that

the poles could be translated anew so long as they stood at the axis of creative license and bald, emaciating theft, which created an exile from show trials who could see and hear at least one pole who had traveled back to Ithaca.

I wouldn’t suppose that the honor among thieves is sustenance like flat bread that sours over and over and over, consuming itself and bubbling over.

I think about Bartleby in his copyist’s costume, play acting at refusal until it logically if surprisingly progressed to the sickness unto death.

I think about sleep but bed down with insomnia. Which the 1970s would always understand, for which I am thankful.

Fortuna in a dark lair with iris eyes, having watched us heap fads on Eleusis

You don’t need to read tarot cards to try to trace the way in which the death’s head endures, sticks to the salt that gathers on the rocks that are sometimes on the rivers edge and sometimes deep beneath the channel, depending on which era of accretion under reckoning. You step in that river once, the tumult comes and then the tremendum strikes and shimmers in the cold’s clamorous residue.

An apparition, convex for a moment but then regained, strutting up and down the ranks and urging them on to shed blood and pay out the last length of the mortal coil, sputtering like a leaky sieve until the last becalming moment of silence has come.

Colors presented, the march goes on. someone stands to the side, tosses seeds into the furrows that had been raked in their wake, and after the excessive spoils of the sun did their work, the leaves that emerged could be read to say:

Pound canceled in his own mind the disassociations that had been isolating fact from fact for centuries. To have closed the gap between mythology and botany is but one movement of the process; one way to read the Cantos is to go through noting the rest restoration relationships now thought to be discreet — the ideogrammatic method was invented for just this purpose. In Pound’s spatial sense of time the past is here, now; it’s invisibility is our blindness, not its absence. The 19th century had put everything against the scale of time and discovered that all behavior within time’s monolinear progress was evolutionary. The past was a graveyard, a museum. It was Pound’s determination to obliterate such a configuration of time and history, to treat what had become a world of ghosts as a world eternally present.

Even the prisons were prisons

I was elbows deep in life: a users manual and could not avoid how much I needed something sumptuous to eat.  I wanted Mark Strand’s poem about eating ink like a ravenous carnivore raw, not cooked, but it was off menu. The cutlery clattered to the floor. I pushed it off the edge with a tall red plastic pizzeria glass that sweated. Being able to say enough is enough is a developmental milestone for those who hold a visceral, painful knowledge of what is too much.

Ingres and other parables was set for auction and I figured it would sate me, but what little money I had was staked to buying an all day ticket to the white box gallery in which my mind had hung all the paintings from painters whose work I wanted to feel numb in front of but which buzzed around in my head for years asking to be thought out loud.  I did not, though, think them out loud. Salutary inner monologues proved reasonably, damnably sufficient  for the purpose of giving voice to these paintings’ hold on me. I will no longer make any boring art is a paraphrase of what was written in chalk by the innocent proxies who knew enough to accept payment for the deed when the punishment constituting it would come ever so freely.

Arresting colors, transfiguring shapes, and then reading and eating and viewing all gave way to a paralyzed recognition of how many munitions were still hanging out there, tracing a precise parabola toward their intended target, whom I never knew nor could pick out in a despairing line up, but to whose end I had - symbolically or or by omission or otherwise - made some contribution.

How is a social contract cancelled, would you say? This may become something more than a thought experiment in a coming era when the tails cease wagging the dogs.

Why did you leave your father’s house? To seek misfortune

To become a muse for a disorienting movement. To chronicle civilizational massacre. To gather more experiences than might be collated into a particular historical epoch’s particularized blooming neurosis.

Because all the hollow men, the stuffed men, could not bring themselves to give honest answers to the questions:

  • What is your idea of perfect happiness?

  • What is your greatest fear?

  • What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

  • What is the trait you most deplore in others?

  • Which living person do you most admire?

And instead caught trains to Trieste and Zurich and spread the feverish din of original declamations.

Vademecum on how desultory triumph leavens seraphic dread

All angels are terrible. No wonder their beauty triggers paralytic bliss. Pay the favor of the lash to any man or woman who doubts that two moments in their presence up in heaven would be withstood. Snap self-abnegatingly out of it!

For our supper we sing on the beat but three notes off the melody. Some sharp, others flat. This is recompense for selling our time so cheaply and letting wants go bearded as needs. And yet: rent, baby formula, tires that are not so bald as to reintroduce friction and grip to the idea of vehicular control, food that a great great grandmother would recognize as food.

Look around. The sad must not become extinct, even if the sad sacks do, or else the real will, too. Which is both an erudite wish and a brute truth, like pilfered taxes.

I am not sure anyone remembers how to spell heaven, much less find the map on which an X marks its entrance. And why would it need gates? And what would come of our wounds, if we entered them? Terrible but necessary, the seraphic beauty, leaving so many mortals cocooned in their still-to-be-deadness and insulated by the amniotic deadness of their still-aliveness.

he’s the most human kind of otherworldly kind of Greek god I’ve ever met.

Is what was said of the creator of the mind-bending and the navel-gazing and the honest artifacts, to whose nominally intact artistic gaze I am about to devote one month’s worth of attentive immersion.